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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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[In addition to blogging, I am now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. You can follow me on Twitter at: twitter.com/scottgu (@scottgu is my twitter name)] This is the eleventh in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers WPF 4. WPF 4 Improvements WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is one of the core components of the .NET Framework, and enables developers to build rich, differentiated Windows client applications. WPF 4 includes major productivity, performance and capability improvements – in particular in the areas of Controls, XAML, Text, Graphics, Windows 7 integration (multitouch, taskbar integration, etc), Core Fundamentals, and Deployment. This is the first of several posts I’ll do over the coming months about some of the improvements and new features. I will do a separate post soon that covers some of the major advances coming with VS 2010’s WPF and Silverlight Designer – which also includes a ton of improvements. Controls  Controls for Building Rich Clients
WPF 4 adds a variety of new controls that make building rich line-of-business applications for the client easier and faster. The new, richer control set includes LOB essentials such as DataGrid, DatePicker, and Calendar controls. These new controls are 99% API- and behaviorally-compatible with their Silverlight counterparts, enabling developers to create a consistent experience across the client and web while optimizing workflow by reusing code between Silverlight and WPF implementations. Bag O'Tricks is back We are also releasing an out-of-band collection of eight controls called the WPF Bag O’ Tricks download. It includes the following controls: AnimatingTilePanel, ColorPicker, InfoTextBox, ListPager, NumericUpDown, Reveal, TransitionsPresenter, TreeMapPanel. Windows 7 & Office Ribbon Control A new WPF Ribbon Control will be available for download shortly after the release of WPF 4. It features skins for Windows 7 and Office, as well as all the standard Ribbon features that end-users are familiar with, including tabs and groups, dynamic resizing, quick access toolbar, application menu, contextual tabs, key tips, and more. 
The WPF Ribbon will be fully extensible to meet changing guidelines for future releases. A CTP with a limited feature set is available today here  GRAPHICS
Cached Composition Massive performance wins are possible with the new Cached Composition feature in WPF 4, which allows applications to cache arbitrary content including live and fully-interactive controls, vector geometry, etc. as bitmaps which persist in video memory. Once cached, these elements can be arbitrarily transformed, animated, manipulated, and can have Effects applied, all without having to re-render the cached element. This spares both the CPU and the GPU the cost of re-rendering content, and instead allows the GPU to render straight from the cache. The cache(s) understand dirty regions, so a blinking cursor in a cached textblock, for example, will only need to re-render the cursor between frames. There’s even a new Brush which specifically uses these intelligent caches – effectively a VisualBrush with vastly better performance.
Pixel Shader 3 Support WPF 4 builds on top of the very popular ShaderEffect support first introduced in WPF 3.5 SP1 by allowing applications to now write Effects using Pixel Shader version 3.0. The PS 3.0 shader model is dramatically more sophisticated than PS 2.0, allowing for even more compelling Effects on supported hardware. LayoutRounding WPF 4 adopts the UseLayoutRounding property, originally introduced in Silverlight 2. WPF’s layout engine frequently calculates sub-pixel positioning coordinates. This can lead to rendering artifacts as elements positioned on sub-pixel boundaries are anti-aliased over multiple physical pixels. UseLayoutRounding will force the layout engine to place elements on whole pixel boundaries, thus removing most of the rendering artifacts caused by this problem – which generates cleaner and crisper UI by default.  Animation Easing Function
Discrete, linear, and spline animations were supported with previous versions of WPF. WPF 4 introduces a new concept of Easing Functions – which allows application authors to create fluid behavior using animations. This can be used in an infinite number of ways, such as creating a springy behavior, or adding anticipation to an animation. Easing Functions customize the manner in which animations progress from start to finish. The built-in easing functions provide a range of behaviors such as circular, exponential, elastic, and bouncy animation progress. The extensibility design also allows application authors to create custom easing functions to define the manner in which their animations progress. With this easy-to-use feature, designers can effortlessly create fluid, organic animations. CleartypeHint The new CleartypeHint attached property allows application authors to enable higher-quality Cleartyped text rendering in many situations where it would have previously been disabled. Such situations include text in layered windows, text in VisualBrushes, DrawingBrushes, BitmapCacheBrushes, and anywhere else where the introduction of an intermediate render target would have previously resulted in grayscale text rendering. TEXT STACK New Text Rendering Stack The WPF text rendering stack has been completely replaced – a change that brings with it significant improvements to text rendering clarity, configurability, and support for international languages. The new text stack now supports display-optimized character layout, to produce text with comparable sharpness to Win32/GDI text: 
WPF’s new text stack also now supports explicitly selecting aliased, grayscale, or ClearType rendering modes: 
The new text stack allows optimizing text hinting and snapping for either animated or static text. Additionally, the new text stack now supports fonts with embedded bitmaps. This allows many East Asian fonts to render with the sharpness to which Win32 users have grown accustomed.
BindableRun Since the initial release of WPF, Run.Text has been a normal CLR property. This has meant that Run.Text lacks all the benefits of the WPF dependency property system, most notably the ability to be bound. In WPF 4, we have converted Run.Text to a dependency property allowing developers to use the first WPF supplied bindable Run. More details can be found here.
Custom Dictionaries WPF includes a spell checker which before WPF 4 only used the OS-provided dictionary for input validation. This has been a major issue for apps which target specific industries with specialized terminology, as those apps were plagued by misspelling notifications. WPF 4 has introduced an API to allow an application to add words to the dictionaries used by WPF for spell checking. More details can be found here.
Selection and Caret Brush In a push to allow rich customization of the look and feel of WPF apps, developers can also now change the brush used to paint WPF text selection and carets via two simple properties: SelectionBrush and CaretBrush:  
 WINDOWS 7 LIGHT UP
Windows 7 Multitouch Support With the introduction of multi-touch input and manipulation processing support, WPF 4 provides a great way to light up your client applications in Windows 7. Multiple finger input are exposed through existing and new input events in WPF 4, while new manipulation and inertia events are now available for developers to use. New features include: - Multi-touch Manipulation, Inertia (Pan, Zoom, Rotate) events on UIElement
- Raw multi-touch events (Up, Move, Down) on UIElement, UIElement3D and ContentElement
- Multiple capture supporting multiple active controls
- ScrollViewer enhancement to support multi-touch panning
- Touch device extensibility
- Future Surface SDK compatibility
Windows 7 Shell Integration WPF 4 also exposes several new and key Windows 7 Shell features to WPF developers. These Shell features enable a richer, integrated user experience. The new taskbar is less cluttered and can convey more information at a glance. The Aero thumbnails support user commands. Jump lists provide access to contextual startup tasks and files available to the application. WPF 4 integrates Windows 7 Jump List functionality, including: - Tasks
- Items
- Recent and Frequent Lists integration
- Custom Categories
Windows 7 Taskbar integration, including: - Progress bar
- Overlay Icon
- Thumbnail buttons with commanding support
- Description Text DWM Thumbnail clipping
In Windows 7, the taskbar has been redesigned to be less cluttered and to help users perform tasks with fewer clicks. WPF 4 provides integration with the Windows 7 taskbar in XAML, allowing applications to surface useful information to the user from the application's taskbar icon using icon overlays, progress bar, thumbnail toolbars, thumbnail description text, and thumbnail clipping. There is also a new TaskbarItemInfo class in WPF 4 that is exposed as a dependency property. It encompasses all the new taskbar features introduced in Windows 7.  Icon Overlays
Icon overlays allow an application to communicate certain notifications and status to the user through its taskbar button by display of small overlays which appear at the lower-right corner of the button. Progress Bars A taskbar button can be used to display simple progress information to the user without that user having to switch to the application window itself. Progress bars can be used to track file copies, downloads, installations, media burning, or any other operation that will take a period of time. Thumbnail Toolbars Thumbnail Toolbars provide access to the key commands for an application without the user having to restore or activate the window. This feature enables application authors to embed an active toolbar control in a window's thumbnail preview. The application can show, enable, disable, or hide buttons from the thumbnail toolbar as required by its current state:  WPF FUNDAMENTALS New XAML/BAML Parser Engine WPF 4 has replaced its implementation of XamlReader.Load(), BAML loading, Control & DataTemplates functionality with a new engine built on top of the new System.Xaml.dll. As part of this effort, we’ve fixed many bugs and made many functionality improvements. Users of XamlReader.Load() can take advantage of several new language features in XAML2009 such as support for generic types. MarkupExtensions and TypeConverters can now get more services during object graph creation, enabling more scenarios, such as access to the Root object. Tools to analyze and manipulate XAML will also be much easier to create with many of the new low level APIs provided in System.Xaml.dll. Data Binding Support for DLR Unlike CLR classes, the members of dynamic objects are defined at runtime. DynamicObject is a new abstract class in the .NET Framework 4 that allows developers to easily implement IDynamicMetaObjectProvider. With C#’s new DLR support with the ‘dynamic’ keyword, we are expecting some library implementations to switch to using DynamicObject and IDynamicMetaObjectProvider as a standard way to exposing runtime defined properties and members of objects. WPF 4 data binding support for IDynamicMetaObjectProvider will allow the use of natural property syntax to access dynamic properties. This feature extends the WPF data binding engine to map the existing property and indexer access data binding syntax to support access to dynamic members offered by IDynamicMetaObjectProvider. Visual State Manager (VSM) Another new feature supporting the WPF-Silverlight continuum is the VisualStateManager, which introduces a simple new way to apply visual states to controls. This mechanism provides a way to easily customize both the look and feel of a control by providing the means to map the control logic to its respective start and end visual states. 
