Microsoft has released the first beta of its LightSwitch product.
LightSwitch allows you to create web-based data-driven applications, using industry-standard patterns and technologies: Entity Framework, WCF RIA Services and Silverlight.
More LightSwitch links:
Get the news here: Silverlight 4 Beta : The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site
Silverlight 4 development will require Visual Studio 2010.
Visual Studio 2010 can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Please read the known issue on installing Visual Studio 2010 if you already have the Silverlight 3 SDK installed.
Silverlight 4 on MDSN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc838158(VS.96).aspx
What’s New (partial listing)
Printing (finally): Silverlight 4 adds printing support that allows developers to control whether their Silverlight application can print itself, how the content is formatted when printed, and determine the content that will appear. For example, you could add a print button to your Silverlight application that opens the Print dialog allows the user to choose the printer, and then prints the Silverlight content.
Implicit Styles: Silverlight 4 introduces new styling features that allow you to create a style as a resource that can be used implicitly by all elements of a target type. This allows application developers to customize the look across multiple instances of a control and modify the appearance of these control instances by changing the implicit style.
Right Mouse Click: Silverlight 4 adds the ability to right click a visual element to perform custom actions such as displaying a menu that provides contextual commands or invoking commands for a Silverlight game.
Programmatic Clipboard Access: Silverlight 4 adds the ability to programmatically access the clipboard to format and modify data during copy, cut, and paste operations. To copy data from a Silverlight application to the clipboard use the Clipboard.SetText method
Silverlight as a Drop Target: Silverlight 4 now supports being a drop-target for the common drag-and-drop practice of clicking on a virtual object and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. Both Windows and Mac platforms support this feature. Silverlight only supports dragging of file(s) from local client and dropping them onto a Silverlight application. It does not support dragging of folders (directories).
ObservableCollection<T> Constructor Accepts IList and IEnumerable (yay!): Silverlight 4 also can take advantage of new constructor overloads that allow it to initialize an ObservableCollection<T> from an IEnumerable or IList.
More can be found on Tim Heuer’s blog: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx
Not according to Jesse Liberty.
You will want Blend 3 for its terrific designer and animation capabilities and VS for its development capabilities. Microsoft is trying to make these tools the best for their target audience, rather than one tool that does everything merely adequately.
The other point Jesse makes: Because it is a few months old at this point, the Blend 3 beta won't work with .NET 4 projects yet. If you want to work on projects in VS 2010 and Blend 3, create them as .NET 3.5 projects.
According to this post by Tim Heuer, the good news is that you can install the Silverlight 2 and 3 SDKs with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. You will get multi-targeted Silverlight development (i.e., either Silverlight 2 or 3) and an editable design surface.
Do not install the Silverlight 2 or 3 Tools packages, it won't work on VS 2010. And the Silverlight Navigation App template is not included with the SDK, only with the tools package.
You also need to install the Silverlight 3 Beta Developer runtime.
The bad news: .NET RIA Services will not install on VS 2010 Beta 1.
Look here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx
You can find documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063(VS.100).aspx
The next release of ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF) will be numbered 4.0 to sync to the .NET version and will be part of .NET 4.0
You can see some screenshots here: http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DesktopDev/MSTech/visual-studio-2010-screenshots
The first Beta release of VS 2010 is available starting today for MSDN subscribers.
There is a great write-up on Jason Zander's blog -
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/18/announcing-vs2010-net-framework-4-0-beta-1.aspx
Highlights:
Wow. I am looking forward to a test-drive.
Microsoft's MIX conference took place last week in Las Vegas, NV. It's a gathering of designers and developers who are focused on using Microsoft's latest and greatest tools to build web sites.
Silverlight and WPF are increasingly being seen as relevant tools for building line-of-business applications. Here are some of the talks that speak to Professional LOB app developers.
Web Development Using Microsoft Visual Studio: Now and in the Future
What's New in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 4
Automated User Interface (UI) Testing with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010
Microsoft Silverlight Is Ready for Business
User Experience Design Patterns for Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3
Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3
Building Out of Browser Experiences with Microsoft Silverlight 3
Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF): Sharing Skills and Code
Microsoft just released a white paper outlining how .NET Framework 4.0 and new Windows Server capabilities (code-named Dublin) will help developers design, build and maintain Composite Applications. The white paper is available here.
What are composite SOA applications? Applications that are composed by assembling and integrating reusable services. This makes the deployment and management of applications (and servers) more complex and creates new requirements to address scalability, performance and reliability.
Microsoft has announced .NET Framework 4.0 to add functionality to WCF and WF, and also "Dublin", an add-on to Windows Server 2008, that will make SOA applications and servers easier to deploy, configure, manage and scale. The first preview will be available at the PDC at the end of October.
See the chart below from the white paper:
Windows Communication Foundation 4.0
Windows Workflow
Foundation 4.0Windows Server
"Dublin" technologiesRESTful enhancements
· Simplifying the building of REST Singleton & Collection Services, ATOM Feed and Publishing Protocol Services, and HTTP Plain XML Services using WCF
· WCF REST Starter Kit to be released on Codeplex to get early feedback
Messaging enhancements
· Transports - UDP, MQ, Local in-process
· Protocols - SOAP over UDP, WS-Discovery, WS-BusinessActivity, WS-I BP 1.2
· Duplex durable messaging
Correlation enhancements
· Content and context driven, One-way support
Declarative Workflow Services
· Seamless integration between WF and WCF and unified XAML model
· Build entire application in XAML, from presentation to data to services to workflow
Significant improvements in performance and scalability
· Ten-fold improvement in performance
New workflow flow-control models and pre-built activities
· Flowcharts, rules
· Expanded built-in activities – PowerShell, database, messaging, etc.
Enhancements in workflow modeling
· Persistence control, transaction flow, compensation support, data binding and scoping
· Rules composable and seamlessly integrated with workflow engine
Updated visual designer
· Easier to use by end-users
· Easier to rehost by ISVs
· Ability to debug XAML
Provide standard host for WF and WCF applications
Pre-built developer services
· Message-based correlation
· Message forwarding service
· Content-based message routing
· Compensation service for long-running transactions
Greater scalability and easier manageability
· Enable scale-out of stateful workflow applications
· Persisting and rehydrating state for high scalability
· Enhanced management and monitoring functions
· Tracking store for workflow events
Supports “Oslo” modeling platform
Key takeaways:
Links:
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.
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:
