Articles filed in category 'Visual Studio 2010'

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.

Many people will not be able to upgrade to Windows 8 right away for various reasons. However, there is nothing to stop you from designing your WPF applications to have a similar look and feel.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open REST-ful protocol for exposing and consuming data on the web. Also known as Astoria, ADO.NET Data Services, now officially called WCF Data Services in the .NET Framework. There are also SDKs available for other platforms like JavaScript and PHP. Visit the OData site at www.odata.org.

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

In the last issue of CODE Magazine, we took a look at CODE Framework’s WPF features. This time, we are going to look at a completely different area of the framework: Creating business logic and middle tiers as SOA services. SOA is the cornerstone of many modern applications, creating systems that are more maintainable, flexible, and suitable for a wide range of scenarios, ranging from Windows to Web and Mobile scenarios using a wide variety of technologies, and outperfor...ming conventional multi-tiered applications in a range of metrics. Using CODE Framework, it also becomes easy and extremely productive to build SOA layers.See More

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

Software developers live and breathe debugging. It’s an essential and integral part of our day-to-day job. Whenever we are confronted with any bug in code, our typical first question is, “How can I reproduce this issue?” Any problems that cannot be reproduced are generally considered tricky to resolve. In order to really understand the challenges with debugging hard to reproduce issues, let’s walk through a few scenarios here.

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.

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new product in the Visual Studio family aimed at developers who want to quickly create data-centric business applications for the desktop and the cloud.LightSwitch is an extensible development environment and application framework that simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you. LightSwitch is perfect for small business or departmental productivity ap...plications that need to get done fast. In this article I will walk you through creating a business application from beginning to end using Visual Studio LightSwitch.Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new product in the Visual Studio family aimed at developers who want to quickly create data-centric business applications for the desktop and the cloud.LightSwitch is an extensible development environment and application framework that simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you. LightSwitch is perfect for small business or departmental productivity applications that need to get done fast. In this article I will walk you through creating a business application from beginning to end using Visual Studio LightSwitch.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

Check out the new features in Visual Basic 10, the latest version of VB coming out with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0.

May/June 2008 .NET Rocks! column

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch uses a model-centric architecture for defining, building, and executing a 3-tier LightSwitch application.

Aside from the obvious summary here, Sahil goes into details about why you should also be happy about these three SharePoint 2010 features. In his words, these features give a SharePoint architect so much more flexibility in implementing and delivering SharePoint projects that they will invariably prove to be extremely valuable.SharePoint 2007 has been a very successful product for many reasons. Perhaps it is the good applicability of .NET to SharePoint. Maybe it is the ...fact that SharePoint gives you so much beyond plain vanilla ASP.NET, that it gets both techies and business users excited.Having been available for about three years now, there has been time for developers to discover a few rough edges to the product as well.See More

WCF 4 is all about productivity.

Deborah covers many of the different ways you can use lambda expressions to work with your lists and make your code easier to read and write.Lambdas provide shortcuts for sorting, filtering, finding and working with information in lists, making your code easier to read and write.

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

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a set of out-of-the-box features, services and tools that enhance SharePoint by streamlining the creation of solutions with deep integration of external data and services into SharePoint!SharePoint 2007 had a similar technology called BDC. But BDC was much more primitive compared to BCS.

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.

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.

Continuing on our odyssey exploring the features of Visual Studio 2010, we turn our attention to the New Project dialog box. You noticed a difference no doubt, but may not be aware of just <i>how much </i>it has changed. Sit back, relax, open up Visual Studio 2010 and follow along as we dive into the details.

When your WPT TreeView needs to go deeper than two levels, you might run into a snag. Paul shows us how to use the HierarchicalDataTemplate to get around this problem.

Microsoft released the .NET Runtime 4.0 and with it comes a brand spanking new version of ASP.NET - version 4.0 - which provides an incremental set of improvements to an already powerful platform. .NET 4.0 is a full release of the .NET Framework, unlike version 3.5, which was merely a set of library updates on top of the .NET Framework version 2.0. Because of this full framework revision, there has been a welcome bit of consolidation of assemblies and configuration setti...ngs. The full runtime version change to 4.0 also means that you have to explicitly pick version 4.0 of the runtime when you create a new Application Pool in IIS, unlike .NET 3.5, which actually requires version 2.0 of the runtime. See More

Visual C# version 4.0 offers new features that make it easier for you to work in dynamic programming scenarios.Besides dynamic programming, you have support for optional and named parameters, better COM interop support, and contra-variance and covariance. This article will show you how each of these features work and provide suggestions of how they can be applied to help you be more productive.

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