VSM is very flexible in that it automatically generates the transition animations in between the respective states, so the control author spends less time writing code and more time on the visual states that are defined in a control template. That means VSM can give a control author the ability to easily interchange the look and feel of controls, and VSM gives the control author a way to easily interchange how a control visually responds to user interaction. This is fully supported with Expression Blend.
HTML-XBAP Script Interop WPF 4 provides the means for direct communication between an XBAP and script in the host HTML page (where the XBAP is loaded in an HTML frame or IFRAME element). The XBAP can get deep access to the HTML DOM, including to any ActiveX controls embedded in the containing HTML page and including handling of DOM events. WPF exposes the main script object from the host frame. This is a dynamic object that represents the frame’s window object plus any custom script functions and global variables from script in the HTML page. From it, an application can invoke script functions directly or “dot into” the HTML DOM. The functionality is available in partial-trust XBAPs and under all supported versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. UIAutomation Virtualization WPF has introduced virtualized controls in past releases; however there was never a standardized way for an automation client to interact with a virtualized control. Two control patterns, ItemsContainerPattern and VirtualizedItemPattern, have been added in WPF 4 to support access and interact with virtualized elements. ItemsContainerPattern is used to access the virtualized controls & find virtualized items and VirtualizedItemPattern is used to realize virtualized items. SynchronizedInput Pattern This is another UIA control pattern added in WPF 4. This pattern could be used by automation clients to track whether the given input event is routed to the correct element by WPF framework. This pattern has three associated automation events, viz. InputReachedTargetEvent, InputReachedOtherElementEvent and InputDiscardedEvent to indicate where the input is handled. CLIENT DEPLOYMENT .NET Framework 4 Client Profile To improve deployment size, time and overall experience of the .NET Framework 4 deployment, there is now a more compact version of .NET that is a subset of the full .NET Framework 4 - called the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. The current redistributable size of the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile is about 30MB. The full Microsoft .NET Framework 4 is a pure superset of the Client Profile. The goal of the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile is to improve and help streamline the deployment size, time, reliability and overall deployment experience for client applications. The Client Profile contains the functionality that most common desktop client applications (including Windows Forms and WPF applications) would need so it is anticipated that the majority of client application developers will target it instead of the Full .NET Framework 4. For that reason, most Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 client project templates target the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Client Profile by default. Unlike the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Client Profile, an important enhancement in the NET Framework 4 Client Profile is its support on all platforms and OSs, including those supported by the Full Framework like Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Servers 2003 and 2008, Windows 7, all for both x86 and x64. You can view or change the version of the framework that you target by opening your project’s properties window, and then select the "Application" page. You can then change the “Target framework” drop-down to either the full .NET Framework or the .NET Client Profile. The project Publish property page also allows you to select the prerequisite needed for your ClickOnce deployment. In Beta2, VS2010 automatically selects the correct profile (Client Profile or Full) depending on your primary project target: 
The same prerequisite dialog from above appears when you create “Setup and Deployment” projects (under “Add New Project”/“Other Project Types”). The NET4 Client Profile prerequisite entry is checked by default in this case. Enhancements in NET4 Client Profile vs. NET 3.5 SP1 Client Profile Although the concept of a Client Profile is not new and was introduced in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile contains several important improvements: | | .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (NEW) | .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Client Profile | | Supported OS | Supported on all platforms and OSs that are supported by the .NET Framework (excluding IA64 and the Server Core role in W2K8) | Supported only on Windows XP 32-bit machines that did not have any .NET Framework version installed. (Client Profile setup silently installs the full 3.5 SP1 Framework otherwise) | | Redistributable | Supports redistributable as well as web download | Supports web download only | | Add Remove Programs entries | The full Framework comprises the Client Profile and another part called “Extended”. Thus it has two entries in the Add/Remove Programs dialog (or Programs and Features window). If you installed the Full Framework, you can switch to the Client Profile by simply removing “Extended” from Add/Remove Programs. | Single entry in Add Remove Programs | | Visual Studio | Improved support for Client Profile targeting in Visual Studio 2010. By default many Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 Client project target the NET4 Client Profile. | Single checkbox in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 “Application” Project properties for .NET Framework 3.5 projects. Client Profile support unavailable in out-of-the-box VS 2008. | | Features | Includes new .NET 4 features (such as Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), C# 4 Dynamic Keyword, etc) as well as features previously included in NET 3.5 SP1 Full (Speech, WPF Spell Check, etc) | Subset of features in .NET 3.5 SP1 Full | Because .NET 4.0 is a side-by-side release from previous releases of the .NET Framework, installation of the .NET 4.0 Framework does not require that prior versions of .NET on the machine need to be serviced/patched. This means that the .NET 4.0 Client Profile installs much faster on a machine than the .NET 3.5 SP1 Client Profile. Full Trust XBAP Deployment Starting in WPF 4, the ClickOnce elevation prompt is also enabled for XAML Browser Applications (XBAPs) in Intranet and Trusted Zones, making it easier to deploy full-trust XBAPs. For XBAPs that require security permissions greater than the minimum code access security (CAS) permission grantset of the Intranet and Trusted Zones, the user will be able to click 'Run' on the ClickOnce elevation prompt when they navigate to the XBAP to allow the XBAP to run with the requested permissions. Summary
As you can tell above – there is a bunch of great new functionality coming with WPF 4.0. Below are a few links and resources you can follow to learn more some of these features: I’ll do more posts in the coming months that also highlight some of the new WPF 4 capabilities and how to take advantage of them. I’ll also be doing another post shortly that talks about the new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer – which makes it possible to build great WPF and Silverlight applications using a WYSIWYG designer directly within Visual Studio 2010. Hope this helps, Scott 
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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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Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. 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 AJAX .NET -
Ukadc.Diagnostics: Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc). Visual Studio Silverlight WPF Hope this helps, Scott 
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Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them). We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates. You can download and install the beta here. Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form - so you should be careful about installing it on critical machines. There are a few important SP1 Beta installation notes to be aware of: 1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta. There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release. These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta. 2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure). You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things). It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package. We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta. 3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend. This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running. Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue. Improvements for Web Development .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain a bunch of feature improvements targeted at web application development. The VS Web Dev Tools team has more details (including specific bug fix details) on some of the VS specific work here. Below are more details on some of the work in the web-space: ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data) .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support for a rich ASP.NET data "scaffolding" framework that enables you to quickly build functional data-driven web application. With the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature you can automatically build web UI (with full CRUD - create, read, update, delete - support) against a variety of data object models (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, REST Services, and any other ORM or object model with a dynamic data provider). SP1 adds this new functionality to the existing GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView controls in ASP.NET, and enables smart validation and flexible data templating options. It also delivers new smart filtering server controls, as well as adds support for automatically traversing primary-key/foreign-key relationships and displaying friendly foreign key names - all of which saves you from having to write a ton of code. You can learn more more about this feature from Scott Hanselman's videos and tutorials here. ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing) .NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible new URL routing engine that allows you to map incoming URLs to route handlers. It includes support for both parsing parameters from clean URLs (for example: /Products/Browse/Beverages), as well as support to dynamically calculate and generate new URLs from route registrations. This new routing engine is used by both ASP.NET Dynamic Data as well as the new ASP.NET MVC framework. It will support both WebForms and MVC based requests. ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support .NET 3.5 SP1 adds new APIs to ASP.NET AJAX to allow you to better control the history list of a browser (enabling you to control the behavior of the back/forward button of the browser). You can learn more about this feature in the article here and the screencast here. ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support .NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new <CompositeScript> element on the <asp:ScriptManager> server control, which allows you to declaratively define multiple script references within it. All the script references within the CompositeScript element are combined together on the server and served as a single script to the client, reducing the number of requests to the server and improving page load time for ASP.NET AJAX applications. The script combining feature supports both path based scripts and assembly resource based scripts, and dynamically serves up the combined scripts using the ScriptResources.axd handler. Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor In February we released a HotFix roll-up that included a number of performance improvements and bug fixes for the VS 2008 Web Designer. VS 2008 SP1 includes all of these fixes, as well as a number of additional performance improvements. Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences Visual Studio has for several releases supported rich source code formatting options for VB and C# (spacing, line breaks, brace positions, etc). VS 2008 SP1 adds richer source code formatting support for JavaScript as well (both inline <script> blocks and .js files). You can now set your Javascript coding preferences using the Tools->Options dialog: 
