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Earlier today we shipped the beta of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools. You can download them here. 
What is included in the Windows Phone Developer Tools The Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta includes: - Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – a new free, express edition of Visual Studio 2010
- Express Blend for Windows Phone – a new free, edition of Blend focused on Windows Phone 7 development
- Silverlight for Windows Phone 7
- XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7
Integrated with the development tools is a phone emulator that enables you to easily develop and test Windows Phone 7 applications on your laptop or desktop machine – without requiring a phone device. It is hardware accelerated, supports multi-touch events on multi-touch capable monitors, and provides a really easy way to debug and try out your phone applications. Devices for Developers In addition to testing applications within the emulator, we are also this month starting to ship pre-release phones to developers. You can learn more about this program and sign-up to receive one from this blog post from the Windows Phone 7 team. Learning More I previously blogged a nice step-by-step tutorial that covers how to build a Twitter search application using Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. It provides a nice introduction on how you can easily use Silverlight and the Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone to quickly build applications. You can read and follow the tutorial here. Read today’s blog post from the Windows Phone 7 team which provides more details on today’s release. It also mentions two new Silverlight controls – a Panorama and Pivot control - which will enable you to easily implement the new Windows Phone 7 navigation style. These controls are not implemented in today’s beta, but will be released as an update in a few weeks. If you have used the previous Windows Phone 7 CTPs, also make sure to read Jaime’s Migrating Applications from the Windows Phone April CTP Refresh to the Beta blog post. It provides a wealth of details on how to update code that you’ve already written. Uninstalling Previous CTP Bits Update: Some people have reported problems with uninstalling the previous CTP of the Windows Phone 7 Developer tools. Amit has a blog post here that discusses how to fix this. Aaron also has a blog post that discusses how to remove XNA Game Studio in the event that you have a partial install of it that you need to clean up. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu 
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The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download. Download and Install If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have previously installed that). The Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 package extends the Silverlight support built into Visual Studio 2010 and enables support for Silverlight 4 applications as well. It also installs WCF RIA Services application templates and libraries: 
Today’s release includes the English edition of the Silverlight 4 Tooling – localized versions will be available next month for other Visual Studio languages as well. Silverlight Tooling Support Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications. It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources: 
The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls. The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists. For example, let’s assume we add a “Person” class like below to our project: 
We could then add it to the Data Source window which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE: 
We can optionally customize the default UI control types that are associated for each property on the object. For example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a “DatePicker” control: 
And then when we drag/drop the Person type from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class: 
VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog: 
This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how validation errors should be handled, etc: 
In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment. Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features. These include: Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application. You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio: 
Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications). Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support: Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications. This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control. In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources. This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”: 
Style Intellisense VS 2010 enables you to easily modify styles you already have in XAML, and now you get intellisense for properties and their values within a style based on the TargetType of the specified control. For example, below we have a style being set for controls of type “Button” (this is indicated by the “TargetType” property). Notice how intellisense now automatically shows us properties for the Button control (even within the <Setter> element): 
Great Video - Watch the Silverlight Designer Features in Action You can see all of the above Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 features (and some more cool ones I haven’t mentioned) demonstrated in action within this 20 minute Silverlight.TV video on Channel 9: 
WCF RIA Services Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA Services. It is included and automatically installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup. WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business applications with Silverlight. It simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using the power of WCF for communication. WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier. Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the client, and then save it back to the server. It supports a validation architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers. WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the client and the server It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that can be used by any client. You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video. Putting it all Together – the Silverlight 4 Training Kit Check out the Silverlight 4 Training Kit to learn more about how to build business applications with Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands-on labs that explain Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services concepts and walks you through building an end-to-end application with them. 
The training kit is available for free and is a great way to get started. Summary I’m really excited about today’s release – as they really complete the Silverlight development story and deliver a great end to end runtime + tooling story for building applications. All of the above features are available for use both in VS 2010 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition – making it really easy to get started building great solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu 
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We recently released a new free Silverlight 4 Training Kit that walks you through building business applications with Silverlight 4. You can browse the training kit online or alternatively download an entire offline version of the training kit. The training material is structured on teaching how to use the new Silverlight 4 features to build an end to end business application. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands on labs. Below is a breakdown and links to all of the content. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Module 1: Introduction Click here to watch this module. In this video John Papa and Ian Griffiths discuss the key areas that the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course focuses on. This module is the overview of the course and covers many key scenarios that are faced when building business applications, and how Silverlight can help address them. 
Module 2: WCF RIA Services Click here to explore this module. In this lab, you will create a web site for managing conferences that will be the basis for the other labs in this course. Don’t worry if you don’t complete a particular lab in the series – all lab manual instructions are accompanied by completed solutions, so you can either build your own solution from start to finish, or dive straight in at any point using the solutions provided as a starting point. In this lab you will learn how to set up WCF RIA Services, create bindings to the domain context, filter using the domain data source, and create domain service queries. Videos Module 2.1 - WCF RIA Services  Ian Griffiths sets up the Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services for the sample Event Manager application for the course. He covers how to set up the services, how the Domain Services work and the role that the DomainContext plays in the sample application. He also reviews the metadata classes and integrating the navigation framework.
Module 2.2 – Using WCF RIA Services to Edit Entities  Ian Griffiths discusses how he adds the ability to edit and create individual entities with the features built into WCF RIA Services into the sample Event Manager application. He covers data binding fundamentals, IQueryable, LINQ, the DomainDataSource, navigation to a single entity using the navigation framework, and how to use the Visual Studio designer to do much of the work .
Module 2.3 – Showing Master/Details Records Using WCF RIA Services  Ian Griffiths reviews how to display master/detail records for the sample Event Manager application using WCF RIA Services. He covers how to use the Include attribute to indicate which elements to serialize back to the client. Ian also demonstrates how to use the Data Sources window in the designer to add and bind controls to specific data elements. He wraps up by showing how to create custom services to the Domain Services.
