Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2

Microsoft has released Feature Pack 2 for Visual Studio. Here is a small excerpt from official announcement:

About a week ago, I wrote a post describing some cool stuff coming in Visual Studio ALM Feature Pack 2. I'm happy to announce that it is now available.

A reminder that Feature Pack 2 is available to customers with VS Ultimate with MSDN, VS Premium with MSDN or VS Test Professional with MSDN. You can find the download on our Feature Packs page here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=192777

Being mindful of the number of things we suggest people install, we have made Feature Pack 2 cumulative with Feature Pack 1. One installer will get you both.

Download Link

Introducing Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™

Today during the VSLive! keynote here in Redmond I announced a new product called Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™, which is the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and cloud.  LightSwitch is a new member of the Visual Studio family focused on making it easy to develop line of business applications.

At their core, most end user business applications combine two things:  data + screens.  LightSwitch is optimized around making these two things very simple.  Let’s walk through a simple example which demonstrates how easy it is to get going.

Hello World

LightSwitch is a stand alone Visual Studio product (it will also be available in future versions of Visual Studio Professional and above).  VS Professional gives you a lot of options for building your application, including being able to build top tier enterprise wide apps.  This is very powerful but also presents you with a lot of options to sort out up front as you contemplate your architecture.  With LightSwitch we make it really simple with two choices:  VB or C#!

Other Data, Including SharePoint

Not all of your data is stored in a single database.  Often time you need to combine data from more than one database as well as other data sources.  LightSwitch makes it easy for you to do joins across disparate data sources (internally using WCF RIA Services to serve up the data).  So as an example you can attach to a SharePoint list and create new screens that combine data from a database and SharePoint.  Being able to do this kind of data mash up is very powerful.  Being able to do the join without having to write any code is just awesome :-)

Kick Starting the Cloud

I’m sure you’ve seen that we are “All in” on the Cloud and LightSwitch is no exception.  In fact LightSwitch has been designed to target the cloud using the same set of data and screen designers I’ve shown above.  You can easily create your schema and store data using SQL Azure.  Your running business logic can be hosted in the Azure cloud meaning you never have to do administration work.  The really powerful thing about this is there is nothing special for you to do in order to run in the cloud.  You will simply do the deploy step when you are happy with your app and then point your users at the URL.  The same is true of SQL Azure:  it is just like any other database you can target.

Running in the Browser

By default LightSwitch produces a desktop application.  This kind of app can work very easily with local data and can integrate with Office as mentioned above.  Some times you will also want to give access to the application in the browser.  This is very easy using the Properties settings for the application:

Full Story at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2010/08/03/introducing-microsoft-visual-studio-lightswitch.aspx

How to Install Offline Documentation for Windows Phone Developer Tools

Microsoft's Windows Phone Developer Tools have only offered online documentation for general Windows Phone developer topics and Silverlight Windows Phone application development topics.  However, it is possible to use the Visual Studio 2010 Help Library Manager to download an offline copy of the Windows Phone developer documentation. 

Steps to Install Offline Documentation:

1. Run this command:  "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Help Viewer\v1.0\HelpLibManager.exe" /product vs /version 100 /locale en-US

2. If you have never run Help Library Manager before, you will have to first select a local path to download the content to. 

3. After selecting a local path, the main Help Library Manager page will appear.  Click on the link named Install content from online. 

4. In the list of online content, scroll to the bottom, locate the item named Windows Phone Development and click the Add link. 

NOTE: You can also use the Help Library Manager to install offline content for other technologies like the .NET Framework, the Windows SDK, etc.

Microsoft's Visual Studio Product Group Joins Twitter

Microsoft's Visual Studio Product Group has joined Twitter.  (Thanks Sharon)

Follow them --> @VSDeveloper - Visual Studio Product Group

Final Release of Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is now available!

The WPF and Silverlight Designer Team is delighted to be able to tell you that the final release of Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is now available!

Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 includes many essential features to help you work with your Silverlight 4 applications:

• Support for targeting Silverlight 4 in the Silverlight designer and project system
• RIA Services application templates and libraries to simplify access to your data services (check out this Silverlight.tv video and whitepaper giving full details)
• Support for Silverlight 4 elevated trust and out-of-browser applications
• Enhanced support for other new Silverlight 4 features, including:
  • Working with Implicit Styles
    • Go To Value Definition - navigate directly from controls on your page to styles that are applied to them.
    • Style Intellisense - easily modify styles you already have in XAML
  • Working with Data Source Window outputs
    • Data Source Selector - easily select and modify your data source information
    • Grid Row and Column context menu - Add, remove, and re-sort DSW outputs and other Grid layouts
    • Thickness Editor for editing Margins, Padding etc
• Sample Data Support -  see your item templates and bindings light up at design time
• Working with Silverlight 4 Out-of-Browser applications
  • Automatically launch and debug your OOB app from inside the IDE
  • Specify XAP signing for trusted OOB apps
  • Set the OOB window characteristics

Please Note: many of the new designer features work well with WPF as well as Silverlight projects, so this download is definitely recommended for Visual Studio 2010 WPF designer users too.

Check out this 20 minute Silverlight.tv video which shows most of the new Designer features in action.

Download and install the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010
Follow the instructions at www.silverlight.net/getstarted  to install the final release version.

Don’t forget to uninstall any previous pre-release versions of the tools you might have.

We hope you enjoy this new release, and welcome your feedback via our MSDN forum.

General Performance Improvements in VS2010 since Beta2

The most notable ones are

1. Switching to Desiger from Editor

2. General Designer performance

3. Loading Toolbox

4. Command line msbuild

5. Build and Rebuild within IDE

6. Adding events by double-clicking controls in Designer

7. Load/ Close solution

8. Typing in HTML editor

Micosoft Visual Studio 2010 Final

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 mark the next generation of developer tools from Microsoft.
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 focuses on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements.

Microsoft Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It can be used to develop console and graphical user interface applications along with Windows Forms applications, web sites, web applications, and web services in both native code together with managed code for all platforms supported by Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework and Microsoft Silverlight.

Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista

Visual Studio 2010 can be installed on the following operating systems:
   o Windows XP (x86) with Service Pack 3 - all editions except Starter Edition
   o Windows XP (x64) with Service Pack 2 - all editions except Starter Edition
   o Windows Vista (x86 & x64) with Service Pack 1 - all editions except Starter Edition
   o Windows 7 (x86 and x64)
   o Windows Server 2003 (x86 & x64) with Service Pack 2
   o Windows Server 2003 R2 (x86 and x64)
   o Windows Server 2008 (x86 and x64) with Service Pack 2
   o Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64)

Download : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Download : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Download : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Windows Phone Developer Tools has incompatibilities with Visual Studio 2010 RTM

After official launch of Visual Studio 2010 in Las Vegas, Microsoft has highlighted incompatibilities of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP (Windows Phone Developer Tools) with Visual Studio 2010 RTM.

If you install the retail (RTM) release of Visual Studio 2010 on the same machine on which you already have the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, you will be unable to build your Windows Phone projects. Further, while the Windows Phone project type will continue to appear in the File/New dialog, you will not be able to build Windows Phone 7 applications.

The current CTP is based on Visual Studio 2010 RC; reason being that updates made to Visual Studio RTM since RC release, are causing some incompatibilities. Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (WPDT) has different Development Life Cycle than regular Visual Studio release and exclusively targeted to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has also assured the an update will be made available in coming weeks to resolve the incompatibilities.

Meanwhile, if you want to avoid this issue and want to use Visual Studio 2010 RTM then you can either install Visual Studio 2010 to a VPC image or on another machine, because installing WPDT CTP to a VPC image is not supported.

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 LIVE now

Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. They also announced that Silverlight 4 will release to Web (RTW) later in the week. Together, these technologies simplify the entire development process, enabling developers to target new platforms and build high-quality applications. Developers will be able to download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 in conjunction with the Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo launch event in Las Vegas.

Why developers love Visual Studio? The answer is, its the only product which is created by looking at the needs of developers, rich library and rich support , even a newbie can create its first “Hello World” in some minutes with it. And not to mention MSDN the ultimate free resource for sample codes and help.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 have something for every developer. The new editor, now using Windows Presentation Foundation, delivers a more flexible, feature-rich environment that supports concepts such as the use of multiple monitors. This enables a developer to have one monitor with code, another with the user interface designer, and yet another with database structure.