These preferences will be automatically used as you type new Javascript code in the source editor. You can also select existing code, right-click, and choose the "Format Selection" option to apply your style preferences to existing JavaScript code. You can learn more about this new feature here. Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks VS 2008 includes Javascript Intellisense support in source view. The intellisense support with the initial VS 2008 release works well with vanilla JavaScript as well as code written using the ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript type patterns. JavaScript is a very flexible language, though, and many JavaScript libraries use this flexibility to full advantage to implement their features - sometimes in ways that prevented the intellisense engine from providing completion support. VS 2008 SP1 adds much better intellisense support for popular Javascript libraries (we specifically did work to support JQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, ExtJS, and other popular libraries). You will get better default intellisense when you reference these libraries. We are also looking at whether we can maintain additional intellisense hint files that you can download to get even better intellisense and documentation support for some of the more popular libraries. Below is an example of using a JQuery startup function with the VS 2008 SP1 JavaScript intellisense engine: 
Notice below how VS 2008 SP1 can now provide method argument completion even on chained JQuery selectors: 
Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects VS 2008 SP1 adds better refactoring support for WCF services included within both ASP.NET Web Site and ASP.NET Web Application Projects. If you use the refactoring support to rename the class name, interface contract, or namespace of a WCF service, VS 2008 SP1 will now automatically fix up the web.config and SVC file references to it. Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging Previous versions of Visual Studio included support for intellisense and debugging within classic ASP (.asp) pages. The file and project templates to create classic ASP pages/projects hasn't been in VS for a few releases, though, and with the initial VS 2008 we incorrectly assumed this meant that people weren't still using the classic ASP support. We heard feedback after we shipped that indeed they were. With VS 2008 SP1 this support for classic ASP intellisense and debugging is back: 
Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects The Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition (which is free) is being updated in SP1 to add support for both class library and ASP.NET Web Application project types. Previous versions of Visual Web Developer Express only supported ASP.NET web-site projects. Among other benefits, the support of class library and web application projects will enable ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight projects to be built with the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. All of the above JavaScript, Dynamic Data, Classic ASP, and AJAX improvements work with Visual Web Developer Express as well. Improvements for Client Development .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain major performance, deployment, and feature improvements for building client applications. Tim Sneath has a great blog post that talks about some of the client improvements here. Below are more details on them: Application Startup and Working Set Performance Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes significant performance improvements to the CLR that enable much faster application startup times - in particular with "cold start" scenarios (where no .NET application is already running). Much of these gains were achieved by changing the layout of blocks within CLR NGEN images, and by significantly optimizing disk IO access patterns. We also made some nice optimizations to our JIT code generator that allow much better inlining of methods that utilize structs. We are today measuring up to 40% faster application startup improvements for large .NET client applications with SP1 installed. These optimizations also have the nice side-effect of improving ASP.NET application request per second throughput by up to 10% in some cases. New .NET Framework Client Profile Setup Package .NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new setup package option for developers building .NET client applications called the ".NET Framework Client Profile". This provides a new setup installer that enables a smaller, faster, and simpler installation experience for .NET client applications on machines that do not already have the .NET Framework installed. The .NET Framework Client Profile setup contains just those assemblies and files in the .NET Framework that are typically used for client application scenarios. For example: it includes Windows Forms, WPF, and WCF. It does not include ASP.NET and those libraries and components used primarily for server scenarios. We expect this setup package to be about 26MB in size, and it can be downloaded and installed much quicker than the full .NET Framework setup package. The assemblies and APIs in the .NET Framework Client setup package are 100% identical to those in the full .NET Framework setup package (they are literally the same binaries). This means that applications can target both the client profile and full profile of .NET 3.5 SP1 (no recompilation required). All .NET applications that work using the .NET Client Profile setup automatically work with the full .NET Framework. A developer can indicate that the client application they are building supports both the .NET Framework Client Profile and the full .NET Framework by pulling up the project properties page for a client application within VS 2008 SP1. Within the project properties page they can select a new checkbox that indicates it only requires those assemblies included in the .NET Framework Client Profile: 
VS 2008 will then ensure that the project can only reference those assemblies shipped in the client profile setup package (and it will generate a compile error if you try and use a type in an assembly not included in the client redist). The compiled client application will then run on machines that have both the full .NET Framework installed, as well as machines that only have the .NET Framework Client Profile installed. If you have a machine that only has the .NET Framework Client Profile installed, and you try and run a .NET application on it that did not mark itself as supporting the .NET Framework Client Profile, then the CLR will refuse to run the application - and will instead prompt the end-user to upgrade to the full .NET Framework package. This ensures that applications always run correctly - and that developers do not need to worry about missing assembly exceptions at runtime if a user tries to run an application that requires the full .NET Framework on a machine that only has the .NET Framework Client Profile installed. We believe that a large class of .NET client applications will be able to use this new .NET Client Profile setup to significantly speed up their installation, and enable a much more consumer friendly experience. New .NET Framework Setup Bootstrapper for Client Applications .NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new "bootstrapper" component that you can use with client applications to help automate making sure that the right version of the .NET Framework is installed. The bootstrapper component can handle automatically downloading and installing either the .NET Framework Client Profile or the full .NET Framework Setup Package from the Internet if your machine doesn't have either of them installed. The boostrapper can also automatically handle upgrading machines that have a previous version of the .NET Framework installed. For example, if your machine already has .NET 3.0 installed, and your application requires .NET 3.5, the bootstrapper can optionally download just the update files needed to upgrade it to .NET 3.5 (and avoid having to download the full .NET Framework setup download). The setup bootstrapper component can be used with both ClickOnce based setup packages, as well as with third party installer products (like Installshield). The boostrapper optionally enables fully customized setup branding experiences (splash screens, custom setup wizard steps, etc) and should make it much easier to build optimized client setup experiences. ClickOnce Client Application Deployment Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several improvements for ClickOnce deployment of both Windows Forms and WPF applications. Some of these improvements include: - Support for the .NET Framework Client Profile (all ClickOnce features are supported with it)
- ClickOnce applications can now be programmatically installed through a ‘Setup.exe’ while displaying a customized, branded install UX
- ClickOnce improvements for generating MSI + ClickOnce application packages
- ClickOnce error dialog boxes now support links to application specific support sites on the Web
- ClickOnce now has design-time support for setting up file associations
- ClickOnce application publishers can now decide to opt out of signing and hashing the ClickOnce manifests as they see appropriate for their scenarios.
- Enterprises can now choose to run only Clickonce Applications Authenticode signed by ‘Known Publishers’ and block anything else from running
- FireFox browser extension to support Clickonce installations using FireFox browsers
Windows Forms Controls SP1 adds several new Windows Forms controls - including new vector shape, Printing, and DataRepeater controls: 
WPF Performance Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several significant performance optimizations and improvements to WPF. Some of the specific graphics improvements include: - Smoother animations
- Hardware accelerated rendering of Blur and DropShadow Bitmap Effects
- Text Rendering speed improvements - especially with VisualBrish and 3D scenes
- 2D graphics improvements - especially with z-index scenarios
- A new WriteableBitmap class that enables real-time and tear-free bitmap updates. This enables custom "paint"-style applications, data visualizations, charts and graphs that optionally bypass the default WPF 2D graphics APIs.
