And the winners are…

After a long judging process (includes putting all the screencast in an Excel file, watching them all and judging them by different criterias) we have two winners. Finding the two winners was really hard because the submitted screencasts were really good and we had to find the small differences to understand who were the best.

Before announcing the two winners I want to thank you all for participating in this competition. We had 17 screencasts in total, which is really awesome and more than I expected. Please don’t delete them to allow other people to watch them and learn from them. I want also to thank the judges for doing a great job during the judging process.

Aaaaaaaaand the two winners are (in arbitrary order)…

We decided to award these two screencasts because the presentations were done very well. Also, despite of the content being more for beginners, they were able to deliver it in a way that even professional people enjoyed watching the screencast without getting bored or fast forwarding parts of it. The highlighting of important features was also done very well.

Published on Aug 3rd, 2008 — Tags: , ,
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The “Get me MSDN Premium and Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite” competition

What’s this post about?
Microsoft gave me two licenses for the MSDN Premium and Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite. These are full subscriptions, not a kind of half baked something and each one is worth nearly $ 11,000.

I’m allowed to give them to people in the community and therefore thought to create a small competition where you can win them as grand prizes.

How to win?
Create one or more screencasts and post them as comments (a link to them and a short description) of this post. The submitted screencast should be around 15-20 minutes (it can also be longer) and cover one or more Microsoft technologies. The language of the screencast needs to be English (because that’s the language that all the judges understand).

The idea is not to advertise one of the technologies but rather to create a screencast that allows people to learn something about that technology. Examples would be: “How to create a game in XNA”, “How to use Visual Studio 2008″, “How to build a website in ASP.NET”, “How to create and style a control in Expression Blend”, or even “How to start with Visual C++”.

You can use tools like Camtasia, Community Clips or even Microsoft Media Encoder to record the screencast and upload it to YouTube or any other platform that you want. I’m mentioning YouTube because they offer the new High Quality videos. Please make sure that the screencast is of a decent quality (also after being uploaded to the web): it’s no fun to watch them if you can barely see what it’s going on!

For examples on how the final screencast could look like check out my screencast section.

Who is allowed to participate?
Everybody around the world who is a human being (and doesn’t work for Microsoft because they obviously already have the subscription) can participate at the competition. ;)

When does the competition take place?
It starts on the 1st of July 2008 and goes until the 31st of July 2008. Entries submitted within that period are taken into consideration; entries submitted outside this period are not taken into consideration!

How is the winner selected?
After the competition is over the judges (Alex Duggleby, Sven Groot and me) are going to watch the different screencasts and they are going to choose the two winners. The two people who created the best screencasts (speaking of how well they are done and how valuable they are for people who want to learn the technology that is shown in the screencast) are going to be selected as winners. The two winners get a notification and will receive the prizes.

Attention: please make sure to post your real e-mail address and name so that I can contact you if you win the prize. Please include also the country in which you life.

Submitting screencasts means that you agree with the terms and conditions mentioned in this post.

Published on Jun 28th, 2008 — Tags: , ,
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Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta

Finally, after it has been postponed because of mother’s day (and we all understand that) the SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 has gone public.

The service pack is still beta but holds a few nice improvements and, as we are geeks, need to test it because it is new and everything that’s new needs to be tested. :P

It’s so cool that we get, again, speed improvements with this upcoming service pack. I like this improvement a lot:

Improvements in the WPF designer including a (10-20%) improvement in startup time.

The WPF designer in Visual Studio 2008 behaves sometimes really like a version 1.0 release. Perhaps these improvements remove some of the pain. Sad that we don’t get much speed improvements in the CLR itself; but perhaps they give us something in the next versions.

If you need a guided tour on the SP1 improvements check this website out.

You only want the links to download the new bits (never cared about guided tours yadda-yadda-yadda)? Here you go:

Published on May 12th, 2008 — Tags: , , ,
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Academic Community Launch 2008

Alex, Mario, Horst and me are organizing (Alex and Mario are doing a lot of the work) the so called “Academic Community Launch 2008″ in Austria. 8)

communitylaunch.png

The community launch is free for students and interested people (free as you don’t have to pay any entry fee and you get something to drink and eat for free). We are going to talk about the new features in Visual Studio 2008 (Mario), the new data features in .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008 and beyond (Alex) and the new features in .NET 3.5 such as LINQ, anonymous types, lambda expressions, XML literals, own LINQ providers, … (me).

The talks are going to be in German and we will tour all Austria; including Salzburg, Linz, Hagenberg, Innsbruck, Wien, Graz and Klagenfurt.

If you are interested in visiting one of our events go to the official website and register.

Published on Mar 1st, 2008 — Tags: , , ,
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Fixing Visual Studio 2008 BETA 1 solution files

Andrew Arnott (found via the “This Week on Channel 9″ show) wrote in one of his latest posts about the problem that certain Visual Studio solution files won’t open if they are double clicked. What happens when you click a solution file? Internally an application is launched that inspects the solution file and depening on what is found in the header the corresponding Visual Studio is launched (if installed on the system).

The Visual Studio 2008 BETA (aka. Orcas) created an entry into the header that looks like this: “# Visual Studio Codename Orcas”. When the version selector (that’s the name of the application that inspects the solution file) inspects the file it finds this tag and doesn’t know what to do because the VS 2008 BETA might no longer be on your system. Nothing happens.

