Dave Bost

The release of Visual Studio 2010 is right around the corner. For several months, developers have been plugging away at the Beta bits and we have received valuable feedback. Based upon that feedback, the Visual Studio team has decided to push out a Release Candidate (RC) that is now available for you to download.

Jason Zander provides some additional details regarding the RC…

We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses.  In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product.  Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.

You can now download the Visual Studio Release Candidate and continue to provide your valuable feedback.

Scott Guthrie is taking it one step further by inviting you to submit your feedback to the Visual Studio Connect website, but also sending him an email directly:

Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix.  If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it.  I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).

The team is also looking for feedback regarding the install experience as well.

Visual Studio 2010 is a MAJOR release. A number of items (based on customer feedback) has been ripped and replaced with leading-edge technologies. All of this effort to gain customer feedback is to make sure we’re ALL (Microsoft and the community of developers and users) is happy with this release. We all want a tool that is going to help us succeed in what we do – write software!

Go download the bits now!

.NET 4, .NET Development, Announcements, Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010

Today Soma announced the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 Beta 2.  Soma also added a little nugget of information around the ship date of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – March 22, 2010.

The Beta 2 bits are available today for MSDN Subscribers and general availability will be October 21st. It was also announced that Beta 2 comes with a  “Go Live” license, which essentially states that Microsoft will provide a smooth upgrade path to the final release as well as provide support for the product.

Visual Studio 2010 is a huge undertaking. There are many enhancements not the least of which is a complete rewrite of the shell! There are also a number of improvements to the underlying .NET Framework to provide the means to build great applications on top of Windows 7. The first step for you is to download and install VS2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2. Brian Keller provides a nice walkthrough on how to download and install the necessary bits and get you up and running.

The next step is to download the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit and work your way through all of the great training content. In addition, I’d set aside some time to watch the series of 10-4 episodes on Channel9 and learn about all the new features in VS2010 and .NET 4.

From there, I’d ask that you report bugs and provide feedback on the Visual Studio Connect Site. With your feedback we can be sure that Visual Studio 2010 is the product that *you* demand on March 22, 2010.

.NET Development, Team System, Visual Studio, training

This is old news to some but new to many. Last winter, a number of Microsoft MVP’s and Regional Directors published a series of articles as part of a promotional program on MSDN called {You Shape} IT MSDN. Those articles have been combined and published as part of a book that you can now download for free called DevShaped.

This is a great collection of insights and essays from some of the stalwarts of the .NET developer community.

Working with Brownfield Code by Donald Belcham (Microsoft MVP)
Beyond C# and VB by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)
Remaining Valuable to Employers featuring Barry Gervin, Billy Hollis, Bruce Johnson, Scott Howlett, Adam Cogan, and Jonathan Zuck
All I Wanted Was My Data by Barry Gervin (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Efficiency Upgrade by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Getting Started with Continuous Integration by Sondre Bjellås (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
On Strike at the Software Factory by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)
C# Features You Should Be Using by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)
Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets by Brian Noyes (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Is Silverlight 2 Ready for Business Applications? by Jonas Follesø (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Innovate with Silverlight 2 by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)
Real World WPF: Rich UI + HD by Gill Cleeren (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Hidden Talents by Peter Jones
Creating Useful Installers with Custom Actions by Christian Jacob
Banking with XML by Peter Jones
Sending Email by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

You can download the PDF eBook at http://devshaped.com/files/developersdevelopers.pdf. For those of you who like to read offline, you can purchase a full-color version or black-and-white version from Lulu.

.NET Development

This week I am attending php|tek and while learning how to “Get it Done” from Wez Furlong, Soma announced on his blog that Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 (Beta 1) has shipped to the developer masses.

You can download the bits, submit feedback to the Connect site and participate in the ongoing conversations on the Beta forums. The documentation has been removed from the download for Beta 1 but you can find all of the documentation online on MSDN.

Once you kicked off the download, be sure to read What’s New in .NET Framework 4 and What’s New in Visual Studio 2010.

You can install Visual Studio 2010 side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio or you can drop it into a virtualized machine with something like Virtual PC.

Once you have everything up and running, download the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit to learning about the latest features and enhancements. There are also a number of walkthroughs posted highlighting some of these new features.

Enjoy!

.NET Development, ASP.NET, Announcements, Team System, Visual Studio, WPF

I would like to thank everyone who came out for the OnRamp240 events in Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago over the past week. We had a great discussion around the Microsoft web development platform, including the greatExpression tools that are sure to please many a web developer and designers out there and not to mention taking a dip in the Silverlight waters for a brief time. There is surely more to come from these great tools and technologies.

As I was able to relay to some of you (Sorry, Indy), the Expression Web product discs are currently on the assembly line and should be shipping out around May 28th. If you attended the OnRamp240 session and filled out an evaluation, you should be receiveing your copy in the mail shortly thereafter.

There are quite a few resources I pointed out during the session and I promised all of you that I would post them here.

First and foremost, no one should miss ScottGu’s keynote from the MIX’07 conference. Scott lays out the full Silverlight story and invites a number of customer’s up on stage to show what they’ve been able to do with the technology in a short amount of time. Simply one of the best keynotes I’ve ever seen and not to be missed!

For the developers, Ihighlyrecommend viewing Omar Khan’s MIX’07 session on Using Visual Studio Codename “Orcas” to Design and Develop Rich AJAX Enabled Web Sites. The Javascript Intellisense feature and debugging support is enough for any Javascript developer to take notice.

Unfortunately we had a short amount of time to cover a lot of material. We weren’t able to go into ASP.NET AJAX as I would’ve like and some of you might have hoped. No worries, though. Head on over to the ASP.NET AJAX Community Site and check out Joe Stagner’s “How-To” video collection on ASP.NET AJAX.

For those of you looking to make the plunge into Silverlight. Everything you need can be found on the Getting Started page of the Silverlight community website. The Sprawl game, that seems to kick my butt everytime, can be found in the Silverlight 1.0 Gallery, whereas the Chess and Silverlight Airlines samples can be found in the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery.

.NET Development, Illinois Events, Indiana Events, Wisconsin Events