Articles filed in category 'Visual Studio 2008'

As is often the case, applications are not typically designed with accessibility in mind.Usually, applications are designed to satisfy business requirements. If those business requirements do not include accessibility, more likely than not, the application as a whole will be inaccessible to important segments of users. There are, however, steps you can take to mitigate this common lack of foresight in requirements analysis.

While the development community has accepted the inevitable future of Line-of-Business RIAs and indispensable role of Silverlight in their creation, many of them have started looking for ways to use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services in Silverlight applications. It is logical: Reporting Services is reasonably capable and the most-used reporting engine on the market. Millions of developers are Reporting Services professionals and of course they would like to continue... using the tool in their RIAs as well.See More

Visual Studio is a great tool on its own and it can be extended.By using the Visual Studio SDK (VS SDK), one can create powerful extensions to fit almost any developers’ needs.

Microsoft’s Azure platform has finally been released into production. This new entry into the cloud computing market provides .NET developers with a scalable, robust platform for developing applications.After over a year in CTP, Azure is finally ready for prime time. At PDC 2009, Microsoft announced the release of new components, such as the management API, that make Azure worth considering for use in production environments. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to use ...the different components of Azure Services to build a self-scaling application.See More

Visual Studio provides one of the most powerful IDE’s on the market. One under-exploited aspect of this IDE is the extensibility model. Programming IDE’s are not static development tools. Development techniques, tools, and concepts change. Extensibility has been built into Visual Studio from its early inceptions. The great thing about Microsoft’s foresight is that you can augment functionality of Visual Studio yourself. This article will demonstrate how to extend the Vis...ual Studio IDE using Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and the Visual Studio Add-In and automation models. See More

With Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, developer’s data access options have increased substantially. In addition to using ADO.NET to create DataReaders or DataSets, Microsoft has added LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework as well as ADO.NET Data Services, which leverages those two. In addition to these new options, there are new syntaxes to learn. LINQ, which is built into Visual Basic and C#, has one implementation for LINQ to SQL and another for LINQ to Entities. In Entity ...Framework, you have the option to use LINQ to Entities as well as two other ways of querying with Entity SQL, as you can see in Figure 1.See More

Every developer needs to test their code, or have it tested by someone.I don’t know about you, but I am horrible at testing my own code. Does this mean that I do not need to test my code? Heck, no! It is always best if you do not rely on your end user to test your code. This can end up with a very frustrated user, and your user can lose faith in your ability to get their project done.

There are some big, exciting changes happening around Visual Studio! Microsoft is shifting the focus of VS from being just a developer tool to being an entire platform. As part of that shift, the Visual Studio Gallery web site went live on Feb 27, 2008. The site is your one-stop resource for cool productivity tools called Visual Studio extensions. An addition to CodePlex’s repository of collaborative projects and CodeGallery’s place to find sample apps and code snippets,... Visual Studio Gallery is THE place to find extensions targeted at Visual Studio. Extensions can be anything from macros to item, project or solution templates to add-ins to full-blown extensibility packages. You’ll find both free and paid extensions built by both professional companies and community members.See More

Visual Studio 2010 makes T4 easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates. Kathleen shows you how to use T4 in Studio 2005 and beyond.Microsoft included its T4 generation language in the box in Visual Studio 2008 and added important new features in Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2010 makes generation easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates.Code generation lets you automatically create signific...ant portions of your application. It has the potential to decrease bugs and increase your ability to alter code across your application as needs change. Microsoft’s generation language is T4 and it is included in the box starting with Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2010 makes T4 easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates. I’ll show you how to use T4 in Studio 2005 and beyond.See More

In today’s world of fast food, fast cars, and instant gratification, people expect to be in touch at all times.We have become conditioned to staying in touch with businesses, friends, and families. Because of this desire for instant data, we have the Internet, cell phones, Wi-Fi, MP3 players, and DVD players. As the equipment needed to drive this thirst has become smaller and smaller, we find ourselves looking for portable replacements for our bulky desktop computers.

May/June 2008 .NET Rocks! column

I have a funny story about how Visual Studio extensibility works. I work at Microsoft in the SQL Server division focusing on XML technologies and I went to the Visual Studio team a few years ago and asked them if they could build some better XML tools.

The Microsoft® Sync Framework is the new framework and runtime for adding synchronization, roaming, and offline capabilities to applications. It supports peer-to-peer scenarios, works with devices and services, and is agnostic of data types, stores, and protocols. In this article, I’ll cover the high-level vision for the platform as well as the enabled scenarios made possible by the framework for developers, ISVs, and OEMs.

In the next Visual Studio wave of products, Microsoft will distribute its world-class IDE freely via its VS 2008 Shell offerings. In this article, I will give an overview of what the Shell is, what it contains, and how you can start leveraging it to start creating your own tools IDE.

VSSDK Assist makes it easier to start extending Visual Studio using the Visual Studio SDK (VS SDK).

With the combined launch of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft is introducing five implementations of .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ).Of these five implementations, two specifically target access to relational databases: LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities.

