I wanted to walk you through a quick demo on some of the enhancements for data access in Visual Studio 2005. Please note that though I have a bunch of screen shots, the application here is pretty simple. My goal is not to show you the power of the new stuff that makes the developer more productive and a lot of it is the small stuff - which all adds up to a fair amount of FTE’s....
I got a bit of time this weekend to play with SQL Server Express (SQE) and here are some more details on it. I installed this part of Whidbey 2005. By default the setup installs this under the SQLEXPRESS instance name, so to connect to it you would use something like “machinename\SQLEXPRESS”. The API set for SQL Server Express is the same as SQL Server so upgrading from one to the other would not be a problem....
Last night I got some time to start playing with the Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 which was code named Whidbey. I got some requests for screen shots and I have uploaded a few. To me these are of not too much value because I have shots of the installation process itself and some initial screen shots of VS.NET 2005 but I don’t cover the real improvements - trust me the “meat” of it will follow soon....
Microsoft has a three series article showing the details of MSBuild. It is a recommended read if you care on what the new build system would be. What is MSBuild you ask? MSBuild is a long overdue IMHO technology installed with the CLR in Visual Studio 2005 and “Longhorn”. Its goal is to replace makefiles by project files written in XML that let you build large-scale systems. In a project file, targets are used to organise and define high-level construction sets with explicit dependencies....
Though this is technically called, OneNote 2003 SP1, why I don’t know. It really is a whole new product with even more features - many excellent features which further improved this amazing product. If you are in a lot of meetings and need to track different things for different clients (which sometimes I have to at the same time), this is an invaluable product to use and worth every penny (IMHO)....
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is a lightweight, redistributable version of SQL Server 2005 that is optimized to provide a data store for small-scale data-driven applications. Per Microsoft, “It is designed for building simple, dynamic applications. SQL Server Express helps developers build robust and reliable applications by providing a powerful database that is also free and easy to use. Too often database systems are overly complex for building simple applications. SQL Server Express and the other Express products reduce this complexity by providing a simple but powerful development environment for building data-driven applications....
Interesting discussion going on MS and Opensource. Is it MS bashing? Is it more “meaningful”. <strong>Check it out</strong> and state your own opinion.
If you want to understand the new stuff in the next release of Visual Studio.NET <strong>Joe</strong> has an <strong>article</strong> detailing demos that you can plan with. This is a good starting point and covers a lot of areas like: Understanding Code (MDLView) - The first demo is all about how you get up to speed on an existing code base. To emphasise the problem I renamed nearly all the files so they were numbers which brings home the point about not understanding what the code is actually doing....
I finally found the time to install and play a little with the new build of Longhorn. It is not too different above the covers than the previous build (PDC Bits), though it *seems* to be a little more stable. One of the first things I found was that SimpleText did not exist anymore - there is another <strong>post</strong> covering that bit. A quick note, all the screenshots here seem a bit washed out - that happened when I tried to convert them to png....
If you have played with both the PDC and the WinHEC build of Longhorn (Build # 4074) and in your small applications if you had a class called SimpleText - that code would now give an exception in the new build with the error “Class not found”. So out of curiosity I <strong>asked</strong> on the newsgroups what was up with it and found out that Microsoft has consolidated their three classes to handle text to two - which help solve some of the confusion....
There has been a lot of talk recently hearting up the wires in cyberworld on Closures and c#. One of the question that some have asked is what the heck are closures? Well I don’t know what all the excitment is all about, but closures are nothing but what is also called the Anonymous Methods. There now that you know it, go do something productive! BTW, anonymous methods are cool and with the combination of iterators you can go pretty interesting things....
This is part 1 (if you will) of a couple of posts. I am surprised how very little most people know how the GC actually works. If you are reading this and are going to be interviewed by me, this is one of my favourite questions. *grin* This is based on an interesting post I found long ago I think on gotdotnet (sorry I forgot who the author was, I’ll try and google it and see if I can find the link to the original post)....