Module 3 – Authentication, Validation, MVVM, Commands, Implicit Styles and RichTextBox Click here to visit this module. This lab demonstrates how to build a login screen, integrate ASP.NET authentication, and perform validation on data elements. Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) is introduced and used in this lab as a pattern to help separate the UI and business logic. You will also learn how to use implicit styling and the new RichTextBox control. Videos Module 3.1 – Authentication ![clip_image004[4]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0044_2AD62D92.gif "clip_image004[4]") Ian Griffiths covers how to integrate a login screen and authentication into the sample Event Manager application. Ian shows how to use the ASP.NET authentication and integrate it into WCF RIA Services and the Silverlight presentation layer.
Module 3.2 – MVVM ![clip_image006[4]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0064_23B6F11A.gif "clip_image006[4]") Ian Griffiths covers how to Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) patterns into the sample Event Manager application. He discusses why MVVM exists, what separated presentation means, and why it is important. He shows how to connect the View to the ViewModel, why data binding is important in this symbiosis, and how everything fits together in the overall application.
Module 3.3 –Validation ![clip_image008[4]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0084_359384E7.gif "clip_image008[4]") Ian Griffiths discusses how validation of user input can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He demonstrates how to use the DataAnnotations, the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface, binding markup extensions, and WCF RIA Services in concert to achieve great validation in the sample application. He discusses how this technique allows for property level validation, entity level validation, and asynchronous server side validation.
Module 3.4 – Implicit Styles  Ian Griffiths discusses how why implicit styles are important and how they can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He shows how implicit styles defined in a resource dictionary can be applied to all elements of a particular kind throughout the application.
Module 3.5 – RichTextBox  Ian Griffiths discusses how the new RichTextBox control and it can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He demonstrates how the RichTextBox can provide editing for the event information and how it can display the rich text for selection and copying.
Module 4 – User Profiles, Drop Targets, Webcam and Clipboard Click here to visit this module. This lab builds new features into the sample application to take the user's photo. It teaches you how to use the webcam to capture an image, use Silverlight as a drop target, and take advantage of programmatic access to the clipboard. Videos Module 4.1 – Webcam ![Devil]( "clip_image004<img src=") " border="0" alt="clip_image004 " src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0046_5BF56832.gif" width="89" height="68" /> Ian Griffiths demonstrates how the webcam adds value to the sample Event Manager application by capturing an image of the attendee. He discusses the VideoCaptureDevice, the CaptureDviceConfiguration, and the CaptureSource classes and how they allow audio and video to be captured so you can grab an image from the capture device and save it.
Module 4.2 - Drag and Drop in Silverlight ![Devil]( "clip_image006<img src=") " border="0" alt="clip_image006" src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0066_299194B3.gif" width="89" height="68" /> Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to capture and handle the Drop in the sample Event Manager application so the user can drag a photo from a file and drop it into the application. Ian reviews the AllowDrop property, the Drop event, how to access the file that can be dropped, and the other drag related events. He also reviews how to make this work across browsers and the challenges for this.
Module 5 – Schedule Planner and Right Mouse Click Click here to visit this module. This lab builds on the application to allow grouping in the DataGrid and implement right mouse click features to add context menu support. Videos Module 5.1 – Grouping and Binding ![Music]( "clip_image004<img src=") " border="0" alt="clip_image004 " src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0048_0D80D5C8.gif" width="89" height="68" /> Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to use the grouping features for data binding in the DataGrid and how it applies to the sample Event Manager application. He reviews the role of the CollectionViewSource in grouping, customizing the templates for headers, and how to work with grouping with ItemsControls.
Module 5.2 – Layout Visual States ![Music]( "clip_image006<img src=") " border="0" alt="clip_image006" src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0068_623C3EC0.gif" width="89" height="68" />Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to use the Fluid UI animation support for visual states in the ListBox control DataGrid and how it applies to the sample Event Manager application. He reviews the 3 visual states of BeforeLoaded, AfterLoaded, and BeforeUnloaded.
Module 5.3 – Right Mouse Click ![Devil]( "clip_image008<img src=") " border="0" alt="clip_image008" src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0086_7418D28D.gif" width="89" height="68" /> Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to add support for handling the right mouse button click event to display a context menu for the Event Manager application. He demonstrates how to handle the event, show a custom context menu control, and integrate it into the scheduling portion of the application.
Module 6 – Printing the Schedule Click here to visit this module. This lab teaches how to use the new printing features in Silverlight 4. The lab walks through the PrintDocument class and the ViewBox control, while showing how to print multiple pages of content using them. Videos Module 6.1 – Printing and the Viewbox ![clip_image004[10]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image00410_48D43B86.gif "clip_image004[10]") Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to add the ability to print the schedule to the sample Event Manager application. He walks through the importance of the PrintDocument class and its members. He also shows how to handle printing the visual tree and how the ViewBox control can help.
Module 6.2 – Multi Page Printing ![clip_image006[10]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image00610_089E220C.gif "clip_image006[10]") Ian Griffiths expands on his printing discussion by showing how to handle printing multiple pages of content for the sample Event Manager application. He shows how to paginate the content and points out various tips to keep in mind when determining the printable area.
Module 7 – Running the Event Dashboard Out of Browser Click here to visit this module. This lab builds a dashboard for the sample application while explaining the fundamentals of the out of browser features, how to handle authentication, displaying notifications (toasts), and how to use native integration to use COM Interop with Silverlight. Videos Module 7.1 – Out of Browser ![clip_image004[12]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image00412_48680891.gif "clip_image004[12]") Ian Griffiths discusses the role of an Out of Browser application for administrators to manage the events and users in the sample Event Manager application. He discusses several reasons why out of browser applications may better suit your needs including custom chrome, toasts, window placement, cross domain access, and file access. He demonstrates the basic technique to take your application and make it work out of browser using the tools.
Module 7.2 – NotificationWindow (Toasts) for Elevated Trust Out of Browser Applications ![clip_image006[12]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image00612_5A449C5E.gif "clip_image006[12]") Ian Griffiths discusses the how toasts can be used in the sample Event Manager application to show information that may require the user's attention. Ian covers how to create a toast using the NotificationWindow, security implications, and how to make the toast appear as needed.
Module 7.3 – Out of Browser Window Placement ![Music]( "clip_image008<img src=") " border="0" alt="clip_image008" src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0088_0112B29F.gif" width="89" height="68" /> Ian Griffiths discusses the how to manage the window positioning when building an out of browser application, handling the windows state, and controlling and handling activation of the window.
