Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 to MSDN subscribers which extends testing, code visualization and modeling capabilities in VS2010. Its main features are more advanced platform and tool support for both manual and automated testing scenarios. It allows you to better control your Silverlight 4 testing scenarios and UI testing code.

Feature Pack 2 includes the following C++ related additions:

• Generate Dependency Graphs for C and C++ Code
• Validate C and C++ Code Against Layer Diagrams

Feature Pack 2 is cumulative and includes Feature Pack 1.

Get more information here.

Today, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. A lot of new features are included. One of them is a completely new editor.

“Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 have something for every developer. The new editor, now using Windows Presentation Foundation, delivers a more flexible, feature-rich environment that supports concepts such as the use of multiple monitors. This enables a developer to have one monitor with code, another with the user interface designer, and yet another with database structure.”

Visual C++ 2010 also includes a lot of new features, some of them are:

• MSBuild and multi-targeting
• IntelliSense and Browsing (#include auto completion, call hierarchy, red squiggles, find all references, class wizard)
• C++ compiler changes (static_assert, auto keyword, lambda, decltype, rvalue references)
• Ribbon designer
• Deployment changes
• Task dialog support
• Restart manager support

Read the full press release here or watch the keynote.

Later this week, Silverlight 4 will also be released to the web (RTW). At that time, an update for Visual Studio 2010 will also become available that will allow you to develop applications using Silverlight 4.

The Windows Phone Application Platform was revealed at MIX 2010. If you couldn’t make it to Las Vegas to attend MIX, you can find the keynotes and sessions here. They explain in great details the Windows Phone 7 Series and how to develop applications for it.

The WP7S developer platform contains 2 frameworks:

• Silverlight: to make rich interactive applications
• XNA: to make complex 2D/3D games

Code is written in C#.

Everyone can start writing applications for the new phone platform. You only need to download 1 free package. This packages contains:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
• Windows Phone Emulator CTP
• Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
• XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP

Download the package to get started. Only Windows Vista and Windows 7 are officially supported to run the tools. Note that the tools are currently in CTP state so they are not yet final. If you want to use Expression Blend you have to download it separately.

More information can be found on the Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Site, where you can also find developer guides, more detailed information, Windows Marketplace submission guidelines, forums, a few code samples etc…

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP (Community Technology Preview) has been released.

Note that this is an early preview look. A number of walkthroughs are included. Features outside these walkthroughs might still not be finished.

C++ is not being forgotten 🙂 The CTP contains a preview of a new concurrency library for C++ to make it easier to write native parallel code. I definitely will be taking a closer look on that.

Find out more here.

On Saturday 18th of October I went to the Microsoft Community event called CodeCamp in Zagreb (Croatia). It was a one day event with presentations all with coding demos, so not just some slides 🙂

The day started with a presentation by Tomislav Bronzin about Exchange server and how to use the Microsoft Unified Communications platform to easily integrate support for contacts, emails, presence information … in your own applications. It looks like an interesting platform. However, using it requires quite a few lines of code.

The second presentation was about using the Windows Mobile 6 SDK to develop applications for mobile devices and was given by Andrej Radinger. Demonstrations included how to use the different emulators that are available. This also includes FakeGPS to fake a real GPS device and a tool (cellular emulator) to simulate sending/receiving of SMS messages, dailing phone numbers, receiving incoming calls, faking busy signals and so on.

Next it was a presentation about SQL Server 2008 by Dean Vitner, explaining and demonstrating things like support for encryption, compression and auditing.

The next presentation was about BizTalk by Josip Šaban, but I skipped that one since I had to leave for half an hour.

After that, Marko Čulo gave us a presentation called “Dirtiest SQL Tips & Tricks” with examples which showed important things to remember like the behavior of nested transactions.

The last presentation was about MS StyleCop by Bernard Katić. MS StyleCop is yet another tool to force coding standards. It will also check your code documentation so that it matches certain standards.

All in all, the presentations were interesting.

On 21st of June I went to the Kulendayz 2008 which is the first regional community conference organized by the Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia with support from INETA and Hupro. Since I’m living in Croatia at the moment and the Kulendayz location was only 30 minutes from my place, it was pretty easy for me to get there.

In the morning I went to a scrum presentation and to a session about advanced debugging of ASP.NET applications using windbg.
In the afternoon I went to a unified communications presentation, explaining the Office Communications Server.

The last presentation I went to was about concurrent/parallel programming in C#. This was one of the most interesting presentations for me (by Bernard Katic). It explained how to optimize code for running on multicore processors, which is becoming more and more important with the release of Quad-Core processors and Octo-Core and even 80-core processors in the pipeline. The session was focussed on the Parallel FX Library and Parallel LINQ. The Parallel FX Library allows you to easily “parallelize” certain parts of your application like for loops. Parallel LINQ allows you to do the same with your LINQ queries. There is an interesting article on MSDN called “Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines” that expains the Parallel FX Library with clear and simple examples.

It was interesting to find out that I was not the only belgian on the conference. Arlindo Alves from Microsoft Belgium was also there giving a presentation on Microsoft Hyper-V.

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a recent powerful addition to the .NET framework and allows you to query your data sources in an elegant and simple way. In this post I’ll give a very brief introduction to LINQ and how it makes your code much more readable. Read the rest of this entry »