A few weeks ago, Microsoft released the Visual Studio Pro Power Tools, a free set of enhancements and features for Visual Studio 2010. There seems to be a small issue (it’s not really correct to call it a bug) with one of the shortcuts that it adds in combination with a Belgian keyboard layout (which is Azerty).

On the tools download page, you can read the following about the added Align Assignments feature:

Align Assignments
This extension is useful for making your code a little more readable by aligning the assignments when you type Ctrl+Alt+] such that it takes this:

And turns it into this:
 

On an Azerty keyboard, AltGr is used to type the square bracket. No issue there (yet).

The issue appears however when typing an array instantiation:

              int []
array = newint]

As you can see, I *wanted* to type new int[], but the opening bracket failed, because of the added shortcut. Instead, the code wants to perform the Align Assignments command. This is a clash of shortcuts that I guess only appears on Azerty keyboard layouts.

The solution is either changing or removing the shortcut for this command, as shown in the image below:

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.

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!

The wait is over. The biggest release of Visual Studio is here… at least in a beta form. Visual Studio 2010 is probably the most remarkable release of Microsoft’s flagship IDE since the introduction of .NET, now already 8 years ago (if I count correctly… man, I AM getting old!!).
You may be wondering; why is this release any bigger than the previous ones? Well, for one thing, the complete shell is now written in WPF. It supports dual screen setups. It includes .NET 4.0. It will support a Silverlight 3 designer. It will even make coffee for you!

If you want to get started with this beta version, head over to MSDN subscriptions (yes, subscriber download only!).

Appearantly, the next version of Visual Studio, version 10, is starting to take shape. While no (public) CTP/early build has been released of this version, Microsoft is working hard on taking the IDE again one step further... Or should I say, many steps? Read on!

Jeffrey Schlimmer posted some information on his blog that outlines where Microsoft is taking the new version of Visual Studio, code-named Hawaii. It seems that there will be 4 main areas of, let's say, BIG improvements:

Visual Studio will start taking advantage of WPF: the editor will be WPF-based and in general, VS10 will be more modular and have fine-grained extensibility. Multi-monitor and multi-core will also become available, as well as a more modern look, again based on WPF.

Also, while not becoming Notepad in terms of startup-time, VS will become smaller and faster. In my personal opinion, with every new version, the load time has been more and more reduced.

Since the installation of Silverlight 2 Beta 2, I had been experiencing crashes of Visual Studio 2008. The crash always occured when shutting down Visual Studio, but only if I was working on a Silverlight application.

I figured it had something to do with the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Tools for Visual Studio, but I had my hopes on VS 2008 SP1 to get rid of all the errors.

Sadly enough, the error wasn't gone after the install of SP1 and reinstall of the (updated) Silverlight Tools.

The only thing left was trying to find help, based on the signature of the error:
EventType : clr20r3    
P1 : devenv.exe    
P2 : 9.0.30428.1    
P3 : 4815597f
P4 : microsoft.visualstudio.silverlight

Luckily, the error was the subject of a thread on the Silverlight forums, and some bright reader found what the solution for the error is:
1. Uninstall the tools (once again in my case...)
2. Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE and search for a DLL called Microsoft.VisualStudio.ServicesProxy.dll. Delete (or better move to a temporary location) this file.
3. Reinstall the tools.

If everything went well, the size of the tools in "Control Panel -> Programs and features" should now display 1.17MB instead of 1.14MB.

Now I can go back to doing Silverlight demo's, knowing that I will not get a crash of my IDE every time :)

Together with the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Microsoft also released an update of the Silverlight tools. The previous version is not supported anymore.

The new version can be downloaded here.

From the Microsoft.com page:
This package is an add-on to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 2. It can be installed either on top of Visual Studio 2008 RTM or Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.

As promised last week with the release of SQL Server 2008, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on Monday August 11th.

At the time of writing, I can't find it on the MSDN site, but it is on the MSDN Subscriptions website, so it's just a matter of time before it appears publicly.
The Service Pack is about 800MB large, the updated MSDN Library about 2.2GB!

Update:  Here's the public download link.

