:MsHelp

If you are looking for more controls to implement in your Silverlight projects than you defenitely need to check out the new Silverlight toolkit on CodePlex.

What is the Silverlight Toolkit?

The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. This first release includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.

What can you find in this toolkit?

The Silverlight Toolkit defines four Quality Bands that describe the stability and finish-level of each component. Below is a summary of where the components currently in the Silverlight Toolkit fall within the quality bands.

• Components in the Preview Quality Band
  • AutoCompleteBox
  • NumericUpDown
  • Viewbox
  • Expander
  • ImplicitStyleManager
  • Charting

• Components in the Stable Quality Band
  • TreeView
  • DockPanel
  • WrapPanel
  • Label
  • HeaderedContentControl
  • HeaderedItemsControl

Themes

In addition to great controls, the Toolkit also includes a beautiful assortment of professional themes to make your applications stand out and improve the overall look-and-feel of your Silverlight UI. See the overview on Theming for more information.

• Expression Dark
• Expression Light
• Rainier Purple
• Rainier Orange
• Shiny Blue
• Shiny Red

Where can I find this toolkit?

You can download the Silverlight toolkit on CodePlex

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Well if you are wondering how the new version of Microsoft Windows, for now just Windows 7, will look like..Check out these screenshots of Windows 7

I think it looks a bit more professional than Windows Vista.

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You start to see more and more companies creating applications for Microsoft Surface. This is another cool application created by Vectorform. The application gives you the possibility to create soundtracks with the tip of your finger.

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Microsoft decided that .NET should get a now logo better aligned with the portfolio of brands that .NET is most strongly aligned with: Silverlight, Visual Studio and the AppPlat server products.

Here it is:

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Some time ago I announced that AT&T stores were going to use Microsoft Surface in their stores. Now I found a video where a salesperson tells us how they use Surface to help sell their mobile phones. I really like the idea of this and it’s a lot more interesting than just a salesperson.

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After five preview version ASP.NET MVC reached to the Beta status. I really see some potential in this technology. Too bad I haven’t had enough time to fully check it out. Download the bits on Microsoft Download. And detailed information can be found on Scott Gu’s blog

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Source control is basically controlling your source. This is not so necessary when you work alone, very handy when you are working in a team. There are many good solutions out there where you need to pay money for. Visual Studio Team System, Team foundation Server, the older SourceSafe etc. These are all Microsoft products but there are probably some other non Microsoft products. I’m a Microsoft fan so I’m not so interested in other brands. If you do have the money go for one of the products I just mentioned. If you don’t have the money, working on an open source project or something else, read on.

You can setup your own source control system using Visual SVN. This is free and very easy to install. If you don’t want to do all the work there are some alternatives with much more extra functionality.

Assembla

This is web application that provides you with +/- 200MB of free space to store your project files. Assembla provides you with a lot of features. Too much to mention in here. It’s one big collaboration system actually. You can create your project, add team members to it. When that is done you can exchange messages, chats. Work together on the wiki that’s created with you project’s space, upload files, create events (which you will be notified for by the system). Another option is to create an agile project. Then you have the possibility to create scrum sessions etc..

It’s very easy to use. Create an account, Create a project and ready to go.

If you want to maintain your repositories from Assembla on your desktop you need TortoiseSVN. When that is installed, just input the URL you got from Assembla and the files will be downloaded. A better alternative would be to integrate your source control in Visual Studio. This is not so hard to accomplish. There are several possibilities. If you have money you can check out Visual SVN Visual Studio AddOn. If you don’t have money, you need to check out Collabnet AnkhSVN. Basically this is the same as Visual SVN Visual Studio AddOn. It has the same functionality as far as I know. The install is again very easy, just install, insert your Assembla URL to your repositories and everything is done. Now you can commit, update your code from Visual Studio. You get a red block when something changed. This way your instantly know when you need to commit your changed code.

Another advantage is that you can revert to a previous version of your source. This is very easy with your new source control system and Visual Studio plugin.

Ok alternative for Assembla is Beanstalk. I haven’t checked it out myself but I think it provides you with the same functionality as Assembla.

If there are any questions regarding source control, how to set it up or anything else. Please let me know.

