.NET is now more than eight years old, and some of its APIs got old with more grace than others. System.IO in particular has always been a little awkward. It’s mostly static method calls ( Path.* , Directory.* , etc.) and some stateful classes ( DirectoryInfo , FileInfo ). In these APIs, paths are plain strings. Since .NET v1, lots of good things happened to C#: lambda expressions, extension methods, optional parameters to name just a few. Outside of .NET, other interesting things happened as well. For example, you might have heard about this JavaScript library that had some success introducing a fluent API to handle the hierarchical structure of the HTML DOM. You know? jQuery . Knowing all that, every time I need to use the stuff in System...(read more)

Just a quick post to share a link to last years videos for the Oredev developer conference http://oredev.org/video Here is my .net debugging presentation where I show off some windbg + new VS.NET features and apart from all the good developer content, you might also want to check out Scott Hanselmans session on Information Overload and managing the workflow with some tips and tricks on how he manages twitter/facebook/email etc. Thank you to the organizers of Oredev for posting these, Tess Read More......(read more)

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to MvcContrib T4MVC page on CodePlex   A few weeks back, we announced (mostly on Twitter) that T4MVC was moving into the MvcContrib Codeplex project.  I didn’t say much about it at the time because there wasn’t a whole lot to say yet, in the sense that the move had not actually happened.  MvcContrib was transitioning from github to Mercurial, and since I wasn’t familiar with either one, I figured I’d wait for that and only have to learn Mercurial. So to make it short, all of this has finally happen, and we can now say that T4MVC is officially part of MvcContrib!  Many thanks to Eric Hexter and Jeremy Skinner for helping make this possible.   So what difference does it make for it...(read more)

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release. Last month I blogged about a patch we released for the VS 2010 RC that fixed a bad intellisense crash issue.  This past week we released two additional patches that you can download and apply to the VS 2010 RC to immediately fix two other common issues...(read more)

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This a quick post to announce a few upcoming events for those in the UK. I’ll be presenting in Glasgow, Scotland on March 25th I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Glasgow on March 25th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet. You can learn more about the event and register for free here .  There are only a few spots left – so register quickly.  When the event fills up there will be a wait-list – please add yourself to this as we’ll be encouraging people who won’t be able to attend to...(read more)

This last week over a 7 day period, I went to Munich, Cairo and Dubai. I presented in three keynotes and did a total of 10 sessions. I crossed 12 time zones and missed my kids. I talked to/with/at about 3000 people. I'm utterly shattered. I took some video while I was travelling with my Creative Vado HD and slapped it into Windows Live Movie Maker just now. Here's my trip montage. You could call this either "The Glamourous Life of a Technical Speaker" or "If this is Tuesday, this must be Cairo" or "Scott needs to learn to say No." It was great fun, I spoke at VSOne in Munich. I talked about .NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC. We also had a nice Nerd Dinnner . Then I headed over to Cairo Code Camp and the turnout was...(read more)

We updated the browser definitions files included with ASP.NET 4 to include information on recent browsers and devices such as Google Chrome and the iPhone. You can use these browser definition files with earlier versions of ASP.NET such as ASP.NET 3.5. The updated browser definition files, and instructions for installing them, can be found here: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41420 The changes in the browser definition files can cause backwards compatibility issues when you upgrade an ASP.NET 3.5 web application to ASP.NET 4. If you encounter compatibility issues, you can install the old browser definition files in your ASP.NET 4 application. The old browser definition files are included in the download file referenced above. What...(read more)

A hotfix is now available for issues most commonly described as " Controls are not being recognized in the code-behind " and " Editing existing .aspx regenerates .aspx.designer.(cs), but most of the controls are now missing ”. This hotfix can be downloaded from: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=27117 The update addresses the following Connect bugs: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=532641 : Cannot embed standard asp.net controls in Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=533071 : Controls in CreateUserWizard WizardStep not visible as before http://connect.microsoft...(read more)

