Latest Microsoft Blogs

Lots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday. I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish. .NET 4 This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release. Shouldn't every release...

The team I work for is called Server and Tools Online. If you go way, way up, our boss is Soma ( Yes, this Soma ), but down here in the trenches there's the folks that make content and systems to help you after you "File | New Project." Our goals this year are to get back to basics and make sure that our online user experience meets these goals in as few clicks as possible. A few months ago I snuck a few "comps" out of a meeting with the designers on MSDN . A few months before that we talked about the a upcoming "loband" option for MSDN and performance improvements to the MSDN library that are bringing page-load times for the MSDN library to the 1- and 2-second level. There was a lot of great comments and feedback...

You, Dear Reader, very likely don't need this information. I assume you're probably not a beginner. BUT, you likely KNOW a beginner. Share this information with them! A bunch of people on Twitter discovered the MSDN Beginner Developer Center today. I tweeted it, figured it was a throw-away tweet and it was "re-tweeted" several dozen times. Apparently there's a hunger for Beginner content out there! Who knew? ;) It's at http://www.msdn.com/beginner   and here's some of the cool stuff. Tell your 12 year old and your great-aunt, Dear Reader. There may be a programmer inside one of them. There's several tracks to go down, first the obvious Web Track and Windows Track , but also Aspiring Pro and Kid's Corner...

As web programmers, we use a lot of strings to move data around the web. Often we’ll use a string to represent a date or an integer or a boolean. Basically "1" in instead of 1, or "April 1, 2009" rather than a proper ISO-8601 formatted culture-invariant date. While these strings are flying around via HTTP it's not a huge deal, but sometimes this loose, even sloppy, use of strings can leak into our own code. We might find ourselves leaving the data times as strings longer and longer, or not even bothering to convert them to their proper type at all. This problem is made worse by the proliferation of JSON, and schema-less/namespace-less XML (that I've often called " angle-bracket delimited files " as they're...

I'm running 64-bit operating systems on every machine I have that is capable. I'm running Vista 64 on my quad-proc machine with 8 gigs of RAM, and Windows 7 Beta 64-bit on my laptop with 4 gigs. Writing managed code is a pretty good way to not have to worry about any x86 (32-bit) vs. x64 (64-bit) details. Write managed code, compile, and it'll work everywhere. The most important take away, from MSDN: "If you have 100% type safe managed code then you really can just copy it to the 64-bit platform and run it successfully under the 64-bit CLR." If you do that, you're golden. Moving right along. WARNING: This is obscure and you probably don't care. But, that's this blog. Back to 32-bit vs. 64-bit .NET Basics I promote...

I used to hate podcasts , but that didn't last long. I got a longer commute, bandwidth became less of an issue and podcasts, frankly, got better. Of course, I'm a smidge biased . I listen to a number of podcasts, not all technical, of course. I also watch the nightly news and a number of other news and political TV shows delivered not over the air or via cable, but by podcast. Here's some technical podcasts, collected and recommended by the my folks and friends on Twitter . I've heard some, and added my thoughts. Others I look forward to listening to. They are listed in no particular order. I threw mine in there as well. ;) NOTE: If you've created a list of YOUR favorite .NET Podcasts, send me a link to your blog and I'll...

A buddy of mine and I had a nice slap in the face yesterday. I was helping him deploy an ADO.NET Data Service to a large company's staging server  and we were seeing REALLY odd behavior. We'd request something like /myservice.svc and get a 404. But we could request /myservice.svc/Stuff or /myservice.svc/?metadata. We settled in to debug this. We thought we were "getting down to basics." You know, you've done this. The conversation goes something like: "Ok, people, what's the definition of insanity? Trying the same thing and expecting a different result." "Right...let's challenge all our assumptions. Let's start from scratch. Can get Hello World working?" "What's the ACLs on...

Here's the results, as promised, of the .NET Survey I took last week . Also, here's the disclaimer. I did this on a whim, it's not scientific, so the margin of error is +/-101%. That said, the results feel intuitively right to me, personally. It was a single question with 14 checkboxes. You were asked to "check al the .NET Framework features that you use in your projects." The results are here after 4899 responses: There were lots of good responses on Twitter and comments on the original blog post . Folks wanted choices like "Other," "None" and "I don't use .NET." Of course, not answering the survey is a good way of reporting that. ;) In fact, 29 people looked at the survey, checked nothing...

There's been some confusion about the size of the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is not really a 200+ meg download.  Which installer do I use? Here's the whole thing in a nutshell for Developers, ISVs, and Administrators. Offline Installer - One single file that can be run offline and can install the .NET Framework any system it's run on. It's complete, all platforms, installable offline. Online Installer - A 2.7 meg setup program that will detect what just the files you need, then go download between 10 and 60 megs. NOTE: If you're IT and inside an office, you'll want to decide if you want everyone in the office downloading .NET separately, or if you just want download it once, and have them to run it off a...

The Beta of .NET 3.5 and VS2008 SP1 is out . I'm sure everyone is blogging the heck out of it, so I'll try to add my own specific kind of value. There's fixes, many improvements (some subtle, some dramatic), and some new technology. Should You Fear This (Beta) Release? Maybe a little bit. Don't be afraid of the new assemblies or the bug fixes, I have found them to be very good and have no stability problems, but this Service Pack Installer might cause you some trouble in this beta, especially if you already have beta stuff installed over the top of VS2008RTM (the original version). It'll be correct when it releases later this summer. Now, if you're going to decide to install a Beta of a Service Pack, do read the ReadMe...