On Demand training on latest web technologies

 

Programming with HTML5 and related technologies

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/in/details/4f39070b-c435-4de5-9f50-0d2852c1dfbe

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 for Web Developers

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/in/details/90b79e80-eae9-47c8-a4f4-a2431e62178d

ASP.NET MVC3 Development with Visual Studio 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/in/details/fd907f28-bcbd-4a00-871f-4be5965d3764

Code-First Development with Entity Framework

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/in/details/966167f3-9da3-422b-ab7c-0ecedd3ae5f2

Web Sockets & Indexed DB

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/in/details/83478b2d-e2c2-427d-8a05-7e795efa03f0

Building cross browser compatible websites

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/in/details/0ed592c6-cf3b-495b-8e22-48f530f89f3b

Feedback on Visual Studio ALM or TFS

Now you can directly provide feedback on TFS to the team in terms of new features which you want to see in next version. You can also vote on existing new features requested.

Reach to this site for providing feedback

http://visualstudioalm.uservoice.com/forums/100197-visual-studio-alm

What’s new in Visual Studio vNext ?

There are still few months before we start getting the beta of Visual Studio vNext including TFS but the recent public announcements and demos have already created lot of excitement.
This will be a next major release after Visual Studio 2010.
Here are few of the important features coming up in ALM space.

• Onboarding Stakeholder & Operations teams on TFS
• Storyboarding tool primarily for Stakeholders
• Stakeholder feedback Tool
• Enhanced TFS web for backlog and iteration planning
• Scrum Board
• TFS connector for SCOM. This will allow operations team to directly log production issues from SCOM into TFS. Beta is already available for this and can be downloaded and installed.
• Code Review inbuilt into TFS.

For further detailed reading, have a look at following links:
Visual Studio vNext Roadmap
Visual Studio vNext ALM Foundational Session

* Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 Released

Enterprise Library is one free code library which is recommended for every development team who wants to focus on writing business code instead of spending too much time on writing framework code. By using EL you automatically bring lots of best practices and patterns to your application.

P&P team has announced the release of version 5.0.  Though no new block has been added, there are considerable amount of improvements in all blocks. It supports .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 contains the following application blocks:

• Caching Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate a cache in their applications. Pluggable cache providers and persistent backing stores are supported.
• Cryptography Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate hashing and symmetric encryption in their applications.
• Data Access Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate standard database functionality in their applications, including both synchronous and asynchronous data access and returning data in a range of formats.
• Exception Handling Application Block. Developers and policy makers can use this application block to create a consistent strategy for processing exceptions that occur throughout the architectural layers of enterprise applications.
• Logging Application Block. Developers can use this application block to include logging functionality for a wide range of logging targets in their applications. This release further improves logging performance.
• Policy Injection Application Block. Powered by the Interception mechanism built in Unity, this application block can be used to implement interception policies to streamline the implementation of common features, such as logging, caching, exception handling, and validation, across a system.
• Security Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate authorization and security caching functionality in their applications.
• Unity Application Block. Developers can use this application block as a lightweight and extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection, as well as instance and type interception.
• Validation Application Block. Developers can use this application block to create validation rules for business objects that can be used across different layers of their applications.

Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 Home Page

* Installing VS 2010 help .. read this first

While installing documentation, you will be asked for value of ‘Library Location’ which is actually the place where local help will be installed.

This cannot be changed once given and even uninstall/install of VS 2010 won’t help. So be careful.

VS 2010 uses new help system called Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0 and so different experience.

If you really need to change it .. uninstall VS 2010 and Help Viewer 1.0 from control panel. Reinstall VS 2010 again.

* MVPs help launch Visual Studio 2010

* VSTS and VS 2010 launched with .NET 4.0

A big reason for developer community to smile and celebrate. Dev tools team at Microsoft has again done a great job.  

Here are few important links :

Soma’s launch announcement

Watch Launch Keynote

Compare Various Editions

What's new in .NET Framework 4.0

What's new in Visual Studio 2010 - Rosario

* Connecting VS 2008 to VSTS 2010 RC

If you are facing issue in connecting to VSTS 2010 RC from your VS 2008 Team Explorer, the possible issue can be due to missing of following update.

KB974558 : Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 (Installer)

You can download and manually install from here.

* Beta 2 of .NET 4.0 and VS 2010 released

Read all the details here.

* MSDN for Low Bandwidth Internet connections

MSDN team has added low bandwidth version also to various view options available for MSDN library pages.

Standard View

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode.aspx

Low Bandwidth View

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode(loband).aspx

PDA

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode(pda).aspx

Robots

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode(robot).aspx

Printer-friendly

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode(printer).aspx

MSDN Inside the (IDE)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode(ide).aspx

MSDN for Visual Studio 2010

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode(dev10ide).aspx

Complete details can be read @ following post http://www.hanselman.com/blog/LowBandwidthViewAndOtherHiddenAndFutureFeaturesOfMSDN.aspx

* 2010 : The next launch wave

2010 is going to see the next launch wave of Microsoft Products. ‘Office 14’ has been named as Office 2010 based on its launch schedule. Exchange 2010 is expected to launch in late 2009 while rest of the Office products in 2010. Remember there was no ‘Office 13’. After ‘Office 12’ its directly ‘Office 14’.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are also expected to be launch in 2010. So get ready…..