So want to try your Hand on, follow th elinks below

Visual Studio 2010 | .NET Framework

News Source: BeingPC

Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2010, New .NET

Microsoft today launched the next major version of its software and web development suite, Visual Studio 2010, and the .NET Framework 4, which provides a managed code runtime and development framework to developers. A related Silverlight 4 release, set for later this week, will provide much of the functionality of the .NET Framework on the web.

"We're excited to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2010 with developers around the world today," says Microsoft President Bob Muglia. "The functionality of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 creates a powerful and unique combination, opening up new opportunities for developers to build applications that take advantage of new and existing devices, as well as emerging platforms like cloud services."

Visual Studio 2010 features a new editing environment based on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the part of .NET aimed at UIs. Among other enhancements, it allows developers to easily work on projects across multiple monitors. Visual Studio 2010 also provides developers with access to modern Microsoft platform features, such as the multi-touch interfaces in Windows 7 and SharePoint. With Silverlight, developers can also target the upcoming Windows Phone platform.

Visual Studio 2010 is available in a variety of product editions that meet various needs, from the free Express versions for students and enthusiasts, all the way up to team-oriented environments such as the Test Professional edition. For more information about Visual Studio 2010, please visit the Microsoft website.

Students: Get Visual Studio 2010 for Free!

You can get Visual Studio 2010 Professional for free via the Microsoft DreamSpark program. Here are the details:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional is the essential tool for individuals performing basic development tasks. It simplifies the creation, debugging, and deployment of applications on a variety of platforms including SharePoint and the Cloud. Visual Studio 2010 Professional comes with integrated support for test-driven development, as well as debugging tools that help ensure high-quality solutions.

To qualify for this offer, you need to get verified, which basically involves having your school verify that you're a student or via a student ID.

Also, for you non students out there, check out the new Visual Studio 2010 Express editions, which are free for one and all.

Visual Web Developer 2010 Express has Arrived!

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express is a free and robust development environment for building, testing and deploying Web applications across the Microsoft Web Platform including ASP.Net, Internet Information Services and SQL Server. Unleash your creativity with powerful design surfaces for building standards-based Web applications and services.

With Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, you can work with Web Standards, JavaScript and ASP.NET. Work within a personalized environment, targeting established and emerging web technologies, including rich internet applications based on AJAX or Silverlight, cloud and web services. Integrated debugging tools let you find and fix bugs quickly and easily to help ensure high quality solutions.

Visual Web Developer 2010 includes:

• MVC 2
• JQuery 1.4
• Microsoft AJAX
• Simplified Web Deployment
• Dynamic IntelliSense for JavaScript
• Snippets for HTML and ASPX files
• Silverlight 3
• Powerful Design Surface for Silverlight XAML
• XAML Collaboration with Designers using Expression Blend
• Multi-monitor support
• ….

Learn more about Visual Studio and ASP.Net 4.0 go here.
The ASP.Net forum for Visual Studio 2010 is here.
You can get started now by downloading Visual web Developer 2010 Express here.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 RTM Available to MSDN Subscribers

Microsoft has announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 RTM versions for MSDN subscribers.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 have something for every developer. The new editor, now using Windows Presentation Foundation, delivers a more flexible, feature-rich environment that supports concepts such as the use of multiple monitors. This enables a developer to have one monitor with code, another with the user interface designer, and yet another with database structure.

Built-in support for Windows 7 multitouch and “ribbon” interfaces delivers stunning applications to end users. For the first time, developers have integrated access to SharePoint functionality into the Visual Studio integrated development environment. Windows Azure tools make it easy to quickly develop, debug, test and deploy cloud applications from within the familiar Visual Studio environment. Built-in support for ASP.NET Model-View-Controller gives developers the flexibility to separately update the appearance and core business logic of Web applications. Windows Phone 7 developers will be able to build amazing mobile applications using Visual Studio with integrated phone design surfaces.

