Microsoft released the CTP2 of Visual Studio 2014 today July 8th 2014.

In my previous News item I mentioned that biggest challenge in trying Visual Studio 2014 was Side-by-Side installation. This issue is claimed to be resolved in this new CTP2 release which can be downloaded from here , whereas I would suggest that you try it with your own responsibility and things might break.

What is CTP anyways?

CTPs are previews for the next major release of Visual Studio. These Visual Studio CTPs are intended to promote continuous feedback between early adopters and the Visual Studio development team.

CTPs have Limitations

CTPs are provided for testing and feedback purposes only. CTPs are unsupportedEnglish-only releases. They are not subject to final validation and are not intended for use on production computers, or to create production code.

Some New COOL Features Added in CTP2

  • Save and Apply Custom IDE Layouts. You can now save and apply custom layouts for tool windows in the IDE. The Save Window Layout and Apply Window Layout commands are under the Window Menu and you can also rename, reorder, and delete layouts from Manage Window Layouts.
  • Light Bulb Editor Adornment. How many times have you found yourself stuck in a complex syntax issue or compilation error which doesn’t seem to go away? I have always wished that there was a legitimate way to have some options displayed as solution to the problem. Microsoft Introduced, Light Bulbs which is an extensible editor adornment to identify and help you fix issues in your code. To use them, place the caret on a line with an issue or hover over an issue and you’ll see a light bulb that lists actions you can take to resolve the problem and even a preview of proposed solutions.
  • Editor Touch Support. All the devices these days are supporting touch. Many software receive direct benefit from the support for touch. Visual Studio Code Editor seem to be an exception to be fully benefited with touch, as development required typing. But a Touch support will certainly enables the developers to do some usual things like scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, tap-and-hold for context menus, double-tap for word selection, and line selection by tapping in the margin etc. All such gestures now acknowledged by Visual Studio 2014 code editor. Needless to mention you have to have a Laptop with Touch Support.
  • ALL CAPS. Remember menu names in Capital letters (All CAPS) was kind of hard to read. SO Microsoft has reverted it to be Title Case (Tools, File, View) as it has been used by various Visual Studio releases.  Microsoft Says.. Last week with the RC for Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 we added an option to sentence case menus; in this VS “14” CTP we changed Menu Bar styling to Title Case for everyone to help us get feedback on the change. 

 So Are you Installing?

I wanted to verify few things and so I chose to install and try the CTP2 bits of Visual Studio 2014. My current laptop settings are as follows:

  • Windows 7 Enterprise
  • Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate
  • Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate
  • newly installed Visual Studio 2014 Professional

Continue Reading….. 

 

 

A .NET Client Profile is supported by .NET Versions 3.5 and 4.0. It is designed for client applications like Windows Forms. The Client Profile version of .NET Framework is a lightweight subset of the framework. This enables quicker deployment and small installation packages.

Read My Full Article Here..

 

Here are some resources which may be useful as you try out the Visual Studio “14” CTP, released yesterday (June 3rd 2014):

Downloads: Download the Visual Studio “14” CTP (also available on MSDN subscriber downloads). Alternatively, save some time and use the provided VM in Azure.

Blogs & Release Notes: Read announcements by Soma & Brian. Check out the team blogs, including Visual Studio, Web Dev (web tooling), Web Dev (ASP.NET vNext), Entity Framework, C#, VB, and C++. See the Visual Studio “14” CTP release notes for a list of new features. Discuss on Facebook & Twitter.

Known Issues: This release should be installed in a test environment, such as a VM or a clean machine. Do not install on a machine with another version of Visual Studio installed. For other known issues, please see the Visual Studio “14” CTP KB.

Feedback: Submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice .

 

I presented a session in Visual Studio 2012 Tech Tour in collaboration of C# Corner Mumbai User Group and Microsoft India.
My presentation topic was Agile Development using TFS 2012. Read the official recap Here

Validation is a process that ensures the sanity of data entered, received or processed by a software module, class or class members.  Some examples of validation are length check, range check, Null check, date range, specific character and so on.

Read full Article here: Validation Application Block

 

One of the long lived issue I struggled with was Visual Studio 2012’s  “Operation taking longer than expected”, as you can see in the screenshot shown below.

I tried many opetions including the most frustating one- re-install and repair the Visual Studio 2012.

The major problem of this issue is that it doesn’t allow you to do many critical things for example “Attching a process during debugging” etc.

The solution to this problem is:

  1. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger
  2. Open x64 folder and rename the msvsmon.exe file to msvsmon_old.exe
  3. Now, navigate to x86 folder and copy msvsmon.exe and paste it into x64 folder.
  4. Restart the Visusl Studio 2012 IDE, and now try attching to process during debugging.

Hope this will help.

 

Usually a traditional class library in .NET is capable of targeting only one framework ver.But many times you may want to build a class library which can target multiple versions of framework. I.e. the objective is to achieve cross-platform development of .NET Framewok applicatioans. This became a possibility with the release of Visual Studio 2012.

Visual Studio 2012 includes a new project template named Portable Class Library, As you can see in the image below,you can use this project to build portable assemblies that work without modification on multiple platforms like:

1-Windows 7, Windows 8

2-Silverlight

3-Windows Phone, and

4-Xbox 360

This project is pretty much like a Class Library project, except its References shows “.NET Portable Subset” instead of individual namespaces.

If you are targeting only one particular framework as many enterprise applications do, then standard Class Library project is the best choice.

 

Value of Knowledge

February 11th, 2013 | Posted by Vidya Vrat in Career Advice | Visual Studio - (0 Comments)

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure out how to fix the engine.Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young.He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do.

After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something.Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.“What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!”So they wrote to the old man saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer…… …… ……… $ 2.00

Knowing where to tap……… …… ……… $ 9,998.00

Moral :- Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference! Keep studying hard. Don’t give up!

 

In this post I will explain why .NET 4.5 doesn’t support and what is the benefit .NET 3.5 and .NET4.0 provides with their supported Client Profile flavor.
As we all know there are many type of applications and hence what is required by one application may not be necessarily required by other type of application. For example, System.Web is only used by ASP .NET / Web apps, this is of no use for Windows Forms app.Now if you think from a deployment’s point of view, you would want your installer to be as optimized and small as possible, so it takes minimum and required on the client machine, and this can be achieved by Client Profile flavor of.NET 3.5 and 4.0.
Let’s see how Microsoft made .NET Client Profile.Microsoft removed ASP .NET, MSBuild, Advanced WCF and Data support for Oracle to cut the framework into smaller and optimized footprint.

.NET 4.5 is already optimized and tuned for quicker deployment and takes small disk space. Hence, no more .NET 4.5 Client Profile.