Snowball - The Blog

Microsoft just announced that all of us can help deciding which sessions will be delivered at Tech-Ed 2010 Berlin. That's a great way of making sure that the contents is what the public wants!

I've ran through the list and 4 of my proposals made the shortlist (which is good news :)).

• Treasures for the C# developer in Visual Studio 2010
• AJAX Tips and tricks: things you never knew that could be done in ASP.NET Ajax
• Silverlight data access and services not for the faint of heart
• The good, the bad and… well, that’s it: Comparing good and bad practices in Silverlight application development

If you would like me to deliver one of these sessions on the upcoming Tech-Ed, please vote for them at http://europe.msteched.com/sessionpreference . Of course, there are many really other interesting sessions there as well: I'm sure this will be a great conference!

Thanks for voting!

With my book I wrote together with Kevin Dockx, Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook available for a couple of weeks now, I decided to do a small search on reviews. I’ll be honest, I took all I could find right now.

Here’s the ones I found:

Richard Costall:

“Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook is a great publication, and worthy of a place any Silverlight developers bookshelf. The formula of ‘recipes’ works well, with well explained, yet simple examples covering almost everything you’d ask when starting out building business applications in Silverlight. It highlights Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 functionality differences, yet is right up to date on Silverlight 4.”

Complete review at: http://www.nxtgenug.net/Article.aspx?ArticleID=368

Vikram Pendse writes:

“My Review Comments : * * * * * (5 Stars)..Simple Amazing book !..Go and Grab your Copy Today !!! :)

Impressed with this Book?..want to have a look at? Ok ! What you see is what you get ! kidding..You can download a sample chapter right away !”

Complete review at http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com/2010/05/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and.html

Damir Tomicic writes:

“Das Buch ist sehr praktisch geschrieben. Der Leser merkt sofort, dass Gill und Kevin die Ansätze selbst ausprobiert und für die Leser optimiert haben. Die gewählte Sprache ist einfach, die Beispiele auch für Anfänger geeignet. Ein guter Einstieg in das Thema.”

Complete review at: http://tomicic.de/2010/05/05/MicrosoftSilverlight4DataAndServicesCookbookGillcleeren.aspx

Review on Amazon.com

“Good Introduction to the Datagrid, Dataform, and different Services (4/5)”

Complete review at http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/product-reviews/1847199844/ref=dp_db_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Interested in my book as well? It is available from Packt Publishing, Amazon.com, Amazon UK and many other retailers as well! I hope you enjoy it!

I just noticed that the video of my session on ASP.NET 4.0 at DevDays Netherlands is online. You can watch it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/matthijs/Whats-hot-in-ASPNET-40-by-Gill-Cleeren/

After beta’s and one RC release, starting today, we can get our hands on Visual Studio 2010 RTM. Just hours ago, Microsoft held a keynote on the release of their flagship IDE, Visual Studio 2010. This release coincides with the release of .NET 4.0 and of course Silverlight 4, which has its official launch event tomorrow. This marks probably the largest release ever for developers from Microsoft.

I need it badly

Visual Studio 2010 is like honey, developers swarm to it. It’s understandable that you want to get your hands on the bits. Where can you get them?
If you’re an MSDN subscriber, you’re in luck, as you can get all the bits from the MSDN subscription site. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions)
If you are not, you have the following options:

• Download a trial: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/download
• Download the fully functional Express editions: free Express editions
• Team Foundation Server 2010 trial: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8bb22356-7dfb-4999-9d76-43abddcf6eec&displaylang=en

Why you need it

If I wanted to make a list of reasons why you should be upgrading to Visual Studio 2010, I would be up all night I think. Since it’s quite late already, I’m going to make an all-but-complete list with my top features that make Visual Studio 2010 an not-to-miss upgrade. (For the complete list – you’re warned, it’s very complete – take a look here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063(VS.100).aspx)

The IDE looks really stylish!

Upon opening Visual Studio 2010 for the first time, you’ll immediately notice that something happened… Something big. No longer the traditional grey interface, but an exciting new look for the place you spend all your development hours in. Built entirely in WPF, the new shell offers plenty of extension points so you can make it feel even more like home.

New IDE features

I personally like the Navigate To function a lot (I blogged about it yesterday here: Visual Studio 2010 Tip- Navigate to functionality). Another one I like is the zoom in/out we can now do in the code editor. This is a real life-saver when doing demos on stage or when showing someone some code. Simply keep CTRL key pressed and rotate that mouse wheel of yours. For people who work on multiple monitors, Visual Studio now supports this much better!

Some other nice features:

• Improved IntelliSense
• Highlight references
• Stub generation

New framework and languages

Visual Studio 2010 comes packed with new releases.

