BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) Ltd. has finally released its new plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. First announced in May, the plug-in is designed to allow enterprise developers and systems integrators to leverage existing Microsoft-based dev tools to wirelessly enable applications for BlackBerry smartphones.
"Basically, the plug-in brings BlackBerry development to Visual Studio developers," explained John Edward, product manager at RIM during a recent chalk-talk webcast on the new plug-in. It allows developers working within a .NET programming environment to use familiar development tools to access the BlackBerry Mobile Data System (MDS), the enterprise platform for extending applications to the BlackBerry platform.

The MDS runtime is the same RAD framework used within BlackBerry's own MDS Studio toolset. MDS Studio is a tool for developing rich-client applications using a component-based drag-and-drop approach. It supports XML Web services and service-oriented architectures for integration and interoperability between mobile applications and existing enterprise applications and back-end systems. The plug-in provides a similar set of re-useable BlackBerry components that simplify user interface design, data management and wireless connectivity of rich-client apps, Edward said.

"As a developer, you don't need to learn new techniques for wireless development," Edward said. "You can leverage your existing Web services ... using a pre-built selection of user interface components ... to create an application that will be very familiar to a BlackBerry user. ... We're using terminology and design patterns that are very familiar to a Visual Studio developer."

The client coding is done in JavaScript, so there's no Java development on the device, even though BlackBerry devices run a Java environment. There's also no C#, VB.NET or other CLR languages that would require development on the client application.

"Corporations of all sizes are increasingly recognizing the tremendous opportunities to boost productivity and competitive advantage through wireless data applications," IDC analyst Stephen Drake is quoted as saying on the RIM press release announcing the plug-in. "Offering standard development tools that enable the creation of secure and manageable applications while abstracting the complexities of wireless systems will help accelerate the broader adoption of mobile enterprise applications."

The plug-in comes with sample MDS runtime applications. They've been designed to be deployable as is, reused and modified for free, Edward said.

 

The much-anticipated beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 has been released this morning by Microsoft.

As reported yesterday, Microsoft had planned to release beta 2 sometime this week. It's part of a rollout of a number of developer-related products, including an update to the .NET Framework and Silverlight.

The crown jewel, however, is VS 2008. Code-named "Orcas," the first beta was released in April. Although the product is officially set to launch on Feb. 27, 2008, along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, it's expected to be finished before the end of this year.

The last major update of Visual Studio was Visual Studio 2005, released in October 2005. The first-ever release of a Visual Studio product was Visual Studio 97. VS 2008 marks the sixth major release of the product line, used by developers to build software for various Microsoft products, including Microsoft Office, Windows Vista, and Web development.

Beta 2 can be downloaded here.

 

Tools vendor JetBrains has released ReSharper 3.0, the latest version of its refactoring plug-in for Visual Studio.

This edition introduces support for a number of additional languages, including Visual Basic.NET, XML and XAML. It also features a cross-language capability for projects written in both C# and Visual Basic.

JetBrains says it has also deepened the product’s code analysis capabilities. Beyond spotting errors and issuing warnings, ReSharper 3.0 will provide developers with on-the-fly suggestions for improving code.

XAML features include XML editing in XAML code and real-time error, syntax and semantic analysis.

One new feature in the area of productivity enhancements is a Unit Test Explorer for conducting and debugging multiple unit tests.

JetBrains is offering ReSharper in three editions. Resharper 3.0, a full-featured version; a C# Edition that omits the VB.NET support; and a VB.NET package that leaves out the C# functionality.
 

Microsoft has released another community technology preview of Sandcastle, a tool for creating documentation for .NET projects.

New in the June rev is a presentation layer named "VSORCAS," an apparent play off the former codename of the upcoming Visual Studio 2008.

VSORCAS is aimed at improving the experience of navigating through and searching documentation, according to Microsoft.

"This new documentation presentation layer targets developer audience who need to find information quickly and easily in our documentation that grows significantly with every Visual Studio/.NET Framework release," read a statement on the Microsoft Sandcastle blog.

VSORCAS' features are set to include a persistent language filter, which will automatically show the related files, examples and other information related to a programming language of a user's choosing.

There are other filters as well, including the ability to filter based according to a type's supported frameworks and based on member types, according to a posting on the blog.

VSORCAS also seeks to improve the visual experience of reading documentation by communicating more data in a smaller amount of screen real estate.

The CTP is available for download here.

You can read more about the planned features here.

 

Microsoft is readying a beta of a new SKU of its next generation of Visual Studio, intended for those who want to embed it into their own tools.

