Continue reading »]]> Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 Beta 2 has now been released to members of MSDN, with a public download available from Wednesday.

Beta 2 brings many improvements to the table, including improvements in Sharepoint, WPF, ASP.NET, WinForms, as well as improvements to the core IDE and testing tools. I saw some of these IDE improvements at an event with Scott Gu in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they look pretty cool.

Visual Studio now comes in several flavours, namely Premium, Professional and Ultimate and the good news is that TFS 2010 comes out of the box with all three.  Apparently it only takes 20 minutes to setup source control, bug and issue tracking and automated build with it.

Finally, another great piece of news is that this release also ships with a Go-live license, so this can be used for production projects if you wish

If you are a member of MSDN and want to download the beta now, you can get it from here.

For more information on the release visit Scott Gu’s blog where you he has started a series of posts on the new features in 2010 Beta 2.

Have any of you been using Beta 1? Will you be using Beta 2? What do you think of the way 2010 and .Net 4.0 are shaping up?

Technorati Tags: .NET 4.0, beta 2, visual studio 2010, vs2010

Continue reading »]]>
Ok, this one completely slipped by me! A while back I told you that JetBrains had a page on their web site stating that a preview of ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010 was on its way and that we would see it in June….but there was nothing.  Turns out it has been there since July in the form of Nightly Builds available for download, there was just no major announcement made.

Anyway, if you want to get your hands on it you can download it from here .  To install it just make sure the extension is .Vsix, IE seems to download and save this as a zip so you may need to rename it, and the Visual Studio 2010 extension manager will take over from here and take you through the short installation.

Once it is installed, open Visual Studio, where you will need to enter the licence information provided on the download page.  It is telling me that it is going to expire on the 22nd September at the moment, but this may be extended further until VS 2010 beta 2 is released later in the year.

Anyway, as you can see, I now have mine ready to rock and roll so enjoy!

Technorati Tags: resharper, visual studio 2010

Continue reading »]]> I have been using Outlook 2010 now since the start of the technical preview, which I was lucky enough to manage to be a part of, and I love it! So, for those of you not currently able to try this baby out, I thought I would share a few of the new bits of Outlook that I really like and I am finding useful.

Firstly, here is a full screen shot of the new Outlook 2010 interface.  I suppose I must state that this is only a technical preview and this may still change a lot before the final version is released.

The Ribbon

As you can see from the screenshot above, the biggest change to the Outlook interface is the introduction of the infamous Ribbon, with four main tabs. Lets look at these tabs in a bit more details and see what they bring us;

Home - This contains many of the standard buttons you are used to seeing at the top of an outlook window, such as “New Mail”, “Reply”, “Forward” and a plethora of options relating to email rules and categorising your items.

Send / Receive – As you would expect, this tab contains……the send and receive button!   Along with some of the more commonly used items, such as buttons for marking items for download or triggering the download of headers only.

Folder – From here you can control your mail archiving, mark items as read, create and modify your folders and run your mail rules.

View – This is one of my most used tabs.  Here you can set different views for each of your folders.  The most notable introduction here is the “Conversation” view, which will attempt to group your mail into conversations.  This is not for everyone and certainly not for every folder (I switched it on in a folder to receive Facebook messages and it created one huge conversation as all the subjects were the same), but I like it in the right circumstance.

Contact Actions

One feature I really do like in Outlook 2010 is the new contact action popups.  If you hover over a name in the from or to fields on an email, you now get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on this person, such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call.

Quick Steps

Quick Steps are a set of very useful buttons on the Home tab. They include ways of replying to a team of people or your manager, both of which are customised tasks to suit you.  There are a standard set of buttons here and you can also create custom quick steps to suit yourself. Very nice!

