Latest Microsoft Blogs

Do you like a big pile of source code? Well, there is an imperial buttload of source in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit . It's actually a 178 meg download, which is insane. Perhaps start your download now and get it in the morning when you get up. It's extremely well put together and I say Kudos to the folks that did it. They are better people than I. I like to explore it while watching TV myself and found myself looking through tonight. I checked my blog and while I thought I'd shared this with you before, Dear Reader, I hadn't. My bad, because it's pure gold . With C# and VB, natch. Here's an outline of what's inside. I've heard of folks setting up lunch-time study groups and going through...

I've been travelling some, and I have a few more trips at Microsoft WebCamps before I take a much needed break and stop travelling until 2011. I went to Munich, Cairo, and Egypt a few weeks back and presented on ASP.NET MVC (both Beginner and Advanced), .NET 4 in general, Making Your Blog Suck Less , and Information Overload . I presented at Mix 10 on Web Development and Security with Phil Haack . Last week I was in Belgium and The Netherlands and gave some talks as well. I thought it would be nice to put all my recent talks in one place. So, here's some video recordings of some of my recent talks. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I did giving them. ASP.NET MVC 2: Basics/Introduction Join Scott Hanselman as he explains ASP.NET...

My one-hundred-and-ninety-eighth podcast is up . I sit down with Erik Meijer from the Cloud Programmability Team to hear about the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) . Rx is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections. Sound boring? Not even a little. Rx is a prescription for awesome. Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show Rx Team Blog Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) B# .NET Blog Wes Dyer's Blog Jeffrey Van Gogh's Blog Danny van Velzen's Blog Lambda the Ultimate Blog Rx on Channel 9 Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts , a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show. Telerik is our sponsor for this show...

NOTE: An alternative title to this post might be: " The Weekly Source Code 48: Making The Weekly Source Code 47 Suck Incrementally Less. " Last week I wrote a post about Dynamic Linq Query Generation in order to solve a kind of meta-programming problem. I had a site that used ASP.NET Dynamic Data and I wanted to do a LINQ query against some data. However, because I was creating a template that didn't know enough at compile time to write a proper LINQ query that could, well, compile, I needed to creating my LINQ dynamically. Be sure to hang in here with me, the awesome happens at the end. I was trying to generate effectively this at runtime Items.Select(row => row.Property).Distinct.OrderBy(colvalue => colvalue) And I succeeded...

In October of 2008 I took an informal survey on Twitter . I wanted to get an idea of what features of the .NET Framework people were using. 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. I put the poll out again last week, adding only Silverlight to the end as an option. I realize I could have added many other subsystems and choices, but I felt it would have made this new poll too different from the original. There's certainly many ways that it could be improved as a survey, but it's best to think of it more as a "which direction is the wind blowing" question, than a survey per se. I also didn't...

The folks in the .NET Framework Setup team have a favor to ask, and it's pretty cool info so I offered to help. Here's the deal. When .NET 4 releases, the .NET 4 Client Profile will be released as a recommended update on Windows Update (WU) for Vista and Windows 7. It'll be listed as optional on Windows XP. They need help testing the WU parts. You may have heard, but the .NET 4 Client Profile size is WAY smaller than before. There's been lots of cool improvements since the .NET 3.5 Client Profile . For example, on Window XP the download for .NET 4 Client is just ~28Mb for machines with no framework. .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Client Profile .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Web install only Local package and Web install. Only Windows...

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...

Cross-browser testing is a hassle. Most of the time you can follow standards and get a decent looking website working cross browser, but there's always variations. All browsers have their quirks and older IEs have more than their fair share. As I see it, there's basically three main pillars of cross-browser testing:   Pros Cons Breadth ScreenShot Service Gets you screenshots of your site on a million browsers and platforms No interaction with the browsers, no way to debug interactions. Depth - Interaction Virtual Machines You really get to see how your site looks and works on many browsers. You have to maintain a bunch of Virtual Machines, or a be aware lot of browser installations. Depth - Look and Feel SuperPreview Lets you see...

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...