- Layered window performance improvements
SP1 also adds support for better data scalability in WPF. The ListView, ListBox and TreeView controls now support "item container recycling" and "virtualization" support which allows you to easily achieve a 40% performance improvement with scrolling scenarios. These controls also now optionally support a "deferred scrolling" feature which allows you to avoid scrolling in real time and instead wait until a user releases the scroll thumb (the default scrolling mode in Outlook). This can be useful when scrolling over very large data sets quickly. WPF Data Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several data binding and editing improvements to WPF. These include: - StringFormat support within {{ Binding }} expressions to enable easy formatting of bound values
- New alternating rows support within controls derived from ItemsControl, which makes it easier to set alternating properties on rows (for example: alternating background colors)
- Better handling and conversion support for null values in editable controls
- Item-level validation that applies validation rules to an entire bound item
- MultiSelector support to handle multi-selection and bulk editing scenarios
- IEditableCollectionView support to interface data controls to data sources and enable editing/adding/removing items in a transactional way
- Performance improvements when binding to IEnumerable data sources
WPF also now exposes hooks that enable developers to write custom panels w/ virtualized scrolling. We'll be using this support together with the above data binding improvements to build the new WPF datagrid that will be shipping later this year. WPF Extensible Shader Effects .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support in WPF for a new shader effects architecture and API that allows extremely expressive visual effects to be created and applied to any control or element within WPF. These shader effects support blending multiple input compositions together. What makes them particularly powerful is that WPF executes effects (including custom effects you build yourself) using the GPU - giving you fully hardware accelerated graphics performance. Like almost everything in WPF, you can also use WPF databinding and animation on the properties of an effect (allowing them to be fully integrated into an experience). Applying an effect onto a Control is super easy - just set a Control's "Effect" property. For example, to add a hardware accelerated drop-shadow effect on a button you can use the built-in <DropShadowEffect> on it via either code or XAML: 
Which will cause the button to render like so: 
Because Effects are extensible, developers can create their own custom Effect objects and apply them. For example, a custom "DirectionalBlurEffect" could be created and added to a ListBox control to change its scroll appearance to use a blur effect if you rapidly scroll across it: 
Keep an eye on Greg Schechter's blog to learn more about how the Effects architecture works and to learn how you can both create and apply new effects within your applications. Note: In addition to introducing the new Shader Effects API, WPF in SP1 also has updated the existing Blur and DropShadow Bitmap effects already in WPF to be hardware accelerated. WPF Interoperability with Direct3D .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support to efficiently integrate Direct3D directly into WPF. This gives you more direct access to the hardware and to take full advantage of the Direct3D API within WPF applications. You will be able to treat Direct3D content just like an image within an application, as well as use Direct3D content as textures on WPF controls. For example, below are three samples from the Direct3D SDK: 
We could either load them in as image surfaces within a WPF application, or map them as textures on WPF controls. Below is an example of mapping them as textures onto cubes in a WPF 3D application: 
Note: the Direct3D integration isn't today's SP1 beta release. It will appear in the final SP1 release. VS 2008 for WPF Improvements VS 2008 SP1 includes several significant improvements for WPF projects and the WPF designer. These include: - Several performance improvements
- Events tab support within the property browser
- Ability to sort properties alphabetically in the property browser
- Margin snaplines which makes form layout much quicker
- Better designer support for TabControl, Expander, and Grid
- Code initiated refactoring now updates your XAML (including both control declarations and event declarations in XAML)
- Go to Definition and Find All References now support things declared in XAML
The debugger has also been updated in SP1 so that runtime errors in XAML markup (for example: referencing styles, datasources and/or other objects that don't exist) will now be better identified within the debugger: 
Data Development Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 include a bunch of improvements for data development. Some of them include: SQL 2008 Support VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are being updated to include support for the upcoming SQL 2008 release. Visual Studio 2008 data designers, projects and wizards now fully supporting connecting and working against SQL 2008 databases. ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities: .NET 3.5 SP1 includes the new ADO.NET Entity Framework, which allows developers to define a higher-level Entity Data Model over their relational data, and then program in terms of this model. Concepts like inheritance, complex types and relationships (including M:M support) can be modeled using it. VS 2008 SP1 now includes built-in designer support to help with this modeling: 
The ADO.NET Entity Framework and the VS 2008 Entity Framework Designer both support a pluggable provider model that allows them to be used with any database (including Oracle, DB2, MySql, PostgreSQL, SQLite, VistaDB, Informix, Sybase, and others). Developers can then use LINQ and LINQ to Entities to query, manipulate, and update these entity objects. ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria") .NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible framework that enables the creation of REST-based data services. Formerly code-named "Astoria", the ADO.NET Data Services framework provides support for publishing data through a standard REST URI syntax and using standard HTTP verbs to operate on the data resources. Developers can easily expose data models created using the ADO.NET Entity Framework, and/or use a pluggable provider model to expose other data models. In addition to publishing data sources, the framework also adds a client API for working with remote REST services. Included with this client API is a LINQ library that allows the remote query of REST services. WCF Development Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 include several enhancements for WCF development. Some of these include: - Significant scalability improvements (5-10x) in Web-hosted application scenarios
- Support for using ADO.NET Entity Framework entities in WCF contracts
- API usability improvements with DataContract Serializers, and with the UriTemplate and WCF web programming models
- Enhanced TestClient support within VS 2008 SP1
- New Hosting Wizard in VS 2008 SP1 for WCF Service Projects
- Improved debugging support in partial trust scenarios
VB and C# Improvements The VB and C# teams have also added some nice improvements to VS 2008 SP1: Visual Basic You can now add "XML to Schema" items to Visual Basic projects. On adding these project items a wizard will open that allows you to create a XSD schema set from a variety of XML sources. This schema set is then added to the project and it enables VB XML intellisense. This support was previously available as a web download - you can learn more about it here. A XSD browser is also now included with VS 2008 SP1 and allows you to browse XSD schema sets. With the final SP1 release, developers will be able to right-click on XML element names (either in XML properties or XML literals) in the VB code editor and select “Go To XML Schema Definition” - this will open the XSD browser and display the schema set (and select the current element) for the VB project. C# The C# code editor now identifies and displays red squiggle errors for many semantic code issues that previously required an explicit compilation to identify. For example, if you try to declare and use an unknown type in the C# code-editor today you won't see a compile error until you do a build. Now with SP1 you'll see live red squiggle errors immediately (no explicit compile required): 
The debugger in VS 2008 SP1 has also been improved to provide more debugging support for evaluating LINQ expressions and viewing results at debug time: 
LINQ enabled data sources now have a "Results View" node show up within the debugger watch window. Expanding this node will evaluate a LINQ expression and allow you to examine the materialized objects it returns: 
Team Foundation Server Improvements TFS 2008 SP1 includes a ton of improvements. Please read Brian Harry's Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 Preview blog post for more details. Summary .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 provide a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements, and additional feature enhancements that make building all types of .NET applications better. It will be a fully compatible service pack release. We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates. You can download and use the beta now here. Hope this helps, Scott 
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One of the fundamental design goals of Silverlight and WPF is to enable developers to be able to easily encapsulate UI functionality into re-usable controls. You can implement new custom controls by deriving a class from one of the existing Control classes (either a Control base class or from a control like TextBox, Button, etc). Alternatively you can create re-usable User Controls - which make it easy to use a XAML markup file to compose a control's UI (and which makes them super easy to build). In Part 6 of my Digg.com tutorial blog series I showed how to create a new user control using VS 2008's "Add New Item" project item dialog and by then defining UI within it. This approach works great when you know up front that you want to encapsulate UI in a user control. You can also use the same technique with Expression Blend. Taking Existing UI and Encapsulating it as a User Control Sometimes you don't always know you want to encapsulate some UI functionality as a re-usable user control until after you've already started defining it on a parent page or control. For example, we might be working on a form where we want to enable a user to enter shipping and billing information. We might begin by creating some UI to encapsulate the address information. To-do this we could add a <border> control to the page, nest a grid layout panel inside it (with 2 columns and 4 rows), and then place labels and textbox controls within it: 
After carefully laying it all out, we might realize "hey - we are going to use the exact same UI for the billing address as well, maybe we should create a re-usable address user control so that we can avoid repeating ourselves". We could use the "add new item" project template approach to create a blank new user control and then copy/paste the above UI contents into it. An even faster trick that we can use within Blend, though, is to just select the controls we want to encapsulate as a user control in the designer, and then "right click" and choose the "Make Control" menu option: 
When we select the "Make Control" menu item, Blend will prompt us for the name of a new user control to create: 