Quick Bar

Ok, here is something I didn’t even notice until a couple of days ago, the Quick Bar.  Until recently, every time I wanted to send and receive my email I have been switching to the Send / Receive tab and click the S & R button.  This was ok, but got a bit annoying having to switch tabs every time, as most of the time I use the Home tab for functions like “Reply” etc.  Then I noticed the Quick Bar.  This handy little addition allows for a constant set of buttons that are displayed either above of below the ribbon (your choice) and by default contains a send and receive button with more being added as you see fit.  This is a nice feature, but it is quite small, so that’s why I didn’t notice it for so long!!!

The “Office” Button

The “Office” button sits in the top left hand corner of every Office 2010 application. When clicked, this button allows access to all the features you would normally have seen under the standard menus (file, edit, tools, etc) in Outlook 2007.  You can see Microsoft have spent a long time designing this feature and it works well.  As you can see from the screen shot below, there is plenty of room for each task, much more space for explanations and it just ‘feels’ like a better way of doing things to me.

The Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu

Ok, so you have probably seen this before, but I thought it was worth a mention anyway.  Outlook 2010 now gets it’s own context menu on the Task Bar in Windows 7, which gives a very nice shortcut to common tasks.

Verdict To Date

So far I have found the improvements made in this latest incarnation of Outlook to be very useful and have increased my productivity, which is always good, especially with an integral everyday task such as email management.  But, of course, please feel free to disagree with me as this is just my opinion after all!

Technorati Tags: microsoft office, office 2010, outlook, outlook 2010

Continue reading »]]> The other day I performed an upgrade of Windows 7 RC to Windows 7 RTM using the workaround mentioned here, as this is not an option straight out of the box.

I think I may have just stumbled across one of the reasons why.

I have just noticed that my HTC Touch Pro hadn’t picked up some new appointments from my calendar in Outlook.  Hmmm……odd I thought!  At this point I tried to open Windows Mobile Device Center to attempt to start a sync manually and I received this error!

Upon seeing this I also tried to launch Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 for the first time since I upgraded and…..nothing……not even an error message. It just didn’t launch.

Anyway, I have just re-downloaded and re-installed the beta of .Net 4.0 framework and now my mobile is syncing correctly and WMDC starts without a problem. Great….a 2 minute fix I thought! 

Then I launched Visual Studio 2010 and to my delight I saw the splash screen!…….for about 4 seconds until this……

So unfortunately, it looks like I will need to re-download the Visual Studio 2010 beta and re-install it before that works again

That will teach me to upgrade from RC to RTM!

Continue reading »]]> For those of you who have not installed the beta of Visual Studio 2010, below is a screenshot showing the new feature within 2010 that allows support for multiple monitors.  As you can see, you can now completely undock your editors and other windows and drag them onto another monitor or simply another area of the screen as shown in the second screenshot. Very nice!

Technorati Tags: multi monitor, visual studio 2010

Continue reading »]]> UPDATE: The public version of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 can be found here.

Today sees the waiting over for many people, myself included, for the release of Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010.

According to Mike Ormond the beta will be available to MSDN Subscribers today, with a public download following hot on its heels on Wednesday.

Apparently, the beta will run fine on Windows 7 RC1.

If you are an MSDN Subscriber, visit MSDN subscriber downloads here.

Technorati Tags: beta, Microsoft, MSDN, visual studio 2010, vs2010

Continue reading »]]> Many people, myself included were gvery exicited this week as we were expecting the release of Vsiaul Studio 2010 Beta from TechEd, however, now Mary J Foley has posted on her blog stating that she believes that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 will be released next week.

Although this is nothing concrete, it certainly seems that certain people in the Twitterverse are saying that Jason Zander is saying that they are very close to release and therefore adding some more credence top the claims.

Just hurry up Microsoft!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, visual studio 2010, vs2010

Continue reading »]]> I have used the entity framework in a few projects using .Net 3.5, but we were promised that there was much more to come in the next version which is shipping with .Net 4.0 and with quite a few announcements recently from the ADO.NET Team, I thought I would summarise and provide some links (at the bottom of the post) for you to get some more detailed info if you are interested.