• Silverlight 4 :) More on this at the launch event tomorrow!
• C# 4.0 adds interesting new features to the language (more here). Also VB.net developers aren’t left outside in the cold, their favorite language gets an upgrade as well to Visual Basic 2010.
• ASP.NET 4.0 as well as MVC 2 are born! If you want to get an overview of what’s new, download my talk of DevDays 2010 here. Most striking new features in WebForms 4 are client IDs, control over ViewState and more control over the HTML that’s being rendered.
• Entity Framework makes a jump and goes straight to v4.
• WCF and WF both get an upgrade to v4 as well.
• TFS installation gets really simple using TFS Basic.
• F# is now available for the functional programming needs.
• SharePoint templates!

I want more

Not enough reading material for your brain? A free ebook is made available “Moving to Visual Studio 2010” here.

Warnings here!

Something to watch out for: currently, the Windows Phone 7 tools do not work with the RTM version of 2010. Read more on this here: http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/175181.aspx 

Very often, you need to navigate to a class while coding. Perhaps a class you wrote yourself, perhaps you just want to see the members of a type of the .NET framework.

Visual Studio 2010 has THE ultimate feature for this, namely the Navigate To function. What you do, is hit CTRL + , (yes, indeed the comma) and it will open the Navigate To window, as shown below.

This window follows the same rules as the new IntelliSense: if I’m searching for a property “OverPaid”, I can search by typing Over… or just use OP.

If you have some text already selected in the code editor, the window will perform its search from there.

Are you counting down the days to the Visual Studio 2010 launch as well? I really hope so, as it’s the biggest release for developers EVER! The list of new features is way too long to put in a simple post, so therefore I encourage you to watch the keynote live next week on April 13th 8AM PST (that’s 5PM in the afternoon Belgian time). Click here to add the event straight to your Outlook calendar.

Overlapping with the Dutch DevDays event this year, I was of course present at TechDays 2010 Belgium as well. TechDays really became a big event with lots of attendees, speakers and sponsors. Never before had the line-up of speakers been so impressive, with names such as Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman, Charley Kindel… The feedback that I’ve heard was very positive, with the general comment being that the session content was good, deep dive and well brought by the speakers.

I got 2 session slots:

• Silverlight 4 Tour de Force with a little WPF 4 sauce on top (together with Katrien De Graeve)
• Building Data-Driven applications FAST with RIA services and Silverlight

As promised during the talks, I have uploaded all slide decks and demos for both sessions below. You can download them and use them as you like.

• Silverlight 4 Tour de Force with a little WPF 4 sauce on top
• Slides
• Demos
• Building Data-Driven applications FAST with RIA services and Silverlight
• Slides
• Demos

I took some pictures during the event as well. Below I posted some, the entire set can be seen here.

On March 29th and 30th 2010, DevDays 2010 Netherlands took place for the 13th time.  The event, if I heard and remember correctly, had over 2300 attendees and 120 developer sessions.

I was there, for the second year in a row, as speaker and gave a talk on ASP.NET 4.0. The session slides and demos are available for you to download and use:

Slides

Demos

Here are some images of the event I took with my phone.

The rest of the pictures can be found here.

The new shell written in WPF in VS2010 opens a whole set of options. Take for example the Recent Projects module. In previous versions, it always showed the last opened projects, without giving us any influence on what it should be displaying. It happened to me a lot that I’m working on a project, but by giving a session with some demos, my “real” projects were removed from the list.

In VS2010, we now have the option to tweak it like we want.

For example, we can pin a project, so that it isn’t removed anymore, like so:

Or we can remove any temporary or old projects as shown below:

One of the new features of the 2010 platform, is the ability to install Team Foundation Server on a client OS, like Vista or Windows 7, 32 or 64 bit. It runs on SQL Express as database, which if not installed on your machine, will be installed by the setup configuration of TFS.

My personal setup is going to be a virtual machine in which I install TFS Basic. From my host OS, which has VS2010 installed along with Team Explorer, I can easily connect to it.

In this post, I wanted to show how easy it is to get things running on a Windows 7 (virtual) machine.

1. Installing Team Foundation Server

The installation for TFS basic is the same as for the fully-featured version. Run setup.exe from the disk (32bit or 64bit, depending on your OS).

You should see the following wizard.

By default, nothing is checked. Check the Team Foundation components checkbox.

2. Configuration of TFS so that it will become TFS Basic

At this point, things have been installed, but nothing is running yet. The configuration wizard should start up, as shown in the following screenshot.

Now we get the choice to either install basic, advanced, application tier or upgrade. Select upgrade and click on Start Wizard. This wizard will now guide you through the required steps. On my machine, SQL Server Express 2008 was already installed, so the wizard skipped this installation.

The wizard will now check if all my selections are possible with my config. If so, we can continue.

Success, we’re good to go!

Installation has started.

Finished setting up everything…

TFS Basic is ready, here’s the address of your personal TFS Basic server.

3. Team Explorer is called to the scene

To use my TFS instance from Visual Studio, I need to install Team Explorer. It can be found on the installation iso from TFS. Run its setup.

Installing…

And complete!

4. Visual Studio 2010 now with Team Explorer

In Visual Studio’s Team Explorer, click on Connect with Team Project. Add your server as shown below:

From File > New Team Project, you can start a new team project.

And there we have it, a completely configured system with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS Basic!