Miguel Jimenez has a <strong>post</strong> on how to install Whidbey on the new Longhorn bits. There are some comments on some problems. I myself have not tried this (yet), will be posting my first impressions on the new build and then try this after that - probably this weekend or early next week.
I have been meaning to write something on what are iterators, well actually more on how they work and why is there so much “hype” around them, the only problem being the best excuse we all can fall back to - Time *grin*. After all Java already has them, so is that a big deal that .NET would (when Whidbey is released) have them. Anyways, the point being that <strong>Roshan</strong> has a decent post on that already - probably a much better job that I would do....
<strong>This</strong> utility that can be used to quickly switch the .NET Framework version that the aspx pages are compiled against.I am not sure why you would want to run both the versions of ASP.NET on the same box at the same time as 1.1 is backward compatible to 1.0, but I am sure there are many reasons which make total sense - I just cannot fanthom any at this time....
I never knew this but if you want to force a debugger to launch (especially useful when writing a Windows Service for example) you can use System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); Now I have not tried this myself (yet), but have others? If so, whats the feedback?
Yipeee! I you are a MSDN Universal subscriber - you can download the version they handed out at WinHEC!
In Longhorn MS is looking to add some laptop-specific features designed to make portable machines easy to use as consumer devices such as portable DVD players. They are also looking to add a separate UI that could be “instantly booted up“ to play movies, music, etc. - hence getting you the the experience more comparable to using consumer electronics devices. For someone like me who is mostly on the road, this would be good, if I can cut down to one “device” (i....
Longhorn Milestone 7.2 (M7.2) bits were handed out at WinHEC. Per <strong>Chris sells</strong> , the MSDN subscribes should be seeing this soon. You can check out some of the reviews from the WinHEC participants <strong>here</strong> . I am now rubbing my hands gleefully and eager to get my hands on it - have to wait for it to show up on the subscriber download at MSDN - will need a new HDD then :)....
You probably already heard this, but <strong>Chris Sells</strong> has a new column on MSDN called <strong>Longhorn Foghorn</strong> , that describes each of the “ <strong>Pillars of Longhorn</strong> ” - this is something which IMHO developers would understand and appreicate. In the first article he explains the “Pillars” and then in the next two goes onto build Solitaire. You can download the sample and play with it too.
<strong>Shadowfax</strong> is an interesting set of “Reference Solution” that is being worked on by the PAG group at Microsoft. I think this would be a very important piece in the whole SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) space, with getting bits out the door in a quick and reusable fashion. Basically this is a similar implementation of Indigo in todays technologies (i.e. those that are currently shipping such as .NET). This “unifies” the four messaging options you have today:...
Microsoft is planning on releasing a Longhorn Refresh to geeks like me at WinHEC next month. I am looking forward to that as there are just too many leaks right now. On an average on a machine with a 1gb of mem, I have to reboot on an average every two hours otherwise the memory workingset get way to huge with all the disk thrashing!
Today, on one of the computers at home, Meenakshi accidentally installed one of the spy-wares (via a popup - which interestingly was not blocked). This changed the search engine used by IE, installed some toolsbars and opened a whole bunch of popup windows. Also disabled some of the other legit toolbars that were running (MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc.) Anyways, it took me a good 3+ hours to track the bugger down and clean up the whole machine....
<strong>Here</strong> is a very old post I found lying around on my disk by Brian Harry, he was the Product Manager of the CLR team at Microsoft (he might still be, I just don’t know). This is a long and very interesting read on the issue of resource management and the deterministic finalization of .NET. Brian provides the backgorund so most people (who were flaming MS at that time), understand that this is really a hard problem to solve....
Here are some excerpts from my slide deck on XAML. If you need to see the complete powerpoint, let me know and I can either mail it to you or upload it here. If you don’t know, XAML is the new Extensible Application markup language that is part of Longhorn. If you have the PDC bits you should be able to run these. I am skipping on most of the details of the controls, probably will post that some other day....