November 2007 - Posts
In my previous post, I mentioned that I had VS08/VSTS installed - lucky me :-). I, along with my colleagues, have had some requests for the bits. This being mainly due to the hassles our bandwidth etc.
Unfortunately, we cannot give out these bits. Why not:
1) The bits we have are internally propagated onto our shares and product keys embedded in them. It is simply a huge offense (for which we could be fired) to give out these bits. Right now these are the only bits we have. Furthermore these are layed out for a network install.
2) Our bandwidth at Microsoft is as bad, it not worse, than you might have. Our internal bandwidth is not bad - but the Internet connectivity is bad. Often,I get better download speeds off my ADSL at home.
3) Branding/Legal/Support Issues. This is probably the biggest issue. Giving out software in an ad-hoc fashion, especially released software, creates problems with respect to support. For example what happens if I had a virus on my drive and you copied some bits off it. With the exception of the Express bits, we would also need to take into account what MSDN Subscription you have and this would become very difficult logistically.
Having said that we are looking at ways of getting the Trial Edition. I know Willy in the past has got the VPCs sent to him via courier.
I uninstalled Beta 2 last night and started my install this morning. VSTS along with MSDN docs are installed. So is TFS08 and the Build Server. I followed some of the recommendations on Scott Guthrie's site for the uninstall order. So far all is looking ok.
With VS08 just released a number of other tools have also been updated.
The VS08 SDK and Shell have been released. I know of a few ISVs who are very interested in the Shell in that it allows them to reuse the VS Shell and infrastructure for their own tools. You can get more information from this VSX blog post .
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700819.aspx has all the download links and much more.
The AJAX Control Toolkit has also been updated for VS08. Check http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=AtlasControlToolkit&ReleaseId=8513 for the update.
The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit contains technical content including 20 hands-on labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos. The technologies covered in the kit include: LINQ, C# 3.0, VB, WCF, WF, WPF, CardSpace, Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, .NET Compact Framework 3.5, VSTO 3.0, Visual Studio Team System, and Team Foundation Server.
Download it from here
Juval is a renowned WCF/.NET Expert. The guys from Dariel Solutions are bringing him down to SA and he will be delivering his WCF masterclass at the end of Nov. Check out http://dariel.co.za/wcfmasterclass/ for more information.
Soma made the announcement at TechED Europe yesterday that VS08 should be available by the end of the month. You can find more in his blog post here. At TechED Africa, Brian Harry delivered a session on how Microsoft uses TFS and the process methods we now follow viz feature crews. In that session, he mentioned how going down this route has helped with shipping early and better build quality.
Some other news from TechED Europe.
- We are opening the VSIP program a bit so that partners can now target other platforms.
- We announced a Sync Framework - for which the first CTP is now available. You can more information at http://blogs.msdn.com/synchronizer/archive/2007/11/05/big-new-microsoft-sync-framework-is-out.aspx
- The Popfly Explorer Beta was announced. You can get it from http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/Explorer.aspx. I gotta spend some time on Popfly.
- We are making available Software + Services blueprints.
At TechED, I promised to post a set of resources at my LINQ session. This post is a bit overdue due to things being a bit hectic after TechED. My apologies for the delay.
LINQ Resources
LINQ homepage
LINQ VB Hands On labs and C# LINQ Labs
LINQ Whitepaper
LINQ and other Language Samples
101 LINQ Samples
General VS08 Samples (includes other links)
Useful Websites
Scott Guthrie's series of LINQ posts - this post has links to all of the posts (a total of 9 posts, very useful)
http://www.hookedonlinq.com (very nice)
Some links related to questions in the session.
Can I do joins - Yes, Joins can be both implicit (i.e based upon the relationships in LINQ to SQL) or explicit (i.e using the join keyword). Check http://blogs.msdn.com/zainnab/archive/2007/10/26/linq-and-joins.aspx for a simple join example.
LINQ to SQL vs LINQ to Entities - Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/data/archive/2007/04/28/microsoft-s-data-access-strategy.aspx