.NET Framework 4 adds additional support for industry standards, more language choice, new support for high-performance middle-tier applications including parallel programming, and side-by-side installation with .NET Framework 3.5. With the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile, the size of the runtime has been decreased by over 80 percent, making it easier for developers to get applications, and therefore users, up and running faster.

Download Visual Studio 2010

Download .NET Framework 4.0

Download Link for MSDN Subscribers

Dogfooding Critical to Building Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4

Microsoft’s long-time practice of testing products in development internally, before they are finalized and released to market, was critical to building the company’s next-generation development platform and tools. Both Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 were dogfooded extensively by the software giant at various development milestones throughout the product cycle, according to S. Somasegar, senior vice president, Developer Division. At this point in time, more than 10% of the Redmond company’s employees are already running Visual Studio 2010 into production environments.

“Microsoft teams have a long tradition of dogfooding their products long before releasing them to external customers for their own adoption and Developer Division is no exception to that. In fact, because we are in the same business as many of our customers (namely writing software products) I would say that dogfooding is an especially important practice for us to embrace. I’m happy to tell you that with Visual Studio 2010 we have redoubled our efforts in this area,” Somasegar explained.

When building VS2010, Microsoft had all the developers leverage Team Foundation Server for tasks such as bug tracking and source control. Somasegar shared some numbers related to the feedback generated as the products were being dogfooded. It seems that toward the final part of the development process, feedback generated some 15.5 terabytes of data, no less than 896 builds were being compiled each month, with the team overseeing 828,978 work items, from bugs to change tasks.

“The other big thrust of our dogfooding effort for the VS2010 and .NET 4 project was to ensure that we had broad adoption of the latest builds of Visual Studio itself. Unlike with TFS where the service is centrally managed, the tools developers and testers use on their desktops are not. As such, we built telemetry into dogfood builds of VS to help us understand how many folks were using the product daily and what builds were deployed throughout the team. As of today, we have over 12,000 people inside Microsoft running VS 2010 for their day-to-day development. In addition, employees installed pre-release versions of .NET Framework 4 to their desktops more than 35,000 times, and Microsoft.com and MSDN deployed pre-release .NET Framework 4 on 112 servers,” Somasegar added.

Dogfooding (eating one’s dogfood) for Microsoft ensures that products are ready for users by testing them in production scenarios in the pre-release stage. With thousands of testers, the Redmond company is in an excellent position to assess whether a product is ready for release. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will be made available on April 12, 2010. Visual Studio 2010 Premium Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Professional Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (RC) Build 4.0.50303.0 is available for download here.

On April 12, Microsoft will launch Visual Studio 2010

On April 12, Microsoft will launch Visual Studio 2010, you can join them at the launch ceremony by registering yourself a seat today and by joining them at the Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo, you will not only experience the launch alongside the Visual Studio team and industry legends – you’ll get three days of sessions by the best speakers in the industry on the latest and greatest technologies, such as Silverlight and .NET 4.0.

The topics will range from all the new, great features in Visual Studio 2010 to Silverlight, WPF, WF, WCF, Application Lifecycle Management, .NET 4.0, ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and much more!

And remember: If you sign up for Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo, you’ll automatically get access to both the ASP.NET and Silverlight and the SQL Conference and Expo! That’s a Visual Studio launch and three conferences for the price of one!

So if you want to join them, than register yourself here.

Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Draft Preview) Available, Download Now

This is draft preview, so it has only 3 chapters from what will be a 10 chapter eBook when its released this summer. The book is not referencing any particular language or technology, but will help professional developers move from earlier releases of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover new features and characteristics of Visual Studio 2010 from your point of view using practical approach. This book will go through a lot of the exciting new language features as well and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves.

Download

jQuery JavaScript Library 1.4.1 Included in VS2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2

Developers leveraging Microsoft’s development platform and tools have already been able to take advantage of the integration with jQuery JavaScript. If memory serves me correctly, at the end of 2008, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform, announced that Microsoft would be shipping jQuery as an integral part of Visual Studio moving forward. Two years later, both Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2 included jQuery JavaScript Library 1.4.1. Of course, now, the promise from the software giant is that it will work to do even more, essentially to actively support jQuery JavaScript Library development.

