Hacking WCF Extensions for Visual Studio 2005

If you are still using Visual Studio 2005 and need to develop WCF services you need the following: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package (SP2) The Visual Studio 2005 extensions for.NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP 3 The problem with the later is that Microsoft no longer supports it. Visual Studio 2008 … Read more

Windows API Code Pack for .NET 3.5

MSDN Code Gallery made available an update for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET Framework 3.5 (or above), a library that provides access to some Window 7 features and some existing features in previous operating systems. It includes: Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars. Known Folders, … Read more

More About Code Contracts

In a recent post I wrote about Code Contracts in .NET. Now you can find a more detailed article on this topic at sharparena.com. In this article I’m providing more information and examples on: pre-conditions post-conditions object invariants asserts and assumptions quantifiers In additions, you should check the official user documentation, which can be found … Read more

Google Wave

Google has unveil the next product they will launch later this year. It’s called Wave and it’s a communication protocol. It’s like the email of the 21st century, but much more than that. Wave is a collaborative product. The waves are communication objects, both conversation and documents, allowing people to almost instantly communicate on the … Read more

Code Contracts in Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 has support for code contracts that allow to express pre-, post-conditions and invariants to your .NET code. Let’ say you want to create a function to return a random value in a range. This could look like it: class Program { Random rng = new Random(); public int GetRandom(int min, int max) … Read more

What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 for Unmanaged Development

Here is a list of new things in Visual Studio 2010 for unmanaged development. Visual Studio IDE: The editor has been rebuilt using WPF http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/02/20/a-new-look-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx Ability to zoom in and out, using the Control key and the mouse wheel (a zoom slider control will not be available in this version) http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/02/26/visual-studio-2010-zoom-slider-control/ Dock files (source code … Read more

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0 Beta 1

Microsoft has announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0 beta 1 for MSDN subscribers starting this Monday, and for the public starting this Wednesday. According to Kirill Osenkon, 95% of the planned functionality is already there. This new version of Visual Studio is WPF based. Among the many new features, one important … Read more

Axum, A Language for Building Parallel Applications

Last week Microsoft published on DevLabs a .NET language for building parallel applications, called Axum, and earlier known as Maestro. This new language is build on the architecture of the web, on the principles of isolation, message-passing, fault-tolerance, loose-coupling. It is said to have a more succinct syntax than Erlang, and have the isolation advantage … Read more

Task Dialog in MFC

The new MFC library from Visual Studo 2010 supports another Vista specific feature, the task dialog. This is meant as a replacement for the classic dialog box, and can display command links, customized buttons, customized icons, and a footer. Here is an example of such a dialog (from Windows Server 2008). MFC contains a new … Read more