We'll name it "AddressUserControl" and hit ok. This will cause Blend to create a new user control that contains the content we selected: 
When we do a re-build of the project and go back to the original page, we'll see the same UI as before - except that the address UI is now encapsulated inside the AddressUserControl: 
We could name this first AddressUserControl "ShippingAddress" and then add a second instance of the user control to the page to record the billing address (we'll name this second control instance "BillingAddress"): 
And now if we want to change the look of our addresses, we can do it in a single place and have it apply for both the shipping and billing information. Data Binding Address Objects to our AddressUserControl Now that we have some user controls that encapsulate our Address UI, let's create an Address data model class that we can use to bind them against. We'll define the class like below (taking advantage of the new automatic properties language feature): 
Within the code-behind file of our Page.xaml file we can then instantiate two instances of our Address object - one for the shipping address and one for the billing address (for the purposes of this sample we'll populate them with dummy data). We'll then programmatically bind the Address objects to our AddressUserControls on the page. We'll do that by setting the "DataContext" property on each user control to the appropriate shipping or billing address data model instance: 
Our last step will be to declaratively add {Binding} statements within our AddressUserControl.xaml file that will setup two-way databinding relationships between the "Text" properties of the TextBox controls within the user control and the properties on the Address data model object that we attached to the user control: 
When we press F5 to run the application we'll now get automatic data-binding of the Address data model objects with our AddressUserControls: 
Because we setup the {Binding} declarations to be "Mode=TwoWay", changes users make in the textboxes will automatically get pushed back to the Address data model objects (no code required for this to happen). For example, we could change our original shipping address in the browser to instead go to Disneyland: 
If we wire-up a debugger breakpoint on the "Click" event handler of the "Save" button (and then click the button), we can see how the above TextBox changes are automatically reflected in our "_shippingAddress" data model object: 
We could then implement the SaveBtn_Click event handler to persist the Shipping and Billing Address data model objects however we want - without ever having to manually retrieve or manipulate anything in the UI controls on the page. This clean view/model separation that WPF and Silverlight supports makes it easy to later change the UI of the address user controls without having to update any of our code in the page. It also makes it possible to more easily unit test the functionality (read my last post to learn more about Silverlight Unit Testing). Summary WPF and Silverlight make it easy to encapsulate UI functionality within controls, and the user control mechanism they support provides a really easy way to take advantage of this. Combining user controls with binding enables some nice view/model separation scenarios that allow you to write very clean code when working with data. You can download a completed version of the above sample here if you want to run it on your own machine. To learn even more about Silverlight and WPF, check out my Silverlight Tutorials and Links Page. I also highly recommend Karen Corby's excellent MIX08 talk (which covers User Controls, Custom Controls, Styling, Control Templates and more), which you can watch online for free here. Hope this helps, Scott 
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Last week I did a First Look at Silverlight 2 post that talked about the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta1 release. In the post I linked to some end-to-end tutorials I've written that walk through some of the fundamental programming concepts behind Silverlight and WPF, and demonstrate how to use them to build a "Digg Search Client" application using Silverlight: In this first set of Silverlight tutorials I didn't use a visual design tool to build the UI, and instead focused on showing the underlying XAML UI markup (which I think helps to explain the core programming concepts better). Now that we've finished covering the basics - let's explore some of the tools we can use to be even more productive. Expression Blend Support for Silverlight In addition to releasing the upcoming Beta1 of Silverlight 2, we are also going to ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support for targeting it. These tools will offer a ton of power for building great RIA solutions, and are designed to enable developers and designers to easily work on projects together. In today's post I'm going to introduce some of the features in the upcoming Expression Blend 2.5 March preview for Silverlight 2. After demonstrating some of the basics of how Blend works, we are going to use it to build a cross-platform, cross-browser Silverlight IM chat client: 
The above screen-shot shows what the application looks like at runtime on a Mac. Below is a screen-shot of what it looks like at design-time within Expression Blend: 
We'll use Expression Blend to graphically construct all of the UI for the application, as well as use it to cleanly data-bind the UI to .NET classes that represent our chat session and chat messages. All of the controls we'll use to build the chat application are built into Beta1 of Silverlight 2. Disclaimer: I am not a designer (nor am I cool) Let me say up front that I am a developer and not a designer. I'm also not very cool. While I understand the techniques to create UI, I sometimes choose bad colors and fonts when putting it together (only after I did all the screen-shots for this post did a co-worker helpfully point out that there is actually a site dedicated to banning some of the fonts and colors I used. Ouch). For those of you with artistic skill out there - please be gentle with me and focus your attention on the features and techniques I demonstrate below, rather than on the font and color choices I use. :-) Getting Started: Creating a new Silverlight 2 Project Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008 share the same solution/project file format, which means that you can create a new Silverlight project in VS 2008 and then open it in Expression Blend, or you can create a new Silverlight project in Expression Blend and open it in VS. You can also have both Expression Blend and VS 2008 open and editing the same project as the same time. Since in my previous Silverlight tutorial series I already showed how to create a new Silverlight project using VS 2008, let's use this post to show how to create a new Silverlight application using Expression Blend. To do this, simply choose File->New Project in Expression Blend, select the "Silverlight 2 Application" icon, and click ok: 
This will create a new (VS-compatible) solution file and Silverlight application project: 
Blend includes a full WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight 2 applications. When opening Silverlight pages and controls you can switch the design-surface to be in design view, a XAML source view, or a split-view that shows both the design view and XAML source view at the same time (and which supports live edits of both). Above we are using the split-view option. Understanding Some Basics: Adding Controls to the Surface Expression Blend has a slightly different tool palette then Visual Studio (it more closely resembles what you'd find in a design tool like Photoshop). It supports vector graphic editing: 
It also supports adding controls. There is a special icon on the Toolbox for layout controls (Grid, Stack, Canvas, Border, ScrollViewer, etc), text controls (TextBox, TextBlock, etc), and an icon that displays the controls you've recently used: 
Clicking on the final ">>" icon on the tool palette displays all of the controls that are available to be used: 
Make sure to click the "Show All" checkbox in the top-right hand corner of the Asset Library if you don't see the control you are looking for. You can also use the "search" textbox to filter the controls by name. Important: Blend supports a design experience for all controls (both the built-in ones as well as any 3rd party control or user control that your application references). Once you select a control from the toolbox, you can click and drag on the design-surface and draw out the control. You can also drag controls from the asset tool onto the artboard. By default you get automatic rules and positioning placement markers when you add and interact with the controls on the design-surface (below is a form with the built-in button, calendar and slider control on it): 
Understanding More Basics: Working with Control Properties You can select any object on the design-surface and then click on the "properties" panel on the right-hand side of the screen to customize its properties: 
Above I'm changing the "Background" brush of the button to be a deeper blue gradient (the third tab circled in red under the "Brushes" node allows us to configure the gradient brush). Useful Tip: The properties window includes a search box near the top that you can optionally use to filter the visible property names: 
Because all UI objects in Silverlight and WPF are composed using vector graphics, we can shape/stylize/transform controls however we want. For example, we could either set the "Transform" properties on our Button control or click on the corner edges of it to rotate/skew/scale it: 
This gives us a lot of power and flexibility to quickly and easily customize the experience however we want: 
Useful Tip: You can zoom in and out of the design surface by holding down the ctrl key and then use the wheel of your mouse to control the zoom depth. You can then move the viewable region of the design surface by holding down the space bar, which will cause a hand-cursor to display, and then you can hold down the mouse and use it to drag the currently visible region around the screen. This later tip is useful when you are zoomed way in and want to easily move the visible content around. Building our Chat Application: Defining the Layout In Part 2: Using Layout Management of my previous Silverlight tutorial series I talked about the layout management system within Silverlight and WPF, and how we can use layout panels to easily control application layout and flow. Expression Blend makes defining layout rules easy, and includes built-in tool support for using these layout panels. Remember that our goal in building our chat application is to have UI that looks like this: To do this we'll start by defining a three row <grid> layout on our page. We'll do this by hovering the mouse over the left margin of the design-surface and then click where we want to establish a new row definition (below I've already setup a top row definition - the cursor location circled in red indicates where I'll click to add a second row definition): 
Clicking on the top-left corner of the design surface (circled in red below) allows us to toggle whether the design surface is in Canvas layout mode or Grid layout mode. 
When in Grid layout mode Blend will show us whether a particular row or column has a fixed width, or whether it is proportional to the size of the control. Above the "empty locks" indicates that the three rows are currently proportional to each other (meaning they will all increase proportionally if we resize the browser to get bigger): If we click the top and bottom locks we can set those rows to have a fixed height instead, and leave the middle row to fill the remaining height. 
