Microsoft to Release Source Code to .Net Framework Libraries

Holy Frameworks Batman! The news is spreading quick, Microsoft has announced that they will be releasing the source code, complete with comments and debugger support. Now you and I will be able to step into those framework classes in an effort to debug our apps and maybe even learn something. This will be part of the VS2008 Orcas release.

Check out the announcement on the ScottGu blog at

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

Shawn Burke has details on his blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2007/10/03/making-net-framework-source-available-to-developers.aspx

Channel 9 video at:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=345805

Scott Hanselman also has the scoop on his podcast:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast83MicrosoftToReleaseNETFrameworkLibrariesSource.aspx

This ranks in the uber-cool category.

Fun with Silverlight

I spent my weekend learning Silverlight, writing a game in Silverlight 1.0. I did all of my project in Visual Studio 2005 and using Silverlight 1.0 runtime. It’s a pretty simple game, I’ll reveal more later in the week and eventually post all the code and blog about the development experience.

The biggest pain was not in the XAML, that was pretty straight forward, it was all the [explicative deleted] Javascript. It’s been a few years since I did any Javascript so I had a lot of relearning to do.

If you are want to look into Silverlight coding, I highly recommend you go to the Getting Started site on Silverlight’s website. http://silverlight.net/getstarted/Default.aspx

After you download all the bits, go to the very bottom of the page under “3. Learn from Samples and Documentation”. Go read all the QuickStarts!!! Very good code samples here to get you started.

After you go through the code samples, there are some really good focus videos at http://silverlight.net/Learn/learnvideos.aspx . These helped me over quite a few hurdles.

The documentation was also very helpful in looking up how some properties worked, going back and forth between Java and Xaml. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188743.aspx

There will be more to come on this subject to be sure, but over the next few days I’ll be preparing my presentaion for Alabama Code Camp 5 on SQL Server 2005 Full Text Searching,

Arcane Fun Fridays

WHEW! All of this WPF / XAML sure has been a lot of fun. But I think it’s time to come up for air and see what else is happing out there in Dot Net land.

Alabama Code Camp is coming up in just a little over a week, Saturday October 6^th to be exact. Still plenty of time to register and even just a bit of time if you want to get in on the Silverlight programming contest. First prize for that is a Zune! http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/home.html

devLink, the large conference for a cheap price comes up right afterward in Nashville, Friday and Saturday October 12^th and 13^th. http://www.devlink.net/ . You can tell I’ll be there, my name’s on the front page as a winner of a Barnes and Nobel gift card (look for the dude from AL !)

(By the way, anyone know of a good dog repellent? My nephew is coming to house sit and is bringing Marshmallow and Buttercup, his twin Dobermans along because I have a big back yard they can play in. Last time though they ate the garden hose, chewed the handle off my shovel, and bit through one of my lawnmower tires.)

There’s a new add-on for SQL Server Management Studio I’m eager to try out. It’s still in Beta but looks promising. It was blogged about at http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/mladenp/archive/2007/09/20/SSMS-Tools-Pack—an-add-in-for-SQL-Management-Studio.aspx or you can download it directly at http://www.ssmstoolspack.com/ .

If you are a fan of NUnit, you’ll appreciate the new xUnit. Read James’ announcement at http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com/posts/2007/09/announcing-xuni.html .

In a recent Dot Net Rocks episode, Carl Franklin announced they would be taking over Shrinkster.com. Shrinkster has been down due to spam abuse, as soon as Carl gets everything setup we’ll be able to go back to using short links again!

Speaking of Dot Net Rocks, I especially enjoyed show 274, where the new features of VB.Net and C# for the 2008 release were discussed. Entertaining and lots of good tidbits. I think my favorite feature so far has got to be C#’s extension methods. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=274

During my long drive to the Tallahassee Code Camp last week, I put together a podcast theme session, and copied a bunch of related podcasts onto my cheapo SanDisk mp3 player. This time I went with a “Millenator” theme and got all the episodes of Dot Net Rocks that Mark Miller appeared on. Good stuff, lots of thoughtful material combined with some humor. Next time you go on a trip, copy a bunch of past episodes of your favorite podcast that are in the same theme and make that long drive go much quicker.

There have been several updates to the world’s greatest Visual Studio Add-In, CodeRush, over the last few weeks ( http://www.devexpress.com/Home/Announces/CodeRush25.xml ). Apparently Mark Miller and the boys have been busy! If you’re not on 2.5.4 go update yours today.

Speaking of Mark Miller, I love his intro slide for his VSLive session coming up in LasVegas. Take a look, pure genius. http://www.doitwith.net/2007/09/11/MyLastVSLiveSessionEver.aspx

A final note, between getting ready for Alabama Code Camp and going to devLink my blogging may get spotty for the next few weeks, bear with me and I’ll have full reports from both code camps and lots of fun new stuff to share.

Tallahassee Code Camp A Blast!

