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 am currently in the Microsoft Office 2010 tech preview and I must say that I am loving it!  

What I did not love though was after installing Office 2010, my Visual Studio 2010 Beta stopped working, simply displaying the message “Cannot Create The Window”.

Microsoft claimed not to be able to recreate the issue and I was quite happy to wait until another version of VS 2010 was released, but luckily for me, Microsoft have now found the issue.  Apparently, there is a version msvcm100.dll in C:\windows\system32 which is different in office 2010 than in vs 2010.  It also seems that office and vs play nice when using the VS version of the dll, but that VS falls over when using the office version.

Ok, so to the workaround……

You have two options;

1. Replace the msvcm100.dll with this one, msvcm100.zip, I took from my system32 folder. 

or

2. If you would prefer not to use a randomly downloaded dll from here, you can rename the msvcm100.dll in system32 to msvcm100.dll.old and then run VS 2010 setup and choose to repair.  This will recreate the dll.

The working version of msvcm100.dll has a datetime stamp of 6th May 2009 7:20AM.

Well, now my Visual Studio is working again, I am off to have a play!

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: msvcm100.dll, office 2010, visul studio 2010

Continue reading »]]> There has been a lot of information being passed around recently about the changes being introduced in the second major release of Microsoft’s Entity Framework, so I thought it might be a good idea to get a list of articles together on the subject that I have found useful.

If you know of any more good articles you have found yourself, let me know!

Enjoy!

The ADO.Net Entity Framework (2010) (MSDN) – If you don’t know or are unsure of what the Entity Framework is, then this might be a good place to start.  It provides a good overview with links to more articles going into details in specific areas.

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What’s New In Entity Framework 4 (Slides) – For those of you who are familiar with the first version of the Entity Framework in .Net 3.5 SP1, but have not yet delved into the next release, these slides give an overview of what has changed and what has been introduced.

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TUTORIAL: Model First using Entity Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 – This is a tutorial I wrote a while back for those with the Visual Studio 2010 beta who wanted to see the new model first functionality introduced in EF v2.

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Entity Framework v2 and Data Access Architecture Best Practices – Some design patterns and development style discussion for when using the EF v2 and Visual Studio 2010.

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N-Tier Application Patterns with Entity Framework v2 – A good article regarding designing N-Tier applications with EF v2, using .Net Framework 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF.

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Multiple Database Support in Entity Framework 4 – Interesting article discussing the database independence being introduced with the Entity Framework.

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BOOK: Professional ADO.Net 3.5 With LINQ and the Entity Framework - I am currently reading this book which tackles ADO.Net 3.5 with the Entity Framework.  Whilst this is not specifically for version 2, this seems to be a good into the the EF and worth a look if you are new to the subject.

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Technorati Tags: .NET 4.0, ef 4, ef v2, Entity Framework

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 »]]> Following up on my recent post about the improvements to the Entity Framework in .Net 4.0 this is the first in a series of posts examining some of the new features and showing you how to put some of them into practice.

In this post I am going to look at one of the most anticipated features, Model First.  In the first version of the Entity Framework, you took a pre-existing database and the tools would generate your entity model for you.  In v2.0, you now have the option of creating your entity model first and then generating your database DDL from your finished model.

To follow this tutorial you will need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, .Net Framework 4.0 Beta 1 installed, SQL 2005 or 2008 / SQL Express.

Please bear with me and let me know if there are any parts of this tutorial that are not completely clear.  I am new to writing these! So any comments welcome….

Creating your project and adding your blank entity model

Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Dynamic Data Entities Web Application project(you could another project type to host your entity model, such as an ASP.Net Web Application).

Once your project has been created add a new ADO.Net Entity Data Model to the project. 

You will then be asked about what the model should contain.  As with version 1 of the Entity Framework, you have two options, Generate from Database and Empty Model.  To a large extent, the latter was redundant in the first version of the framework, but with version 2 it becomes very useful.  Select Empty Model and click Finish.

Adding an entity and scalar properties to your model

You will now be presented with your empty model designer ready for you to add your entities.  Right click on the designer and select Add –> Entity…  For this example we will name our entity “Customer” and the entity set “Customers”.  This will create your Customer entity in the designer.

You will now need to add some properties to the entity.  You can do this by right clicking the entity and Add –> Scalar Property and then selecting the data type of the property. Do this and create two string scalar properties for Name and Email.

Adding complex types

You should now have a Customer entity with properties for the customer’s name and email address. A complex type is essentially a property that can contain sub properties.  To display this we are going to create one for the customer’s mailing address.

In your model browser, right click on the “Complex Types” folder and select Create Complex Type.  Rename this created type “Address”.  Now right click on the Address object you have created and select Add –> Scalar Property –> String.  Rename the created property “Line 1”.  Repeat this, adding properties for Line 2, Town, County, Post Code (you could use City, State, Zip if you are in the U.S. for example).

Once you have created your complex type, you can add this to your Customer entity by right clicking the entity and selecting Add –> Complex Property. If you name your property Address, then the property type should automatically be set to Address, which is what we have just created.  You can check this and alter the type via the properties of the complex property (that’s a lot of properties )

Create some additional entities

Once I had created my Customer entity, I then went through the same steps to create two additional entities for Order and Product. If you do this, then you should end up with something like below.

Adding entity associations

Now that we have our entities for Customer, Order and Product, we need to tell the model how the entities are associated.  For example, a customer will have related orders and an order will have related products.

To add our first association, right click the Customer entity and select Add –> Association. You will then be presented with the dialog shown below to actually define the association.  As you can see, the primary entity for this association is Customer which is related to Order with a multiplicity of one-to-many.  Here is where we also set the navigation properties which will allow us to access related entities.  So for example, the Customer entity will have a navigation property of “Orders”.  There is also a plain English description of the association you are about to create to ensure that you are creating it correctly.

Once you are happy click ok and the association will be shown on your model connecting the Customer and Order entities.

We now need to also create an association between the Order and Product entities using the same steps as above, but this time the properties of the association are slightly different as the multiplicity is many-to-many as show below.

Generating the database

Ok, so we have our model containing our entities.  Our entities have their properties and their associations, but we still do not have a database for our model to map to.  This is the bit I really like.  Right click on the model designer area and click “Generate Database Script From Model…”.

This will then open the standard database connection dialog we are all used to in Visual Studio. Add a connection, select your server and enter a name for your database (use a name that does not already exist, I called mine “ModelFirstTestDb”…..original I know!), then click OK.  You should then be prompted to create the database as seen below, so click Yes to create the database.

You should now see your new connection selected and the option to store the credentials in the web.config should be checked. Click next and the database schema scripts (DDL) will be generated for you and you will be presented with the generated script as below.  Take a minute to have a look through the DDL and see how it has created the tables and fields.  In the image below you can see the fields that have been generated to map to the complex type for the Customer address we created earlier.

Now we just need to click Finish and we will be warned that our existing mappings and store schema will be overwritten, click Yes to continue.

Execute your DDL

Now you need to take the generated script and execute it against your database.  The database itself will have been created, but in this beta version you still need to execute the scripts manually.  The ADO.Net team have indicated that this will not be the case in the final version.

Running your Dynamic Data Entities application

If you now open the Global.asax.cs file in your project and add the following line in the RegisterRoutes method, you should be able to run your application and see your new model and database in action;

DefaultModel.RegisterContext(typeof(Model1Container),new ContextConfiguration() { ScaffoldAllTables = true });

Technorati Tags: .net 4, ADO.NET, Entity Framework, tutorial, 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 »]]> 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