Orcas, Vista & .NET 3.x

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Library Source Code Now Available

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:41:09 GMT

Scott Guthrie[MSFT] announced the availability of .NET fx 3.5 library source code as promised. (Setup and how to use)

Quote from the announcement:

Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries:

.NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).

ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)

Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)

Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)

ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

We are in the process of adding additional framework libraries (including LINQ, WCF and Workflow) to the above list. I'll blog details on them as they become available in the weeks and months ahead.

[IMPORTANT] License Note:

First let's see what Scott said about it:

Reference License

The .NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license. When we announced that we were releasing the source back in October, some people had concerns about the potential impact of their viewing the source. To help clarify and address these concerns, we made a small change to the license to specifically call out that the license does not apply to users developing software for a non-Windows platform that has “the same or substantially the same features or functionality” as the .NET Framework. If the software you are developing is for Windows platforms, you can look at the code, even if that software has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the .NET Framework.

Long story short:

The source code is meant to be used solely for better debugging inside Visual Studio 2008, not any other use. You are truly not permitted to not just copy but also to read with intend to use it for learning or inspiration in your open projects (if any!).

Frans Bouma (the key guy behind LLBLGen, one of the best .NET ORMs) had a very detailed take on this earlier. I think you need to read it.

Read How to Setup and Use The Source Code

Technorati Tags: .NET Framework,.NET Framework Source Code,Visual Studio,VS 2008,Announcements

Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Updated for RTM

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:57:19 GMT

Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 have just been updated to work with the final version (RTM) of VS 2008.
It's not yet available on the Silverlight official community website, but the announcement and download link are already available on Scott Guthrie's weblog.

Visual Studio 2008 Shipped Already!!

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:38 GMT

An hour ago, I claimed (based on my my previous post) in my ASP.NET AJAX session @ IT WORX that VS 2008 would ship next week or by end f the month, but just now realized it has just been shipped already!!

Quoting Somasegar[MSFT]'s post:

am thrilled to announce that earlier today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

Over the past few months, I have blogged about some incredible features that the team working on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 have built. I wanted to share these with you so that you can get a flavor of a few of the several hundred features that are a part of this release. The entire family of Visual Studio products (from the Express Editions to the Professional version to Visual Studio Team Suite) and .NET Framework 3.5 are available for immediate download here.

I am incredibly proud to be a part of the team that is truly advancing the state of developer tools. We know we could not have done this alone and I wish to thank you all (the community, customers and early adopters) who have provided incredibly valuable feedback to make these products the right ones.

When I look back over the last few years at how we were able to ship these two products, I truly believe that both our customer input and our renewed focus on intentional engineering allowed us to release a great product in the timeline that we originally set out to hit. We adopted Team Foundation Server to manage this release and to collect data and enable reporting on our progress. It was incredibly helpful to me personally to be able to view our progress in real time. Just adopting TFS, however, was not the silver bullet – it was just a vehicle to enable the behaviors we desired. TFS enables process enactment, collects a lot of data, and enables reporting on it. It provides visibility to everyone and it enables enforcement of certain things. I had a chance to film a Channel9 video talking about this that you can check out.

We hope that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 enables you as an individual or as a team to build great applications. Whether you are a professional developer or a software enthusiast, are building applications for the client, server, web, or devices we hope you have fun with these products as your software is our passion.

Sorry guys in the session for the misleading information !!

UPDATE:
Read Scott Guthrie[MSFT]'s post on the VS 2008 RTM for way more information on VS 2008 and so useful resourcesa bout it.

Visual Studio 2008 To Come Next Week (Or so...)

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:44:01 GMT

Yeah, of course that's for MSDN subscribers. VS 2008 to be available by end of the month.
The news comes from eWeek note, as well as MSDN Subscribers Weblog post.

UPDATE:
It shipped already.

