Drewby

Did you see the announcements over the last month on Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0? Are you still wondering what is new and improved in those products? There is a lot!

I’ve been developing on .NET since the beta of 1.0 and I can tell you that this release is as exciting as any of the previous releases. There are a lot of improvements both in the technology and the way that we’ll build applications on the .NET Framework.

There will be a larger learning curve for this release than for previous releases – it will still feel familiar, but to take advantage of the new technologies, you’ll need to invest some time to learn how to use them. There’s enough there that it’s worth taking time now to understand what’s coming.

What’s the best way to do that? Here’s three ways you can start learning today:

1. Get your hands on the product by downloading the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC. This is a pre-configured VPC that you can use to start learning about the new features. There are even walkthroughs for each technology that show you how everything works.
2. Check out the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit. This kit has several presentations and hands-on-labs that will walk you through various parts of Visual Studio and .NET Framework technologies.
3. View the videos on Channel9. There are two themed weeks of videos that really do a great job of covering what’s coming in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Everything from languages, to IDE enhancements, debugging and team system are covered. Here is a complete list of the videos across both weeks:

The last several weeks have been a lot of fun. My team at Microsoft was busy supporting the announcements for Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 that happened at PDC and TechEd EMEA.

Jason Olson delivered a tremendous series of videos on Channel9 focused on Visual Studio 2010 that followed an earlier, very successful series for Visual Studio Team System produced by Brian Keller. Between the two themed weeks, the videos have 1.2 million views!

We finally have some time to breathe and think about what comes next. And I took this chance to follow-up on a conversation I had with Jeff Julian at PDC. He convinced me to get back to blogging on GeeksWithBlogs.net and I’m glad to be part of this community.

Another community I’m looking forward to visiting again is the wonderful CodeMash community in Sandusky, Ohio. Their next event is in January and I’ll be presenting two sessions. The speaker list looks really awesome, not two mention three tremendous keynoters.

Here’s my two sessions:

Modern Web Applications with .NET- To be honest, I’m not even sure what that means. The submission page for sessions had a really small character limit for title and this is what I came up with after 4-5 tries. Basically, we’ll be talking about what is coming in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 for web developers.

Managed Extensibility Framework – This is one is a little more straight forward.  In this session, I’ll introduce the audience to the Managed Extensibility Framework coming in the .NET Framework 4.0. We’ll look at how its used to extend Visual Studio 2010 and how it can be leveraged in your own applications.

Also, I’m setting up 14 computers while I’m there to allow attendees to go through the hands-on-labs in our Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit and get some experience with the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.

There's been so many technologies for me to learn since joing Microsoft. IIS7 is one that I had not seen yet and it is truely impressive. The Metabase is DEAD! You can now configure IIS7 websites using the web.config file which means application deployment and configuration is a lot easier.

One of the things you can configure is the modules that are configured for each site. You can not only add your own modules, but you can remove modules provided by Microsoft. One of the demos I saw showed all of the modules removed including authentication and static file modules. Basically, configured a null web server. The advantage of this is total control over what bits are running on the server.

Another feature of file-based configuration is that site managers can configure their website without having to be administrator on the server machine.

There were a ton of features shown..too many to write about. I'll point you to the Communications track at PDC Bloggers for observations from others.