The Moth

I opened the Tools menu of VS2008 Beta 2 and observed three changes compared to Beta 1. Can you spot them without reading beyond the screenshot:

(Obviously the "Upgrade Visual Basic 6 Code..." is not available in C# projects but everything else is the same in C#)

That's right:
1. The "Device Emulator Manager" moved up next to the other Device options.
2. There is a new menu item "Partner Product Catalog" which seems to open a web page with VSIP members.
3. The "WCF SvcConfigEditor" is back. For more on this configuration editor tool visit the relevant msdn page.

Want a lightning quick tour of the complete list of .NET 3.5 assemblies and where to find them? Wanna know how I personally explore new DLLs? Watch my 14' video here.

For those of you with blogs out there, how many times do you genuinely search for something on the web only to get your blog as the top result? As pleasing as it is to see your blog in the top search results, sometimes it just gets in the way because you know darn well that you do not have the answer on your blog (or else you'd just search that, rather than the whole wide web, right?).

I somehow ended up having a similar conversation over email with one of our interns, Ian MacGillivray, here at Microsoft UK and he found a solution (showing off LIVE's rich customisation) and it looks like he is phishing for a link to his blog now... So, if you want to see how LIVE is superior to Google or how to create your own customised search engine or how to search the web excluding my blog (not recommended!), read the post from Ian MacGillivray aka Bartholomew ;-)

Soma writes about one of my favourite features of Visual Studio 2008 (that is actually an msbuild feature). If you want to see it in action, watch the 15' video I recorded last week on channel9.

LINQ to SQL has had some positive changes in VS 2008 Beta 2.

The most significant is that it is now faster (for background to this, see Rico's post) and has numerous bug fixes. Another very visible change is that for customisation, partial methods are utilised everywhere (LINQ to SQL was one of the drivers behind that feature). An aesthetic tool change is that when you map your database to the auto generated classes, you do not add a "LINQ to SQL File" item, instead you add a "LINQ to SQL Classes". It also has a much more professional icon rather than the old one that looked like it was drawn by... me! Here is the new one:


Opening System.Data.Linq.dll in your favourite dissasembler will reveal quite a few refactorings, but instead of looking inside out, I'll hand it over to Dinesh that has a fuller change list.

I recorded a 13' video on the improvements in VB intellisense (codenamed "intellisense everywhere") with VS2008. For more context and to watch it go here.

One of the fixes to the updates for CLR v2.0 (that we will receive when Fx 3.5 ships) is ngen performance improvements (inc. for WPF assemblies). Read the full story here.

Two of my favourite new APIs of Windows Vista are: restart/recovery and Restart Manager.

I mentioned in passing that Orcas March CTP supported the restart API. I haven't had a chance to test if that area has been improved because I can't get Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 to crash! If you have a repro case that crashes Beta 2, please let me know how.

How about Restart Manager support by Visual Studio 2008? I had tested this with Beta 1 and the answer was "no". Tested it with VS2008 Beta 2 and the answer is a resounding "yes". Not only it supports RM for being gently shutdown, but it actually does the right thing when it is restarted which is to auto open the solution you had open even down to the file you were viewing! If you had a file unsaved, it will prompt you on restart if you'd like to recover:


To see the RM functionality with VS2008 in action on your Vista machine running Beta 2, one easy way is to download my Vista demos, locate the project in the folder "RestartManagerSimulator", build it and then execute from the Debug folder the executable: RestartmanagerSimulator.exe. You should see an app that looks like this. In the textbox enter "devenv" (without the quotes) and hit the buttons in order: "Supports Restart?", "Register" and "Shutdown". Wait while that operation completes and Visual Studio exits. Then click on "Restart" and watch the magic happen ;-)

One of the annoying things of Visual Studio 2005 is that when you try and add a new item to a project the templates are listed in non-alphabetical order and there is no way to change that from the GUI. There are a couple of workarounds for VS2005 (e.g. see links from here), but they involve more work than to my liking.

Visual Studio 2008 improves the story by (almost always in Beta 2) sorting alphabetically :-)

Nice! The same is partially true for the New Project dialog. Also, as an added bonus, both of these dialogs are now resizable as the screenshots prove ;-)

I knew about covariance and contravariance that we got in the .NET 2.0 timeframe and I also knew that VB 9.0 (shipping with Visual Studio 2008) would fully support the feature and even enhance it. I hadn't appreciated how much it would be enhanced until I accidentally run into it yesterday (while recording a video on VB intellisense improvements).

I created a thread and had the delegate point to a method that I had already written. So I went to change my method to accept the Object as an argument and before having a chance I noticed that VB's background compiler hadn't complained about it!? In case you haven't guessed it by now, in VB9 you can omit the parameter list of a method pointed by a delegate, if you wish ;-)

Example:

' No need to type (s As Object, e As EventArgs)
Sub Button1_Click() Handles Button1.Click    
    Dim t = New Thread(AddressOf MyWorkerMethod)
    t.Start()
End Sub

Sub MyWorkerMethod() 'No need to type (o As Object)
    'Do sth on worker thread
End Sub

Read more about relaxed delegates on msdn (bottom of the article). Like with all other language features, you can use this one in your .NET 2.0 projects in VS 2008.