DevTopics

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for MSDN Subscribers.  Visual Studio 2010 is a complete suite of tools for building both desktop and team-based enterprise Web applications.  In addition to building high-performing desktop applications, you can use Visual Studio’s powerful component-based development tools and other technologies to simplify team-based design, development, and deployment of enterprise solutions. 

Visual Studio 2010 Product Highlights
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Tom Ollar and Jim Bennett have developed a very interesting prototype for a next-generation version of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE.  They present 20 new concepts ranging from the inherently useful (visual stack) to the somewhat silly (remoting eye, an eyeball that indicates your programming partner is connected to the session).

One interesting concept is the “mini,” shown in the photo at left.  Before you say “not another diagramming standard!” note that the “mini” DebugDiagrammer is pluggable and can be replaced with UML or your own custom diagrammer.  The intent is to visualize objects, not classes.  The “mini” acts as a thumbnail showing the working internals of an object.

I’m a sucker for next-generation user interfaces.  I love watching movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Minority Report to ogle their futuristic UIs.  But I believe that future interfaces will be more simple and less cluttered, similar to what we’re seeing emerge on the iPhone.  The days of “command smorgasbords” — layers upon layers of menus, toolbars and panels — will eventually give way to simple, malleable interfaces that provide just the information and controls you need at any one time to perform your task.

Read the Code Project article and download a prototype

This is scary, folks.  If you use Microsoft Visual Studio to create web services, you could be subject to lawsuits for patent infringement.  Yes, simply using a software program puts your company and livelihood at legal risk, yet another sign of how terribly flawed is the U.S. software patent system.

Fortunately, Microsoft is coming to save the day.  Microsoft filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week to defend users of its Visual Studio development tools.  The lawsuit seeks to invalidate several patents that WebXchange is using to sue three large companies: Allstate Insurance, Dell computer and FedEx.

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Microsoft announced the next version of its developer platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.  Microsoft said VS10 will focus on five key areas (in marketing-speak): riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).

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Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.  This update patches numerous bugs, improves performance, and even adds a few new features. 

As a .NET commercial software developer, I am most excited that SP1 provides a .NET Framework installation optimized for client applications.  The optimized download is less than 28 MB, compared to the original 200 MB download that all but ensured consumers would not download .NET 3.5 and hence forced us to remain on .NET 2.0 (see FAT .NET).

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Please check out C# 411, a new blog from the author of DevTopics that focuses on the C# programming language and .NET Framework and is full of C# information, news, tips and code.

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework v3.5.  These upgrades enable .NET software developers to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and reliable applications and take advantage of new features found in Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

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Tags: .NET, AJAX, C#, LINQ, Tools, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Visual-Studio-.NET

Microsoft has announced that it will release the source code for the .NET Framework with .NET version 3.5 later this year.  Microsoft will release the code under its Reference License.  This is essentially “read-only mode,” meaning that you can view the source code for reference and debugging, but you cannot modify or distribute the code.  This is Microsoft’s most restrictive shared-code license and should not be confused with “open source” code such as Linux and the projects on SourceForge.Net. Continue reading »

Tags: .NET, Open-Source, Visual Studio, Visual-Studio-.NET

Upgrading to Windows Vista takes time, money and patience.  And after much sweat and a few tears, it was all for naught, and I ultimately retreated back to Windows XP.

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Tags: Software, UAC, Vista, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows-Vista