Is the release of SP1 a big deal? Yes, it surely is.
Below is a list containing a few of the new/improved features:

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support
• Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging
• ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
• Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects
• New .NET Framework Setup Bootstrapper for Client Applications
• New Windows Forms Controls like the vector shape, Printing, and the DataRepeater
• WPF Performance Improvements (handy for my current WPF project that contains High Definition video!!)
• VS 2008 for WPF Improvements
• SQL 2008 Support
• ADO.NET Entity Framework and Linq to Entities
• ADO.NET Data Services
• Several improvements to C# as well as Visual Basic
• Many improvements on Team Foundation Server

More information here.

All the links you need:

• Express Editions
• Team Foundation Server SP1
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Visual Studio 2008 Preparation Pack Tool
• .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1
• Silverlight Tools for VS2008 SP1

Today, I had create a deployment procedure for a VSTO 2007 Excel Add-in. Since I'm not an expert in Office-related development, I started doing some research on the topic. Here's what I found out to be the best way to do such a deployment. (Note, again, I'm a rookie at Office development, so there might be better ways...) 

Initially, I found the most easy way to deploy an add-in is using the Publish function in Visual Studio 2008. This way, a ClickOnce is created.
Now, the add-in connects to a lot of WCF services. The addresses of the endpoints of these services, among other configuration information, is stored in the app.config from the add-in. This information needs to be editable, since the server address might change over time.

When using the ClickOnce setup, the deployed application worked fine. The application was able to read out the settings of the app.config file. However, it is not stored in a specific location, since it is in the cache of ClickOnce. So, I had to find another solution, so that the config file can be located and edited.

So, after doing some more research on the subject, I found the correct way to deploy an add-in is a simple setup project created from Visual Studio. However, you need to add some registry settings as well as some other configuration.
The complete procedure is explained here and here.

I was today doing some development in Visual Studio 2008 on a n-tier application, where some Webservice needed to be called that would then call some deeper layer on its turn, the usual stuff. However, the breakpoints in the DAL were not being hit and when stepping-in, the following error was shown:

Unable to automatically step into the server. The remote procedure could not be debugged.This usually indicates that debugging has not been enabled on the server."

Turns out that this was caused by the web.config not having a

attribute. Therefore, any breakpoint located in a layer behind the service layer, was not hit. I remember having the same issue with Visual Studio 2005, but I never got this error however.

Today, I gave students at the "De Nayer Instituut" in Mechelen an introduction to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

As you can expect from this title, it's a very high level introduction to the new aspects of Visual Studio 2008 and .net 3.5. More specifically, there are some slides on the following:

• language enhancements (anonymous methods, automatic properties, lambda expressions...)
• LINQ
• the new features of the web designer (javascript debugging, CSS support...)
• WPF, WCF and WF
• Office 2007 development (ribbon designer...).

I thought it would be a good idea to post them here. Feel free to use the deck for your own presentations. If you do, maybe add a comment so I know they have been of good use!

Visual Studio 2008 Intro.ppt

Just a small post on a new download that's available on Microsoft Download: Visual Studio 2008 Support for SQL Server 2008, Community Technology Preview.

Using this CTP, you can now have your Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 successfully connect to SQL Server 2008 and have it show tables and stored procedures. Other resolved issues can be found on the download page.

Unfortunately, the CTP does not make it possible yet to use LINQ to SQL with SQL Server 2008.

Download can be found here.   

A Hot-fix was released for Visual Studio 2008 to address minor problems with the web development part of the IDE.

Here's what was changed with this service release:

HTML Source view performance

• Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
• “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
• Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
• Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
• The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

Design view performance

• Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.

HTML editing

• Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
• Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.

JavaScript editing

• When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.

Web Site build performance

• Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.

After installation, you should see the hot-fix in the About dialog like the following:

If you want to download the fix, log on to Connect.

This is something handy: the largest comparison of Visual Studio 2008 versions ever made. It was created by Rob Caron and can be viewed here.

The Visual Web Developer created V2.0 of the spell checker for Visual Studio and makes it compatible with Visual Studio 2008 at once.

The spell checker now supports text verification in:

• HTML style comments <-- HTML -->
• ASP.NET server side comments: <%-- ASP.NET --%>
• JScript, C# and C++ comments: // C++ style comments
• CSS and C style comments: /* C style comments */
• VB and VBScript style comments: 'This is VB comment

The free plugin can be downloaded here.

