I really liked Angus’ recent post on User Stories (Wikipedia link about User Stories here) and how he grapples with question of whether they are even needed. User Stories feature prominently in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 releases, so you’re sure to hear more about them (in the Microsoft space that is). The value in Angus’ post is how he outlines the issues (and thoughts from a variety...
I was pleased to see Somasegar’s blog post last week announcing that the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 release is being delayed. The reason: quality. The Beta 2, whilst good, isn’t up to the standard they wanted in order to meet the current release schedule. Thus, they’re going to extend the beta period in order to get it right. In fact they’re going add an additional release in Feb to...
I love the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 pitch – no namby-pamby here: This is no namby-pamby beta. It’s a full-octane beta release with a “Go Live†license that you can use to concept, build, test, and deploy* your next project. The Beta 2 has just been released, and whilst it seems to be downloading/installing OK, I notice that most of the download pages still refer to Beta 1 (but I’m...
As Nick has mentioned we’ve released a Getting Started guide for the Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio controls. The November CTP (details here, download here) has a bunch of controls for implementing Live Services in your web apps. It includes ASP.NET controls for Contacts, Login status, Maps, Messenger chats, Silverlight streaming etc. The November CTP includes compatibility with Windows...
I’ve always liked how the Team System team work hard to provide details on what they’re up to. This is becoming more the norm on Microsoft assets (just check out the great job Beth Massi has been doing on the VSTO site for example), and so I shouldn’t be surprised to see just how serious they see simple things like content management to be. as Jeff Beehler notes, the Team System team have...
One of the biggest hurdles with VSTO is deployment. As you probably know, the pre-requisites for running a VSTO app (even of the simplest Hello World variety) include: .NET Framework 3.5 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) VSTO Runtime (Plus Office of course) Now, packaging these isn’t the issue, since the Visual Studio team have worked hard to make the ClickOnce process a simple and seamless...
Maarten van Stam has a nice tip for isolating specific changes made in SP1. Check out his post here, or just run this search and you’ll see the list of 902 pages worth of doco changes. You can then narrow that further by selecting one of the one of the Refinement options: Refining by Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual Studio 2008 for example gives us 306 results: Speaking of VSTO related...
Thanks to Deepak Kapoor for alerting me to this one – the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery – a list of add-ins and extensions for Visual Studio. It’s been around for a little while now, so you may already know about it. But if not, start here with the list of Highest Rated add-ins for Visual Studio.
Technorati Tags: Visual Studio Gallery
A nice little interview with Milind Lele by Beth Massi, uncovering some of the nice data sync enhancements coming in SP1 (especially if you are connecting to SQL Server 2008). If you haven’t seen this stuff covered before, then this 15 minute overview is worth watching. But treat this as a ‘what’s possible’ not a ‘how to do it’ video. It covers the functionality nicely, but I’m a...
I’ve been meaning to blog link this for ages, because I use it all the time but always have to go searching for the URL… So here it is, Corneliu’s most excellently helpful Anti-spam email encoding tool. Put in your email address and it’ll return a nice encoded one that most spam bots won’t recognise (sure the smarter they become the less effective this will be, but you’ve still got a...