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Time for another new article, this time about Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization.
The Finnish Tietokone magazine features my article titled "Hyper-V virtualisoi Windows-palvelimet". You can read it from issue 12/2008's page 49 onwards.
Happy Halloween!
More information flowing from .NET 4.0 from PDC: Microsoft has now compiled a data sheet about the planned features for both WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and Workflow Foundation (WF) in their forthcoming 4.0 version.
WCF 4.0 will (according to today's plans at least) have better REST support, and WS-Discovery'ability (could that be a word?). WF will get boosted performance and better visual designers with a XAML debugging feature.
Speaking of Windows Azure, there's now a data sheet available here.
As Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) is rolling in Los Angeles, it's no surprise announcements are being made. Yes, Windows 7 is coming, and there's already a wealth of information available on MSDN in the format of a Developer Guide. Great!
Windows 7 appears to be more light-weight than Vista, but also backwards compatible with new features for everyone. For instance, the Office 2007 style ribbon seems to be there.
But then, there's Windows Azure. Azure is a cloud-computing version of Windows, allowing developers to write .NET code to run on the Azure platform. Developers already have their pre-release SDKs which is something I'm planning to investigate soon enough. There's also a new page called www.azure.com to have more information. Go check it out!
As a sidenote, Embarcadero/CodeGear announced Delphi Prism, which is RemObject's Oxygene in new clothing. Shortly put, it's Delphi .NET inside the Visual Studio IDE. Maybe something to look at.
Speaking of new development related web sites, MSDN's DevLabs in one such new site.
Presently, this new site features three "in the works" type of projects, namely PopFly, Pex, Chess and Small Basic. Of these, Small Basic seems the most interesting: a tiny, easy Basic like development system for beginners and kids. On a more serious note, Pex and Chess aim at helping developed build quality code.
Check them out!
Interested about Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System, VSTS? I noticed a new web site called Team System Rocks.com, that contains information about the product.
I'm not exactly sure if this is a new site, or is it just that I've visited it before, and then forgotten? Nonetheless, this is a site that you might want to visit, especially the tutorial videos seem interesting.
Just a day after I had finished my ASP.NET MVC session at Microsoft's Finnish WebDay 2008 at Kinopalatsi, Microsoft announced the first beta version of MVC.
The previous version used to be ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 from August, and this beta version is now said to be quite close to being feature complete.
More information can be found from Scott Guthrie's blog.
The Finnish Prosessori magazine has my latest .NET programming article titled ".NET sai uusia ominaisuuksia". The article talks about the new features in .NET versions 3.0 and 3.5, including the recent SP1.
The waiting is over: Silverlight 2.0 RTW (Release To Web) is finally here. Download your copy from Silverlight.net.
Scott Guthrie announced the new version yesterday in a teleconference, and today a press release was made.
Also, MSDN has just been updated, and you can find the Silverlight 2.0 runtime download there, plus the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 enabled development kit (SDK), and also Expression Blend 2 SP1.
More information available here as well. Go Silverlight!
Oftentimes, you need a way to find the correct location of the user's desktop, or any other special folder like Documents, Pictures, and so on. For years, this has been easy with Shell API functions such as SHGetFolderPath, but the thing is that this particular API is getting old. So old in fact, that beginning of Windows Vista (think Windows Server 2008 and forthcoming Windows 7 as well) this function is deprecated.
Thus, you need a better function, and in Vista an onwards it is called SHGetKnownFolderPath. Just lately, I needed to refresh an older Delphi application for Vista, and wanted to stop using deprecated APIs (a good idea more often than not). But of course (no surprise here), nobody had bothered to do the C language header translation for Delphi, so I had to do it myself (this is one reason I'm getting tired of Delphi, lack of cutting-edge API support). Here are the declarations you need, but remember that this only works on Vista and later.
Uses
ComObj;
Type
KNOWNFOLDERID = TGUID;
REFKNOWNFOLDERID = ^KNOWNFOLDERID;
PWSTR = PWideChar;
PPWSTR = ^PWSTR;
Const
FOLDERID_Desktop : KNOWNFOLDERID =
'{B4BFCC3A-DB2C-424C-B029-7FE99A87C641}';
Function SHGetKnownFolderPath(
rfid : REFKNOWNFOLDERID; dwFlags : DWORD;
hToken : THANDLE;
var ppszPath : PPWSTR) : HRESULT; StdCall;
External 'shell32.dll';
Procedure CoTaskMemFree(
pv: Pointer); StdCall; External 'ole32.dll';
Now then, with the API declarations in place, it's easy to write functions such as GetDesktopPath:
function GetDesktopPath: String;
Var
PathBuf : PPWSTR;
APIResult : HRESULT;
begin
APIResult := SHGetKnownFolderPath(
@FOLDERID_Desktop,0,0,PathBuf);
OleCheck(APIResult);
Result := WideCharToString(PWideChar(PathBuf));
CoTaskMemFree(PathBuf);
end;
Of course, if you are a C/C++ developer, simply start using the SHGetKnownFolderPath API from the latest header files. And if .NET and/or C# programming is your call, then you already have System.Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Desktop).
Keywords: HowTo, How to get desktop path, desktop directory, special folder location, shell folder.
In the process of recording Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 version numbers for RTM and SP1 (Service Pack 1) versions, here are they are for future records.
For Visual Studio 2008 original version, the version number reads as follows:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Version 9.0.21022.8 RTM Microsoft .NET Framework Version 3.5
The, once SP1 is installed, the version information is:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Version 9.0.30729.1 SP Microsoft .NET Framework Version 3.5 SP1
As years pass, finding this information can be difficult. And experience tells that later on, this information can be hard to find.
Finally, here are the images from Help/About. RTM:
And SP1:
It was announced just recently, that Microsoft has combined the Team System products Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Developers and Team Edition for Databases to a single product bearing the Developer name.
Those who have the MSDN subscription, will be able to download the database bits to work with the original developer edition.
As Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 have been just announced, it's no surprise that more details are coming available each day.
Now, Microsoft has come up with a new site talking more about the planned features for .NET 4.0 and especially the new Windows Server codename "Dublin". And, we're sure to see and hear more once Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) kicks in.
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