Module 7.4 – Out of Browser Elevated Trust Application Overview ![clip_image010[4]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0104_27E0C8DF.gif "clip_image010[4]") Ian Griffiths discusses the implications of creating trusted out of browser application for the Event Manager sample application. He reviews why you might want to use elevated trust, what features is opens to you, and how to take advantage of them. Topics Ian covers include the dynamic keyword in C# 4, the AutomationFactory class, the API to check if you are in a trusted application, and communicating with Excel.
Module 8 – Advanced Out of Browser and MEF Click here to visit this module. This hands-on lab walks through the creation of a trusted out of browser application and the new functionality that comes with that. You will learn to use COM Automation, handle the window closing event, set custom window chrome, digitally sign your Silverlight out of browser trusted application, create a silent install option, and take advantage of MEF. Videos Module 8.1 – Custom Window Chrome for Elevated Trust Out of Browser Applications ![clip_image004[14]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image00414_4EAEDF1F.gif "clip_image004[14]") Ian Griffiths discusses how to replace the standard operating system window chrome with customized chrome for an elevated trusted out of browser application. He covers how it is important to handle close, resize, minimize, and maximize events. Ian mentions that the tooling was not ready when he shot this video, but the good news is that the tooling now supports setting the custom chrome directly from the property page for the Silverlight application.
Module 8.2 – Window Closing Event for Out of Browser Applications ![clip_image006[14]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image00614_329E2034.gif "clip_image006[14]")
Ian Griffiths discusses the WindowClosing event and how to handle and optionally cancel the event. Module 8.3 – Silent Install of Out of Browser Applications ![clip_image008[10]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image00810_0759892D.gif "clip_image008[10]") Ian Griffiths discusses how to use the SLLauncher executable to install an out of browser application. He discusses the optional command line switches that can be set including how the emulate switch can help you emulate the install process. Ian also shows how to setup a shortcut for the application and tell the application where it should look for future updates online.
Module 8.4 – Digitally Signing Out of Browser Application ![Devil]( "clip_image010<img src=") " border="0" alt="clip_image010" src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0106_2E279F6D.gif" width="89" height="68" />Ian Griffiths discusses how and why to digitally sign an out of browser application using the signtool program. He covers what trusted certificates are, the implications of signing (or not signing), and the effect on the user experience.
Module 8.5 – The Value of MEF with Silverlight ![clip_image012[4]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/scottgu/clip_image0124_4004333A.gif "clip_image012[4]") Ian Griffiths discusses what MEF is, how your application can benefit from it, and the fundamental features it puts at your disposal. He covers the 3 step import, export and compose process as well as how to dynamically import XAP files using MEF.
Summary As you can probably tell from the long list above – this series contains a ton of great content, and hopefully provides a nice end-to-end walkthrough that helps explain how to take advantage of Silverlight 4 (and all its new features). Hope this helps, Scott 
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The final release of Silverlight 4 is now available. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] What is in the Silverlight 4 Release Silverlight 4 contains a ton of new features and capabilities. In particular we focused on three scenarios with this release: - Further enhancing media support
- Building great business applications
- Enabling out of the browser experiences
On Tuesday I gave a 60 minute keynote about Silverlight 4 which showed off many of the new features and capabilities now available. You can watch my keynote to learn more about Silverlight 4 and see a ton of great demos of it in action. Also check out these three great posts by Tim Heuer that talk about the new features and provide a guide to the new Silverlight 4 capabilities: Also read David Anson’s great Silverlight 4 Toolkit post to learn more about the new controls and functionality also available within the Silverlight Toolkit release we also made available today. Visit this page to learn more about the new Pivot functionality in Silverlight 4 – which makes it really easy to visualize and interact with collections of images using Silverlight. Lastly – make sure to visit the www.silverlight.net web-site and visit the “Get Started” section to find free tutorials that you can use.
Download and Install Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 To develop Silverlight 4 applications you should first download and install Visual Studio 2010 or download and install the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express edition. Then install the Silverlight Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010. This setup includes the Silverlight 4 Developer Runtime, Silverlight 4 SDK, RIA Services, and VS 2010 tools support. Once installed you can do File->New Project and choose Silverlight Application to create your first Silverlight 4 project. You can then use the new WYSIWYG Silverlight designer in Visual Studio 2010 to design and build rich Silverlight 4 applications. 
Important: If you previously installed the Silverlight 4 Beta or RC build on your machine, please make sure to go into Add/Remove programs and uninstall the “Update for Visual Studio 2010 (KB976272)” package prior to installing the Silverlight Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010 setup. Note that while Silverlight 4 is released, the “Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010” is currently in “RC2” mode (meaning we are going to keep an eye out for any remaining issues before finally calling it done). We’ll update the tools to be “final” in a few weeks once we verify that no last minute issues/bugs remain. Download and Install Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate You can also download and install the Expression Blend 4 RC to create and design great Silverlight 4 applications. Blend contains “Sketchflow” support – which makes it really easy to rapidly prototype ideas and applications. To learn more about Sketchflow watch this 90 second video of it in action. Summary Today’s release is the fourth release of Silverlight that we’ve shipped in the last 2.5 years. The team has done a great job of advancing it quickly and staying focused. Today’s Silverlight 4 release opens up a ton of new opportunities to build great solutions for both consumers and business scenarios. We are looking forward to seeing what you build with it! Hope this helps, Scott 
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The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available. Download and Install Today MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark/BizSpark/DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center. If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010. Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++. These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page). What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4 Today’s release is a big one – and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better. What this means is that you don’t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release. There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them. Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate). It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used. It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow. The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense. The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging. VS 2010’s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications. And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster. TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and continuous integration support. Testing support (both automated and manual) is now much, much richer. And VS 2010 Premium and Ultimate provide much better architecture and design tooling support. VB and C# Language Features VB and C# in VS 2010 both contain a bunch of new features and capabilities. VB adds new support for automatic properties, collection initializers, and implicit line continuation support among many other features. C# adds support for optional parameters and named arguments, a new dynamic keyword, co-variance and contra-variance, and among many other features. ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website. ViewState within applications can now be more easily controlled and made smaller. Client IDs rendered by server controls can now be controlled. ASP.NET Dynamic Data support has been enhanced. More controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster. New starter project templates now make it easier to get going with new projects. SEO enhancements make it easier to drive traffic to your public facing sites. And web.config files are now clean and simple. ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods. It also enables more modular/reusable applications. The new <%: %> syntax in ASP.NET makes it easier to HTML encode output. Visual Studio 2010 also now includes better tooling support for unit testing and TDD. In particular, “Consume first intellisense” and “generate from usage" support within VS 2010 make it easier to write your unit tests first, and then drive your implementation from them. Deploying ASP.NET applications gets a lot easier with this release. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes. WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 WPF 4 includes a ton of new improvements and capabilities including more built-in controls, richer graphics features (cached composition, pixel shader 3 support, layoutrounding, and animation easing functions), a much improved text stack (with crisper text rendering, custom dictionary support, and selection and caret brush options). WPF 4 also includes a bunch of support to enable you to take advantage of new Windows 7 features – including multi-touch and Windows 7 shell integration. Silverlight 4 will launch this week as well. You can watch my Silverlight 4 launch keynote streamed live Tuesday (April 13th) at 8am Pacific Time. Silverlight 4 includes a ton of new capabilities – including a bunch for making it possible to build great business applications and out of the browser applications. I’ll be doing a separate blog post later this week (once it is live on the web) that talks more about its capabilities. Visual Studio 2010 now includes great tooling support for both WPF and Silverlight. The new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer makes it much easier to build client applications as well as build great line of business solutions, as well as integrate and bind with data. Tooling support for Silverlight 4 with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will be available when Silverlight 4 releases to the web this week. SharePoint and Azure Visual Studio 2010 now includes built-in support for building SharePoint applications. You can now create, edit, build, and debug SharePoint applications directly within Visual Studio 2010. You can also now use SharePoint with TFS 2010. Support for creating Azure-hosted applications is also now included with VS 2010 – allowing you to build ASP.NET and WCF based applications and host them within the cloud. Data Access Data access has a lot of improvements coming to it with .NET 4. Entity Framework 4 includes a ton of new features and capabilities – including support for model first and POCO development, default support for lazy loading, built-in support for pluralization/singularization of table/property names within the VS 2010 designer, full support for all the LINQ operators, the ability to optionally expose foreign keys on model objects (useful for some stateless web scenarios), disconnected API support to better handle N-Tier and stateless web scenarios, and T4 template customization support within VS 2010 to allow you to customize and automate how code is generated for you by the data designer. In addition to improvements with the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL with .NET 4 also includes a bunch of nice improvements. WCF and Workflow WCF includes a bunch of great new capabilities – including better REST, activation and configuration support. WCF Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) and WCF RIA Services also now enable you to easily expose and work with data from remote clients. Windows Workflow is now much faster, includes flowchart services, and now makes it easier to make custom services than before. More details can be found here. CLR and Core .NET Library Improvements .NET 4 includes the new CLR 4 engine – which includes a lot of nice performance and feature improvements. CLR 4 engine now runs side-by-side in-process with older versions of the CLR – allowing you to use two different versions of .NET within the same process. It also includes improved COM interop support. The .NET 4 base class libraries (BCL) include a bunch of nice additions and refinements. In particular, the .NET 4 BCL now includes new parallel programming support that makes it much easier to build applications that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores on a computer. This work dove-tails nicely with the new VS 2010 parallel debugger (making it much easier to debug parallel applications), as well as the new F# functional language support now included in the VS 2010 IDE. .NET 4 also now also has the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) library built-in – which makes it easier to use dynamic language functionality with .NET. MEF – a really cool library that enables rich extensibility – is also now built-into .NET 4 and included as part of the base class libraries. .NET 4 Client Profile The download size of the .NET 4 redist is now much smaller than it was before (the x86 full .NET 4 package is about 36MB). We also now have a .NET 4 Client Profile package which is a pure sub-set of the full .NET that can be used to streamline client application installs. Visual C++ VS 2010 includes a bunch of great improvements for C++ development. This includes better C++ Intellisense support, MSBuild support for projects, improved parallel debugging and profiler support, MFC improvements, and a number of language features and compiler optimizations. My VS 2010 and .NET 4 Blog Series I’ve been cranking away on a blog series the last few months that highlights many of the new VS 2010 and .NET 4 improvements. The good news is that I have about 20 in-depth posts already written. The bad news (for me) is that I have about 200 more to go until I’m done! I’m going to try and keep adding a few more each week over the next few months to discuss the new improvements and how best to take advantage of them. Below is a list of the already written ones that you can check out today: Stay tuned to my blog as I post more. Also check out this page which links to a bunch of great articles and videos done by others. VS 2010 Installation Notes If you have installed a previous version of VS 2010 on your machine (either the beta or the RC) you must first uninstall it before installing the final VS 2010 release. I also recommend uninstalling .NET 4 betas (including both the client and full .NET 4 installs) as well as the other installs that come with VS 2010 (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2 preview builds, etc). The uninstalls of the betas/RCs will clean up all the old state on your machine – after which you can install the final VS 2010 version and should have everything just work (this is what I’ve done on all of my machines and I haven’t had any problems). The VS 2010 and .NET 4 installs add a bunch of new managed assemblies to your machine. Some of these will be “NGEN’d” to native code during the actual install process (making them run fast). To avoid adding too much time to VS setup, though, we don’t NGEN all assemblies immediately – and instead will NGEN the rest in the background when your machine is idle. Until it finishes NGENing the assemblies they will be JIT’d to native code the first time they are used in a process – which for large assemblies can sometimes cause a slight performance hit. If you run into this you can manually force all assemblies to be NGEN’d to native code immediately (and not just wait till the machine is idle) by launching the Visual Studio command line prompt from the Windows Start Menu (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt). Within the command prompt type “Ngen executequeueditems” – this will cause everything to be NGEN’d immediately. How to Buy Visual Studio 2010 You can can download and use the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++. These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). You can buy a new copy of VS 2010 Professional that includes a 1 year subscription to MSDN Essentials for $799. MSDN Essentials includes a developer license of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 DataCenter R2, and 20 hours of Azure hosting time. Subscribers also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, and Priority Support in MSDN Forums. Upgrade prices from previous releases of Visual Studio are also available. Existing Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard customers can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional for a special $299 retail price until October. You can take advantage of this VS Standard to Professional upgrade promotion here. Web developers who build applications for others, and who are either independent developers or who work for companies with less than 10 employees, can also optionally take advantage of the Microsoft WebSiteSpark program. This program gives you three copies of Visual Studio 2010 Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio, and 4 CPU licenses of both Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and SQL 2008 Web Edition that you can use to both develop and deploy applications with at no cost for 3 years. At the end of the 3 years there is no obligation to buy anything. You can sign-up for WebSiteSpark today in under 5 minutes – and immediately have access to the products to download. Summary Today’s release is a big one – and has a bunch of improvements for pretty much every developer. Thank you everyone who provided feedback, suggestions and reported bugs throughout the development process – we couldn’t have delivered it without you. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu 
