Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Microsoft has released the Release Candidate version of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.

See Scott Guthrie blog post about it.

Right now it’s available for MSDN subscribers.
On Wednesday 10th of February everyone will be able to get their hands on it

Two important things to know (from Scott Guthrie blog post):

• If you have previously installed VS 2010 Beta 2 on your computer you should use Add/Remove Programs (within Windows Control Panel) to remove VS 2010 Beta2 and .NET 4 Beta2 before installing the VS 2010 RC.  Note that VS 2010 RC can be installed on the same machine side-by-side with VS 2008 and VS 2005.
• Silverlight 3 projects are supported with today’s VS 2010 RC build – however Silverlight 4 projects are not yet supported.  We will be adding VS 2010 RC support for SL4 with the next public Silverlight 4 drop. If you are doing active Silverlight 4 development today we recommend staying with the VS10 Beta 2 build for now.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 are now available. The final version is scheduled for 22nd of March 2010. I’m looking forward to it

For Visual C++ developers there are lots of new things to look forward to, like parallel programming, MFC ribbon resource editor, easy application local deployment model etc etc…

When you use the .NET Framework you will apparently be able to have deployments with up to 81% reduction in the framework size by using the Client Profile.

According to the press release:

“The company also outlined a simplified product lineup and pricing options for Visual Studio 2010 as well as new benefits for MSDN subscribers, including the Ultimate Offer, available to all active MSDN Premium subscribers at the official product launch on March 22, 2010.”

The product lineup is simplified with the following versions:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN. The comprehensive suite of application life-cycle management tools for software teams to help ensure quality results from design to deployment
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN. A complete toolset to help developers deliver scalable, high-quality applications
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN. The essential tool for basic development tasks to assist developers in implementing their ideas easily

Download Beta 2 now.

Read the full Microsoft press release.

I just stumbled upon the Windows API Code Pack for the Microsoft .NET Framework. It’s a code pack that allows .NET developers to take advantage of some of the new Windows 7 features.

Features supported by version 0.9 of the code pack are:

• Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars.
• Known Folders, Windows 7 Libraries, non-file system containers, and a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities.
• Windows 7 Explorer Browser Control.
• Shell property system.
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls.
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs.
• Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs. (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
• Sensor Platform APIs
• Extended Linguistic Services APIs
• Power Management APIs
• Application Restart and Recovery APIs
• Network List Manager APIs
• Command Link control and System defined Shell icons.

Requirements:

• .NET Framework 3.5 or later.
• This library targets the Windows 7 RC version, though some of the features will work on the older versions of Windows operating system.
• DirectX features have dependency on Windows SDK for Windows 7 RC and March 2009 release of DirectX SDK.

There are also a few short 2-minute videos available to show you how easy it is to use some of the above features.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and .NET FX 4 Beta 1 have been released and is available for download if you have an MSDN subscription. The beta 1 will be publicly released very soon. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx for more information.

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP (Community Technology Preview) has been released.

Note that this is an early preview look. A number of walkthroughs are included. Features outside these walkthroughs might still not be finished.

C++ is not being forgotten The CTP contains a preview of a new concurrency library for C++ to make it easier to write native parallel code. I definitely will be taking a closer look on that.

Find out more here.

On Saturday 18th of October I went to the Microsoft Community event called CodeCamp in Zagreb (Croatia). It was a one day event with presentations all with coding demos, so not just some slides

The day started with a presentation by Tomislav Bronzin about Exchange server and how to use the Microsoft Unified Communications platform to easily integrate support for contacts, emails, presence information … in your own applications. It looks like an interesting platform. However, using it requires quite a few lines of code.

The second presentation was about using the Windows Mobile 6 SDK to develop applications for mobile devices and was given by Andrej Radinger. Demonstrations included how to use the different emulators that are available. This also includes FakeGPS to fake a real GPS device and a tool (cellular emulator) to simulate sending/receiving of SMS messages, dailing phone numbers, receiving incoming calls, faking busy signals and so on.

Next it was a presentation about SQL Server 2008 by Dean Vitner, explaining and demonstrating things like support for encryption, compression and auditing.

The next presentation was about BizTalk by Josip Šaban, but I skipped that one since I had to leave for half an hour.

After that, Marko Čulo gave us a presentation called “Dirtiest SQL Tips & Tricks” with examples which showed important things to remember like the behavior of nested transactions.

The last presentation was about MS StyleCop by Bernard Katić. MS StyleCop is yet another tool to force coding standards. It will also check your code documentation so that it matches certain standards.

All in all, the presentations were interesting.

On 21st of June I went to the Kulendayz 2008 which is the first regional community conference organized by the Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia with support from INETA and Hupro. Since I’m living in Croatia at the moment and the Kulendayz location was only 30 minutes from my place, it was pretty easy for me to get there.

In the morning I went to a scrum presentation and to a session about advanced debugging of ASP.NET applications using windbg.
In the afternoon I went to a unified communications presentation, explaining the Office Communications Server.

The last presentation I went to was about concurrent/parallel programming in C#. This was one of the most interesting presentations for me (by Bernard Katic). It explained how to optimize code for running on multicore processors, which is becoming more and more important with the release of Quad-Core processors and Octo-Core and even 80-core processors in the pipeline. The session was focussed on the Parallel FX Library and Parallel LINQ. The Parallel FX Library allows you to easily “parallelize” certain parts of your application like for loops. Parallel LINQ allows you to do the same with your LINQ queries. There is an interesting article on MSDN called “Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines” that expains the Parallel FX Library with clear and simple examples.

It was interesting to find out that I was not the only belgian on the conference. Arlindo Alves from Microsoft Belgium was also there giving a presentation on Microsoft Hyper-V.

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a recent powerful addition to the .NET framework and allows you to query your data sources in an elegant and simple way. In this post I’ll give a very brief introduction to LINQ and how it makes your code much more readable. Read the rest of this entry »