The company will offer what it calls Visual Studio Shell, a scaled-down version of its flagship developer tool suite. Microsoft launched Visual Studio Shell at its TechEd conference in Orlando.

Visual Studio Shell is intended to allow developers to build Visual Studio functionality atop their own vertical tools, as well as integrating various languages such as Fortran, Cobol, Ruby and PHP. Microsoft will release a beta version this summer. When it ships with Orcas, now officially dubbed Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Shell will be free.

 

In a surprise to absolutely no one, the official name of the next edition of Microsoft's flagship integrated development environment (IDE) will be Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft announced this week at its Tech Ed 2007 show in Orlando, Fla.

A second beta of the product -- previously codenamed "Orcas" -- is expected later this summer. RDN Senior Editor Kathleen Richards recently took a detailed look at which planned features are in and out of Visual Studio 2008.

Microsoft also announced at Tech Ed that Visual Studio 2008 will include the Visual Studio Shell, a stripped-down version of the core IDE that is "intended to let developers integrate their products directly into Visual Studio and then ship them as if they were their own products," says Joe Marini, group product manager for Microsoft's VSIP program.

 

Via The ServerSide.Net

Microsoft has shipped the first beta of “Orcas,” the next version of Visual Studio. This follows a long roll out that witnessed a quarter million downloads of various Orcas CTPs. Along with this beta comes the first Express edition of Orcas. The announcement was made on the weblog of Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president, Microsoft’s Developer Division.

Improvements are multiple and wide ranging for this long-awaited tool set. Among Orcas’ high points are: LINQ integrated query building using either C# or Visual Basic for objects, databases and XML data; improved unit and load test capabilities; AJAX-style Web client design; Jscript IntelliSense support; full integration of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) with Visual Studio; and support for deployment of runtimes to multiple versions of the .NET Framework.

With this release also appears the ADO.NET Entity Framework allowing developers to program against relational data as entities. Moreover, with this release, VBA-VSTO integration takes a step forward as developers are now able to access VSTO add-ins from VBA application code.

The company’s newly minted Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) gains a useful tool via the WPF Designer, formerly known as Cider - although, at release time, WPF Designer has to be patched onto VB Express and VC# Express. To date, with Orca and Microsoft Expression Blend design tool, admitted Somasegar in conversation with TechTarget editors this week, “you had to do a lot of hand coding.”

“Orcas is the best tool set for the latest platform,” said Somasegar, pointing to the tools’ extensive support for ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Vista and Office 2007 client building as examples.

Visual Studio Orcas Beta download information
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx

 

Visual Studio shipped the final release of VS 2005 SP1 yesterday.  It is available for immediate download in all 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and both traditional and simplified Chinese).  You can download and install it here.

This SP release is a pretty major service pack, and incorporates a lot of bug-fixes and feedback from customers.  Included built-in with the service pack is support for VS 2005 Web Application Projects (which we also made available as a separate download back in May).  It also contains a number of design-time performance optimizations and fixes across the product.

Check out Scott Guthrie’s Comments at his blog

 

Microsoft recently announced the availability of Visual Studio Service Pack 1 beta.  SP1 fixes a number of issues that were reported through the MSDN product feedback center and our own internal testing. This includes any fixes, such as general distribution releases (GDRs) that have been put out for the product. The service pack also fixes the top 50% of bugs that had been reported to cause crashes. Sample things that we fixed include:

KB Article	Fix Description
KB898904	"An update to the Web Project Conversion Wizard in Visual Studio 2005 is available"
KB910832	"FIX: The IDE stops responding when you work with nested generic types in C# in Visual Studio 2005"
KB911281	"FIX: A native application takes a long time to start when you try to debug the application by using Visual Studio 2005"
KB915038	"FIX: You may receive Visual Basic compiler error messages when you are developing a Visual Basic 2005 project in Visual Studio 2005"
KB916769	"FIX: The Visual Studio 2005 IDE stops responding when you work with a large Visual C++ .NET solution in Visual Studio 2005"
KB917036	"FIX: The Visual Studio 2005 IDE may corrupt the deployment files for a Web Setup Project and for a Setup Project"
KB917452	"FIX: You may experience performance issues when you use solutions that contain large Visual Basic projects in Visual Studio 2005"
KB918559	"FIX: You may experience slow performance and increased memory usage when you start the debugger for a Visual C++ project in Visual Studio 2005"

 

Via Network World

Microsoft is hoping to fire up a community of developers on a code-sharing forum the company has been testing since May but rolled out officially on Tuesday.

