In case you didn't catch this S. Somasegar announced today during his TechEd Developers Keynote in Barcelona that Visual Studio 2008 will ship by the end of this month (November!). Yeah! Most people were counting on this before the end of the year which mean December or early January so this comes as a nice surprise.
We're talking about some cool technology:
- Visual Studio 2008 (all editions)
- Team Foundation Server 2008
- .NET Framework 3.5
- Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
Now of course the best feature in Visual Studio 2008 is multi-targeting. This features allows you to continue to develop .NET 2.0 or 3.0 applications without migrating to 3.5. There are lots of great features if Visual Studio 2008 - even if you don't move to .NET 3.5:
And if you are a Team System User
- SharePoint 2007/WSS 3.0 or MOSS support
- Simplified Installation
- Better Offline Support
- A bunch of other stuff including Power Tool Rollups.
And don't worry - you can install VS 2008 side by side with VS 2005.
Jeff Beehler blogs here and here that the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPCs are prematurely expiring on November 1st. If you're using your VPC for demos - you'll be limited to 2 hours before you have to shut down. If you're using it for real work - that will be annoying - especially if you are using it for your TFS server Follow Jeff's links to instructions on backing that up and moving it. Look for new VPCs next week - hopefully we'll see a Release Candidate shortly.
Update: Jeff has posted a link to updated VPCs here.
The Microsoft 2008 MVP Summit Site (https://www.mvpsummit2008.com) is now live. The event will occur April 13-17 in Seattle & Redmond Washington as usual and is for any MVP or Regional Director.
A new twist I noticed on the site is the concept of Open Space meetings...
"Highly dynamic and interactive sessions, designed based on Open Space Technology, where you’ll be able to define topics, attend, or even host"
Well that sounds really cool - a little birds of a featherish, but with some better guidance. Open Space World has an elevator speech that describes Open Space Technology meetings.
Pictures are worth a several thousand words. Check out the slideshow:
If you get our newsletter, you'll hopefully appreciate the new layout and content. Thanks to the stylings of Mr. Nick Van Exan and human aggregations of Julie James.
The current newsletter can be browsed online at www.ObjectSharp.com/NewsLetter. There is no RSS feed (yet) nor online subscription mechanism, so in the meantime, drop Julie James an email at jjames at objectsharp.com and she'll add you to her list.
This past Saturday, I gave a talk at the Toronto SharePoint Camp on building composite applications. I started talking in general requirements terms of why composite applications are useful, what they are, and what are the platform requirements - it naturally came down to a SharePoint demo - it's a great platform for building web based composite applications. The nice thing about SharePoint is that much of that work can be done in an ad hoc fashion. This means less plumbing code for us developers and we get to focus on solving business problems.
Some of the things I demonstrated are all available with Windows SharePoint Services (free). For example, Document Libraries and Custom lists, along with the excellent Outlook integration (including offline support) not to mention version control. Then we got into Workflow and integration with enterprise data with the Business Data Catalog of which requires the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or MOSS 2007 which is not free (approx $5000), but a totally worthwhile investment. You can easily save the license fees several times over in reduced development effort. I also used SharePoint Designer which is about $200-300.
My slides and demo files are attached. Let me know if you have any questions. I've also included some demo script notes in the slide notes for those who asked.
Also, check out Rob Windsor's Pictures on Flickr of the event
Should you take Lakeshore or the Gardiner home tonight? I just noticed on Local.Live.com that the Traffic button works for Toronto. I have no idea how long this has been going on - anarchy I tell you. Live Search Maps with Canadian Data! Bravo. Incidentally, this picture was taken from the 3D view - it's just too much fun. If only I could fly home that fast.
This coming Thursday, Microsoft is hosting the annual Toronto Architect Forum at their offices in Mississauga. The target audience is architects that are *not* in the financial service industry. Here's the agenda:
8:00 - 8:30 am |
Breakfast and Registration |
8:30 - 9:00 am |
Welcome by Mark Relph |
9:00 - 9:30 am |
Architectural Agility as Business Value, Dave Remmer |
9:30 - 10:30 am |
Office Business Applications, Mike Walker |
10:30 - 10:45 am |
Break |
10:45 - 12:00 pm |
Visual Studio 2008 “All Up”, Adam Gallant |
12:00 - 1:00 pm |
Networking lunch |
1:00 - 2:15 pm |
Architectural Implications of LINQ, Barry Gervin |
2:15 - 2:30 pm |
Break |
2:30 - 3:00 pm |
Project Experiences using AJAX, Amalan Ponnampalam |
3:00 - 4:15 pm |
How to be an Effective Architect, Mohammad Akif |
4:15 - 4:30 pm |
Wrap-up and Prize Draw |
As you can, I've secured the ever so popular "right after lunch" time slot. I don't know if there are detailed abstracts online for each session, but here is mine:
LINQ: Architectural Implications
Support for Language Integrated Query in the .NET 3.5 Framework promises to simplify and unify querying operations across object collections, relational data, DataSets and XML. The opportunity to simplify or even eliminate the notion of a data access layer is one many architects are considering. During this session we will quickly introduce the capabilities of LINQ, LINQ to SQL and the upcoming Entity Framework, and then discuss how this may affect the design of our data access logic moving forward.
Registration is still open - here.
Update - the event is for Architects not in the financial services industry (my mistake).
via Soma
Back in the days of fxCop, (before we had to pay for code analysis in Team Developer) if you didn't like an error/warning, you could have your request to ignore said message in an external central file.
With the advent of Visual Studio Team Editions for Developers 2005, suppressions were stored as attributes in front of blocks of code. Look on the bright side we were told - now you could see your suppressions inline with your code, versioned alongside, etc. But we lost some things with this as well. Now if you were doing major code sweeps adding suppressions, you would be touching lots of files, creating some unnecessary code churn.
Another scenario may involve a given developer doing a sweep for localization, or security, compliance, etc. In fxCop, different developers could have different settings & suppression files.
Well, Visual Studio 2008 to the rescue. Code Analysis will now give us back this capability.
One of the little pet projects I'm working on is to take a code analysis pass, and cross reference that with a change set. The goal is to generate a report of obvious warnings related to the code I'm churning. We can't be perfect here as sometimes code analysis will return an error to a line of code you didn't change, but it is indirectly caused by that. The only way to truly get a clean report would be to do a code analysis before & after the checkin - that might be too much. But this would definitely be a great report for a build - to compare code analysis passes on previous builds.
Come to camp on Saturday October 20th, 2007 in downtown Toronto. We'll do paper mache, cook marshmallows over a fire, and learn how to rapidly build collaborative portal solutions. You can visit the site and register here, and they are still looking for speakers.
I hope to be speaking about something in the Architect Track, but haven't quite decided on what I'd like to talk about yet. What would you like to hear? Drop me a line.
Scott Guthrie announced today that the source code for the .NET Framework will be released with Visual Studio 2008. That's just awesome. Check out the post for the debugging scenario here, it's beautiful to just step right into .NET code. Of course you could have fired up reflector in the past, but this is much more streamlined and bonafide.
This is pretty genuine transparency and will give customers lots to be happy about.