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Great news for all multi-core enthusiasts earlier today from the "blog press": Microsoft has announced a CTP of a paraller programming extension for .NET developers. I haven't yet tested the new extensions, but it sure would be great to have semi-automatic support for multi-threading. In the long run, all processors will be multi-core, but I'm afraid not all developers are able to take best advantage of the new processors if they need to manually code threading into their applications. Thus, these kind of extensions are really needed to drive the industry forward, one application at a time.
At the same time, Microsoft also published a new white paper about these topics, titled "The Manycore Shift".
I was attending the Finnish Microsoft Expression Designer Tour in Helsinki last week, and all the sessions were recorded.
Now, the videos and the presentations are available for everyone to see. You can see the videos in standard WMV format along with the slides, or in cool Silverlight format, where both the videos and slides are shown nicely together. Little design, it seems. :-)
I noticed that MSDN hosts a page that links to recent TechEd presentations (from 2007 to 2005) about Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Here are the links to previous years:
Now, that's a lot of free information! Be sure the check them out if you are using VSTS.
The Finnish Microsoft subsidiary's DPE team (the developer team) has started a Finnish blog about current affairs in the field. The RSS feed can be found from the address:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dpe_finland/rss.xml
An HTML version is available here. Enjoy!
Sounds strange but it's true: Google has developed a collection of generic ASP.NET error handlers, and the result is a project called ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers.
Their code is open-source and supports both ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0. It logs the errors to a SQLite version 3 database, which by the way happens to be the same as Adobe Lightroom uses.
Yes, the news were true: Microsoft has put Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite (the most extensive edition) available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads earlier today.
Go download your copy today! I got dozens of "Server Too Busy" and "Server Error" messages, but eventyally I got there. Download size is 3921 MB, and my copy should be here in about 10 hours. :-) Very cool indeed.
Found from eWeek this morning: Visual Studio 2008 is now ready, and might already appear on MSDN Downloads next week (the week starting Nov 19th). Very cool!
However, the Team Suite/Team Editions would take a little longer to finish, but they should be available later this months. Can't wait to get my hands on the RTM bits. More news to follow as the information is published more broadly.
Adobe has just recently announced a new version of the Photoshop Lightroom product, which I use extensively to arrange and maintain my digital image library. The new update, version 1.3, seems not the be available through Adobe's pages just yet (at this writing the links point to version 1.1, but version 1.3 should be here), but I'd expect the site to be corrected soon. Support for newest camera models like Canon EOS 1-Ds Mark III is included, and I'd guess some minor tweaks to the application along the way.
In the mean time, use this direct FTP link to download the Windows version of Lightroom 1.3. Size is about 50 MB.
The newest issue of the Finnish Tietokone magazine has two of my articles: "Web-surffailuasi seurataan" and "Windows Search tehokäyttöön". The first article talks about web browsing and the tracking of thereof, and the latter shows how Windows Vista's desktop search can be used to find your documents and e-mails better.
Enjoy!
Windows Server "Longhorn" is getting ready, and just recently Microsoft has announced the forthcoming versions of Windows Server 2008. They are similar to the previous 2003 version editions:
In addition to these, there's a whole new set of editions that include the new "Hypervisor" or virtualization layer, called Hyper-V. This layer can also be bought as a stand-alone for the price of USD $28, but it can also be bought along with the operating system. If you don't need Hyper-V, then you can purchase the new OS without it, and get a small price reduction.
I learned a new trick in Word today: you can enter any Unicode character into your Word documents if you know the four-number character code. For example, the Unicode character code for the Euro sign (€) is "20ac" in hex. To enter this character by not using an euro keyboard, just type in the Unicode code, and then press Alt+X. Voila!
Another Word tip that I've shared with you already, but is worth repeating: sometimes you need to add a short and long dash to your document. This is done easist with the following keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+Minus (on the numeric keyboard) for en dash (the short one) and Ctrl+Alt+Minus for em dash, the long one.
A fellow colleague pointed me to a nice web page thatcompares different database SQL syntaxes, data types and so forth with each other. Included are Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, two databases which are probably to most common ones amongst .NET developers.
The page compares for example date handling, TIMESTAMP data types, creating of tables with the CREATE TABLE data definition statements, metadata reading, and more.
Enjoy!
Very often, I find myself wanting to delete a line of code in Visual Studio's code editor, but so far, I haven't found a keyboard shortcut to do that. In Delphi, the key is Ctrl+Y, but naturally that's a different environment. Visual Studio has Ctrl+L for cutting a line to the clipboard, but that would replace the clipboard contents, which I don't usually want to do.
Luckily, I found the key while looking at the list of Visual Studio's commands. The IDE has an internal command called Edit.DeleteLine, which was just what I was after. And then, in the Customize dialog box I found it: the keyboard shortcut for deleting a line is by default Ctrl+Shift+L. Woo hoo! :-)
Just hot from the Microsoft press room and/or TechEd, depending on where you are: Visual Studio 2008 will be available for developers later this month. That's already, as Microsoft's original plans were that the three products, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 would all be available only in the spring. However, since Visual Studio is almost ready, there's no point in delaying it further.
Thus, MSDN subscribers (at least) will get a white Christmas, after all. Sounds great to me!
November already! It is again time for winter tyres and frosty mornings. From time to time, people ask me what's the difference between Visual Studio 2005's Web Sites (File/New/Web Site) and Web Application projects, for example File/New/Project/ASP.NET Web Application.
The answer can't be given in a single sentence, but basically web site are "projects" where a folder structure defines the set of files included, but web application have a traditional project file. To casual developers, or small projects, this might not make much difference but the professionals it does: if you use version control, I suggest that you use web applications instead of web sites, they will make your life much easier in most cases. Read more about the differences from MSDN.
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