VS2005
VS2005
According to Charles Young you simply need to install .Net 3.5 and change any relevant assembly references to .Net 3.5 versions. Of course, you can use the new language features such as the LINQ query syntax. But you could use the extension methods as regular static methods, for example.
However, in Scott Gutherie’s blog entry on the release of VS2008/.NET 3.5 this comment specifies a problem with upgrading the Ajax code. (Or maybe he did not upgrade the Ajax code.) From Scott’s reply they are not expecting any issues with the upgrade. There are tons of comments to this blog entry I may be work your wile to peruse the list to see if there are any other potential gotchas.
Daniel Moth affirms that the “Red Bits” of 3.5 are just the SP1 for .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0.
A word of warning from Rick Straw: From an administrative standpoint the CLR is still at v2.0.
K. Scott Alan has a great, concise introduction to the System.Workflow.Activities classes.
Here are two great resources for better using the Visual Studio 2005 IDE
I got bit recently and squandered time because I didn't know that the VS2005 setup projects have adequate support for ASP.NET applications. Scott Guthrie has a post that shows you how and how to to avoid some pitfalls.
K. Scott Allen is very generous to share his PowerShell script for sorting the frustrating "Add New Item" dialog in Visual Studio. Nice example of the power of PowerShell.
Microsoft has published a new roadmap for delivery of Visual Studio Team System technologies. The road map includes a detailed features list of several technologies and the following dates for Orcas:
Projected Availability:
- Beta 1 - 2nd Quarter, CY 2007
- Beta 2 - Mid-year CY 2007
- RTM - TBA
At the end of Aaron Skonnard's September 2006 Service Station article on System.Xml 2.0, he summarizes with a list of guidelines. Read and do.
- Always use the static Create factory methods for creating readers and writers, even when you need support for things such as validation.
- If you care about performance, you should always use XPathDocument as your in-memory store when querying or transforming the document.
- Only use XmlDocument when you need an editable store, and when you do need one, use XPathNavigator to write the updating logic.
- Always use XslCompiledTransform to execute XSLT transformations when you're concerned about performance.
- Take advantage of the various API improvements to simplify your code.
- Read "What's New in System.Xml for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Release," by Mark Fussell
Jeff Attwood of Vertigo Systems introduces us to a utility by Eyal Post to convert VSS to TSF using a GUI. Very nice.
Jeff also has a post on how to do it with the Team System command line too, VSSConverter. I would suggest the command line for batch jobs.
Jason Scheuerman has written a Visual Studio 2005 template for the creation of Cmdlets, extensions to the PowerShell commands that can participate in the .Net object pipeline that makes PowerShell so, well, powerful. Details from Scott Hanselman post.
With Visual Studio 2005, MSFT has delivered yet another configuration technology. Let's see:
Registry, Configuration Sections, configuration/appSettings, Dynamic Properties, Profiles, now Application Settings. Let's delve into Application Settings.
Application Settings...
- Have design time support and result in strongly typed objects. (So do Profile Properties.)
- Should not be used for class libraries, since it relys on app.config settings that only exe's are in charge of.
I had to hunt for the .NET 2.0 Configuration API in the msdn2 user guide. It's located under ASP.NET configuration! Maybe the ASP.NET team wrote it along with Role and Membership. At least this one isn't in the System.Web assembly. Look into how to create your own custom sections here.
Reference on the config sections (note that System.Configuration and System.Web.Configuration define ConfigurationSection subtypes for each defined section. Have at it!)
Here the general .NET configuration topic
Here's the secret sauce topics, inexplicably in the ASP.NET documentation.
Scott Guthrie shares a registry fix so that ASPX pages are not included when refactoring C# classes. It can significantly improve performance.
Update: Enterprise Library 2.0 has been released.
Enterprise Library 2.0 (EntLib 2.0) includes these application blocks:
r Logging
r Exception Handling
r Data Access
r Security
r Caching
r Cryptography
EntLib 2.0 has new core functionality embodied in
r Configuration Helpers (built over System.Configuration)
r Instrumentation configuration
r Object Builder library
View to the EntLib 2.0 Overview (slides) and EntLib 2.0 Core Architecture (slides) presentations.
Enterprise Library 2.0 is still prerelease software. It should hopefully be released by the end of January 2006. There is a November CTP with documentation and installer. There is also a source-only December interim Community Drop that includes the configuration editor source.
Hullo! I'm back. It's been quite a while. I've been a designing/coding maniac on a really fun project for half a year but I'm back in the Senior Application Architect seat. Hope to have a great time and share my experiences with .NET 2.0, Team System, and EntLib 2.0.
Brian Button of the EntLib team, mentioned the use of the InternalsVisibleToAttribute in VSTS test projects in his blog entry on TDD with VSTS. As this C# Programming Guide article explains, InternalsVisibleToAttribute is an assembly attribute that allows a specified assembly to see all non private members of the assembly that uses the attribute. This permits two scenarios. The first is directly testing important internal members and classes. In my recent project the entire data structure tree for calc engine was internal to allow expected future modification during the optimization phase. The second is to permit back door access to internal structures to test integrity or other state that you want to remain hidden but exposed to the test tool.
Update: sorry, forgot link to the article.
This C|Net news article introduces Atlas, a client side object model for JavaScript (read DHTML) coding. My readers may know that I believe that the end of Ajax, WSRP, and Portlets leads directly to Smart Clients. It's interesting that the article itself calls JavaScript spaghetti-code. Why write spaghetti code when you could be doing Avalon+Indigo? None, unless you want to support the minority (is this true?) of systems that won't run them.
windowsforms.net has a quick pictoral explanation of new features in Windows Forms 2.0, including:
Controls
WebBrowser
ToolStrip
SoundPlayer
DataGridView
SplitContainer
MaskedTextBox
Designer
ToolStrip Designer
Smart Tags
Document Outline
Snaplines
Runtime
ClickOnce
Windows XP Visual Style Support
Client Configuration
Improved Data Support
Layout
I found a link to the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta Quickstart Tutorial. This should get you a real leg up on the code after you've read ASP.NET v. 2.0 - The Beta Version. Highly recommended book.
Here's a
great post by MVP
Rick Strahl on how to client-side callbacks (Ajax) using the built in features of ASP.NET 2.0. Looks like more plumbing and glue are needed for it to succeed in a large project.
One of the sleepers at the EBC was the “annoucement” that MSF Formal became MSF for CMMI. It was shared that support for CMMI was actully announced in March. Where was I?
My current client is using MSF 3.1, so I was checking around for more info on MSF for CMMI. I found David Anderson's blog entry on the announcement. It has a good overview of the gist of MSF for CMMI. Tidbit here is that they're supporting level 3 in this release and will shoot for level 5 in a future release. The big news however is the attempt to apply agile concepts to formal development. Given the input he's had be SEI, he actually may be able to pull it off.
David is a PM on Team System and has a great blog. Read it here.
Unfortunately I haven't found any details on whether anything from MSF 3.0 was preserved. Given the “Ground up” approach they seem to be taking, I think not.
At issue at the EBC was whether VB6 was going to be supported by Team System. Well it looks like we have our answer:
2. Microsoft will write a provider to allow Visual Studio 2003 and VB6/VC6 to access the new Team Foundation Version Control system. People have been asking for this repeatedly, and Microsoft has listened. I have to give kudos to Microsoft for this, I've never watched a product release as closely as I'm watching this one, and I can honestly say that Microsoft is listening to customer feedback and using that to strengthen their offering.
[Via Chris Menegay]