* OBA, Office Development and VSTO – Getting started

OBAs (Office Business Applications) are new types of application/solutions which are built on Office System 2007 as a platform and so deployed on top of Office System 2007 apps. The development stream to develop OBAs is called Office Development and the tools used to develop OBAs are called VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office).

A typical Information worker in any industry today uses various tools and communication channels to complete an atomic business process. The list may comprise of following:

· Line of Business Solution for Transactions etc.

· Content Management solution or Knowledge Portal for reference knowledge.

· Mails to communicate & share documents with peers

· Telephone calls for knowledge gathering/sharing

While middleware technologies have considerably improved the automation and workflow enablement of system based business processes, the business process which involve humans are still quite disjointed. There is a lot of opportunity to improve productivity and efficiency in human based workflows.

OBAs are newer kind of application which try to fill the gaps in human workflow by providing a simplified and yet powerful platform to collaborate and execute business processes. OBAs can be exposed to users via a popular and familiar Office client interface or web based interface.

OBAs leverages the following Office System capabilities:

· SharePoint workflow and Windows Workflow foundation.

· Extensible User Interface of Office Clients

· ECMA Office Open XML File formats

· Business Data Catalog for connecting to LOB applications.

· Search portal

· Business Intelligence and Reporting Services.

Pls find below the first three articles in this series.

OBA, Office Development, VSTO - An Overview

Visual Studio Tools for Office - Getting Started

VSTO - Application Level AddIn Architecture

VSTO - Document Level Customization Architecture

* Captions Language Interface Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

Now you can read the captions in Visual Studio in following languages:

Arabic, Czech, Hebrew, Hindi, Malayalam, Oriya, Polish, Tamil and Turkish.

The Microsoft Captions Language Interface Pack (CLIP) is a simple language translation solution that uses tooltip captions to display translations for English user interface terms.
CLIP is designed for those Visual Studio users who are not very fluent in English. CLIP can help those users learn and use Visual Studio 2008 by providing translation for the most common user interface elements of the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). CLIP is the result of the close collaboration between Microsoft and local academic communities.
To use, simply move your mouse around the screen and halt briefly over any text you want translated. Users can also add their own translations and copy and paste any translation results.

Download CLIP for VS 2008

* Free Microsoft Software for Indian Students

Bill Gates recently launched the DreamSpark initiative which provides free Microsoft software to students in India.

It can be downloaded from Internet or DVD can be collected from partners after verifying the student status.

Following products are available :

• VS 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Expression Studio
• Virtual PC
• Game Studio 2.0

DreamSpark

* Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP available for download

The CTP of VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 is available for download from here.

Its available as Virtual PC image only and total download size is around 7GB.

• What's new in .NET Framework 4.0
• What's new in 'Dublin' Windows Application Server
• What's new in Visual Studio 2010 - Rosario
• What's new in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1

* What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 – Rosario

The main objectives of this release are:

• A tool for everyone involved in Application Lifecycle Management
• Absolute delight for Architects with lot of focus on Modeling
• Make testing easier and more effective.

Read the complete list and details here.

New in VS 2010

* What’s new in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Check out my latest quick article covering following:

• New in .NET 3.5 SP1
• New in Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Download links for .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1

Article : What’s new in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1

I will be adding more to it.

* Rosario, Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft.NET 4.0

Last year in August when I blogged about the new features coming up in Rosario, little was known about the time frame of its release.

The latest press release from Microsoft gives lots of information about it ..

Rosario is Visual Studio 2010 and will target Microsoft.NET 4.0. This also marks the beginning of first wave for OSLO platform.

The main objective of VS 2010 will be to fill some of the gaps in the Application Lifecycle Management like:

• Comprehensive support for Modeling tools and will support both UML and DSL including OSLO repository.
• Better testing and collaboration capabilities.

Read more of it here Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0

* What gets modified with VS 2008 SP1 ?

Here is the list :

Visual C++ 2008 SP1 - x86 Runtime
Visual C++ 2008 SP1 - x64 Runtime
Visual C++ 2008 SP1 - IA64 Runtime
Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007
Microsoft Office Visual Web Developer 2007
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite - ENU
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Performance Collection Tools - ENU
Visual Studio Tools for the Office system 3.0 Runtime
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 Tools
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 Win32 Tools
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 .NET Framework Tools
SQL Server System CLR Types
Microsoft SQL Server Management Objects
SQL Publishing Wizard 1.3
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 (ENU)
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Design Tools (ENU)

* Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 – SP1 Released

Links for download :

• Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions with Service Pack 1 (Bootstrappers)
• Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions with Service Pack 1 (iso)
• Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Bootstrapper)
• Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)
• Visual Studio  Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1
• NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

New/Enhancements in this release :

• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Entity Designer
• Support for SQL Server 2008
• .NET Framework Client Profile

Other Important Links

• VS 2008 SP1 Beta must be removed prior to installing the release of VS 2008 SP1
• Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool
• Installation troubleshooting tips