Developing your Data Access Layer with ADO.NET Entity Framework 4

Please visit http://tinyurl.com/37jqqfx for an excellent article by Amirthalingam Prasanna on developing data access layer with ADO.NET entity framework 4.0

Top 10 reasons to go for Visual Studio 2010

Quickly interpret your code: The new code editor makes it easy to zoom in on your code, highlight method references, and overlay powerful features.

Create rich user experiences: Use new visual designers for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight™ to target Windows® 7 and the Web.

Customize Visual Studio to fit your style: Key IDE enhancements–including support for multiple monitors and improved readability–that make the familiar environment even more productive.

Use your existing skills: SharePoint development, including tooling for Web Parts, Lists, Workflows, Events and more, bring great new customized collaboration tools to your company.

MSDN subscriptions: With Visual Studio 2010 MSDN subscriptions, you have access to specified servers and clients for development and test purposes, in addition to all the other MSDN subscription benefits such as support resources, Windows® Azure™ compute hours, learning tools, and high quality information resources.

Database Development Made Easy (Premium): Apply the same life-cycle tools to your database code and your application code. This includes offline development of database schema, use of source code control to persist versioned schema information, participation in Agile methodologies and use of the associated work items.

Identify Test Impact from Code Changes (Premium): Test Impact Analysis provides a list of recommended tests to run after code changes are made. Developers know immediately which tests are impacted by a given change and testers know which tests to run to verify a given build.

Understand Existing Architectures (Ultimate): The Architecture Explorer and UML sequence diagrams help you explore and understand your existing code assets and their inter-dependencies.

IntelliTrace™ Eliminates ‘No Repro’ (Ultimate): Easily step through code that was previously executed on the same or another machine in order to identify what happened during the code execution and significantly cut down on time spent reproducing a bug.

Prototype Ideas Quickly (Ultimate): With Sketch Flow in Expression Studio you can quickly deliver a functioning prototype that looks and feels like handwritten mock-ups.

6 Cool Features of Visual Studio 2010

1 - Generating Sequence Diagrams To Inspect And Document control flow

Another cool feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to generate Sequence diagrams. You may right click inside a method and select “Generate the sequence diagram”  from the pop up menu, to generate the diagram. In this example, you may see that my SubmitOrder method in OrderViewModel class is instantiating an OrderServiceClient, to call AddOrderAsync method inside the same.

2 - Architecture Explorer

A cool addition in VS2010 is the Architecture Explorer (Click View->Architecture Explorer). The Architecture Explorer will provide you a very friendly interface to browse through and navigate to your solution assets. You can right click on an item (Namespace, Class Name, or Class Member etc) and select ‘View Content’ to navigate to the definition as well.

Also, you can export the selected items to a graph document from the Architecture explorer. You can do this by selecting the members, and clicking the ‘Create new graph document’ button (in top left corner) of the Architecture Explorer. Let me export some of the members in my OrderViewModel class, and have a look at the generated graph. You can also use the graph document to understand your code members in a better way, to analyze circular references, un referenced nodes etc (see the image below.)

3 – Code Navigators

Visual Studio 2010 has a number of useful code navigators. A simple yet useful code navigation/identification feature is ‘Highlight Reference’ - you can double click on any member to view the references highlighted, and can navigate across references using the Ctrl + Shift + Up/Down arrows.

Another cool code navigator is the ‘Navigate To’ window. You can use ‘Navigate To’ to search code members quickly when you work with the editor.

You can bring up the “Navigate To” window using the shortcut Ctrl , (press Ctrl and comma). You can search by any term, and you can even search using camel case. See that I’m searching for ‘OV’, to get a list of all code members following the OV convention.

Another cool code navigation feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ‘Call Hierarchy’ window. You may right click any member to bring up the popup menu, to select ‘Find All References’ to bring up the call hierarchy window. So, next time when you change a method, you can have a look at where all you are going to impact. You can also view all overrides of your method, if you have any.

4 – Pinning Data Tips While Debugging

When you are debugging, you can pin variable values, so that they’ll be there for you to see later.

Also, you can even enter comments for a pinned data tip, so that you can view the comment later.

VS 2010 has also got a tone of other Debugger Enhancements, read about them from Scott Gu’s blog if you are interested.