Dan Fernandez posted an overview of 15 great features you'll love with the new Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions.
His list encompasses integration of LINQ, free ebooks, WPF designer support... and of course, the fact that the Express editions are completely free.
Did you know there's even an ISO you can download with all express editions included? It's a 900MB download that, when installed, gives you the complete express suite. All for free!

Dan's list can be found here.

And here's a list of direct links to download the express editions.

Also, you can download the XNA game studio 2.0 (beta), which installs as an add-on for Visual Studio. Yes, again, all for free... More information here.

Start downloading, I'd say!

Finally, we can present the RTM version of the Visual Studio 2008 RTM Training Kit.
This kit is a real goldmine, containing presentations, Hands-On-Labs, demo's... on all topics related to Visual Studio 2008.
Now you only have to find about 5 days to complete all that's in here, and you're set!

All the info is below:
The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit has been updated for the RTM and has been released on the Microsoft.com Download Center for anyone to download and use.

The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit contains a full 5-days of technical content including 20hands-on labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos.   The technologies covered in the kit include:  LINQ, C# 3.0, VB 9, WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, .NET Compact Framework 3.5, VSTO 3.0, Visual Studio Team System, and Team Foundation Server. 

Originally developed for early adoption work with ISVs, it is now available to all. 

You can download the entire training kit from the download center here:  http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397 .  The kit is just over 120MB compressed.   After downloading the kit, simply run the installation program to extract the contents to your local machine.  Once the installation process is complete, you will see an HTML page that allows you to navigate through the contents of the kit.  

Yes, it's here, the eagle has landed!

Visual Studio 2008 has RTM'ed! If you're an MSDN subscriber, you can start your download engines, it's a whopping 3921 MB large file for the entire Team Suite.

From MS PressPass:
"On Monday, Nov. 19, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM). With more than 250 new features,Visual Studio 2008 includes significant enhancements in every edition, including Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team System. Developers of all levels – from hobbyists to enterprise development teams – now have a consistent, secure and reliable solution for developing applications for the latest platforms: the Web, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Office system, and beyond."

You want it? Of course you do!

Maybe you already know SnagIt. It's a great screen capture tool, from the makers of Camtasia (normally used to create webcasts).
Appearantly, there's a plugin available to use it in conjunction with Visual Studio Team System: using this plugin, you can easily attach a screenshot to a workitem in VSTS.

Here you can see how it really works.

The free plugin, which requires Snag It of course, can be downloaded here.

Since the introduction of C# now already several years ago, C++ - once the most used development language - got in second (third?) position.

In a post on his blog, Somasegar explains the future of the language and its position in Microsoft's development roadmap. The upcoming features are also explained. A must read for every VC++ dev still out there.

Read the article here.

Microsoft has released a long-awaited Web interface for Team Foundation Server.

The Power Tool, dubbed Team System Web Access, is based on technology Microsoft acquired in March from DevBiz.

The company had already made the 1.0 and 2.0 versions of DevBiz's TeamPlain tool available for download, but did not provide customer support, according to a blog post from Brian Harry, a Microsoft distinguished engineer.

You can read more and download the tool here.

Today, Microsoft released a new CTP of Orcas, the next version of Visual Studio. At the moment, only a VPC is available with Team Suite installed. You can download it here.

Appearantly, I missed this one on release...
It's the January CTP of Orcas, the next Visual Studio.

Go here for the download (a hefty 5GB): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1FF0B35D-0C4A-40B4-915A-5331E11C39E6&displaylang=en

And another interesting release for webdevelopers like myself is the beta 3 of the web developer toolbar. It has been very long since that has been updated (I think I was even working at real at that time...). Anyway, here it is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en&tm

With Windows Presentation Foundation coming closer to its release date with Vista almost being upon us, more and more people are taking a look at programming in WPF… Lately, people searching on Google for WPF-related information is soaring. How do you know that, you might ask? Well, in my logs, I notice a steep increase in people landing on my blog who searched for information on WPF. That’s a good thing!! ?

However, what I do notice, is that there is still some confusion on some topics.  In this article, I want to help clear out the difference between the different application types in WPF/Vista. Since this is a major change with previous application models, lots of people, including me when I first heard about it, seem confused.