The project, called CodePlex, is a forum for Microsoft code and code from other developers, said Jon Rosenberg, director of community source programs at Microsoft.

"We're actually establishing a venue for the development community to collaborate with us and feed back into these projects," Rosenberg said.

CodePlex is not unlike many online communities where developers modify and develop source code. In recent years, Microsoft has extended olive branches to open source developers after being criticized for its fierce protection of its own source code.

Code contributed to the site can be posted under any licensing terms, Rosenberg said. Microsoft is offering some of its source code under its own Share Source Initiative (SSI) licensing plan, which offers access to source code under varying conditions.

The software titan revamped and simplified the language of those licenses last October. Microsoft has released 7.5 million lines of code under SSI licenses, available here.

Microsoft has softened the look of the CodePlex Web site, perhaps to make it more appealing to developers in the open source camp. Instead of the Microsoft logo, it has a green banner that says "CodePlex."

"This is really designed to be a site that is in some ways owned as much by the community as it is by Microsoft," Rosenberg said. "We just thought a more neutral branding was appropriate."

[Read More]

 

"Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals delivers a market-shifting database development product designed to manage database change, improve software quality through database testing and bring the benefits of Visual Studio Team System and life cycle development to the database professional."

New Features

• The new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of your choice


• Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change


• A New T-SQL editor allows you to be more productive when writing T-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel execution of queries and viewing of execution plans


• SchemaCompare allows you to quickly compare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and a database) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync


• DataCompare allows you to quickly compare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databases into sync


• The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to create database unit tests using T-SQL or managed code


• DataGenerator lets you create data generation plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based upon your existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior to running unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

Learn More at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx

 

There’s a new LINQ preview from the Visual Basic team. The new CTP updates the samples and bits that were first showcased and discussed at PDC last year. Now is your chance to download the samples, take them for a spin, and provide some feedback to shape the future of Visual Studio.

 

The long-awaited update to Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0 is now available - the official release is branded January 2006. This release of Enterprise Library includes six application blocks (Caching, Cryptography, Data Access, Exception Handling, Logging and Security), and provides similar functionality to the previous releases for the .NET Framework 1.1; however, Enterprise Library has been redesigned to use the new capabilities of the .NET Framework 2.0.

Get your copy at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/EntLib2.asp

From Tom Hollander

 

All methods use a subset of elements from the same master set. In C# 2.0, the set of optional elements will grow. Historically—except in C++ inline methods—methods required a name, a return type, and a body. Optionally, methods could use an access modifier and a parameter list. In C# 2.0, the method name has been moved from the list of required items to the list of optional items.

C# 2.0 (and .NET in general) introduces the anonymous method. An anonymous method can be used anywhere a delegate is used and is defined inline, without a method name, with optional parameters and a method body.

To use anonymous methods, you need to know what a delegate is, so we'll review delegates briefly before getting into when to use anonymous methods and about anonymous method limitations.

Read More

 

 

Via TheServerSide.Net

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 to manufacturing, which means that MSDN subscribers can download these releases from the MSDN Subscribcription section. This release covers all versions including Visual Studio Team System Tester, Developer, and Architect. Also included are new versions of Visio for Architects and Infopath VSTO Toolkit.

"This is by far the best Visual Studio and .NET Framework release that we have ever done. I am very proud to be a part of the team that did a phenomenal job of delivering this fantastic product. I also want to take this opportunity to thank the community and early adopter customers for their incredible help and invaluable contributions in helping us ship the right product." -- S. Somesegar's Blog

In addition to the long awaited developer tools and SQL Server Database, Microsoft has release two supporting products. Visio for Enterprise Architects has been updated to be able to engineer code for Visual Studio 2005. Infopath support has also been added to Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005.

Support for InfoPath means you can add business logic to your form using managed code instead of script. Managed code allows you to use the Microsoft .NET Framework common language runtime (CLR) to write code in Microsoft Visual C# or Microsoft Visual Basic, and to make calls into the .NET Framework class library for advanced tasks such as digital signature processing and encryption/decryption. Visual Studio integration includes F1 Help support, full-featured debugging, and Microsoft IntelliSense in the code editor. IntelliSense provides statement completion, members lists, and inline parameter information on the InfoPath object model.

 

Based on the perceived instability and incompleteness of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System, developers have posted a request to delay the release of the product on the beta feedback center. Instead of a release, they would prefer a third beta with a release to follow several months later.

Less than two hours after the recommendation was posted to the product feedback center, it was resolved as "Won't Fix" with an assurance that the product will be ready to go.

Via The ServerSide.Net