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.
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.
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).
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!
1. You Always Talk About Script club 2. You Always Talk About Script Club 3. If Someone asks for Help, And You Can Help, You Help 4. Two People Help One Person at One Time 5. One Module Per Person Per Night 6. All Scripts, All PowerShell 7. Scripts will be as short as they can be 8. If This is your First time at Script Club, You Have to Script
I’m a total noob when it comes to PowerShell. I think I’ll need to make a trip up to visit Script Club to learn more. The interesting things is that the meetings are taking place in a municipal courtroom in the Greenfield Law Enforcement center. This club is so dangerous, they need court supervision!
You can find all the details on the group and their upcoming meeting on Steven’s blog.
The Bing Maps team has just released a major update built entirely on Silverlight 3. Some of the new enhancements are simply crazy cool! First up is something called Streetside. With Silverlight 3 they’re able to take advantage of some 3D aspects for this Streetside concept and really immerse the users into the site. One of the first things I tried out was to bring up Chicago and literally walk throughout the city with my little blue avatar. The imagery and the navigation is simply amazing. It was very simple to walk down the street and navigate myself around different streets and corners. In the upper right-hand corner, the map shows me the direction I’m viewing and my field-of-view.
If I move my blue avatar further down the street, the technology is able to detect a geographic change in the street, in this case Wacker Drive rounding a corner, and changes my avatar to let the user know there is a directional change. Think of what’s going on here. This is Silverlight, folks! Very cool!
Some of the other enhancements include an Enhanced Bird’s Eye view that incorporates our 3D model views and hi-res bird’s eye images for both urban and rural areas. In cases where we don’t have bird’s eye photography, we use various satellite data to represent 2D data as a 3D model, such as a mountain, thanks to Silverlight.
Also, one of the coolest things is the integration of Photosynth into Bing Maps.
This means you can zip down from space down into someone’s house…not kidding. If you’ve built a synth on Photosynth.com and geo-annotated it (the little globe icon) your synth gets indexed into Bing Maps.
Ram Cherala, Principal Program Manager in the Visual Studio Test Tools Business, will be visiting the Midwest District to provide a deeper dive into the innovative new capabilities being introduced in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Test Elements and Test and Lab Management products.
These sessions are targeted toward Developers, Architects, and Quality Assurance teams. Attendees will be given the unique opportunity to have a first glimpse into the products and interact directly with the Redmond team responsible for designing and delivering these products to the market. We will cover a broad range of important topics including Software Quality Assurance, historical debugging, manual test runner, test impact analysis and test lab management.
Date
Location
Register
Milwaukee Monday, December 14, 2009
N19 W24133 Riverwood Drive Suite 150 Waukesha, WI 53188
It might not be our new marketing campaign for SQL Azure, but maybe it should be! The SQL Azure team has kicked off a feature suggestion site. If you would like to help shape SQL Azure and have a say on what features the team focuses on, share your thoughts (and votes) at http://mygreatsqlazureidea.com.
Ram Cherala, Principal Program Manager in the Visual Studio Test Tools Business, will be visiting the Midwest District to provide a deeper dive into the innovative new capabilities being introduced in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Test Elements and Test and Lab Management products.