“Guthrie announced Microsoft is taking a more active role participating in the open-source, community-driven development of the jQuery JavaScript Library,” stated Peter Galli, the Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group. “Microsoft will now work in concert with the jQuery JavaScript Library team to accelerate the creation of new features that make creating rich-web applications on any platform faster and easier.”

According to Galli, the work that Microsoft plans to do is designed to make sure that developers will be able to simplify the building of rich, JavaScript based client-side Internet applications. As a lightweight open source JavaScript library, jQuery has become a sweetheart with devs in a relative short amount of time.
“Gforward, the company also plans to assist in the development of both standards-based and ASP.NET based jQuery Plugins aimed to simplify interoperability between the two platforms, and Microsoft will now help make the jQuery JavaScript Library a primary development option on Windows,” Galli added.

Microsoft’s alignment with the evolution of jQuery fits perfectly into the patterns of the open source model. In this regard, devs will be able to not only provide their input, but also modify the materials added to the jQuery JavaScript Library by the Redmond-based company.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Professional Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Released to Web (RTW) is available for download here.

Develop Windows 7 Phone Applications using Visual studio 2010 Express

Visual Studio 2010 Express is now available for windows phone for free from Microsoft. Now you can create Windows mobile applications as well 3D games for the phone with XNA Game Studios, Optimize your existing Silver light application for the phone and  enjoy Windows Azure services from within your phone .

Windows Phone Developer Tools includes:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Emulator
• Silverlight for Windows Phone
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP

Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE) handles from design to testing of Windows Phone 7 Series phone applications. You can test these phone applications using the Windows Phone Emulator.

More Info here : http://www.microsoft.com/express/Phone/

Download : Download

35 years of Visual Studio : Timeline

Visual Studio, World’s most popular development environment is about to go RTM in 2nd Week of April for it latest version Visual Studio 2010. It was initiated as early as 35 years ago when Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a version of Basic for Altair 8080. And since then it has been released as Basic, QuickBasic, Visual Basic and finally Visual Basic. Net. Here is a timeline of this product covering measure releases in development of this Platform.

TIMELINE

Products and Milestones

1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a version of Basic for Altair 8080

1982 – IBM releases BASCOM 1.0 (developed by Microsoft)

1983 – Microsoft Basic Compiler System v5.35 for MS-DOS release

1984 – Microsoft Basic Compiler System v5.36 release

1985 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 1.0

1986 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 1.01, 1.02, 2.00

1987 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 2.01, 3.00, 4.00

1987 – Microsoft BASIC 6.0

1988 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.00, 4.00b, 4.50

1989 – Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System 7.0

1990 – Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System 7.1

1991 – Microsoft Visual Basic released May 20-Windows World Convention –Atlanta

1992 – Microsoft Visual Basic 2.0

1993 – Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 in Standard and Professional versions

1995 – Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 released, supported the new Windows 95

1997 – Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 – introduction of IntelliSense

1998 – Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 that included Visual Basic 6.0 released (first VS)

2002 – Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 7.0

2002 – Visual Studio .NET

2003 – Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 7.1

2003 – Microsoft Visual Studio w/Intellisense

2003 – Visual Studio .NET

2004 – Announce Visual Studios 2005 – Code name Whidbey

2005 – Visual Studio 2005 release w/Extensibility

2005 – Visual Studio Express released

2006 – Expression Tool Set released – devs and designers work together

2006 – Visual Studio Team release – November 30th

2007 – Visual Studio 2008 (code name Orcas) ships November = Video Studio Shell

2010 – Visual Studios (code name Rosario)

Found this on Channel9.

Download Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer’s Guide

Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer’s Guide is a detail document highlighting the new features and capabilities of the Visual Studio 2010 product.

This reviewer’s guide is designed to give you an overview of the features available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. It’s intended to give you an understanding of how professional developers can be more creative and more productive while building high-quality applications.
The guide begins with an example scenario to showcase the new product features in action, complete with screenshots of the solutions being built. It then covers each of the new features in greater detail. Throughout the document, we’ve included links to Web sites that offer deeper information about the technology.

This guide will be updated as information becomes available, and is subject to change. For the latest information about Visual Studio 2010, you may visit http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/.

Download Size: 32 MB

Download : VS2010 Reviewer’s Guide