Gotcha: Wokflow designer not working when openning workflow in non-workflow VS 2005 project

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:45:24 GMT

If you worked with Windows Workflow before on Visual Studio 2005, copied a workflow diagram from a workflow project into a second normal project, added the proper references, built the second project and everything, but afterwards tried to open the workflow diagram in designer, and it didn't work, giving you an error message like tis one:

The service 'System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Design.IIdentifierCreationService' must be installed for this operation to succeed. Ensure that this service is available.

You can solve this by one of two ways:

Create a 3rd project as workflow project and move everything from the 2nd project to it. [Sounds like Microsoft recommendation - I hate that one though]
Modify the .csproj file file to add the lines in green under the black lines:

<AssemblyName>ASEEMBLY_NAME_HERE__TYPICALLY _SAME_AS_PROJECT_FILE</AssemblyName>
<ProjectTypeGuids>{14822709-B5A1-4724-98CA-57A101D1B079};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>
</PropertyGroup>
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.0\Workflow.Targets" />

Hope that helps!

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is out

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:31:52 GMT

Scott Guthrie earlier today announced the availability of Visual Studio 2008 (Codename Orcas) Beta 2 for download.
The downloads available are separate installation disc image for each of VS 2008 editions (including Express), and a couple of more disc images for MSDN library and TFS; also, included separated VPC image for VSTS and TFS.
Quote from the download homepage:

Installation Disc Images

If you prefer to install the software yourself, you can download separate disc images for the following products:

IMPORTANT:

After the Beta 2 installation has finished, you should run this script to ensure that the installation of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 will not affect the development of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications.

To install Team Foundation Server, you must follow the steps and system requirements details on the download page.

When installing prerelease software, we advise that you do not install it on a production machine.

Note: Alternative Method of Download:
Rob Caron blogged about an alternative method of download, using a tool from Microsoft research.
Quote from Rob Caron's post:

Psst! Looking for an easier way to download those huge Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 files? Go grab the Microsoft Secure Content Downloader from Microsoft Research.

Post Installation Notes:
Scott Guthrie mentioned in his post important notes you have to watch out for when installing VS2008 Beta 2 side by side with VS 2005.
Quote from Scott Guthrie's post:

Important Installation Notes - PLEASE READ!

There are two important things you should do immediately after i ()nstalling VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2:

1) You should download and run this batch file. This takes only a few seconds to run, and fixes an issue we found earlier this week with the version policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll - which is the assembly that contains ASP.NET AJAX. If you don't run this batch file, then existing ASP.NET 2.0 projects built with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and VS 2005 will end up automatically picking up the new version of ASP.NET AJAX that ships in .NET 3.5 Beta2. This will work and run fine - but cause you to inadvertently introduce a .NET 3.5 dependency in the applications you build with VS 2005. Running the batch file will change the version binding policy of the new System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly and ensure that you only use the new .NET 3.5 ASP.NET AJAX version with projects that you are explicitly building for .NET 3.5.

2) If you have ever installed a previous version of "Orcas" or VS 2008 on your machine (either Beta1 or one of the CTP versions), you need to reset your VS 2008 settings after installing Beta2. If you don't do this, you'll have an odd set of settings configured (some windows will be in the wrong place), and you'll potentially see some IDE performance slowness. You can reset your settings by typing "DevEnv /resetsettings" on the command-line against the VS 2008 version of the IDE:

So, here come more days/hours of download again (and probably troubleshooting afterwards )

Update:
Troubleshooting During-&-Post Installation Problems
If you installed VS 2008 Beta 2 (or tried) and ran into an issue or a blocking point, these are reference places to check out:

MSDN Forums: Common VS2008 and NETFX 3.5 Setup Problems
Scott Guthrie: Fixes for Common VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2 Issues
Microsoft Connect Bug Feedback: VS 2008 Beta 2: IDE fails to load the XML Editor and Workflow Designer Packages (I'm facing this myself and not resolved yet, check for updates)

VS 2008 Launch With Other Stuff in Feb. 2008

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:41:37 GMT

Quote from TheServerSide.NET

At a partners event in Denver, Microsoft disclosed its plans for formally releasing Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. COO Kevin Turner said the company will launch all these products together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008

The Official Microsoft Press Statement

P.S
We are supposed to get VS 2008 Beta2 in few weeks, with Go-Live license according to this.