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I am currently working on a project where I need to transfer a certain file from a server to a client. My transfer is ok, but how ok is actually? I was asking myself: What is the delay if I send a certain file. How long does the process take to complete? Basically I wanted to stopwatch the time between the start and the end.

This isn’t really hard code, it’s just nice to know.

   1: //to store the start time

   2: private static DateTime StartTime;

   3: //to store the end time

   4: private static DateTime StopTime;

   5: 

   6: //property to get the time between start and end

   7: public static int TimeInMiliSeconds

   8: {

   9:     get

  10:     {

  11:         TimeSpan ts = StopTime - StartTime;

  12:         //You could also get the Seconds, Minutes ..

  13:         return ts.TotalMilliseconds;

  14:     }

  15: }

To set and get the values you do the following

   1: //Just before the process starts

   2: StartTime = DateTime.Now;

   3: ....

   4: //When the process stops

   5: StopTime = DateTime.Now;

   6: //Display the time it took to process your process

   7: Console.WriteLine("Time it took to process your process: "+ TimeInMiliSeconds +" miliseconds");

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And I can only say that I’m really looking forward to these new releases. I’ll try to give a summary of the video in this post. Like Norman Guagagno is saying VSTS 2010 will focus a lot more on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), Architecture, Testing and several more things. With better ALM they want to involve all the different participants more in the same process and don’t integrate all the different work into a single process. What does this really mean? There are many different functions in an application lifecycle. For instance you have the analyst, the architect, the developer, the tester etc. The way it works now is that the analyst does the analysis, the architect does his logical design, the developer does his developing and the tester does his testing. Most of the time they do this in their own environment. This can sometimes lead to problems. They developer doesn’t entirely understand the logical design , the developer cannot reproduce a certain bug tester has gotten. With VSTS2010 they want all this to happen in the same environment. This will solve a lot of problems I think. Microsoft is also putting a lot of effort into creating the necessary tools ad features to make this all possible. In example there will be a lot of new tools for the architect. Microsoft has embraced UML so there will a tool for creating UML diagrams. There will also be a tool for creating better models, logical models that can even have constraints (f.e. you cannot link a presentation layer model directly to a database layer model). Another thing that I really like is the hysterical debugging. Like I said earlier sometimes a developer cannot reproduce a certain bug. Now if a tester and a developer would have access to the same environment or tool they would have some common ground. And this way it is possible to abstract environment data and share this through that same environment. This way the developer could get that abstracted data and entirely recreate the situation the tester was in.

There will also be several improvements to the already existing TFS(Team Foundation Server). There will be a better way to control the source, the work items, better dashboards to control what is in the TFS etc…

I know I didn’t talk a lot about .NET4.0 but this was a post purely on the new tool to use the new framework. The framework will be covered later.

If you want more details be sure to check out the following videos’s!

Norman Guadagno: Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

Architecture Day (Tuesday, September 30th):
- Cameron Skinner: Visual Studio Team System 2010 – Architecture
- “Top-down” design with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- “Bottom-up” Design with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architect
- ARCast.TV – Peter Provost on what’s coming for Architects in Visual Studio Team System
Business Alignment (Wednesday, October 1st):
- Achieving Business Alignment with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Agile Planning Templates in Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Enterprise Project Management with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Requirements Management and Traceability with Visual Studio Team System 2010
Software Quality (Thursday, October 2nd):
- Better Software Quality with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Manual Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Historical Debugger and Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio Team System 2010
Team Foundation Server (Friday, October 3rd):
- Brian Harry: Team Foundation Server 2010
- Branching and Merging Visualization with Team Foundation Server 2010
- Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management with Mario Rodriguez
- Team Foundation Server 2010 Setup and Administration
- An early look at Team Foundation Build 2010 with Jim Lamb
- A first look at Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2010
- Update on Team Foundation Server Migration and Synchronization

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This is a war that has been there for ages now. What’s the best, fastest, best performing language: Java or .NET ? Well I’m a fan of Microsoft so you’ll know where my vote goes to. But now Evans Data surveyed  350 developers at several major enterprises (1000+ employees) and the final result was that their .NET investments were growing faster then their Java projects. Which resulted in a demand for .NET developers.

You can read more in the following article: .NET Making Gains Against Java, Survey Says

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