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