SilverKey Demo Day 2 (SKDD2) FREE Registration - The 07/07/07 Event

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:59:40 GMT

Yesterday we started accepting FREE registration for the 2nd Demo Day. If you remember from the 1st one, Demo Day is an event we love to hold being our way to expose knowledge and most importantly excitement regarding the latest pre-release technologies to the developer community in Egypt, mainly focusing on technologies bound to Microsoft, as our chosen method of getting things done, plus other technical inspirations that we'd think most developers would benefit from, at least as a new way of thinking.

Last Demo Day we talked about C#3.0, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX (ATLAS by then, that was my session), UI Design, and Agile project management. This year we are planned to include: (Note: links lead to speakers' blogs)

Jasper (Based on Entity Framework fundamentals, and how RAD that is)
IronPython (vs. C#3.0 - A debate between static and dynamic languages supported by MS)
Silverlight (Introducing Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 - including Architecture and showing inner power)
CLR By XAML (From WPF, to Silverlight, to MS Surface, the common language)
WCF (Answering the BIG question "What's SOA?", and how to apply it using WCF)
3D Game Development on Windows Platform (Using Torque game engine)
JavaScript (Deep into the language not various implementations, also includes Managed JScript) - By me
WF (A look at the practical scenarios, not the typical demos)
LINQ For XML (A master insight on how to approach maximum data processing productivity without pain, even with XML!)
Software Testing (Using Open Source .NET Tools)
SEO for Programmers (What web developers should "get" for ) - By me
Un-conference Session (An open mic session for open discussions on future technologies)

The conference this time will be in the International Conference Center (Arabic: قاعة المؤتمرات), Mankaure Hall (Arabic: قاعة منقرع), on July 7, 2007. Yeah, that's 07/07/07

check the conference website: http://www.demoday.us/ for more information about the sessions and speakers.

Also that's where you need to go in order to get your FREE REGISTRATION.

If you have been to our 1st Demo Day, you might also like to check its history page.

See you there

Update [Saturday, June 23rd, 2007]:

Side-By-Side In-Process Versions of the CLR and Silverlight

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:19:29 GMT

Jason Zander [MSFT] wrote about a feature for the next ersions of the CLR which is enabling two versions of the CLR to work side by side in the same process.

You might not know that now .NET supports hosting multiple versions of the CLR, but for each process, it has to run on one of those (the least version of the CLR that's equal to or bigger than the CLR version the assembly was compiled on), having two assmblies using different versions of the CLR to talk to each other is done via unmanaged interop.

In this post, Jason also tells how the decision to support side-by-side in-process CLRs was activated while discussing whether Silverlight should use the existing .NET CLR capabilities IF installed on the client maching (no - it doesn't, and won't).and why this wasn't activated before (thread suspending issues).

Very intersting post to read.

Sliverlight 1.0 Beta and 1.1 Alpha!!! Live@mix07

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:56:09 GMT

Mix07 is live and lots of awaited stuff has come .

Silverlight has a couple of new releases, Silverlight 1.0 BETA, and 1.1 ALPHA.

~~Why 1.1 while 1.0 is not fully released yet? No idea .~~ (See update below)

What matters here is that 1.1 ALPHA targets developers more than anyone else. It also has a GoLive license . You should be just fine by installing it, and the SDK, and then start playing. (maybe also download the pre-release expression products).

Silverlight Homepage (Has cool videos and more goodies)
Silverlight MSDN homepage
Silverlight Downloads
Silverlight MSDN Downloads
Silverlight 1.1 ALPHA SDK Download (the SDK download page in the main site is NOT working, use this link instead)

The downloads also have good good samples to check out.

Update {May1st, 2007]:

Silverlight 1.0 is for development using just JavaScript and a sub set of XAML, while Silverlight . is for development using a managed language and a subset of the .NET framework.
You can get much i insights about Silverlight from Silverlight.net.