One last step we can take is to click on the top margin and define a right-hand column as well - which we'll set to have a fixed width (and leave the left column to dynamically resize): 
Once we do the steps above, our XAML file with have a Grid defined like so: 
Useful Tip: Above we have a fixed width and height set for our Silverlight application (notice the Width and Height attributes on the root <UserControl> element). We can cause the application to instead have a dynamic size and automatically flow and size to fit the containing HTML element or browser window size by removing the Width and Height attributes completely (I talk about this at the end of my layout tutorial here). If we want to set a design-time width and height on our application, we can do that by setting a d:DesignWidth="640" and d:DesignHeight="476" attribute on the root UserControl element. This will cause the designer to default to that size dimension when using the designer on the application. Building our Chat Application: Adding Controls and Colors Now that we have the core layout of our chat application defined, let's add some controls to it and start to customize how it looks. We'll start by selecting the root Grid layout panel and customize its background color to be a blue gradient. One easy approach we can use to select a particular control is to use the "Interaction" panel and then click the control we want to select within it: 
We can then use the "Brushes" property panel to customize a blue LinearGradient brush for the background of our Grid: 
Once we have this set we'll work on the bottom of our chat window, and add a "Send" button to it: 
For our chat message textbox we'll use a standard textbox. But to add a little more pizzazz we'll first add a border control with a "RoundRadius" of 5 and a Background and BorderBrush like so: 
We'll then embed our TextBox within the Border control. Important Tip: To nest the TextBox within the Border control using the design-surface, we'll want to double-click the Border control within the interaction window. This will set it as the active insertion control in the design surface, and highlight it in yellow like below: 
We can then use the control toolbox to select a TextBox control and add it into the Border control. We'll set the TextBox's background and border brush to pick up the nice curved look from the parent Border control: 
The XAML markup generated by Blend will look like below (notice how the TextBox is nested under the Border control - it wouldn't have been if the Border hadn't been the active insertion control): 
We can repeat the above process for the header row as well, and embed a TextBlock within a Border control and add a image control to the right column to create UI like so: 
The XAML markup generated by Blend looks like below: 
Last but by no means least, we'll add another Border control in our center row and add a ListBox control inside it. We'll configure the Border control to stretch across both columns in our Grid, and customize its background and foreground colors. We'll then put some test message inside the ListBox as placeholder text (we'll customize the UI and databind real values later): 
The XAML markup generated by Blend looks like below: 
And now when we run the application we have a basic chat IM client (with hard coded values) running in the browser. As we resize the browser the application will automatically flow and resize to fit the window. 
We still have a bunch of UI work to-do to make our IM client look less lame, but at least we now have something up and running. Building our Chat Application: Adding "ChatMessage" and "ChatSession" classes Now that we have created our initial UI within Expression Blend, let's open up the same project in Visual Studio and add some chat classes that we can use to bind our UI against. We can open up the project in Visual Studio either by selecting File->Open Project inside VS 2008 and selecting the project file for our project, or within Expression Blend we can right-click on the project node and choose the "Edit in Visual Studio" menu item to launch VS 2008 with the project open: 
VS 2008's Silverlight support in Beta1 has project management support for Silverlight 2 solutions, full intellisense and event-wireup support, and support for debugging Silverlight applications running both on Windows and the Mac. VS 2008 also has split-view editing support for Silverlight .xaml files. For example, here it the same Page.xaml file we built above in Blend open inside VS 2008: 
The VS 2008 design-view in Beta1 isn't interactive (meaning it is still read-only). Changes you make in source-view, though, are updated immediately in design-view - which gives you a nice XAML-pad experience (and VS 2008 supports full XAML source intellisense with Silverlight 2 Beta1). For this blog post we aren't going to be using the Visual Studio XAML editor. Instead we are going to create some classes that we'll use to represent a ChatSession and associated chat messages. We'll then use Expression Blend to bind our UI controls against these. We'll start by adding a new class called "ChatMessage" that defines two public properties: 
We'll then create a class called "ChatSession" that represents a chat session. 
The ChatSession class above has three public properties. The first two properties represent the remote user name and avatar on the other end of the chat. The third property is a collection of the past chat messages. Notice that its type is not a List<ChatMessage> collection - but rather an ObservableCollection<ChatMessage> collection. ObservableCollection might not be a familiar class to you if you are coming from an ASP.NET background - but those coming from a Windows Forms or WPF background are probably familiar with it. Basically it is a generic collection class that raises change notification events when items are added/removed from it (or when items that implement INotifyPropertyChanged within it have their properties changed). This comes in very handy when doing data-binding - since UI controls can use these notifications to know to automatically refresh their values without a developer having to write any code to explicitly do so. The ChatSession class then has two public methods - one whose job it is to connect to a chat server, and another whose job it is to send messages to the chat server. For the sake of simplicity (and because I don't have a chat server) I've just faked out these methods. In real-life we would probably use the network sockets implementation built-into Silverlight to connect to a remote chat server. The ChatSession class implements the INotifyPropertyChanged interface - which means it exposes a public "PropertyChanged" event. We'll raise this event within our class when we change the properties on it. This will enable listeners (for example: controls data-binding against it) to be notified when changes in the property values occur - which allows them them to rebind the values. Implementing Fake Data for Design-time Databinding From a purely functional perspective, the above code is all we need in order to implement our chat client. To help improve the design-time experience in Blend, though, we'll also add a constructor that checks whether we are in runtime or design-time mode, and loads up our ChatSession object with "fake data" if it is being hosted in a designer: 
We'll see in a moment how this helps make it easier to visualize data-bound data in the designer. Building our Chat Application: Wiring up UI using DataBinding in Expression Blend Now that we have the ChatMessage and ChatSession objects defined, we can use them within Expression Blend to databind our UI controls. I introduced how data-binding in Silverlight and WPF work in my Tutorial 5: Using Databinding and the ListBox control to display list data post from last week. In today's post we'll be using Expression Blend to wire-up the databinding expressions instead of manually typing them. We'll start by using the "Data" panel under the "Project" panel inside Blend: 
We'll click the "+ CLR Object" link in the "Data" panel to pull up a dialog that allows us to pick any .NET object to databind our UI controls against. We'll use it to select the "ChatSession" object we just created: 
This will cause the ChatSession object to be added to our Data tray, and expose its properties (and sub-properties) in a tree-view: 
We can then bind any of our UI controls in the design-view to these properties by selecting them in the "Data" tray and dragging/dropping them onto the UI controls in the design-surface. For example, we could replace the static "ScottGu" label with a {Binding RemoteUserName} databinding expression by dragging the RemoteUserName property from the Data tray on top of it: 
When we drop the "RemoteUserName" property onto the TextBlock, Blend will prompt us like above to either Bind the property to the existing TextBlock, or create a new Control to represent the property. If we choose the default (bind to the existing control), Blend will then ask us what type of binding expression we want: 
We'll indicate we want a "OneWay" binding to the TextBlock's "Text" property. When we click ok our control will be updated with a {Binding RemoteUserName} expression for its "Text" property. We can repeat this drag/drop interaction for the Image control (with the RemoteAvatarUrl property) as well as the ListBox (with the MessageHistory collection property). When we are done Blend will show our "dummy" data within the design-view surface like so: 
You might be wondering about the contents of the ListBox - why do the items show up as "ChatClient.ChatMessage"? Well, right now the ListBox is binding to a collection of custom .NET objects and the "ChatClient.ChatMessage" string is the value being returned by calling "ToString()" on the ChatMessage instances. We can modify this to look better by adding a <DataTemplate> to the ListBox like so: 
Note: For the Blend 2.5 March preview release of Blend you have to define datatemplates in source-view. In future preview releases you'll be able to use the designer to define them as well. This feature is already available for WPF projects if you want to play with it: As a designer, you can interactively create the look of data with a full WYSIWYG experience. Just create a WPF project to try it out. Doing this will then cause our UI to look like below at design-time: 
The benefit of having this "dummy data" show up at design-time is that it enables us to get a much better sense of what the UI experience will be like at runtime, and allow a designer (or a developer) to easily work on the UI without having to wait on the rest of the application to be built. Building our Chat Application: Updating our Button and ListBox UI using Styles and Control Templates One of the things I talked about in my Part 7: Using Control Templates to Customize a Control's Look and Feel Digg tutorial was about how Silverlight and WPF allow developers and designers to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility to sculpt the UI of an application and create exactly the user experience desired. We could use the Control Template feature of Silverlight and WPF to customize the Send button and the ListBox structure in our chat application above to have a little more of a polished look and feel. We could do this by creating "MessageHistory" and "SendButton" style resources that we store within the App.xaml file of our project. Each of these style objects would then have a Control Template that overrides the look and feel of the control and changes its visual structure. Note: the Blend 2.5 March preview release of Blend you have to define control templates in source-view. In future preview releases you'll be able to use the designer to define them as well. This feature is already available for WPF projects if you want to play with it - just create a WPF project to try it out. For example, the below ListBox Control Template could be used to remove the outer double border around the ListBox control and define a "flat" look with just a scroll-bar for the list container: 
Applying this template to our ListBox would then cause it to render with a much flatter look around the edges: 
We could get even fancier with our Button control template, and not only define a custom button shape - but also define various story-board animations to apply to the shape to provide custom UI behavior when it is in "MouseOver", "Pressed", or "Normal" states (these can all be encapsulated within the Style definition - meaning the page developer never has to-do anything to enable them): 
Once we have our "MessageHistory" and "SendButton" style objects defined, it is easy to use Expression Blend to apply them to controls on the design-surface. Clicking on the "Resources" tool Window within Expression Blend lists all of the resource locations within our project: 
We can expand the "App.xaml" node to see the styles that are available for us to use within it. To apply a particular style to a control on the page, we can simply drag/drop it onto the control. For example, here is what our send button control looks like before we apply the "SendButton" Style: 
Dragging/dropping the SendButton style onto it will change it to our custom Control Template shape/structure: 
Because our "SendButton" style has state animations defined within it, the button will change at runtime depending on how the end user interacts with it. By default the button will look like this: 
When an end user moves the mouse over it the balloon will subtlety change to a lighter color: 
When in the push down state the button will depress and its shadow will disappear: 
When released the button will pop back up. These subtle animations and interactivity gestures can add some really nice polish to an application. Best of all, a designer can build and customize this functionality entirely themselves - the developer implementing the page functionality does not have to be involved nor write any code to enable it. In future preview releases of Expression Blend 2.5 designers will be able to not only define the shape/structure of this button - but also define all of the animation transitions for it - entirely using the design surface (no source editing or coding required). Implementing our our Chat functionality Now that our we've used Expression Blend to databind our control UI, and to tweak and polish the interactivity of the UI, let's go back to Visual Studio and write the code that implements the UI chat behavior functionality. Specifically, we'll add the below code to our Page constructor to initiate a ChatSession with a remote user, and then handle the scenario where the "Send" button is clicked to send a message to the remote user. 
