VS2010 is alive!

Hey, I’m excited.  While I don’t know all the new features, I have been using it.  And I like it. I run it on vmware, and find it quite responsive.  It has a nicer look & feel, and a lot of intellisense improvements.  It’s available now for MSDN subscribers.  But wait about 15 more minutes until my download finishes so you don’t slow it down. :)

VS2010 At First Glance

So the public beta for Visual Studio 2010 has been available for a little while, but I’ve been to busy to grab it even though I could have gotten when it was MSDN only. I’m still too busy to spend a lot of time but I wanted grab a couple screen shots and offer one feedback item.

I have Win7 RC 1 running in VMWare Fusion on OSX, and VS2010 didn’t install smoothly for me. I downloaded it from MSDN and used 7-Zip to extract the files with which to install it. Unfortunately I got a missing or corrupt file 3-4 times. It’s possible that something was corrupted during extraction, or it could be caused by the fact I was running the install in win7 on fusion in the background while I did other things on this Mac. Either way, I don’t think it was VS2010.

The improved Start Page is nice, but nothing shockingly new or different during install and initial launch.

I created a Test project with the default name. I prefer to start with unit tests and figured it would be a good, simple way to try a couple things. I tried some tests for List<> and delegates/anonymous methods.

I’m not very familiar with the MSTest way of doing things because I typically use nUnit or MbUnit.  To me this view looks different, and it’s odd when you’re used to using TDD.Net for running tests. Not bad, just different. (I recommend all of the tools I just mentioned.) 

The default colors and fonts do look a lot better than the previous version; not sure if that’s Win7 or VS2010.

I was taking this next shot to show you my preferred test naming style, and noticed something nice. The line number are on by default. I didn’t notice at first because turning those on is the second thing I do to VS after I install it. (The first being to change the default theme/color/font settings.)

So far it looks nice and runs well in my vmware machine of win7. I didn’t push it that hard so I can’t say just yet but it looks good to me. Should probably build something, target .Net 3.0 and deploy it to the website just to see how it goes.

My one feedback item so far is that the intellisense seems a bit overly aggressive. Maybe its because it’s in a VM but it gives the sense of jumpy, slightly confused itellisense choices while I’m typing. Does anyone else get that?

-j

Glenn Block On MEF

I have some interesting in MEF for future projects. We are already using Unity for a dash of composite in on project, but there is so much more potential there than just that. It so happens that I’m as a Microsoft Conference today with Scott Guthrie, Jaime Rodriguez, and Glenn Block giving presentations.

I’m gonna live-blog this as he goes, so you may need to update this. Not time-stamping the updates though.

Fragments & points from Glenn’s talk:

• Phoenix is hot
• worked on Prism, Unity, and MEF (currently) [also working on View Model Infrastructure]
• not a comedian, not magician, not rock start.. just a guy who cares about maintainable software
• Extensibility
• Open-Closed Principle – open to be extended but closed to modifications
• Compose – composed, modular apps are a good thing, glossed over this so far..
• Where MEF is being used – Visual Studio Extensibility.. sample from VS2010 (oh why wont you install on win7 in vm fusion!)
• Really interesting demo in vs2010 popping up a regex dialog from intellisense. create new regex or use saved ones. way cool.
• Very cool demo of a came using MEF. Just opened a new dll while it was running to get a while new set of shapes. No reset.
• MEF basics
  • Export it
  • Import it
  • Compose it
• MEF is not type based. huh, i’m curious what he means. “not based on any types, but uses types for convenience” –glenn block
• Parts (components), Catalog (container - library of available parts). sounds like type registration to me. still not sure how it’s not type based.
• Compose it – type catalog, assembly catalog, directory catalog, aggregating catalog. this is starting to sound familiar: find and ways to load modules.
• showing how to create and register a rule. audience sample rule: IncrementByOneRule
• switching from manually registering types to AssemblyCatalog to find the types (rules in his sample) defined in his demo.
• Intersting, for demo which was only taking one rule, switched to [ImportMany] IEnumerable<IRule> {get;set} to accept a collection of rules instead of a single rule.
• But they are getting rid of [Export] in future release so the demo code is nearly obsolete. otherwise very cool
• [distracted by Ayende blog post. sry]
• Power of being declaritive. conventions, export. MEF just cares about contracts.
• lifetime management with MEF container (related, another)
• now showing a catalog form Ruby code. very very interesting. now MEF with XAML? impressive.
• I like how MEF is finding the click action for a button in the demo. not sure what I would do with my usual design as a result.

That is all. Nice intro and overview of MEF.

-j

Wicked Cool Code – dynamic Coming to .Net 4.0

  So far the VS 2010 and .Net 4 fanfare hasn’t resonated with me. I’m sure it will be good and all, but I’m far to busy to get swallowed up in hype. Then I read this post from ScottHa on the dynamic keyword. It looks like some of the goodness of dynamic languages is sneaking into .Net. This is good, and looks like this:

   1:  dynamic calc = GetCalculator();

   2:  int sum = calc.Add(10, 20);

  Which also means I’m going to need to get some updated syntax highlighting for code samples. It doesn’t recognize dynamic as a keyword, of course.

  Also, it’s going to be even more important to use good Unit Testing if you write code with this. Intellisense won’t cut it because the compiler doesn’t know the object contact/interface until runtime. Absolutely use TDD for this. Also, it’s cool that ScottHa is using a python file in his example.

PS: I know about the DLR, etc. I tend to think C# when I say .Net.

-j