So, let’s get to it!

WPF has 2 main applications models: standalone and browser. On the other hand, it also has 2 types of navigation: menu-driven, which is what we’re all used to in traditional Windows applications and link-driven, which is the default for web applications. The first thing to note is that in WPF, both types of navigation can be used in either of the application models. Neat, isn’t it?
That basically means that you can create a web application as if it were a windows application, containing a menu to navigate around. Or, create a standalone desktop application that feels like a web application, with all buttons replaced by links.
No longer are you bound to one application model with is “natural” navigation model!

Standalone applications

When you want to create a “traditional” Windows application, you should choose to create “Windows Application (WPF)”.

The Windows Form now became a Window, each of these is declared as Window1.xaml. Notice that the build action for a Window file is automatically set to Page. What this means, is that the markup is turned into a special type of resource that can be identified uniquely by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). This way, WPF can load the window using a URI, as is done set the starting point in your App.xaml.

<Application x:Class="WindowsApplication2.App"
    xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation "
    xmlns:x=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml "
    StartupUri="Window1.xaml"
    >

This way, your application knows which window it has to load up first. This window is loaded modeless, meaning that it has no problems with you clicking anywhere else in the application.

Page’d applications

Should you want to create an application that mimics the web experience but still run as a standalone application, you should start by adding a Page(WPF).

Just like in the Window, you can add controls and content to the page. However, when you change the startupuri in the App.xaml to your newly added page, some things will change.

A window can host itself, like a form did in traditional Windows Forms programming. A HTML/ASPX page requires a browser. Now, we created a “standalone” application with the starting point set to a page. Kinda weird, right?

Well, the Application class in WPF is smart enough to detect if your startupuri is set to a page. It will then create a window to host your application.

Now, where does this “hosting window” come from?
When the startupuri is set to a XAML page or HTML page, Application  creates an instance of NavigationWindow to host them. This class derives from Window but extends it to make it look like a mini-browser window, providing navigation buttons at the top.

When content changes or when you click a link to navigate to another page, the previous content is added to the history. The management of the history itself is managed too by the NavigationWindow.

XAML Browser applications

The final type of application is the XAML browser application. While the previous type of application basically is a web application, being hosted in its own mini-browser, you can’t really take advantage of all the features modern browser have today. If that’s what you need, you should create a XAML browser application or XBAP.

To create one, you should choose new “XAML Browser Application (WPF)”. After that, you can copy all the code you created for that WPF standalone application to one or more pages, and your application is ready for the web!

One more thing you can do with XBAPs is publish them on a web- or intranet server. This is done using ClickOnce, which creates the executable along with 2 manifest files. One of these 2 has the extension XBAP, and that’s were the user navigates too. It then “downloads” the application to the local computer.

Because of the security risk, XBAPs are not installed and run in a security sandbox: some operations like writing to the registry are not allowed. Basically, XBAPs can only do things that are allowed for apps launched from the Internet zone, a restricted set of operations.

Conclusion
As you can see, the ways an application is build are different from what you are used to in traditional programming. I hope this guide is clear enough to help you choose the correct type when building a WPF application for Vista.
 

A key Microsoft executive disclosed this week that the coming Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 may not be totally compatible with Windows Vista -- though it remains unclear what his statements mean.

"Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will run on Vista but will likely have a few compatibility issues," said Somasegar's posting. "We are working with the Vista team to understand those, to provide workarounds where possible and also work on providing you with a set of fixes beyond SP1," he continued, although he did not reveal what the problems are or when those fixes will be made available.

However, he did mention that Windows Vista will ship with the .NET Framework 3.0 pre-installed.

More here.

Microsoft has released a new add-in tool to help Visual Basic developers preserve Visual Basic 6 applications and breathe .Net into them.  Microsoft released its Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 as a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .Net WinForms in a VB6 application.

The new toolkit not only helps to preserve VB6 applications, but also lets developers add functionality to them through additional .Net forms. For example, a developer could provide more dynamic content by adding a WinForm that accesses Web services or RSS feeds, Microsoft said.

Moreover, instead of upgrading the entire code base, VB6 applications can be extended one form at a time, Microsoft said.