When we add the above code and re-run the application we'll see that our UI now databinds to a ChatSession with "ScottGu" as the RemoteUserName (instead of the fake design-time data we defined earlier). When we type text in the message TextBox and click the customized Send button our Listbox is automatically updated with the chat history: Why did the ListBox automatically update you might wonder? It did this because the ListBox was data-bound to the ChatSession.MessageHistory property - which is of type ObservableCollection<ChatMessage>. This means the collection automatically raises change notifications when a new ChatMessage object is added to it, which the ListBox then detects and uses to update itself with the new data. No explicit code was required by us to have the ListBox reflect these changes. The clean view/model binding architecture of our application automatically handled it for us. Summary I've only shown a few of the features supported with Expression Blend. All of these features work for both Silverlight and WPF projects. All of them will also ship in the upcoming Expression Blend 2.5 March preview - which will be available to download (for free) shortly. I think you'll find that Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio bring a tremendous amount of productivity and power for building great RIA solutions. Developers and designers can use them together when working on the same projects (and avoid accidentally stepping on each other). You can also easily have both open together on one machine and edit a single application with them at the same time. I'll be blogging more about Expression Blend (and a bunch of features in it that I haven't covered yet) once it is available for download. I'll also post the above simple chat example for download once Silverlight 2 Beta1 ships so that you can open and run the code yourself. Hope this helps, Scott 
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A few months ago I did a .NET Web Product Roadmap blog post where I outlined some of the product plans we have to build on top of the web development features we’ve shipped with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Over the next few months we will also be releasing a number of enhancements specific to client development as well. We have put a lot of effort into addressing some of the biggest areas of customer feedback, while also trying to really push the envelope on the capabilities developers have when building Windows applications. All of these improvements build on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, and will make .NET client development even better going forward. Below is a roadmap of some of the upcoming releases we have planned for the months ahead: Improved .NET Framework Setup for Client Applications One of the biggest asks we’ve had over the years from customers and ISVs building client applications is to make the setup and installation of the .NET Framework easier and faster. This summer we are going to ship a new setup framework for .NET that makes it easier to build optimized setup packages for client applications. This setup framework can be integrated with existing installation frameworks (for example: products like InstallShield), and enables a smaller and faster end-user setup experience of the .NET Framework. Windows Forms and WPF client applications will be able to use this setup framework to cleanly “bootstrap” getting the .NET Framework installed onto machines. The setup “bootstrap” utility will support automatically downloading the minimal set of .NET Framework packages needed to enable .NET 3.5 client applications on a machine. For example, if a user already has .NET 2.0 installed on their machine, setup will be smart enough to automatically download only the upgrade patches necessary to update .NET 2.0 to 3.5 (and not have to re-download the components already provided by .NET 2.0). This will significantly shrink the payload size of client setup programs, and speed up the installation experience. We’ll also be delivering improvements that enable a more integrated application install experience for both MSI and ClickOnce based solutions, and support a more consumer friendly user experience that is easy to build. Improved Working Set and Startup Improvements for .NET Client Applications One of the other common asks we receive is to enable .NET client applications to launch faster in “cold startup” scenarios. “Cold startup” scenarios occur when no other .NET client applications are running (or have recently run) on a machine, and require the OS to load lots of pages (code, static data, registry, etc) from disk. If you are loading a large .NET client application or library, or are using a slow disk, these cold startup scenarios can require many seconds for your application to start. This summer we are going to ship a servicing update to the CLR that makes some significant internal optimizations in how we optimize our data structures to cut down on disk IO and improve memory layout when loading and running applications. Among many other benefits, this work will significantly improve the working set and cold startup performance of .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 applications and will dramatically improve end-user experiences with .NET-based client applications. Depending on the size of the application, we expect .NET applications to realize a cold startup performance improvement of between 25-40%. Applications do not need to change any code, nor be recompiled, in order to take advantage of these improvements so the benefits are automatic. WPF Performance Improvements This summer we are also planning to release a servicing update to WPF that includes a bunch of performance optimizations that improve its text, graphics, media and data stack. These include: - Moving the DropShadow and Blur bitmap effects, which are currently software rendered, to be hardware accelerated (making them many times faster). The APIs for these effects will stay the same as they are today (which means you do not need to change any code nor recompile your apps to take advantage of these improvements). - Text scenarios, especially when used in Visual and DrawingBrush scenarios, will be substantially faster. The APIs for these scenarios also stay the same (which means you do not need to change any code nor recompile to take advantage of the performance improvements). - Media and video performance scenarios will also be much faster (also no need to change any code nor recompile to take advantage of the improvements). - We’ll be including a new WriteableBitmap API that enables real-time bitmap updates from a software surface. We’ll also be adding support for a powerful new effects API that enables you to build richer graphics scenarios. - We’ll also be including new data scalability improvements that can be leveraged for data editing scenarios. These include container recycling and data virtualization support that make it easier to build richer data visualization controls. WPF Control Improvements Later this year we are also planning to release a number of new controls for WPF. Included in the list we are working on are DataGrid, Ribbon, and Calendar/DatePicker controls. VS 2008 WPF Designer Improvements We are also planning to release a servicing update of VS 2008 that includes a number of feature additions to its WPF designer. These include event tab support within the property grid for control events, toolbox support within source mode, and a variety of other common asks and improvements. Summary The above improvements should make it easier to build great desktop applications. Because these improvements are built on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, they will also be easy to take advantage of (and in most scenarios not require any code changes to take advantage of them). Stay tuned to my blog for more details about each of the above improvements in the weeks ahead. Hope this helps, Scott 
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Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET - .NET Debugging Demos Lab: Tess Ferrandez, who is an ASP.NET escalation engineer for Microsoft support and who also posts incredible articles on the art of debugging production ASP.NET applications, has started a new tutorial series that provides a sample "buggy" application and a series of questions/problems you can work through to learn how to debug problem applications in production environments.
- 4 Alternative View Engines for ASP.NET MVC: The open source MvcContrib project has been adding lots of cool goodness on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Jeffrey Palermo posts about 4 alternative view rendering engines now in the project that you can use if you don't want to use the default .aspx based view engine. BTW - I'll be doing a new post on ASP.NET MVC within the next week talking about some of the cool new features coming soon with the next refresh.
ASP.NET AJAX - Boost ASP.NET Performance with Deferred Content Loading: Dave Ward continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX. This article talks about how you can improve the perceived load-time of a page by using an AJAX callback to retrieve HTML content once the page loads on the client. This approach is similar to the one I wrote about in my tip/trick post here.
Visual Studio - Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison: Several people have sent me email in the past asking for a page that describes the differences between the various Visual Studio 2008 editions (Standard, Professional, Visual Studio Team System, etc). This link is useful to bookmark if you want to learn more about this.
- Did you know...You can Shift+ESC to close a tool window: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know..." VS 2008 tips and tricks series. I confess I didn't know this one. One productivity tip I always recommend is to really learn the keyboard shortcuts of your development tool environment well - since using them over time can yield significant productivity savings. Click here to download a VB 2008 key bindings poster, or click here to download the C# 2008 key bindings poster equivalent. Print them out and put them under your pillow to absorb them while you sleep.
