July 2010 - Posts
This is the twenty-fifth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s blog post is the first of several posts I’ll be doing that cover some of the improvements we’ve made around web deployment. I’ll provide a high-level overview of some of the key improvements. Subsequent posts will then go into more details about each feature and how best to take advantage of them. Making Web Deployment Easier Deploying your web application to a server is something that all (successful) projects need to do. Without good tools to help you, deployment can be a cumbersome task – especially if you need to do it manually. VS 2010 includes a bunch of improvements that make it much easier to deploy your ASP.NET web...
Earlier this week the Visual Studio team released updated VS 2010 Keyboard Shortcut Posters . These posters are print-ready documents (that now support standard paper sizes), and provide nice “cheat sheet” tables that can help you quickly lookup (and eventually memorize) common keystroke commands within Visual Studio. This week’s updated posters incorporate a number of improvements: Letter-sized (8.5”x11”) print ready versions are now available A4-sized (210x297mm) print ready versions are now available The goofy people pictures on them are gone (thank goodness) The posters are in PDF format – enabling you to easily download and print them using whichever paper size is in your printer. Download the Posters You can download the VS 2010...
This morning we posted the “Preview 1” release of ASP.NET MVC 3. You can download it here . We’ve used an iterative development approach from the very beginning of the ASP.NET MVC project, and deliver regular preview drops throughout the development cycle. Our goal with early preview releases like the one today is to get feedback – both on what you like/dislike, and what you find missing/incomplete. This feedback is super valuable – and ultimately makes the final product much, much better. ASP.NET MVC 3 As you probably already surmised, ASP.NET MVC 3 is the next major release of ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it will be easy to update projects you are writing with MVC 2 to MVC...
Last week I blogged about the new Entity Framework 4 “code first” development option. The EF “code-first” option enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data. It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything In last week’s blog post I demonstrated how to use the default EF4 mapping conventions to enable database persistence. These default conventions work very well for new applications, and enable you to avoid having to explicitly configure...
Last month I blogged about the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Extensions – a free set of Visual Studio 2010 extensions that provide some really nice additional functionality. The initial Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools release included a bunch of really useful productivity enhancements – including a much faster “Add Reference” dialog, lots of code editor additions and enhancements, and some nice IDE improvements around document tab management. You can learn more about these features in my previous blog post . VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Update Yesterday we shipped an update to the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools which adds some nice new features and enhancements. If you already have the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools installed...
.NET 4 ships with a much improved version of Entity Framework (EF) – a data access library that lives in the System.Data.Entity namespace. When Entity Framework was first introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1, developers provided a lot of feedback on things they thought were incomplete with that first release. The SQL team did a good job of listening to this feedback, and really focused the EF that ships with .NET 4 on addressing it. Some of the big improvements in EF4 include: POCO Support: You can now define entities without requiring base classes or data persistence attributes. Lazy Loading Support: You can now load sub-objects of a model on demand instead of loading them up front. N-Tier Support and Self-Tracking Entities: Handle scenarios...
Earlier today we shipped the beta of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools. You can download them here . What is included in the Windows Phone Developer Tools The Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta includes: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – a new free, express edition of Visual Studio 2010 Express Blend for Windows Phone – a new free, edition of Blend focused on Windows Phone 7 development Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7 Integrated with the development tools is a phone emulator that enables you to easily develop and test Windows Phone 7 applications on your laptop or desktop machine – without requiring a phone device. It is hardware accelerated, supports multi-touch events on multi...
In preparation for enhancing Visual Studio design-time experience testing, we’d like to collect a catalog of real world applications to use for performance, stress, and ad hoc testing by the Web Platform and Tools team. We’re looking for small, medium, and large applications covering a range of architectures, languages, frameworks, and features. Your contributions will help us to ensure stability and performance in the areas of greatest interest to you. These additional testing opportunities will also help us ensure that we will have more real world samples to verify every release of Visual Studio whether it is Beta, RC or RTM. If you are interested in helping us, please provide the following information: Please send an email to WptApps@live...
The WebMatrix announcement last week triggered a range of reactions on Twitter. It also brought back some personal memories. A decade ago (wow), I started a little tool to simplify using and developing asp.net server controls as a side project, and it grew bigger and was eventually released using the name "WebMatrix". It was a fun project, and my first "serious" side project so to speak. There were a few interesting things we did there, both technical and non-technical. It is great seeing similar things happening in this generation of WebMatrix branded tooling . :-) Vertical and Scenario-Focused Tooling I personally think having a variety of tools is good, especially if they can focus on different verticals, and are optimized...
Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] ASP.NET Extending ASP.NET Output Caching : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to take advantage of ASP.NET 4’s extensible cache provider API to implement richer output caching mechanisms. Also check out my article on ASP.NET 4 output caching improvements here . Installing and Configuring Windows Server AppFabric and “Velocity” Memory Cache : Scott Hanselman has a nice blog post that describes how to install and configure Windows...
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