.NET Bits

VS.NET 2010 UI sneak peak

2009-02-25T15:34:00Z

Find below , a post from Jason Zander with some screen shots

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/02/20/a-new-look-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx

Looking forward to playing with the beta when its out

70-565 - Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

2009-02-25T15:28:00Z

Looks like Prometric has published the results for the Beta exam,noticed it appear on my transcript and the prometric website and I'm glad that I cleared it :-)

2 more exams to go for MCPD EAD 3.5

MCP Profiles & Directory.. Where did they go??

2009-02-11T20:49:00Z

Just yesterday , I was trying to look up some one on the MCP directory (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/directory/default.mspx)

and noticed that the link no longer works . Searched around the MCP landing page and still could not find the directory.

Another feature that was also missing was the MCP Profiles page that was rolled out in early 2008 and gave the ability for MCP's to have a community profile like MVP's .

( link to the blog post from Georgeo announcing it http://blogs.msdn.com/mcp/archive/2007/10/18/mcp-2008-recognition-respect-and-reward.aspx)

Did any one else notice this? Did they get scrapped? Haven't seen any official announcement to this effect though.

If any one knows where they currently exist, drop me an email / a comment

Update 02/12/2009

I got an answer from Sarah Grant at Microsoft .Reproduced below

"Yes, the reason you cannot update your profile is that we found very few people used it and was not making the impact in the community we wished. It was announced that it would retire in December - and it did"

70-563 Designing and Developing Windows Applications using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

2009-02-03T15:49:00Z

Was checking my transcript today and found out that I cleared this exam during its beta offering in the month of October. I could not give 70-505( the TS exam) because of a schedule conflict. Hope to give 70-505 one of these days schedule permitting :-)

Number of Microsoft Certified Professionals ( world wide)

2009-02-02T19:39:00Z

I was just asked by some folks today if there was a page that lists the number of Microsoft Certified Professionals, hence posting the link to the page

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/certified.mspx

This page has been there for quite some time now

MCPD ASP.NET Developer 3.5

2009-01-28T14:50:00Z

Just found out that I cleared the exam 70-564, Designing and developing ASP.NET applications using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 during the Beta period making me a charter member for MCPD ASP.NET 3.5 . I had previously cleared the TS exam 70-562 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development during its Beta offering in April 2008.

Windows 7 Beta -Experiences

2009-01-27T14:44:00Z

I have been running Windows 7(32 bit) for the last week and a half and thought I'll blog about my experiences.

Hardware

Dell inspiron 1525 with 3 GB RAM 160 GB harddrive and T 3200 processor

Installation

Downloaded the beta , burnt a DVD . I did not want to wipe out my current Operating System( Windows XP Service Pack 3) hence decided to dual boot my machine. Popped the DVD and let the installer do it thing . It was smooth install and Windows 7 immediately recognized all my hardware and I did not have to go scouring for drivers.

Everything was up and running in about an hour. Adding the Machine to the my wireless network was also a breeze.

Other application installs

I haven't installed a whole bunch of applications on my windows 7 partition , but did try out Firefox, some of the chat applications like yahoo ,acrobat,skype and all of them ran without any issues.Plan to try out visual studio on it this weekend

Performance

Copying files on the local disk and over the network were definitely much faster than Vista. In general I found windows 7 to be much more responsive than windows Vista

Task bar

In general I like the new Task bar and how you can pin applications. I also liked how hovering over the icons shows you the thumbnails of open windows of that application . What was neat was that if you had Internet explorer or mozilla open , it shows you all the open tabs and you can close the tabs right from the task bar .Also hovering on the thumbnail brings that window to the front and makes all other windows translucent.

However what did throw me off was that that generally clicking the icon , you expect it to start a new instance of the application , but this wasn't the case.

I liked the concept of jumplists where right clicking on the icon in the task bar you get a list of commonly used tasks in that application. However looks like applications would have to be coded to take advantage of the same.

Boot up and Shut down times

Windows 7 was pretty quick to boot up and shut down. Also going to hibernate , it was much quicker than my Windows Vista (enterprise) work machine which has much better hardware specs

Crashes

None so far

At this point of time, I am pretty happy with the stability of Windows 7 and its overall performance considering the fact that it is a Beta 1 product

ASP.NET 4.0 Road map

2008-10-30T14:15:00Z

A good video from PDC that outlines what is in the works for ASP.NET 4.0

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC20/

If you are interested in getting some of the latest bits then you may want to take a look over here

http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet

.NET Framework 4.0 Poster

2008-10-30T14:07:00Z

If you are interested in getting the .NET 4.0 poster, here you go...

I saw this on Brad Abram's blog

Deep zoom version

PDF Version

Microsoft Web platform & Application installer Beta

2008-10-28T13:48:00Z

If you run any of these OS( Windows Vista RTM, Windows Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 )and need to get your PC all set up for doing web development then you may want to take a look at these 2 Beta products that are now available

Microsoft Web Platform Installer - Installs IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008( express edition) , SQL Server 2008 (Express edition) and the .NET Framework. It also allows you to pick and choose the components you want installed.

Microsoft Web Application Installer - Allows you to install commonly used applications like .NET Nuke,Graffiti etc to name a few

I definitely like this concept and I am sure it sure simplifies the install experience. I would definitely like to see a version for Windows XP too :-)

TFS- Controlling Labelling

2008-10-06T11:41:00Z

TFS does a great job of automating build. With out having to mess with msbuild , it will pull all the source code from source control, do the build label the build in source control etc. In our scenario we did not want TFS to label each and every build, but only builds that were of production quality. To turn off labelling in TFS build set the property SkipLabel to true like below

We also have the option to override the label that TFS puts in. By default it looks something like this

[Name of build definition]_yyyymmdd.[running number of build for that day]

To override the default label, go ahead and add a Target called BeforeLabel and set the property for LabelName and LabelComment(Comments are optional, but its always good to have them ;-) . In our case , in the comments we add the information about who triggered the build, from which machine and at what time just for posterity sake

</CreateProperty>

</Target>

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4.0

2008-10-02T14:02:00Z

Some information on Vistual Studio 2010 aka Rosario and .NET Framework 4.0

From Channel9 , From the Microsoft Web site , From CRN

Also note that from October 1st all MSDN subscribers who get Visual Studio Team System Development edition will also get the Visual Studio Team System Database edition and vice versa... Nice !!!!

Preventing a check in from triggering a Continuous Integration (CI) build

2008-10-01T17:44:00Z

As a part of the team build process, if you need to check out and check in a file and do not want that to trigger a CI build then the easiest way is to put ***NO_CI*** in the comment during check in.Easier than that there is built in property $(NoCICheckinComment) that you can use

On finding find this string in the comment TFS knows that it doesn't need to trigger a build

Silverlight Resource Tip

2008-09-26T17:07:00Z

If you are building a default template for your custom control , then you would define it in a file called Generic.xaml and include it as a resource. When you do so , make sure that the custom tool and Custom tool namespace entries are cleared .Other wise , the template will not show up

If it looks like below ( note the Custom Tool entry), it does not work

This is how the properties should look for it to work

Note the entry for custom tool is cleared

Silverlight RC available

2008-09-26T12:11:00Z

Silverlight Release Candidate is now available.

There are some changes from Beta 2 to RC . Changes are listed here There are also 3 new controls namely

1.Combobox

2.Progressbar

3.PasswordBox

For more information.. see this indepth post from Scott Guthrie