.NET - The Power of Yield: Joshua Flanagan has a nice article on one of the coolest, yet underused, feature of C# in .NET 2.0 - which is the yield keyword. This is a very powerful feature that enables you to efficiently work with IEnumerable scenarios and enable deferred iteration (LINQ leverages this heavily with .NET 3.5). To master C# even more, I also highly recommend the new C# 3.0 In a Nutshell book (I posted a 5 star review of it on Amazon).
WPF - Making VS 2008 Open in XAML Mode By Default: Matthias Shapiro has a nice post that shows how you can configure VS 2008 to by default load WPF files in XAML mode instead of design-mode. A very useful shortcut if your natural inclination is to work directly with XAML markup.
- How can I debug WPF bindings? Beatriz Costa from the Microsoft WPF team has a great post that talks about tips/tricks you can use to better identify "what went wrong" when a databinding expression fails with WPF.
- Programming WPF and Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed: If you would like to learn WPF (especially now that there is project and designer support for it in VS 2008), I recommend these two books by Chris Sells and Adam Nathan. Both are excellent resources to use to learn from.
Hope this helps, Scott 
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MIX is a Microsoft web development conference we hold in Las Vegas each year. MIX tends to be a pretty fun event, both because it covers cutting edge content (we used MIX07 to announce our Silverlight plans), and also because it tends to attract a really diverse set of attendees (including both those who use Microsoft technology today, and a large % of attendees who don't). The conference structure includes a healthy blend of sessions and interactive panels, and the layout and organization is designed to facilitate great conversations. This year's MIX is being held March 5th-7th in Las Vegas. Ray Ozzie and I are both giving keynotes the first day of the event, and Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki will be doing a keynote the second day of the event. The conference (and especially my keynote) is going to cover a lot of new web technology. Attendees will be able to attend sessions covering: - IE 8
- IIS 7.0
- ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
- VS 2008 and Expression Studio
- WPF
- Silverlight 2
- And much more....
Channel 9 recently did an interview with me where I talked about some of these new technologies. In Part 1 of the interview I talked about IIS7, and in Part 2 of the interview I talked about ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight 2. Register Soon Or You'll Miss Your Chance MIX is held at a smaller venue then some of our larger events like TechEd and PDC. This gives the conference a more intimate feel (which is fun). It also means that it sells out each year, and once it is sold out it is really sold out. Last year I received about 50 emails from people begging for tickets after it was full, and many people even flew to the event hoping to somehow be let in at the door (only to be unfortunately told they couldn't get in). Unfortunately because of size constraints (and fire marshal restrictions) once it is sold out there really are no more tickets to be had. Even my own team members get turned away if they haven't registered in time. This year's registration is filling up faster than any of the previous MIX conferences. If you want to attend I highly recommend registering really soon to ensure you can go. You can learn more about the event and register online here. Hope to see some of you there - it is going to be fun.... Scott 
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Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET MVC Visual Studio -
Spell Checker for Visual Studio: My team recently shipped a cool new Visual Studio add-in that provides spell checking support. In addition to supporting spell checking within HTML files, it also supports spell checking within JavaScript, VB, C# and ASP.NET comments. Works with both VS 2005 and VS 2008. Debugging .NET IIS 7.0 -
Behavior Changes for ASP.NET applications running in Integrated Mode on IIS 7.0: Mike Volodarsky from the IIS team has a great blog post that details behavior changes for ASP.NET applications when they run in "integrated mode" on IIS 7. "Integrated mode" enables ASP.NET developers to take advantage of much tighter integration with IIS - and enables a host of additional scenarios (richer URL rewriting, integrated authentication/authorization, etc). If one of the behavior changes listed in Mike's document impacts your application, you can optionally change the application to run in "Classic Mode" - which maintains the same ASP.NET behavior as with IIS6. WPF Hope this helps, Scott 
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Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET MVC Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 IIS 7.0 -
Running 32-bit and 64-bit ASP.NET versions at the same time in different worker processes: With IIS6 you either had to run all web worker processes in 32-bit mode, or all of them in 64-bit mode. There was no easy way to mix and match depending on the application (you couldn't have one 32-bit ASP.NET application that needed to use a C++ component on the same machine as another 64-bit ASP.NET application in a separate application pool). With IIS 7.0 this is now supported and easy to enable. Rakki Muthukumar from Microsoft support describes how to configure this. WPF and Silverlight -
.NET 3.5 Add-In Model: Jack Gudenkauf is a developer on my team who has driven the design of the new System.AddIn namespace in .NET 3.5. This namespace makes it easier to build add-in extensibility to your client applications. Among other things, this enables you to isolate addins and WPF controls across application domain and process boundaries (here is a sample of one). Watch Jack's Channel9 video to learn more. -
Data Binding in WPF: A nice MSDN Magazine article from John Papa that describes some of the basics of how WPF's binding model works. Josh Twist also has some good WPF databinding companion articles that complement this here and here. To learn WPF in more detail, I highly recommend Adam Nathan's excellent WPF Unleashed book (still 5 stars after 45 reviews on Amazon.com). The next public release of Silverlight 1.1 will support the same powerful databinding model that is in the full WPF, and will make building data aware applications much easier. Hope this helps, Scott 
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I'm very pleased to announce that the Beta 2 release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2 is now available for download. You can download the Visual Studio 2008 product here. You can alternatively download the smaller VS 2008 Express Editions here. VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express can be installed side-by-side with VS 2005. .NET 3.5 Beta2 also includes a go-live license which allows you to build and deploy applications into production. Very Important: Please read my "Installation Notes" at the bottom of this blog post for a few post-installation steps you must make to ensure everything runs well. One of these steps fixes a side-by-side issue we found with ASP.NET AJAX. Quick Tour of Some of the New Features for Web Development Over the last few months I've written several blog posts that discuss some of the new improvements in this release. Below is a quick summary list of several of them that I have already published. This list is by no means exhaustive - there are a lot more things I haven't had a chance to blog about yet (stay tuned for more posts!): VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. You can learn more about how this works from my blog post here: VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support VS 2008 includes a significantly improved HTML web designer. This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration. Below are two articles I've written that discuss this more: ASP.NET also has a new <asp:ListView> control that I'll be blogging about in the near future. It delivers very flexible support for data UI scenarios, and allows full customization of the markup emitted. It works nicely with the new CSS support in VS 2008. ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support .NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (and adds new features like UpdatePanel support with WebParts, WCF support for JSON, and a number of bug fixes and performance improvements). VS 2008 also has great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications: I will be doing a blog post in the next few days that talks more about some of the ASP.NET AJAX specific improvements, as well as how to upgrade existing ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications to use them. Language Improvements and LINQ The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages. Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code. These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET. Below are some of the articles I've written that explore these new language features using C#: Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M (object relational mapper) in .NET 3.5. It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model. You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it. LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures. It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model. Below are some of the articles I've written that explore how to use it: I'll be adding several more articles to my series above in the weeks ahead. I think you'll find that LINQ to SQL makes it dramatically easier to build much cleaner data models, and write much cleaner data code. Lots of other improvements The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming. For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support. ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox. WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data. Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon. WCF and Workflow projects and designers are included in VS 2008. Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS). Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS. AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU. And there is much, much more... Important Installation Notes - PLEASE READ! There are two important things you should do immediately after installing VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2: 1) You should download and run this batch file. This takes only a few seconds to run, and fixes an issue we found earlier this week with the version policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll - which is the assembly that contains ASP.NET AJAX. If you don't run this batch file, then existing ASP.NET 2.0 projects built with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and VS 2005 will end up automatically picking up the new version of ASP.NET AJAX that ships in .NET 3.5 Beta2. This will work and run fine - but cause you to inadvertently introduce a .NET 3.5 dependency in the applications you build with VS 2005. Running the batch file will change the version binding policy of the new System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly and ensure that you only use the new .NET 3.5 ASP.NET AJAX version with projects that you are explicitly building for .NET 3.5. 2) If you have ever installed a previous version of "Orcas" or VS 2008 on your machine (either Beta1 or one of the CTP versions), you need to reset your VS 2008 settings after installing Beta2. If you don't do this, you'll have an odd set of settings configured (some windows will be in the wrong place), and you'll potentially see some IDE performance slowness. You can reset your settings by typing "DevEnv /resetsettings" on the command-line against the VS 2008 version of the IDE: 
Summary There are a lot of new improvements and enhancements that I hope you'll find really useful with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. Stay tuned to my blog over the next few weeks as I'll be posting more about some of the new features and how to get the most out of them. Thanks, Scott 
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