ORCS Web has updated their Hosting Sandbox for Visual Studio 2010 RC and ASP.NET 4.0 RC. http://vs2010host.com To learn more about the new Web Deployment features in Visual Studio 2010 check out this Step by Step Walkthrough on Web 1-Click Publish with VS 2010 To provide feedback on the RC please visit the Visual Studio Connect site .  You can also contact the Web Tooling team directly by sending mail to vsweb@microsoft.com Ben Byrd | Visual Web Developer Read More......(read more)

I’ll use a walkthrough example to show how to package a web application with speech API COM component using Visual Studio 2010.  I wrote and tested the sample in Win7 x86 with IIS7.5, and packaged and manually installed to win2k3 x86 IIS6 (which only had 3.5 framework installed). 1. Create a C# 3.5 web application 2. Add COM reference to “Microsoft Speech Object Library” 3. In Default.aspx, add the following between <div> < asp : ScriptManager ID ="ScriptManager1" runat ="server"> </ asp : ScriptManager > < asp : UpdatePanel ID ="UpdatePanel1" runat ="server"> < ContentTemplate > < asp : TextBox ID ="TextBox1" runat ="server" Width ="274px">...(read more)

Visual Studio.NET 2010 has a new feature that allows you to create nice directed graphs with a markup language called DGML (Directed Graph Markup Language).  Visualizing object graphs with DGML Chris Lovett wrote a tool that takes GCRoot output and transforms it to a DGML document so that you can see the roots of an object in a more visual way, and finally Mohamed Mahmoud went one step further and made a debugger extension that does this for you directly.    The debugger extension is called VGCRoot and you can get the extension, and some instructions and demos for it here . The VGCRoot extensions If you are looking at a memory dump in windbg and try to figure out why your object is still sticking around, collection after...(read more)

You can learn a lot by reading other people's source code. That's the idea behind this series, " The Weekly Source Code ." You can certainly become a better programmer by writing code but I think good writers become better by reading as much as they can. I was poking around in the WebFormsMVP project's code and noticed an interesting pattern . You've seen code to get data from a database and retrieve it as an object, like this: public Widget Find(int id) { Widget widget = null; widget = (from w in _db.Widgets where w.Id == id select w).SingleOrDefault(); return widget; } This code is synchronous, meaning basically that it'll happen on the same thread and we'll wait around until it's finished. Now, here's...(read more)

My friend and fellow debugger Brian at http://Kodehoved.dk recently wrote a couple of posts on news with sos for .NET framework 4.0 (in Danish) New SOS Commands in .NET 4 More debugging news in CLR 4 Since Danish, although a beautiful language is probably foreign to most of you I figured I’d write a summary of the new commands in English and add some comments of my own. Loading sos for .NET 4.0 As in 2.0 you will find sos.dll in the framework directory so you can load it in windbg or cdb using the full path .load C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30128\sos.dll You can also use the short hand .loadby method but since the name of the core dll has changed in 4.0, you will no longer load it using .loadby sos mscorwks, instead you can now load...(read more)

One of the comments I got on my last post on view/view model hookup options was the following: I've been a mvvm fan but actually when I see all the hoops to jump through I wonder at times how effective this is So I wanted to take a moment to list what I thought compelled me to adopt the ViewModel pattern of client application development (so much so, that I now feel odd writing Silverlight and sometimes even Ajax apps in any other way). Some will be obvious benefits, especially to those already using MVVM in their everyday development, but I want to throw in a couple that are farther out exploratory ideas that I am thinking about. I'd also love to pursue what it means to make view model more mainstream, so if you've got ideas on...(read more)

If there’s one impression that Austin left on me, besides the one that Rudy’s “extra moist” barbecue left on my gut, is that it’s a developer friendly town. This past week I spent three days in Austin meeting with all sorts of developers and had many great conversations about technology. I met with companies and people with a passion for technology that couldn’t be suppressed. Meeting with Dell The reason I was in town was to give a couple of presentations at a mini-conference for Dell employees. On my first day in Austin, the day before the conference, I met with a team working on the next generation of Dell.com . The site is undergoing a large scale rearchitecture based heavily on ASP.NET MVC 2. I fielded some questions on ASP.NET MVC and...(read more)