Andrew’s solution to fix this problem is to open the solution file and change the “# Visual Studio Codename Orcas” to “# Visual Studio 2008″. Now, what if you have more than one of these files lying around?

Well, the user staceyw created a simple PowerShell script (a one liner - very impressive!) that inspects the solution files and alters the header to make them work with Visual Studio 2008:

dir . -r *.sln | %{$t=cat $_.fullname;$t -replace “Codename Orcas”,”2008″ > $_}

But what if you don’t have PowerShell and you don’t want to install it? I have created a short C# console application that does exactly the same as the PowerShell script; it’s a lot more in code but you don’t need to install the PowerShell ;)

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“SolutionFix v” + Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version.ToString());
        Console.WriteLine(“Copyright 2008 Christian Liensberger”);
        Console.WriteLine(“====================================\r\n“);

        // check if all arguments required have been given.
        if (args.Length == 0)
        {
            // print the usage to the screen.
            Console.WriteLine(“USAGE:”);
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format(“{0} <Path>; example: {0} C:\\“,
                Path.GetFileName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location)));
            return;
        }

        string[] files = null;
        try
        {
            // get all files for the given directory and sub-directories.
            files = Directory.GetFiles(args[0], “*.sln”, SearchOption.AllDirectories);
            Console.WriteLine(files.Length + ” solution file(s) found.\r\n“);
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(“Error while searching for files: “ + ex.Message);
            return;
        }

        // loop over the results.
        foreach (var file in files)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(“Processing: “ + file);

            try
            {
                // read all the lines of the file and check if we can use it.
                var lines = File.ReadAllLines(file);
                if (lines.Length < 3)
                    continue;

                // understand if a fix is required.
                var version = lines[2];
                if (version == “# Visual Studio Codename Orcas”)
                {
                    Console.Write(“Solution file needs to be fixed…”);
                    // apply the fix.
                    lines[2] = “# Visual Studio 2008″;

                    // create a backup copy of the solution file.
                    File.Copy(file, file + “.bak”);
                    // write the fixed file to the given location.
                    File.WriteAllLines(file, lines);

                    Console.WriteLine(” done!”);
                }
                else
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(“Solution file doesn’t need to be fixed.”);
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(“Error while processing file: “ + ex.Message);
            }
        }
    }
}

Download the compiled version from here.

Published on Feb 16th, 2008 — Tags: ,
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The Code Project Visual Studio 2008 Beta Competition

The Code Project is having a competition. Yay! You can win $10,000 by writing an article on .NET 3.0 and the Visual Studio 2008…

Everybody in?

Published on Oct 16th, 2007 — Tags: ,
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Visual Studio Express 2008 Beta 2

Are you interested in programming for the Windows platform or even the web application via ASP.NET? Microsoft has released the Beta 2 of their Express Editions. The best is that they cost $0. They are completely free and may be even used in commercial products. I have also used them in some courses for my university work because they were free and I did want to develop in C#. The only problem is that the stand-alone installers are quite big: 400+ megabytes are a lot when you are on a dial-in.

The Express Editions are available for several .NET languages, such as Visual Basic 2008, Visual C# 2008, Visual C++ 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008. Visual C++ Express allows for the first time (speaking of an Express Edition) to develop native Windows applications. Native Windows applications are applications that run without the .NET framework.

Each Express Edition can be installed side-by-side with the older 2005 versions or any other Visual Studio installation. Everything will just work.

If you have some free time, try them out. Problems and bugs that might be in the beta versions should be reported to Microsoft. They are usually very fast in providing answers. I have installed the Beta 2 on my computer and it seems to be very solid. The .NET Framework (version 3.5) that comes with the Beta 2 has also a go-live license. That means you can legally publish and distribute applications that are building upon .NET 3.5 Beta 2.

For more information about what has been changed in the Express Editions have a look at the series that Dan Fernandez started at his blog.

You are a novice programmer? You need introduction to the tools? Have a look at the G?Beginner Developer Learning CenterG?. ItG??s a great resource for beginners, who are interested in Windows and Web programming.

Another interesting toolkit for the hobbyist programmers is the G?Coding4Fun Developer Kit 2008 Vol.1G?. It is a collection of tools that provides a set of drag G??n drop controls and components that enable rapid development of hobbyists. Another example is the Facebook Developer Toolkit, which is a set of controls and components that provide Visual Basic and C# wrappers for the Facebook API that allow you to easily and quickly develop .NET applications that you can share with your Facebook friends.

Published on Aug 20th, 2007 — Tags: ,
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Visual Studio 2008 side-by-side with Visual Studio 2005 on Vista

It works! I have installed Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (Scott Guthrie blogged about the release) side-by-side with my old Visual Studio 2005 (SP1 + SP1 for Vista) on Vista. I haven’t had any problems so far, although I’m only doing C# and sometimes a little bit C++ coding.

And by the way: the “You need to be admin to start this application” dialog that appears on Vista after starting Visual Studio 2005 is also gone. It don’t know if they only removed it or have fixed Visual Studio so far to work without admin rights. I expect the first, but hope the later.

If you have some free time download the beta and enjoy the LINQ and lambda experience! There’s also a Virtual PC image available, if you don’t want mess around with your current Windows installation. ;-)

Published on Aug 2nd, 2007 — Tags: ,
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