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Here is the latest in my link-listing series. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET -
Web Deployment Made Awesome: Very nice MIX10 talk by Scott Hanselman on the new web deployment features coming with VS 2010, MSDeploy, and .NET 4. Makes deploying web applications much, much easier. ASP.NET MVC AJAX Visual Studio Silverlight Hope this helps, Scott 
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On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here). In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (we’ll ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4. I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using Silverlight – a quick “Hello World” application and a “Twitter” data-snacking application. Both applications were easy to build and only took a few minutes to create on stage. Below are the steps you can follow yourself to build them on your own machines as well. [Note: In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Building a “Hello World” Windows Phone 7 Application First make sure you’ve installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – this includes the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone development tool (which will be free forever and is the only thing you need to develop and build Windows Phone 7 applications) as well as an add-on to the VS 2010 RC that enables phone development within the full VS 2010 as well. After you’ve downloaded and installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, launch the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone that it installs or launch the VS 2010 RC (if you have it already installed), and then choose “File”->”New Project.” Here, you’ll find the usual list of project template types along with a new category: “Silverlight for Windows Phone”. The first CTP offers two application project templates. The first is the “Windows Phone Application” template - this is what we’ll use for this example. The second is the “Windows Phone List Application” template - which provides the basic layout for a master‑details phone application: 
After creating a new project, you’ll get a view of the design surface and markup. Notice that the design surface shows the phone UI, letting you easily see how your application will look while you develop. For those familiar with Visual Studio, you’ll also find the familiar ToolBox, Solution Explorer and Properties pane.  For our HelloWorld application, we’ll start out by adding a TextBox and a Button from the Toolbox. Notice that you get the same design experience as you do for Silverlight on the web or desktop. You can easily resize, position and align your controls on the design surface. Changing properties is easy with the Properties pane. We’ll change the name of the TextBox that we added to username and change the page title text to “Hello world.” 
We’ll then write some code by double‑clicking on the button and create an event handler in the code-behind file (MainPage.xaml.cs). 
We’ll start out by changing the title text of the application. The project template included this title as a TextBlock with the name textBlockListTitle (note that the current name incorrectly includes the word “list”; that will be fixed for the final release.) As we write code against it we get intellisense showing the members available. Below we’ll set the Text property of the title TextBlock to “Hello “ + the Text property of the TextBox username: 
We now have all the code necessary for a Hello World application. We have two choices when it comes to deploying and running the application. We can either deploy to an actual device itself or use the built‑in phone emulator: 
Because the phone emulator is actually the phone operating system running in a virtual machine, we’ll get the same experience developing in the emulator as on the device. For this sample, we’ll just press F5 to start the application with debugging using the emulator. Once the phone operating system loads, the emulator will run the new “Hello world” application exactly as it would on the device: 
Notice that we can change several settings of the emulator experience with the emulator toolbar – which is a floating toolbar on the top right. This includes the ability to re-size/zoom the emulator and two rotate buttons. Zoom lets us zoom into even the smallest detail of the application: 
The orientation buttons allow us easily see what the application looks like in landscape mode (orientation change support is just built into the default template): 
Note that the emulator can be reused across F5 debug sessions - that means that we don’t have to start the emulator for every deployment. We’ve added a dialog that will help you from accidentally shutting down the emulator if you want to reuse it. Launching an application on an already running emulator should only take ~3 seconds to deploy and run. Within our Hello World application we’ll click the “username” textbox to give it focus. This will cause the software input panel (SIP) to open up automatically. We can either type a message or – since we are using the emulator – just type in text. Note that the emulator works with Windows 7 multi-touch so, if you have a touchscreen, you can see how interaction will feel on a device just by pressing the screen. 
We’ll enter “MIX 10” in the textbox and then click the button – this will cause the title to update to be “Hello MIX 10”: 
We provide the same Visual Studio experience when developing for the phone as other .NET applications. This means that we can set a breakpoint within the button event handler, press the button again and have it break within the debugger: 
Building a “Twitter” Windows Phone 7 Application using Silverlight Rather than just stop with “Hello World” let’s keep going and evolve it to be a basic Twitter client application. We’ll return to the design surface and add a ListBox, using the snaplines within the designer to fit it to the device screen and make the best use of phone screen real estate. We’ll also rename the Button “Lookup”: 
We’ll then return to the Button event handler in Main.xaml.cs, and remove the original “Hello World” line of code and take advantage of the WebClient networking class to asynchronously download a Twitter feed. This takes three lines of code in total: (1) declaring and creating the WebClient, (2) attaching an event handler and then (3) calling the asynchronous DownloadStringAsync method. In the DownloadStringAsync call, we’ll pass a Twitter Uri plus a query string which pulls the text from the “username” TextBox. This feed will pull down the respective user’s most frequent posts in an XML format. When the call completes, the DownloadStringCompleted event is fired and our generated event handler twitter_DownloadStringCompleted will be called: 
The result returned from the Twitter call will come back in an XML based format. To parse this we’ll use LINQ to XML. LINQ to XML lets us create simple queries for accessing data in an xml feed. To use this library, we’ll first need to add a reference to the assembly (right click on the References folder in the solution explorer and choose “Add Reference): 
We’ll then add a “using System.Xml.Linq” namespace reference at the top of the code-behind file at the top of Main.xaml.cs file: 
We’ll then add a simple helper class called TwitterItem to our project. TwitterItem has three string members – UserName, Message and ImageSource: 
We’ll then implement the twitter_DownloadStringCompleted event handler and use LINQ to XML to parse the returned XML string from Twitter. What the query is doing is pulling out the three key pieces of information for each Twitter post from the username we passed as the query string. These are the ImageSource for their profile image, the Message of their tweet and their UserName. For each Tweet in the XML, we are creating a new TwitterItem in the IEnumerable<XElement> returned by the Linq query. We then assign the generated TwitterItem sequence to the ListBox’s ItemsSource property: 
We’ll then do one more step to complete the application. In the Main.xaml file, we’ll add an ItemTemplate to the ListBox. For the demo, I used a simple template that uses databinding to show the user’s profile image, their tweet and their username. <ListBox Height="521" HorizonalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,131,0,0" Name="listBox1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="476">
<ListBox.ItemTemplate>
<DataTemplate>
<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Height="132">
<Image Source="{Binding ImageSource}" Height="73" Width="73" VerticalAlignment="Top" Margin="0,10,8,0"/>
<StackPanel Width="370">
<TextBlock Text="{Binding UserName}" Foreground="#FFC8AB14" FontSize="28" />
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Message}" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontSize="24" />
</StackPanel>
</StackPanel>
</DataTemplate>
</ListBox.ItemTemplate>
</ListBox>
Now, pressing F5 again, we are able to reuse the emulator and re-run the application. Once the application has launched, we can type in a Twitter username and press the Button to see the results. Try my Twitter user name (scottgu) and you’ll get back a result of TwitterItems in the Listbox:
Try using the mouse (or if you have a touchscreen device your finger) to scroll the items in the Listbox – you should find that they move very fast within the emulator. This is because the emulator is hardware accelerated – and so gives you the same fast performance that you get on the actual phone hardware.
