A Quick Look at Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Studio 11 Beta was made available today (See Jason Zander’s announcement). It can be downloaded from here. These are my first impressions after downloading and trying it. The New UI I have already talked about the new Chrome theme. I find it awful, you don’t know what’s enabled and what is not. I wish…

Letter from a concerned developer

Dear Microsoft, I have recently read the two blog posts about the new “developer experience” with Visual Studio 11 (part 1 and part 2). I don’t have the IDE yet (since the beta will be made available on February 29), but from the blog posts I see that you once again changed the look and…

STM.NET

Microsoft has made available a first beta version of an experimental version of .NET 4.0, called .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 Enabled for Software Transactional Memory v1.0. Since that is quite a long name, the short one is STM.NET. This is a special version of .NET 4.0 that enables software transactional memory for C#. It…

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)…

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…

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…

MFC Feature Pack

At the beginning of January, Microsoft released a beta version of MFC Feature Pack, an exstension to the MFC shipped with Visual Studio 2008. This feature pack allows developers to create applications with the look and feel of Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. MFC application can now support: Office Ribbon Office 2003, XP and…