Nicholas Clarke

It seems that you can wait ages for something to finally be released by Microsoft. For example I started .Net with Visual Studio 2005 beta only to wish for the RTM version and then SP1. SP1 came along only for me to wish that I had 2008. All of this due to bugs and missing/cut features.

It seems that Microsoft is coming to the end of a massive development cycle as there are lots of projects starting to stick their heads above water (Microsoft Firewall).

These are some that I have noticed including some links:

Silverlight 2.0 - Beta Q1 of 2008
ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions - Public release due
IIS 7.0 – Coming early 2008 with the new version of Windows Server
ASP.Net MVC – Preview any time now with the supported release in the first half of 2008

• ASP.Net MVC Framework Part 1 - Overview
• ASP.Net MVC Framework Part 2 - URL Routing
• ASP.Net MVC Framework Part 3 - Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views

Windows Vista SP1 – Just got RC so RTM will not be too far away
Parallel FX – Preview out now

• Programming in the Age of Concurrency - Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy: Concurrent Programming with PFX
• Daniel Moth Parallel Extensions
• Parallel FX Team Blog

Visual Studio 2008 – Out now for MSDN subscribers with the official release being February.
.Net 3.5 – Out now
.Net Source Code – Coming soon
LINQ – Out now

• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 1 - Architecture for LINQ to SQL
• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 2 - What is LINQ?
• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 3 - DAOs and Repositories
• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 4 - Dynamic Queries

Volta - Technology preview
Expression Service Packs – Out now
XNA Game development platform – RTM Coming Soon

I’m sure I have missed some, but even so this is quite an impressive list to release at the same time especially when some of these are linked.

All of this makes me wonder what Microsoft is working on that we have not yet heard about. Oh how great it would be if I could to be a fly on their wall. As this is not possible I guess the next best thing is Channel9

So I guess the wait continues. I’m looking forward to the first half of next year.

Shawn has created a short but sweet video of what debugging .Net code will be like. He also goes on to confirm that the source code will only be released in a “Read Only” format! Meaning that we will not be able to modify, recompile and of course redistribute any of the libraries.

This is not to say that someone wont try, but then this is of course then without any Microsoft support, permission and could end up with a court appearance!

Shawn Burke : Discussing the Release of .NET Source Code

Shawn also has some more info on this blog post.

This is the second most annoying thing during my daily developing with Visual Studio.

I’m not totally sure why someone would add this feature but in Visual Studio you are able to copy blank! So if you are like me and have a lazy finger that for some odd reason hits Ctl+C instead of Ctl+V then this tip will be a life saver (especially if you have already closed the original window).

For more great tips on Visual Studio check out Sara Ford’s blog.

Ever since I discovered Sara’s blog I have been playing around with all kinds of settings even to the extent that my colleagues think that I have gone back in time by recreating the terminal windows.

Just for the record in first place with the most annoying thing is the random crashing, which I have heard Microsoft has addressed in Visual Studio 2008.