Summary
Silverlight and the VS 2010 Tools for Windows Phone (and the corresponding Expression Blend Tools for Windows Phone) make building Windows Phone applications both really easy and fun.
At MIX this week a number of great partners (including Netflix, FourSquare, Seesmic, Shazaam, Major League Soccer, Graphic.ly, Associated Press, Jackson Fish and more) showed off some killer application prototypes they’ve built over the last few weeks. You can watch my full day 1 keynote to see them in action. I think they start to show some of the promise and potential of using Silverlight with Windows Phone 7. I’ll be doing more blog posts in the weeks and months ahead that cover that more.
Hope this helps,
Scott
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This a quick post to announce a few upcoming events for those in the UK. I’ll be presenting in Glasgow, Scotland on March 25th I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Glasgow on March 25th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet. You can learn more about the event and register for free here. There are only a few spots left – so register quickly. When the event fills up there will be a wait-list – please add yourself to this as we’ll be encouraging people who won’t be able to attend to let us know ahead of time so that we can add more people to the event. I’ll be presenting in Birmingham, England on March 26th I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Birmingham (UK) on March 26th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and also potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet. You can learn more about the event and register for free here. The event unfortunately filled up immediately (even before I had a chance to blog it) – but there is a waitlist. If you’d like to attend please add yourself to it as hopefully a number of people will be able to attend off of it. UK Party at MIX If you are going to MIX and are from the UK send mail to phil@pixelprogramming.com (or tweet him @plip) for an invite to a party being organized for UK MIX attendees next Sunday (March 14th). Knowing the people involved I’m sure the party will be fun. <g> Cool MIX10 iPhone App Speaking of MIX (and UK developers), Chris Hardy has posted a cool new MIX10 iPhone application on the Apple AppStore. The free application helps track sessions, rooms, etc. You can learn more about it from Chris’ blog post here. The app works for everyone – not just those from the UK. :-) Hope this helps, Scott 
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This past week I’ve been traveling around Europe giving a bunch of presentations (approximately 5 hours in each country) – Norway on Tuesday, Sweden on Wednesday, Denmark on Thursday, and Belgium on Friday. I’ll then be presenting at the BizSpark Camp in France this coming Tuesday. Things went well with the talks, and I had fun meeting lots of new people (more than 3,000 attended the talks!). Below is a picture of my talk in Belgium – where everyone showed up in a red shirt :-) 
Download Talks My talks were filmed in a few locations – and I’ll update this post with pointers to the videos once they are online to watch. Below are copies of my slides + demos bits: Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I’m also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu 
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I’m excited to announce a new program – WebsiteSpark – that Microsoft is launching today. WebsiteSpark is designed for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others. It enables you to get software, support and business resources from Microsoft at no cost for three years, and enables you to expand your business and build great web solutions using ASP.NET, Silverlight, SharePoint and PHP, and the open source applications built on top of them. What does the program provide? WebSiteSpark provides software licenses that you can use for three years at no cost. Once enrolled, you can download and immediately use the following software from Microsoft: - 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
- 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
- 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
- 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
- 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
- DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)
The Windows Server and SQL Server licenses can be used for both development and production deployment. You can either self-host the servers on your own, or use the licenses with a hoster. WebsiteSpark makes it easy to find hosters who are also enrolled in the program, and who can use your licenses to provide you with either dedicated or virtual dedicated servers to host your sites on. In addition to software, WebsiteSpark provides partner opportunities to grow and build your business (including customer referrals through our partner programs). It also includes product support (including 2 professional support incidents) and free online training for the products. Who can join the program? WebSiteSpark is available to independent web developers and small web development companies. The only two requirements to join the program are: - Your company builds web sites and web application on behalf of others.
- Your company currently has less than 10 employees.
