VS2010 Beta 1 Installation Experience and a brief preview

Yesterday, I downloaded the professional edition of the VS2010 Beta 1. This activity was pending for some time. I managed to resume this activity. I installed it on my machine. The iso/ installer size was approximately 700MB+.

The installation was pretty smooth. It took me around 20+ minutes to install this and in the meantime installer asked me to restart the PC twice. Overall, it was satisfactory installation. I was literally anxious to start the application as I had heard about it for some time. I started VS2010 and it was on within few second for the first attempt. Excellent!

The Start Page is a brand new experience especially for the XP users. It is more like Windows 7. A very stylish Start Page made me more anxious to dive deep into the VS2010. And yes amazing docking effects.

Next thing I did was to click on the File -> New -> Project and voila….

Tones of project types (or installed templates as called now a days) starting from classic windows form application to ASP.NET web application to Silverlight application, Silverlight class library, WPF, WCF, Office add-ins and what not. You can select .NET Framework version on this dialog. Interesting is that now you can also select Visual F# to create F# application and libraries.


Next thing, I created a classic Widows Form application just to have a feel of .NET 4.5.
The tool box is rich and cool. It has additional controls and new groups like WPF Interoperability. It also has Visual Basic PowerPacks.

Lots of new tool bars are also added in the IDE like- Web One Click Publish etc.

In the Tools -> Options, you can see lot of new options like: Environment-> Extension Manager, F# related options, Debugging ->Output Window etc.

Overall, cool IDE. I will spend some more time looking into 4.0 Framework and other features….keep on watching this space.

Cheers,
Amol

Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack

Microsoft has released VS++ 2008 Feature pack extending VC++ libraries shipped with VS2008. It includes new MFC classes for building modern UI and also a significant amount of the functionality being added to the Standard C++ Library as part of Technical Report 1 (TR1). TR1 is the first major addition to the Standard C++ Library adopted by the C++ committee.

Some of the key changes in the MFC libraries are: Office ribbon style interface, Office 2007 and XP look and feel, new set of GUI controls etc.

You can download the Feature pack from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D466226B-8DAB-445F-A7B4-448B326C48E7&displaylang=en

Cheers,
Amol

Windows 7 ship date – 22nd October 2009

Microsoft has announced release date of Windows 7 as 22nd October 2009. Windows upgrade option would be also made available.

The release candidate is already distributed.

Source:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Jun09/06-02SteveGuggenheimer.mspx

Cheers,
Amol

Shim Infrastructure for Windows 7

Along with Windows 7, Microsoft has released Microsoft Windows Application Compatibility Infrastructure also called as SHIMS to take care of application compatibility issues.

The Shim Infrastructure implements a form of API hooking. What it means is that it redirects API calls from Windows to Shim itself. Typically call to Windows looks like:
Application --> Import Table --> Windows.

With the Shim Infrastructure, the approach will be:
Application --> Import Table --> Shim --> Windows

Now, some of the interesting facts:
1. The code that runs a shim sits outside the Windows.
2. For Windows, the shim code is just like any application code. Thus you cannot bypass security mechanisms in Windows.
3. All the shims are stored in a shim database.
4. And yes, you cannot create a new shim. You have to get in touch with Microsoft and then Microsoft may release the shims with the HFs or SPs catering to general applications.

Shim is actually really powerful mode to resolve application compatibility issues and get going with Windows 7 deployment.

Cheers,
Amol

Relying on error messages in your application logic

This is a very simple thing but it makes lot of difference for the developers especially the new comers. When we dive deep into our applications/programs to deliver functionality, at times few developers rely on standard error messages thrown by .NET for example. For example, let’s say that you are trying to read a file (which is not present) using .NET base class library. You will get FileNotFound exception. In this case if you have written logic in your application in such a way that if error message is XYZ then do this. This may work with the current version of framework which you are using. However, in future if you install any hot fix or the newer version of .NET framework, the error message may not be the same. The error code may remain same but not the error message.

In simple words, do not rely on standard error messages in your application logic.

Cheers,
Amol

Omaha - From Google

Omaha also known as Google Update installs requested software and keep it up to date. So far it supported Google product but now that it is an open-source anybody should be able to leverage it on Windows 2000 (SP4) onwards.

This autoupdating engine is something to look for going forward. More to come…..
http://code.google.com/p/omaha/

Cheers,
Amol