:MsHelp

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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Call Hierarchy is something which I think will be a very handy new feature in VS2010. First of all you can see which parts of your code are making a call to a specified method and then you can see which calls are made from this method..and so on. To specify your method just right click on the method name and select View Call Hierarchy. Shortcut for Call hierarchy is CTRL + ALT + K.

This will show you what calls are made to the method and also which calls are made from that method. This is very if you need to know where a certain method is used. You also have Find All References. I know that but that’s not comparable with Call Hierarchy. The level of detail with Call Hierarchy is much bigger. As you can see in the screenshot below, you can drill down, see the complete calling structure. You get the idea…

If you have an interface and want to know which concrete classes are using your interface, then you can also use Call hierarchy:

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

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“Navigate to” is just a simple way to find a certain method ASAP without using the search. I could do this kind of searching for a method already before with ReSharper. But if I have to be honest, I think Navigate to will be used more. I’m not to sure because I don’t know all the ReSharper shortcuts, but with ReSharper I had to push two shortcuts. First I had to look for the object, then when I would be in the object, I had to search for the method. With Navigate to.. once you start typing it will go look for anything that matches that criteria. Class, property, method..doesn’t matter.

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

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From now on you can run VS2010 and VS2008 on the same machine. This is new, because back in the day when I was working with Visual Studio 2005. When I tried to install VS2008, I first had to remove VS2005. For me this was a problem at the time because if you are working on a project in VS2005 and open it in VS2008, it will convert it. When you are a alone, that’s no issue, but if you are in a team and not everybody want to upgrade, then there’s an issue. Of course there are ways to overcome this problem, but that’s not advisable. Anyway, the problem will be the same here. Once you upgrade your solution to VS2010, you will also not be able anymore to open it in VS2008. But now because there are 2 IDE’s on the same machine, you are not immediately forced to upgrade the solution.

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

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