If you meet these requirements you can visit the WebsiteSpark website and sign-up today. As part of the enrollment process you can pick either a network referral partner (for example: a hoster or an existing Microsoft partner), or enter a referral code that you have received at an event or from a Microsoft employee. If you send mail to webspark@microsoft.com you can get a referral code quickly. You can then use that code to enroll in the program on the WebsiteSpark website. Once enrolled you can immediately download and use the software, as well as begin to participate in the network/partner opportunities. If you have any problems enrolling, you can also send me mail (scottgu@microsoft.com) and I can connect you with someone who can help. What happens after the 3 years? WebsiteSpark is a 3 year program. There is no obligation to continue to use any of the software after the three years is over, and there are no costs for the three years other than a $100 program fee at the end of the three years. At the end of the three years, WebsiteSpark participants can optionally choose to purchase all of the software in the WebsiteSpark program via a $999/year package. This includes 3 copies of VS Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio (including Blend and Sketchflow), 2 copies of Expression Web, and 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 and 4 processor licenses of SQL Server Web edition that can be used for production deployment. Alternatively, if you want to purchase only the production server licenses, you can take advantage of a $199/year offering that includes both 1 Windows Web Server processor license and 1 SQL Server Web edition processor license. You can buy the quantity you need of this package at $199/year each. Summary The WebsiteSpark program joins the other two successful “Spark” programs we’ve previously launched - BizSpark for startups, and DreamSpark for students. Coming at a time when the current economic climate is still tough, WebsiteSpark will help support developers and companies by providing the business resources, training, and software necessary for companies to get started and grow successful businesses on the Microsoft Web Platform. Visit www.microsoft.com/web to learn more about the Microsoft Web Platform, as well as download and install the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer V2 we released today – which makes it really easy to quickly provision web servers and web development machines. You can then browse and download and use open source web applications from the Windows Web Application Gallery. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I have been using Twitter more recently to-do quick posts and share links. You can follow me on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/scottgu (@scottgu is my twitter name) 
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This is the fourth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers one of the general IDE improvements that I know a lot of people are already eagerly looking forward to with VS 2010 – multiple-monitor support. Using Multiple Monitors VS 2008 hosts all documents/files/designers within a single top-level window – which unfortunately means that you can’t partition the IDE across multiple monitors. VS 2010 addresses this by now allowing editors, designers and tool-windows to be moved outside the top-level window and positioned anywhere you want, and on any monitor on your system. This allows you to significantly improve your use of screen real-estate, and optimize your overall development workflow. Taking advantage of the multi-monitor feature is really easy to-do. Simply click on a document tab or tool-window and drag it to either a new location within the top-level IDE window – or outside of the IDE to any location on any monitor you want: 
You can later drag the document/window back into the main window if you want to re-dock it (or right click and choose the re-dock option). Projects and solutions remember the last screen position of their documents when saved – which means that you can close projects and re-open them and have the layout automatically startup where you last saved it. Some Multi-Monitor Scenarios Below are some screen-shots of a few of the scenarios multi-monitor enables (obviously there are many more I’m not covering). Pretend each window in the screenshots below is on a different monitor to get the full idea… Code source file support: Demonstrates how code files can be split up across multiple monitors. Below I’ve kept a .aspx file in the main IDE window and then moved a code-behind file and a separate class file to a separate screen: 
Tool window support: Demonstrates how any tool window/pane within VS10 can be split across multiple monitors. Below I’ve moved the test runner tool windows to a separate screen: 
Designer support: Demonstrates how a designer within VS can be split across multiple monitors. Below I’ve moved the WPF/Silverlight WYSWIYG designer and the property grid to a separate screen (the code behind file is still in the main window). Note how the VS10 property grid now supports inline color editors, databinding, styles, brushes, and a whole bunch more for WPF and Silverlight applications (I’ll cover this in later blog posts): 
Summary If you work on a system that has multiple monitors connected to it, I think you are going to find the new multi-monitor support within VS10 a big productivity boost. If you don’t already have multiple monitors connected to your computer, this might be a good excuse to get some… :-) Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I have been using Twitter more recently to-do quick posts and share links. You can follow me on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/scottgu (@scottgu is my twitter name) 
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Over the next few months I’m going to be doing a series of posts that talk about some of the cool things coming with the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. VS 2010 and .NET 4 are the next major releases of our developer tools and framework. Together they contain a ton of new functionality and improvements that I think you’ll really like, and which make building applications of all types easier, faster and better. The improvements range from nice small tweaks to major, major enhancements - and can be found across the .NET Framework, the languages, and the IDE. We are still a little ways off from the “Betat2” release of VS10 and .NET 4 - which is the version I’m going to be basing my posts on. I wanted to start ahead of the actual Beta2 release, though, because there are a lot of things to do blog posts about (and it is fun to get a chance to blog about a few of the new Beta2 things before everyone else does! :-). I will update this post with links to the individual posts I do as I publish them along the way. Hope this helps, Scott 
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Today we officially shipped the final release of Silverlight 3. Silverlight 3 Features Silverlight 3 is a major update and delivers a ton of new features and capabilities. Some of the new Silverlight 3 runtime capabilities include: HD Media Silverlight 3 now supports hardware graphics acceleration – enabling both video and graphics compositing to be offloaded onto a GPU. This can dramatically lower CPU usage on a computer, and enables HD video to be played on older low end machines. You can now deliver and play 1080p HD video experiences over the web. Silverlight 3 includes new media codec support for H.264 video, AAC audio and MPEG-4 content. This enables you to easily play and stream media encoded using these standards. Silverlight 3 also includes raw bitstream audio/video APIs that enable you to create additional codecs (in any .NET language) that support playing any other media format. Silverlight 3 also adds a variety of additional media features that enable better logging (for media analytics and ad monetization scenarios), provide the ability to disable screen-savers when playing long-form video content, and enable content protection. IIS Media Services is a free server product that complements Silverlight and provides the ability to efficiently stream media over HTTP. It enables both on-demand and live HD video to be delivered using “smooth streaming” - which is an adaptive streaming algorithm that can deliver video at bitrates optimized for a client’s network conditions and CPU capabilities. Check out this demo to see a good example of smooth streaming in action with Silverlight. The HD support within Silverlight, combined with the Smooth Streaming support of IIS Media Services, enables a dramatically better video experiences on the web. This past week alone, we’ve had multiple customers broadcast live HD events using Silverlight and smooth streaming (up to 3MBits) including: Wimbledon, the Tour de France, AVP Volleyball, and the Michael Jackson Memorial Service. Immersive Graphics The new GPU acceleration capabilities of Silverlight 3 enable even richer and more immersive graphic experiences. Silverlight 3 also adds new perspective 3D support that