Free eBook: Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Well for those of you who want to learn about MS Visual Studio 2010 and are used to earlier versions, here is another great effort from Microsoft and it is free. Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011; 336 pages), written by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines.

The book is not a language primer, a language reference, or a single technology book. It’s a book that will help professional developers move from previous versions of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover the features of Visual Studio 2010 through an application. It will go through a lot of the exciting new language features and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves. It will instead put the emphasis on how you would get to those new tools and features from Visual Studio 2010.

If you are expecting this book to thoroughly cover the new Entity Framework or ASP.NET MVC 2, this is not the book for you. If you want to read a book where the focus is on Visual Studio 2010 and on the reasons for moving to Visual Studio 2010, this is the book for you.

The book is written having three audiences in mind:

• Part I is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010
• Part II is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2005
• And Part III is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2008

You can download a PDF of the book here and can help Microsoft by filling out a survey at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/booksurvey.

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Couple of fixes for Visual Studio

Microsoft Connect site collected all (OK most of ) the fixes for Visual Studio. You can download them as per your need from this link, however, you should pay attention to the Terms of Use, since you cannot redistribute them.

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Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool Extensions

Another news from Scott Gu, who just blogged about the cool new VS 2010 Productivity Power Tool Extensions.
Highlight of this is the Add Reference Dialog:

This new Add Reference dialog caches assembly information – which means it loads within a second or two (note: the very first time it still loads assembly data – but it then caches it and makes it fast afterwards). The new Add Reference dialog also now includes searching support – making it easier to find the assembly you are looking for.

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VS2010 support for iPhone apps in Apple keynote

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft (MSFT) to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. 

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VS 2010 and .NET 4 Series at Scott Gu's blog

Another great set of posts at Scott Gu's blog related to VS2010 and .NET 4. This is an ongoing series for the topics comprising new and enhanced features of VS2010 and .NET 4. However, currently following topics are available:

• Clean Web.Config Files

• Starter Project Templates

• Multi-targeting

• Multiple Monitor Support

• New Code Focused Web Profile Option

• HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets

• Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications

• URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms

• Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010

• VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements

• WPF 4

• Add Reference Dialog Improvements

• SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4

• Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4

• Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms

• Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs

• Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2

• Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010

• New Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4

• JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010

• VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (DataTips, BreakPoints, Import/Export)

• Box Selection and Multi-line Editing Support with VS 2010

• VS 2010 Extension Manager (and the cool new PowerCommands Extension)

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Coding Guidelines

Here is a thread at CodeProject that discusses Coding Guidelines and refers to MS guidelines for coding by Brad Adams.
I would highly recommend to go through the guidelines time to time to refresh ourselves. Here is the link to the guidelines...

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Create and share Visual Studio color schemes

As developers we often spend a large part of our day staring at code within Visual Studio.  If you are like me, after awhile the default VS text color scheme starts to get a little boring.

The good news is that Visual Studio allows you to completely customize the editor background and text colors to whatever you want – allowing you to tweak them to create the experience that is “just right” for your eyes and personality.  You can then optionally export/import your color scheme preferences to an XML file via theTools->Import and Export Settings menu command.

Luke Sampson launched the http://studiostyles.info/ site a week ago (built using ASP.NET MVC 2, ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010).

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Silverlight Training Course (Silverlight 4)

A Free 8-part Silverlight 4 training course from Microsoft is established. The Training Course includes a whitepaper that explains all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!

http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/

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.NET4 Complete List of Breaking Changes

.NET4 Complete List of Breaking Changes (remember it's sidebyside: apps don't break when you install). This topic describes migration issues between the .NET Framework version 3.5 Service Pack 1 and the .NET Framework version 4, including fixes, changes for standards compliance and security, and changes based on customer feedback. Most of these changes do not require any programming modifications in your applications. For those that may involve modifications, see the Recommended changes column of the table. 

This topic describes notable changes in the following areas:

• ASP.NET
• Core
• Data (ADO.NET)
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• XML

For information about new features, see What's New in the .NET Framework 4.
Read the entire article here...

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VS2010 Professional RC is available for non-MSDN subscribers

Here it is for those who are not the MSDN Subscribers.
VS 2010 RC Download Page

[UPDATED]
Note that you can run 2010, 2008 and 2005 side by side, but you must have to uninstall Beta.
For further reading...

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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate

VS2010 RC  is available to MSDN subscribers on Monday, February 8th, with general availability on February 10th.

Release Candidate Highlights

	MSDN Subscribers: Download the Release Candidate
	Featured Overviews and Walkthroughs Check out this diverse collection of walkthroughs for RC. They provide step-by-step instructions for common scenarios and are a good place to start.

Please note: The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC release does not support Silverlight 4 development. If you are developing a Silverlight 4 application you should continue to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Launch Date

Microsoft has announced that the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010.
Read...

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