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The Developer.com web site has published my latest article about ASP.NET MVC development. Previously, I already wrote an introductory article for them about the same subject; this time the focus is more advanced features like localization and unit testing.
The article is available here. An article about ASP.NET Dynamic Data is also coming, so stay tuned and enjoy!
Microsoft has just recently announced that the next version of both Expression Studio and Silverlight — version 3 — will be available on July 10th. New features in these new versions include the following:
It appears that seven plus three equals ten.
Today for some reason, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 in one of my virtual machines I use for testing stopped working. I still fail to understand why this actually happened, but it might be because of an incompatible application install, a Windows update, or something similar. The symptoms in Visual Studio were the following. When starting Visual Studio, I got the following error:
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Microsoft Visual Studio
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Package Load Failure
Package 'Windows Forms Designer Hosting Package' has failed to load
properly ( GUID = {68939055-38E0-4D17-92CB-8909710D8178} ). Please contact
package vendor for assistance. Application restart is recommended, due to
possible environment corruption. Would you like to disable loading this
package in the future? You may use 'devenv /resetskippkgs' to re-enable
package loading.
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Yes No
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When Visual Studio find a problematic package, it asks whether you want to disable it from that point on. Clicking Yes will move the package to a list of disabled packages, and thus when you re-launch Visual Studio, that package isn't loaded anymore. The re-enable loading of failes packages, run DevEnv.exe (the IDE loader) with the "/resetskippkgs" switch. DevEnv.exe by default sits in the directory "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE".
Of course, I thought this would be a temporary problem, but it wasn't. I tried opening or creating new projects, and I always got the following error:
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Microsoft Visual Studio
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Project 'ConsoleApplication1' could not be opened because the Microsoft
Visual C# 2008 compiler could not be created. QueryService for
'{74946829-37A0-11D2-A273-00C04F8EF4FF}' failed.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
Because even rebooting didn't help, I ended up uninstalling and then re-installing Visual Studio 2008. This actually didn't work, because the Web Authoring Components failed to uninstall properly.
I ended up brutally deleting the offending folders from C:\Program Files, after which I did a new installation. Not very neat, but problem solved!
Since Microsoft Exchange is the major messaging and collaboration platform I used from day to day, it’s good to know that you can also develop applications for this platform. Already years ago, I explored the possibilities of extending Exchange's features, and for example reading mail boxes and getting notifications of new e-mails. I shared the results in for example The Delphi Magazine in August, 2006, but back then, developing such applications was difficult, required the use of COM, and didn’t support managed code.
But with Exchange 2007, this has changed, as the major interfaces are new web services. This means that it's quite easy to access these from, say, .NET and C#. But, I say "quite", as the web services has been far from easy or intuitive to use. Surely, they work, but to get wide-spread development, these interfaces should be easier to use.
But now, Microsoft has released a managed wrapper around these interfaces, and that sounds great! One of the key design principles was to keep the interfaces easy to use, and this is exactly what I'd want to see.
So, if you are interested in developing solutions or applications for Exchange 2007 (or, the forth-coming Exchange 2010), then be sure to check out the new EWS Managed API (Exchange Web Services)!
Today, Microsoft has released the first beta version of Visual Studio 2010 (and the .NET Framework 4.0 beta) on MSDN. Previosly, only a CTP version was available, but now a public Beta 1 version is available.
Also, there are new product pages available, they are also worth checking out.
Download your copy today!
Microsoft is busy tuning Visual Studio 2010 as I write. Part of the equation is the new version of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and the central Team Foundation Server 2010. On MSDN blogs, there’s a nice article about the new features planned for TFS 2010.
For instance, the new version will bring team project collections, and ease the task of creating application server farms. To learn more, check out the blog post on MSDN.
Microsoft's partner resources have released a set a nice tips about using the forth-coming Windows 7 more efficiently. The tips are distributed as three PDF files, each having seven (you guessed it!) tips.
If you want to take the best out of Windows 7, then these tips are worth checking out.
If you have been following SQL Server 2008's development, then you are probably available that SQL Server 2008's first service pack SP1 is now available.
Although this service pack is first and foremost addressing usability issues, it also means that the version number of the product is changing. Programmatically, you might want to check whether this service pack has been installed. As you will surely recall, this can be done for instance with the @@VERSION function, as in "SELECT FROM @@VERSION". Executing this query returns a long string with version and operating system details, such as (here on multiple lines for readability):
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (SP1) - 10.0.2531.0 (Intel X86) Mar 29 2009 10:27:29 Copyright (c) 1988-2008 Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Edition on Windows NT 5.2(Build 3790: Service Pack 2)
For the record, the version numbers for SQL Server 2008 RTM and SP1 are now:
This can prove to be valuable information, if you need to reference servers with or without the service pack.
Two weekends ago, I had the change to meet people from our ITpro.fi community at a seasonal spring meeting at Lehmonkärki, southern Finland. This time, the topics circles around Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010. And of course, our team of five .NET developers, a.k.a. "The SoftBoys" also got together.
Thanks again for the local Microsoft people and all ITpro.fi members for arranging and forming this fun and useful event!
Now that Windows 7 RC 1 is available for everyone (great!), it's a great time to start evaluating your applications on the new platform. To aid in this testing, you can download the new Developer Guide, available from MSDN Code Gallery.
Also, MSDN features a site for Windows 7 development. This site is named simply, Develop for Windows 7. Make sure you start testing your application and evaluating your code today, as the summer is soon here and the vacation period is starting.
Gartner has released a new Magic Quadrant about Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM). In this quadrant, software solution provides are ranged on a two-axis scale: vision and ability to execute. The latest report is here.
Recommended reading.
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