can be used with graphic elements, videos and controls. Silverlight 3 also includes new bitmap and pixel APIs, as well as the ability to create and apply custom pixel shader effects (e.g. blur, dropshadow, swirl, etc) to any image, video element, or control. Easing support can also now be used to enable more textured motion within animations. Out of Browser Support Silverlight 3 enables applications to run outside the browser and taken offline. Users can safely install web applications on their computers, and create persistent shortcuts to them on the desktop, start menu and taskbar (this is supported on both Windows and the Mac). New network detection support within Silverlight enables developers to monitor the network status of a machine and switch between offline and online modes within their applications. Silverlight 3 also includes an automatic update mechanism for applications – so that clients who have installed applications are automatically updated when new application versions are deployed on the originating webserver. Application Development Silverlight 3 includes a ton of new application development features. The Silverlight 3 runtime/SDK combined with the Silverlight Toolkit now includes ~100 UI controls that enable common scenarios (layout, data, charting, child windows, etc) while also providing full styling and template customization support. Silverlight 3 enables richer data binding features. Element to element binding support between controls is now enabled. Validation error template support has been added to controls (enabling better error message display). Hierarchical data binding is supported by the DataGrid. And a new DataForm control enables better master/detail scenarios. Silverlight 3 also now enables SaveFileDialog support. Silverlight 3 includes a new navigation framework that enables deep-linking and forward/back button integration within the browser. This also enables search engine optimization (SEO) support so that content within a Silverlight application can be indexed by search engines – including Google, Bing and Yahoo. Silverlight 3 also supports the ability to cache assemblies on the client, and re-use them across multiple applications (decreasing the download size and improving the startup time of applications). Silverlight 3 includes much better text rendering and font support. Text rendered using Silverlight 3 applications is much crisper and cleaner than previous releases, and applications now have access to local fonts. The Silverlight 3 styling system also now supports merged resource dictionaries, BasedOn style inheritance support, and the ability for styles to be reset any number of times. Silverlight 3 also adds richer accessibility support, and is the first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing partially-sighted people to make changes such as high contrast color schemes for ease of readability using familiar operating system controls. Silverlight 3 includes richer networking support. WCF error faults are now supported across the network. Server-side push duplex support is now easier to setup. Binary XML serialization of payloads is now supported. The new .NET RIA Services framework (which now has a go-live license) can be used to easily build multi-tier data applications that span the client and server. .NET RIA Services enables you to write validation code once and have it applied on both the client and middle-tier layers of your applications. Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Silverlight 3 Today we are also shipping a free download that enables Silverlight 3 development support for VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download provides project support, intellisense, compilation, and debugging for Silverlight 3 applications. The next release of Visual Studio - VS 2010 - will add to this and provide a fully interactive WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight (including data binding support within the designer). Click here to download the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight (this will also install the SL3 developer runtime + sdk). Click here to download the Silverlight Toolkit (which adds additional controls). Expression Studio 3 Today we are also shipping a release candidate (RC) of Expression Blend 3 (including Sketchflow) that enables rich editing of Silverlight 3 applications and projects. You can download the Expression Blend 3 + Sketchflow RC here. Expression Blend 3 is a major update and enables dramatically richer tooling support. Some of its improvements include: - Sketchflow: SketchFlow makes it significantly easier to create prototypes, experiment with dynamic user experiences, and incorporate feedback from customers. If you haven’t seen or tried it yet - you must. It really is a game changing new way to create great user centric applications.
- Intellisense: Blend 3 includes C#, VB and XAML intellisense support. You can now write code and event handlers within Blend without having to switch to VS.
- Behaviors: Blend 3 includes behavior support which can encapsulate complex design interactions into reusable components that can be directly applied to a control within the design surface. This enables designers to quickly add functionality and behavior to applications without having to write code.
- Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator Import: Blend 3 now has built-in support for importing Photoshop and Illustrator files. As part of the import process you can view and pick individual Photoshop layers to import, customize and regroup layers, and have Photoshop/Illustrator elements retain their original formats within XAML: including layer positions, editable text and font settings, and vector element conversion to XAML.
- Sample Data: Blend 3 adds design-time sample data support which makes it easy to mock up data-connected applications and see what they look like without requiring access to live data. You can generate sample data or import sample data from an XML file and it is available to controls on the artboard at design-time. You can customize your sample data details, and you can easily switch between using sample data and using live data at run-time.
- TFS: Blend 3 now includes Team Foundation Server (TFS) support – allowing you to use source control and enlist within projects. Blend shares the same project and solution format as Visual Studio – allowing both VS and Blend to work simultaneously on the same projects and enabling seamless editing between them.
- Other Improvements: Additional enhancements including improved animation and easing function support, 3D transform support, visual effects support, and an improved visual state manager designer.
Christian Schormann has a great blog post that describes Expression Blend 3 in more detail. The final release of Expression Studio 3 (which includes the Blend + Sketchflow, Web, Encoder and Design products) will ship within the next 30 days. Expression Studio 3 will be included as part of the MSDN Premium and higher subscriptions (meaning MSDN Premium customers don’t have to pay anything extra to get all of the Expression Studio products). Expression Studio 3 will also be available for standalone purchase for $599 (with discounts available for upgrades from previous versions of Expression and/or competitive products). Summary Today’s release is a major update of our Silverlight stack of products – and comes only 9 months after the release of Silverlight 2. You can learn more about Silverlight 3 and the tools that go along with it from the below sites: Hope this helps, Scott 
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Two weeks ago we held our MIX conference in Las Vegas. MIX is my favorite conference of the year – since it nicely integrates development and design topics together in a single event, and is usually accompanied by some pretty cool product announcements. I gave a first day MIX keynote again this year, and in it I talked about and announced a bunch of new Microsoft web development products. These included: My keynote also included a ton of demos and highlighted a bunch of great customers including: StackOverflow, NetFlix, NBC, Bondi Publishing, and KEXP. Click here to watch the day one MIX keynote online. Bill Buxton led off the keynote with a great talk about user experience for 20 minutes – I then talked for an hour and 50 minutes after him. You can also watch all the breakout sessions from MIX online for free here (Greg Duncan has an easy to navigate list of them here as well). I’ll be doing more in-depth blog posts in the days ahead on many of the technologies we introduced/announced and all the cool things you can do with them. Hope this helps, Scott 
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I'm flying out later today on a pretty intense business trip (22,000 miles, 5 countries, 3 continents, 1 week, no sleep... :-), so my blog activity over the next week and a half will be pretty light. To keep you busy till I return, here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET MVC Visual Studio WPF / Silverlight Hope this helps, Scott 
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