"The goal is a phased upgrade, with production releases at the end of each iteration containing both Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .Net forms running in the same Visual Basic 6 process," according to a Microsoft Web page describing the new toolkit.

More here.

Another new release of the .net framework 3.0 has been released! This time, it's the September CTP.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly known as WinFX), is the new managed code programming model for Windows. It combines the power of the .NET Framework 2.0 with new technologies for building applications that have visually compelling user experiences, seamless communication across technology boundaries, and the ability to support a wide range of business processes.
These new technologies are Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows CardSpace (formerly code named "Infocard"). Microsoft plans to ship .NET Framework 3.0 as part of the Windows Vista operating system. In addition, Microsoft is making these technologies available on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
The following Community Technology Preview of .NET Framework 3.0 enables you to continue experimenting with early builds of these technologies, get acquainted with the development experience, and provide feedback to Microsoft. For more information on these technologies, click here.

Installation
To start the installation process, you will need to run the download file; this will initiate the installation of the .NET Framework 3.0 September CTP; If you have troubles with the download manager, you can download the entire package for x86 or for x64 which are both .EXE files.

Enjoy!

For the first time, the Visual Studio SDK is available for online viewing, without having to register for the VSIP program.
So, no excuses anymore for not developing your own plugins for Visual Studio ;-) .

Here you can access the SDK.

Today, I discovered a 'feature' of Visual Studio 2005.
In VS 2003, I used the //TODO comment a lot, so that a list of all my ToDo items would show up in the Task List.

Today, I was explaining to my collegue how to use this useful command... only to find out that it doesn't work in VS2005 anymore...

This is what MSDN has to say about it:
'Task List comments are not attached to the solution and project nodes displayed in Solution Explorer. For this reason, they do not appear when a solution is first opened. Rather, they are embedded within individual code files. Whenever a code file is opened for editing, any comments that begin with recognized tokens are displayed in the Task List. '

So, you can only see them when the file is open... not project-wide anymore :(

Anyone have another solution to this?

I'm through with learning WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), so now I'll have more time to write some samples for my blog, so everybode can start learning a little on WPF (that double-U-P-F ;-) ).

Today, I'm going to show you a small sample, in which I use a gradient and a storyboard to create a sort of a flashing circle. This could be used to draw the user's attention to something in the UI.

Here is the sample code:

<Page xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x= http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml
WindowTitle="www.snowball.be - WPF Examples" Background="White">
<DockPanel>
   <Ellipse Width="200" Height="200" Name="MyEllipse">
      <Ellipse.Fill>
         <RadialGradientBrush >
            <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="#CCCCCCCC" />
            <GradientStop Offset="0.5" Color="white" />
            <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="black"/>
         </RadialGradientBrush >
      </Ellipse.Fill>
   </Ellipse>
<DockPanel.Triggers>
   <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Page.Loaded">
      <BeginStoryboard Name="MyBeginStoryBoard">
         <Storyboard Name="MyStoryBoard">
            <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="MyEllipse" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Ellipse.Height)" 
               From="0" To="200" AutoReverse="true"
               RepeatBehavior="0:0:10" BeginTime="0:0:0" />
            <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="MyEllipse" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Ellipse.Width)" 
               From="0" To="200" AutoReverse="true"
               RepeatBehavior="0:0:10" BeginTime="0:0:0" />
         </Storyboard>
      </BeginStoryboard>
   </EventTrigger>
</DockPanel.Triggers>
</DockPanel>
</Page>

First, I create an circle, which is actually an ellipse with identical width and height (one could also use the RadiusX and RadiusY properties, the result would be the same).

<Ellipse Width="200" Height="200" Name="MyEllipse">

Then, we use a Brush, in this case, the RadialGradientBrush, to create a gradient fill in the ellipse. No longer are the "GradientStops" or the "GradientStopsCollection" tags neccessary (they were in previous CTP's, but now they can be omitted).
To specify the colors, we use several GradientStop elements. The offset specifies where the color should "start". This is a relative value, and thus can't be more than 1. In this case, I specify 3 colors.

<GradientStop Offset="0" Color="#CCCCCCCC" />
<GradientStop Offset="0.5" Color="white" />
<GradientStop Offset="1" Color="black"/>

Now, to create the flashing effect, we have to use an animation. To start the animation, we use a trigger, in this case, an event trigger, which is routed to the Loaded event. This results in the trigger firing when the page loads.