5 - Consume First Development

Visual Studio is so smart that it can stub your classes, members etc on the go, when you type the code. For example, assume that you have a customer class, and you thought it should have a new method while doing something. You can just type the member name (method, property etc), rest your mouse on top of the tiny blue line under your new method to bring up the popup menu.

Click that, and you’ll see VS stubbing the method for you, as shown below. Note that VS has inferred the parameter type.

You can do that with constructors, properties, method overloads etc as well. That is super cool, especially if you are a TDD guy.

6 – Extension Manager for downloading and installing plugins

The Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010 will allow you to download and install cool plug-ins for your VS IDE. You can bring up the extension manager window by clicking Tools->Extension Manager. Extension Manager will connect to Visual Studio 2010 online Extension library, and you can search and find cool plug-ins there.

Once installed, you may also Disable or Uninstall your plug-ins from the extensions manager.

VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)

Scott Guthrie did a blog post that talks about a bunch of small, but really nice, new VS 2010 debugger features: Click here to view.

• Breakpoint Labels
• Importing/Exporting Breakpoints
• Pinned DataTips
• See the Value from Last Debug Session (Great Code Editor Feature)
• Importing/Exporting Pinned DataTips

Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2010 & .Net Framework 4.0

Microsoft launched its Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 globally, including in India on 12-Apr-2010.

Get multiple monitor support; new support for SharePoint development, including numerous templates; enhanced multi-targeting support allowing developers to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework; and experience how Visual Studio 2010 simplifies building standards-based Web applications with improved AJAX frameworks, core IntelliSense support for JavaScript, and jQuery. You can download the trial here.

"Together, these technologies simplify the entire development process, enabling developers to build new platforms and build high-quality applications," S Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corportion said delivering the keynote address at the TechED 2010, a technology conclave which commenced in Bangalore.

Microsoft's top 50 partners have also made available products and solutions based on its latest wave of developer technologies, he said.

Somasegar said with .NET Framework four client profile, the runtime has been decreased by over 80 per cent.

Direct Download Links of Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Professional Trial
Visual Studio 2010 Premium Trial
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Trial
Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010
Visual Studio 2010 Express Direct

After downloading the VS 2010 ISO images you can do any of the following things

1. Burn it to blank CD/DVD using CD/DVD burning software, In Windows 7, you can ISO Burner tool.
2. Open and copy ISO image files and their contents to a local folder using extracting tools, like WinZIP, WinRAR and 7Zip.
3. Virtually mount and access ISO image as a device.

All Visual Studio 2010 TRIAL editions are free for 90 days. After 30 days, you must register the product to obtain a free key which extends the trial to an additional 60 days.

jQuery UI 1.8 adds position, button, autocomplete, new widget factory, lighter core

The final release of jQuery UI 1.8 with 5 new plugins, 1 new effect, and hundreds of bug fixes and improvements.

We’ve worked extremely hard to make jQuery UI lighter and more modular with an even more flexible and extensible core. Now it’s even easier to build your own widgets or extend ours, whether you use the jQuery UI Widget Factory, the jQuery UI CSS Framework, or both. This release is a collective effort spanning more than 9 months with contributions from hundreds of developers, designers, testers and users. We thank you for all your help and support. And we even get personal (we’ll name names!) at the end of this post.

The code, themes, demos, and documentation are now live on jqueryui.com, the jQuery UI Download Builder, ThemeRoller, and Google’s AJAX Libraries API.

Note: There are significant (and in some cases breaking) changes in this release. If you currently use or develop jQuery UI plugins be sure to consult both the Changelog andUpgrade Guide for full details on these changes and their impact.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Released

The final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for VS 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5.  You can download and install it from the following locations:

• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download Center

ASP.NET MVC 2 Features

ASP.NET MVC 2 adds a bunch of new capabilities and features.  I’ve started a blog series about some of the new features, and will be covering them in more depth in the weeks ahead.  Some of the new features and capabilities include:

• New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers
• Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client
• Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization
• Support for splitting up large applications into “Areas”
• Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel
• Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction
• Lots of new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements
• Improved Visual Studio tooling support

You can learn more about these features in the “What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2” document on the www.asp.net/mvc web-site.