Reviewing where we’ve been over the last decade in the world of .NET and Visual StudioAt the brink of a new release of .NET and Visual Studio, you may wonder where all of this new technology is taking us. Not only do we now have a number of new flavors of Visual Studio targeted to release on April 12, 2010, we also get to enjoy a plethora of new technologies such as Silverlight 4 and RIA Services, as well as new hardware platforms to consider, such as Windows Phone 7 Ser...ies. Understanding the future usually begins with a reflection upon the past so let’s take a look at how Visual Studio has changed in the last decade.See More

Inheritance is one of the fundamental facets of object-oriented programming. In this article,Steve looks at inheritance, and in particular some of the mistakes that many developers make when applying inheritance.

Hot on the heels of the groundbreaking release of ASP.NET MVC CTP 1 in December of 2007, an open source project called MvcContrib came to life.MvcContrib has enjoyed tens of thousands of downloads since it started in December of 2007. In this article, I will explain MvcContrib; it’s major components, how to use it, and how to get involved in its continued development.

Are you moving a Windows desktop application to the browser, and sweating bullets, or perhaps just not quite sure about how all the new Web and data tools work together?With each passing year, Microsoft offers newer and more powerful tools for building rich database applications on the Web. So many and so frequently, in fact, that it can be hard to keep up with the new tools and still meet the requirements of your job! This article will show you how to get the most out o...f the new features in ASP.NET 3.5. The article will also show how you can use features in LINQ, even if you only use stored procedures for data access. And finally, since most applications use reporting, I’ll throw in a few nuggets on using SQL Server Reporting Services.See More

In this article you will learn how to isolate yourself from change by taking advantage of the Provider Model.Designing your applications using the Provider Model will allow you to swap components out at runtime, thus allowing you to upgrade them easily.

The integration of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) inside SQL Server 2005 (SQL CLR 1.0) enabled database programmers to write business logic in the form of functions, stored procedures, triggers, data types, and aggregates using modern .NET programming languages.This article presents the advances to the CLR integration introduced in SQL Server 2008, which significantly enhances the kinds of applications supported by SQL Server.

Visual Studio 2008 is all about making it easier for developers and development teams to create software for the latest and greatest platforms with technologies such as .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ), ASP.NET AJAX ,and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) designer, to name just a few.In this brief article I will highlight just a few of the code editing and designer improvements that are new to Visual Studio 2008.

Extensibility in Visual Studio is a bit like science and technology-there is always more to learn and discover even for the experts. In this article, I’ll present a few tips and tricks you may find helpful when creating packages with the Visual Studio SDK.

Visual Studio Extensibility can appear daunting to the uninitiated.This article will look at the blogging effort on VSSDK.com, as well as the VSMessenger sample application, and examine how they improve overall approachability to Visual Studio Extensibility.

Visual Studio 2008 as well as the .NET 3.0 extensions for Visual Studio 2005 add several new templates that allow you to quickly create .NET 3.0 items such as WPF forms, Workflows, and WCF services. We’ve used templates such as these since the beginning of time to create traditional application elements such as Windows Forms, Web Forms, and User Controls, so you would think that these are equally great; or would you? Unfortunately, creating WCF projects or project items ...come with more baggage than you can imagine. They also don’t exactly promote the best practices I feel should be considered when designing WCF services. So if you don’t use the built-in templates to create your services, what do you use? Well keep reading and I’ll show you how to create everything you need manually with ease while maintaining good design and coding practices.See More

Welcome Letter from the VSX Team

ListBoxes suck. Except that statement is not true anymore. Not in WPF and Silverlight anyway, where ListBoxes have evolved from simplistic controls to true workhorse objects. ListBoxes have been around since the beginning of Windows (and other GUIs) and have served a pervasive yet simple purpose, which can be summed up as “show me a list of labels in a list with a scroll bar.” A premise that has its uses but is not sophisticated enough for advanced data presentation, ...which is why developers often use special controls such as “data grids” or “list views” among others. In WPF and Silverlight, however, ListBoxes are so flexible and powerful that they are the first choice for just about anything. In fact, WPF originally shipped without a data grid control since ListBoxes all but eliminated that need. Developer perception, however, was different and the power of the ListBoxes went largely unnoticed. That is reason enough for me to write an article that displays the ease, flexibility, and power of ListBoxes. See More

The iPhone is one of the most compelling and exciting user interfaces to appear on any consumer electronic device, with many innovations that make it a pleasure to use. How can you deliver a similar experience with your .NET applications?This article demonstrates how you can implement these features in your .NET applications in a step-by-step format as you recreate the iPhone interface using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology with both Visual Studio 2008 an...d Microsoft Expression Blend.See More

XML is everywhere from XML Web Services to databases to config files to Office documents. This article will show you tooling support offered in Visual Studio 2008 that will make working with XML easier. It will cover editing XML files, working with XML schemas, debugging XSLT style sheets and extending Visual Studio by writing your own custom XML Designers.

Though the XML Editor in Visual Studio 2005 has many improvements, it still lacks support for writing and testing XPath queries. In this article, I’ll show you how to leverage the Visual Studio SDK to extend the XML Editor to allow you to write and text XPath queries in Visual Studio 2005.