<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Page.Loaded">

For the animation itself, we use the storyboard. In this storyboard, which is like the name says, a series of steps that will be executed. You can compare it to a band of drawings that form a comic.
The storyboard thus consists of several animations. In this case, I use a DoubleAnimation, because the property I'm going to change, is of value Double: I'm going to alter the Height and Width property of the Ellipse. These are indeed Double values.

In the first animation, I specify that I want to animate the ellipse I created earlier, by setting the TargetName, and the property I want to change is the Height. In the From and the To properties, I specify what the values for the Height should be. In this case, I want the ellipse to pop up out of nothing, so I set the From to 0 and the To to 200.

The RepeatBehavior property specifies how long this animation should repeat, in this case, I set it to 10 seconds. Note that several animations can have different RepeatBehaviors: one can go one longer than the other. The BeginTime simply specifies when the animation should start: you can build in a delay.
Finally, the AutoReverse property indicates that WPF should reverse the animation after completed.

The second animation does essentially the same, but for the width.
Both these animations can't be grouped into one, which is a pity.

The result looks like this:

Already added 2 posts about new stuff today, so I'm going to bundle these last 2 for today...

Yesterday, while I was at Disneyland (you can see my pics on my Flickr account...), MS released SP1 for Visual Studio 2003. It's a 160MB download, and once installed, you can't return without uninstalling, so install with care!

Go here for the download.

Something I came across are Nuggets. In Disneyland, you might ask? Yes, there were Chicken Nuggets, but since this a technical blog, I'm not going to bother you with what I ate... I'm talking about MSDN nuggets, hosted by Microsoft UK.

Don't have the time to read a 10-page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN Nugget, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. View them online now or download for later reference.

Head over here for a lot of good content!

More and more languages seem to be getting "the .net treatment". Next on the list is PHP.
Microsoft is hosting a project on its CodePlex site to deliver a PHP language compiler for the .Net Framework.

The project's name is as Phalanger, the project reached Version 2.0 Beta 2 on July 30.

The primary goal of the project, released under Microsoft Shared Source Permissive License, is to enable full functionality of existing PHP scripts on .Net without any modification, Microsoft said.

Unlike the original PHP interpreter, Phalanger compiles scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language).

The object model in Phalanger is compatible with PHP 5.0, and it lets developers combine PHP objects with .Net ones.

In fact, developers can use a class written in PHP from a .Net application or to import a .Net class—that might be written in C# or Visual Basic—into PHP scripts.

Currently, one of the major features is to incorporate Phalanger in Visual Studio.net.

More on this can be found at CodePlex.com!

Yesterday, Microsoft announced during the Gamefest 2006-event in Seattle, the XNA Game Studio Express. Like the name says, it is a development tool to allow developers, hobbyists and students to write games for the PC and XBox360.

Like the other express editions, it will be available for free, at least if you want to develop for the PC. If however you want to develop for the 360, a fee of 99 dollar is to be payed. This way, developers get access to the "Creators Club". Members of this club can build and test their games on the 360 platform. The distribution of these home-brewn games is probably to be done via the Xbox Live Arcade.

The mayor reason Microsoft wants to attract more people to developing games, is the current cost involved these days to develop a full-blown game. "Big" games cost big money and take up to 3 years to develop. Companies like EA, MS... don't dare to take risks to develop anything new, so the creativity is limited. Developers can't really try out new concepts. With these tools, more people are able to make their ideas into reality, perhaps opening up a whole new world for the game-industry.
Over time, MS hopes to have an entire community where people can distribute their games, and can express their opinion on other games, seperating the hits from the flops.

Now, about the launch date... Microsoft is expecting to launch the first CTP by the end of August. The final version will be released be released in November or perhaps December of this year!
The programming language used will be C#.

Microsoft is said to be doing this to keep get more people on the 360 platform, and keep them away from the PS3, which is due somewhere later this year.

My favorite documentation tool in Visual Studio 2005 is updated to a new version, namely 1.9.5.

Don't know GhostDoc? Here's some info:
GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.


Go here to download the tool.