Model First

This is something that I am really excited about and something that has long been needed IMHO.

In .Net 3.5 you could take a database and generate your entity framework model from it.  In .Net 4.0 , however, it is possible to create your model first and then generate DDL for creating your database from your model. 

This is all fantastic and I can see me using this method alot, but whats even better is the fact that you will also have the ability to customise the DDL generation step yourself to suit your own needs.  For example, the default generation would be to generate a table per entity type, but you may have several entity classes that inherit from a parent class and in this instance you may want to modify the generator to produce a table per hierarchy structure for your database.

Deferred Loading

One of the things that people wish was available in the Entity Framework is deferred loading as it is in Linq to SQL. Well, now thanks to the ADO.Net team listening to the feedback, it is.  Previously, if you had a Customer object that contained Orders for each customer, you needed to explicitly call a Load method on the Customer object to be able to use the Order objects associated with it.

Now though, the following is possible;

using (NorthwindEntities db = new NorthwindEntities())
{
    db.ContextOptions.DeferredLoadingEnabled = true;

    foreach (Customer c in db.Customers)
    {
        if (c.Orders.Count > 10)
        {
            SendLoyaltyRewardToCustomer(c);
        }
    }
}

In the simple example above, you will notice that you do not need to explicitly load any Orders, but simply set the DeferredLoadingEnabled flag to true (this is off by default, but apparently there are ways to change this).

General Entity Framework Improvements

The following is a list from a recent post on the ADO.Net Team Blog of other key improvements coming to the Framework in this version;

1. 1. Development Approaches
      1. Model First development –  We’ve added functionality to the ADO.NET Entity Data Model designer to start from a Model and then have T-SQL and customized code generated.
      2. Testing applications that use the Entity Framework – Along with the patterns above we’ve added an interface, along with guidance, that enables better testability of applications that use the Entity Framework.

      Architectural Concerns

      1. Persistence Ignorance – Enabling developers to use their own classes without needing to introduce interfaces or other elements specific to the Entity Framework.
      2. Applications Patterns – Discussing patterns like the Repository and UnitOfWork patterns with guidance on how to use them with the Entity Framework
      3. Building N-Tier applications with the Entity Framework – Adding API’s and templates that make building N-Tier applications with the Entity Framework much easier.

      Entity Framework Improvements

      1. Customization of Code Generation – Integration with the ADO.NET Entity Framework Designer and T4 Templates in Visual Studio to provide developer controlled code generation.
      2. Small things that make development of applications simpler – Adding things like Pluralization and Singularlization in the model, lazy loading, and more stored procedure mapping make building applications that use the Entity Framework much easier.
      3. Customizing Queries – Adding support for existing LINQ operators, recognizing a larger set of patterns with LINQ, writing model defined functions along with the ability to use these in LINQ, and a number of other ways to create and customize queries.
      4. SQL Generation Readability Improvements – Improving the readability, along with TSQL performance optimizations, of the generated queries to make it much easier to understand what is happening
      5. And much, much more

Useful Links

The ADO.Net team have said that they have many mroe detailed posts on the way in the next couple of weeks so it’s well worth keeping an eye on their blog.  Plus, we should soon see a beta of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 which should contain some of the aforementioned features.  I will be posting here when that’s released so keep an eye out for that.

ADO.Net Team Blog Post regarding Deferred Loading

ADO.Net Team Blog Post reagrding Model First in EF

ADO.Net Team Blog

Technorati Tags: .NET 4.0, ADO.NET, eneity framework

Continue reading »]]> So, I have my Windows 7 RC up and running and I am now itching to get hold of a beta of Visual Studio 2010.

I held off downloading the Virtual PC CTP ion order to wait for an installable version, but that seems to have been a long time coming.

The wait may be over this week though as a lot of rumours are going around that put the release of a beta within the TechEd timeframe (May 11 – May 15).

Fingers Crossed!

Have you tried the CTP yet? What did you think?

Technorati Tags: beta, visual studio 2010