by Joey deVilla on October 19, 2009
The Beta: Available Now!
The newest beta, Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is out! MSDN subscribers can download it right away, while everyone else can get their hands on it on Wednesday, October 21st (and don’t worry, I’ll remind you if you on Wednesday if you have to wait until then).
This new beta features a number of performance improvements and is your last chance to evaluate a pre-release version before we unleash the final version, so download it, take it out for a spin and give us your feedback!
Beta 2 also features the “Go Live” provision for developers who like living on the edge. What this means is that you’re licensed to download the beta and use it to build production software. If you do so, please drop me a line and let me know!
The Final: Available March 22, 2010!
The final version of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 will be available on March 22, 2010. Among the many new features in the final version is the fact that choosing which Visual Studio is right for you will be so much simpler. Instead of the confusing array of Visual Studio versions (I’ve joked about there being so many version that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a “Visual Studio Tartar Control” or “Visual Studio for LOLcats”), the line has been pared down to three levels: Professional, Premium and Ultimate:
Visual Studio can be bought bundled with an MSDN subscription. I recommend getting the subscription , as it gives you first crack at a lot of tools, access to E-Learning and the Special Offers portal for discounts from Microsoft partners, and – most importantly, as far as I’m concerned – a lot of compute time on the Azure cloud platform.
There’s a goodie called the “Ultimate Offer” that’s available for a limited time: buy or renew your MSDN subscription now, and you’ll get the next-level-up version of Visual Studio when we hit the final release date. For example, if you get an MSDN subscription and you have a version of Visual Studio 2008 eligible for upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional, you’ll get Visual Studio 2010 Premium in March (and if you’re eligible for upgrade to Premium, you’ll get Ultimate).
What’s in .NET 4?
A lot. To borrow a line from Scott Hanselman, this isn’t “.NET 3.6”, and it’s not just a bunch of features piled onto the current .NET 3.5. This is a .NET that’s been revised based on your feedback. To quote Hanselman again, it’s about “making the Legos the right size”, “about tightening screws as it is about adding new features.”
Some of the goodies in .NET 4, once again courtesy of Hanselman, include:
Quicker to Install – A smaller Client Profile with a much smaller initial download (down to 0.8 megs from 2.8) for bootstrapping .NET client apps faster than ever)
Side by Side – .NET 4 is a side-by-side release that doesn’t auto-promote, meaning you won’t break existing apps and you can have .NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4 apps on the same machine, happily.
- Side-by-side CLR support for managed add-ins inside of apps like Explorer or Outlook. Again, new and existing apps in the same process, chillin’.
- For more details on Application Compatibilty, check out the AppCompat Walkthrough for .NET 4 on MSDN.
Dynamic Language Support – The DLR (Dynamic language runtime) ships built-in with .NET 4 so you can mix-and-match your solutions and pick the best language (or languages) amongst C# and VB.NET as well as F#, IronPython and IronRuby. This includes better support for COM (yes, COM! People do use COM and it’s even easier with the new dynamic keyword in C# these days.)
More Web Standards Support – Better support for WS-* and REST making interop easier.
Plugins Galore – Visual Studio 2010 uses MEF and WPF to enable a whole new world of clean managed extensions as well as an Online Gallery (there’s an extension for that!)
Multi-Framework Multi-targeting - You can’t really overestimate how useful this is, but a picture is worth a thousand words. You can code all your apps in all your organization’s frameworks with the same IDE:
New Look, New Feel for MSDN
And finally, both Visual Studio and MSDN got a new look. Here’s the new look for MSDN Canada:
The changes are more than skin-deep. MSDN was redesigned to make it easier for you to find what you need, whether it’s tools, downloads, resources, documentation or people. The MSDN library will also get much faster at loading and easier to read, because the “lightweight” look is going to be the standard look:
Keep an eye on this blog – I’m going to start covering development with Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming weeks!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
.NET,
2010,
betas,
Visual Studio
by Joey deVilla on October 13, 2009
Alexander McCabe wanted to know the adoption rates of the various .NET runtimes, from .NET 1.0 up to the current .NET 3.5. He took the data from the logs for the website for his quiz-building software, Question Writer, augmented it by including figures published in Joel Spolsky’s Business of Software forum in March 2008, and turned it into the chart below (click on it to see it at full size):
According to the chart, usage of .NET 3.5 among visitors to the Question Writer site has been growing in leaps and bounds since the spring, from just under 22% in May of this year to the current 52%.
