Monday, September 29, 2008

Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4.0 Roundup

Today Microsoft announced that, although recently referred to as Visual Studio 10 or "Hawaii", the official name of the next release will be Visual Studio 2010 and it will be accompanied by .NET Framework 4.0.

eWeek reports:

Microsoft announces Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, and says the overall development strategy revolves around five pillars. The first pillar involves the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010, formerly codenamed “Rosario.”

Microsoft has announced the name of the next version of its developer tools and platform: Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

In the announcement on Sept. 29, Microsoft also described the next release through the following five focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing ALM (application life-cycle management), said Dave Mendlen, a director of product management in Microsoft’s Developer Division.

However, Mendlen did not give an actual date for when the new technology would become available, except to say that its name implies something about the time frame of its availability.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Microsoft-Announces-Visual-Studio-2010-and-NET-Framework-40/

From InformationWeek:

In Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft also will introduce a feature it likens to an airplane's black box. While running a test of an application, a "black box" records the state of the machine and the application. That way, a tester can look at a debug log running alongside a video replay of the application that was under test and dive into all layers of the computing stack to see where a bug might have occurred.

Visual Studio Team System 2010 will include some pieces of Microsoft's "Oslo" modeling strategy, as first demonstrated at Microsoft's TechEd conference earlier this year. The Architecture Explorer will allow architects and developers to build, customize, and see an architectural diagram of an application and enforce architectural consistency on builds of a piece of software. The software will support the Object Management Group's Unified Modeling Language and domain-specific languages.

 

More screenshots from Martin Heller at InfoWorld (click to enlarge):

 

 

More links:

Videos from Microsoft.

Mary-Jo Foley's blog

SD Times

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available

Scott Guthrie announces.

There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out.  As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though).

You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here.  Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1.  You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support.  If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here.

The final release of Silverlight is not that far off now.  It has been a pretty amazing project that has come a long way in a pretty short amount of time.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Preparation Tool

Microsoft has released a tool that will prepare your system for VS 2008 SP1. It's important to run it if you have installed any beta Visual Studio 2008 software since it went RTM.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A494B0E0-EB07-4FF1-A21C-A4663E456D9D 

The following pre-release programs and updates will prevent Visual Studio 2008 SP1 from installing successfully, so they must be removed prior to installation:


To remove these programs, it is recommended that you run the automated Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool. This tool will remove the specified updates and programs from your system and restore the integrity of any Visual Studio 2008 features that may have been compromised during manual removal of the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta release.