Author Archives: Larry House

If you were not able to attend Build

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If you were not able to attend Build, and you feel like you’re missing out, here’s your fix.

You can download the Windows 8 Developer Preview from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/ .  Scott Hanselman has a great Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) .  Please note the Warranty!  The Windows 8 Developer Preview is pre-Beta software, and as such it WILL crash, do unexpected things and in general misbehave.  I have had pretty good luck with it so far, but I haven’t used it much and I certainly haven’t pushed it at all.

Some of the new items announced @ build are available as NuGet Packages (ex. ASP.NET Optimization – Bundling – 0.1  ) and can be used in Visual Studio 2010.  Just add a Library Package Reference in your project and go.

Also, Channel 9 has the keynotes available to view online.  Currently there aren’t any videos for the sessions, but every session I have attended has been recorded, so I am assuming it is just a matter of time.

Hope this helps!

Build Windows – Day 2

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Day 2 got off to a great start with a great Keynote.  Jason Zander and Scott Guthrie showed some of the great new features coming in Visual Studio 11 / .Net 4.5.  We also got our first peek at some of the work being done in Windows Server 8.  (If you don’t know PowerShell I would highly recommend learning!)  Hopefully later today the video will become available on Channel 9 and I’ll update this post with a link.

Sessions

This is just a brief overview of the sessions I attended and the topics covered.  I’ll cover most of the details in depth in future posts so check back over the next couple of weeks.

What’s new in Visual Studio 11 – Jason Zander (TOOL-820F)

I started out the break out sessions with “What’s new in Visual Studio 11”.  Lots of cool new features!  First off, all the power pack tools are built in out of the box.  There are a lot of enhancements to the UI, with a focus on streamlining tasks and reducing clutter.  For example the find dialog has been replaced with an floating drop down in the editor.

The XAML editor from Expression Blend now replaces the old XAML editor.

The XML/XAML/HTML editor now has tag matching.  If you change a beginning

tag to a tag the matching

tag automatically updates to a </span> etc.

The CSS Editor now has a color picker that displays in-line as you are typing your CSS.  The picker is also smart enough to display the colors you have already used in your style sheet as the first options.

Using Windows Server 8 for Building private and public IaaS clouds – Jeff Woolsey, Sandeep Singhal, Yingal Edery (SAC-429T)

Lots of cool new stuff coming in Windows Server 8,  Especially in Hyper-V.   During the session the demonstrated the new live migration by moving a virtual machine running on one host (using local storage, not shared storage, the vhd was on the host machine’s physical disks) to another host while it was running.  The whole process took just a couple minutes and the virtual machine continued running the whole time!

 ASP.Net 4.5 loves HTML , CSS3 & JavaScript – Matt Osborn (TOOL-76T)

Matt gave a great presentation on HTML 5 in ASP.net 4.5 and Visual Studio 11.  He showed off a number of enhancements in the IDE like:

  • Auto Tag matching
  • CSS Color Picker
  • Automatic DocType detection
  • Intellisense for Character Set Meta Tags
  • CSS Folding and Formatting

We looked at the new Minification feature that is available to automatically compress and combine your CSS style sheets and JavaScript files.  (I believe This is now available as a NuGet package for Asp.Net 4.0 as well).

He also talked a bit about what we can do to use HTML 5 in ASP.net 4.0 today using Modernizr and graceful degradation.

Create rich, data-driven Web apps with ASP.Net 4.5 Web Forms – Damian Edwards (TOOL-906T)

In this session we went through building an application using ASP.Net 4.5 Web Forms and Entity Framework 4.1 (aka. Magic Unicorn Edition 🙂 ) .    Web Forms now has ModelBinder support just like MVC, Strong Typing in bound controls, Data Annotations can now be tied to a validation summary to provided validation feedback, and much more.

Today’s Schedule

I am looking forward to attending these sessions today:

  • Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic – Anders Hejlsberg
  • Creating immersive data experiences with Entity Framework – David Annsley-DeWinter/Jeff Derstadt
  • Building IIS and ASP.Net apps with the power of async –  Damian Edwards / Phil Haack
  • Building high performance Metro style apps using HTML 5 – Mathias Jourdain

Build Windows – Day 1

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Day one of the conference was exciting.  We got out first official look at the Windows 8 Developer Preview with the new Metro Interface, Visual Studio 11 Express, and some demos of building applications with Metro.   Oh, and of course, all the attendees received their Samsung Windows 8 Developer’s PC.  I’ll blog about the PC a bit later, I just got mine up and running due to the lack of internet connectivity around the hotel last night.  Funny thing, if you give 5000 developers a new PC that they have to activate on line the network gets bogged down…

Anyway, a few take aways from yesterday’s Key Note and demos.

  • There is a new Windows API called WinRT (Windows Run Time) which is baked directly into the OS (ie. it’s not a framework layered on top) which is the new way to program on the Windows Platform.
  • Windows 8 has a much smaller memory footprint than Windows 7 (nearly half) and is extremely optimized for performance.
  • Visual Studio 11 supports creating Metro apps from C++, C# & VB.Net, and HTML 5 / Javascript.  (ie. .Net is NOT dead for all those fear mongering before the conference.)
  • Getting started creating simple Metro apps is easy using the built in Visual Studio Templates.
  • WinRT does not support GDI.
  • The Windows 8 interface is extremely immersive and personal.

 

More to come later.  I have to head out for the Day 2 Keynote.

Looking forward to some great break out sessions today.

New Blog…

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Welcome to my new blog.  I really loved the features and themes available from my old blog provider, but it was extremely buggy, so I chose to move everything over to wordpress.   Things seem much more stable here!

I have imported some of my old posts (not many) and hopefully now that I am on a more stable platform I can get to putting  up some content on a regular basis.