:MsHelp

This is something I read some days ago and found interesting. Last year Microsoft announced that they would publically release the PST file specifications to the public. That’s the file that MS Outlook is using to backup email, calendar and contacts to. This means that you would be able to get a better understanding of the PST file structure.

Could be handy to have if you would want to interface with this file. For instance build some functionality in your own CRM application to import contacts from the Outlook PST file.

Now MS has released the specs to MSDN, so if you are looking for this documentation, you can retrieve it here

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Wow I was amazed when I saw this video on Microsoft Bing maps.

I have to be honest, I rarely use Microsoft Bing maps. But that’s because I rarely use any maps software in general. Most of the time I know where I have to be and don’t need to look it up. But when I saw this ..I really like what they have done with product, made so many integrations, it looks very slick!

PS: Mind the person at the end in the video looking at his cell phone – Funny

More information can be found on the following link on TED.com

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As you will already probably have noticed, the whole UI of the IDE changed. Out with the old windows look and feel and in with the new and fancy WPF powered UI. For me they didn’t have to do it. I was kind of used to the previous look. One cool thing however is the floating windows that they have introduced together with the new UI. You can do whatever you want now when it comes to code files,designer view, panels, tools… You can let a code file, a panel,etc float all over your screen. Imagine you have 2,3 maybe even 4 monitors. Filled with all your favourite panels and code files. Aaaah the development that we could do, right?

Well, with VS2010 this becomes reality. Just right click on a code file or panel and select float. You can now do with it whatever you want. Isn’t that cool?

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More info can be found on the Windows Phone Newsroom

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A bit late but some days ago they released the updated Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 training kit. Enjoy this new fine release! Follow the link below to download

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit – February Release

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I already did a blog post about this some time ago: Better Office COM interop thanks to named and optional parameters

Here I talked mainly on how named and optional parameters make life easier for Office developers. This focus was more on that. But actually there are a some other points that didn’t get enough attention. Here are some other great improvements specifically for COM interop.

• No more meaningless ref parameters.
• Better indexer support, property accessing. No specific get/set needed anymore.
• No more need for casting, we can use dynamic binding thanks to the Dynamic class.

I have found a screencast by Sam Ng who explains all this in about 10min.

Link to the original post –> How Do I: COM Interop and Office in C# 4.0?

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It’s out there! Microsoft yesterday released Visual Studio 2010 RC to their MSDN subscribers. If you have an account, head over there and get the new bits.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

For the ones who don’t have an MSDN subscriber account, it will be available to you on 10th of February.

Screencast on Channel 9: Jason Zander: Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Released

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There are a lot of new project templates standard out of the box with Visual Studio 2010. Something that immediately caught my eye was that SharePoint have a lot more templates then before. Which is a very good thing.

Other templates that could become very handy:

• ASP.NET MVC 2
• Ajax control templates
• Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility (VSIX, Adornments,..)
• Modeling projects
• etc..

If you don’t find what you want between these templates, you could always have a look at the Online templates. Here you can find templates people from the community have shared.

So Microsoft has really done a good job of providing us with these new template projects.

If you want to share your own template, that is also possible. Just go to the Visual Studio Gallery and upload them there. Than they will also be available for others in the online templates section.

View this post to see all the new features of VS2010 which I have discussed

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I’m that kind of person that wants to know what’s installed on his machine. Visual Studio installs a lot of extra components. Things you probably don’t care about, you just know it’s something that you could use with Visual Studio. new things that I see with Visual Studio 2010 are for instance Microsoft Sync Framework. You wouldn’t even know it’s there unless you go and look the config panel under Programs and Features. Some other things that are installed with Visual Studio 2010 are:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Data-Tier Application Framework

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Data-Tier Application Project

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Transact-SQL Language Service

You probably already figured it out that this has something to do with SQL Server 2008. But what exactly?

Well it’s all there for the Data menu in Visual Studio 2010. From that menu you could previously look at the data sources and add data sources and things like that. From now on, you can do a bit more than that. You get a complete SQL management studio Express experience bundled with Visual Studio 2010.

I really like that you can run your queries directly from the Visual Studio IDE. You even get the IntelliSense which always is a great help:

View this post to see all the new features of VS2010 which I have discussed

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I’m really a big fan of the Big Bang Theory, great geeky show! There was a part in the show where Sheldon, one of the main characters, comments on the user friendliness of Windows 7. Check it out:

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