Naturally, this data comes with all sorts of caveats:
- The October 2009 data is based on the first 12 days of October.
- Only Internet Explorer reliably reports .NET version information in the user-agent string.
- McCabe has a couple of contradictory explanations:
- IE users may be more likely to have .NET installed because they use Microsoft software.
- IE users may be less likely to have .NET installed because they may be less likely to install software and therefore might be less likely to have .NET installed.
- Question Writer uses the .NET runtime and its site’s visitors may have .NET installed.
- There were a few users using .NET 4.0; McCabe counted them as .NET 3.5 users.
I should try the same exercise using the logs for Global Nerdy, which has a rather mixed audience of open source, Mac and Microsoft types. I wonder how different the results would be.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
.NET,
statistics,
versions
by Joey deVilla on September 29, 2009
My photos from Anthony Vranic’s session at TechDays, Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience, are a bit dark because I used a different camera; my main camera was on video recording duty. I’m including them anyway, because I’m trying to keep a complete record of TechDays.
The original version of this presentation from TechEd North America is somewhat different – its target audience was C++ developers, and TechDays is more of a managed code audience. Since the original TechEd presentation, Microsoft released the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework, and Anthony added it to his presentation.
The Windows API Code Pack for .NET gives managed code access to a lot of features, including some new ones introduced in Windows 7, such as:
- Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars
- Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers
- Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects
- Explorer Browser Control
- Shell property system
- Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls
- Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs
- Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs — (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
- Sensor Platform APIs
- Extended Linguistic Services APIs
- Power Management APIs
- Application Restart and Recovery APIs
- Network List Manager APIs
- Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
- Shell Search API support
- Drag and Drop functionality for Shell objects
- Support for Direct3D and Direct2D interoperability
- Support for Typography and Font enumeration DirectWrite APIs
Watch this blog – I’ll posting some example code for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET in the coming weeks!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
.NET,
Anthony Vranic,
conferences,
TechDays,
Windows API Code Pack
by Joey deVilla on August 12, 2009
Until now, taking advantage of the UI improvements in Windows 7 (and even some features in Vista) took a fair bit of work – there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t available through the .NET Framework. You’d have to either switch to C++ or resort to hacks in order to access these goodies.
That’s all changed with the newly-released Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework. Written in C# – with some DirectX stuff written in C++ – this library acts as a wrapper that gives managed code access to features including:
- Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars.
- Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers.
- Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects.
- Explorer Browser Control.
- Shell property system.
- Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls.
- Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs.
- Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs. (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
- Sensor Platform APIs
- Extended Linguistic Services APIs
- Power Management APIs
- Application Restart and Recovery APIs
- Network List Manager APIs
- Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
- Shell search API support
- Drag and drop functionality for Shell objects
- Support for Direct2D/Direct3D interoperability
- Support for typography and font enumeration DirectWrite APIs
The system requirements are:
We’ll cover the Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework over the next little while in a couple of places – certainly on this blog, as well as at the TechDays 2009 cross-Canada conference in the Optimizing Your Apps for the Windows 7 Experience session.
Download Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework (v1.0)
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
.NET,
APIs,
C,
managed code,
Windows 7
by Joey deVilla on June 23, 2009
Edmonton is holding a Code Camp on September 26th, 2009! It’s going to take place at Grant MacEwan College’s downtown campus. There’s a call for speakers – if you’ve got a topic that you’d like to present, now’s the time to let them know. You can find out more at the Edmonton Code Camp site and the YEGCodeCamp Twitter account.
Tagged as:
.NET,
Code Camp,
Edmonton