I got home a little while ago from spending all day Saturday at the Tallahassee Code Camp. And I have to say, it was a blast! Despite a six hour drive, which included driving through the remains of a tropical storm, it was well worth my time.

The day opened with me actually giving a presentation on SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition. I always like giving my presentations in the first slot, as the attendees are awake (mostly) and energized (or at least heavily caffeinated). They typically ask great questions, and this group was no exception. After my presentation, I was able to spend the rest of the day relaxing and learning about all sorts of great technologies. I attended sessions on Silverlight, LINQ, Windows WorkFlow (WF), and Ajax. All great, and very informative.

The Tallahassee User Group really knows how to put on a good show. Registration was extremely fast, they had more than enough doughnuts and coffee at breakfast and great pizza at lunch. The rooms were nice, all in all quite well run.

And the swag, baby! I have to brag and say I scored some great stuff, primarily a stack of new books on various .Net 3.0 technologies. My best score though came from Joe Healy (http://www.devfish.net/) who gave me one of those cool oval Microsoft stickers which I’ve now proudly affixed to the top of my laptop, just under my Coding Horror sticker.

I also have to give and extra special thanks to my long suffering wife the Southern TinkerBelle ( http://southerntinkerbelle.com/ ), who bent over backwards to arrange things so I could attend. Thanks sweetie!

Thanks again to everyone for a great time, and I look forward to going back next year!

More WPF Resources

Walt Ritscher of Wintellect was in our offices this week, teaching us WPF. Great guy, really knows his stuff, and has a blog well worth checking out at

http://wpfwonderland.wordpress.com/

There’s a great training site on XAML/Silverlight called Nibbles. Be warned the site is done in Silverlight, so for now you’ll need to use IE and have Silverlight installed.

http://www.nibblestutorials.net/

Fellow southern blogger Keith Rome has a blog on WPF and Silverlight:

http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog/

Tim Sneath has a lot of good info on Silverlight:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/default.aspx

Finally, this isn’t specifically a WPF resource, but our regional developer evangelist and all around swell guy Doug Turnure has a posting of .Net bloggers in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dougturn/archive/2007/08/19/most-popular-bloggers-in-georgia-alabama-and-mississippi.aspx

Update: September 15, 2007 – I wanted to add one more resource. I picked up Pro WPF by Matthew MacDonald (http://www.amazon.com/Pro-WPF-Windows-Presentation-Foundation/dp/1590597826/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-6226587-5048708?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189884771&sr=8-3 or http://tinyurl.com/2pw8z9) I have several of Matthew’s books and have always enjoyed his writing, and this book appears to be another winner. It’s a good companion to the Adam Nathan book, as each book goes into some areas the other doesn’t.

Tallahassee, FL Code Camp III

I’m pleased to announce I’ll be speaking at Tallahassee Code Camp III. The event takes place in Tallahassee Florida on Saturday, September 22nd. I’ll be speaking on SQL Server Compact Edition.

For more info, please visit their site at:

http://codecamp.tlhdotnet.net/

Hope to see you there!

Breaking news: Silverlight 1.0 Released!

Hot off the presses, Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0! For those unfamiliar with Silverlight, it’s a lightweight add-in that works with most browsers. It allows you to display incredibly rich content in the browser. Version 1.0 uses AJAX libraries to handle multimedia content, games and more.

Read the Microsoft Press Release at:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/sep07/09-04SilverlightPR.mspx

There is an interview with Scott Guthrie on Channel 9, you can see it here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=339594

You can download Silverlight and learn more about it at the Silverlight site:

http://silverlight.net/Default.aspx

or the Microsoft page (slightly different content)

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

Scott Guthrie has a really informative post on his blog:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/09/04/silverlight-1-0-released-and-silverlight-for-linux-announced.aspx

If you want to see an example of a Silverlight site, visit the Alabama Code Camp site at:

http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/home.html

Sweet.

Arcane Searching

I think we’d all agree the internet is one of the greatest productivity tools around, allowing us to find vast stores of information. I’m sure you’ve also heard it’s the greatest time waster, with lots of distracting sites or useless pages that get in the way of the results we want.

I find it really valuable to have a good search tool, one that focuses on the content I need, and limits the scope of the search to relevant areas. Of course we’ve all heard of Google, the 500 pound gorilla of search engines. While the do a pretty decent job, when your search phrase returns half a million hits it can be difficult to narrow down.

Recently I’ve found the Microsoft engine, Windows Live ( http://www.live.com/ ), has gotten a lot better, especially when looking for .Net related developer content.

My favorite so far though, is Search.Net ( http://searchdotnet.com/ ), a site put together by coding legend Dan Appleman. Dan ( http://www.desaware.com/ ) created a Google powered site, but maintains the list of sites it searches so you know that you are only combing sites devoted to programming and not Happy Harry’s House of Wild Women.

Another site I just learned about this week is Koders ( http://www.koders.com/ ). It’s a site devoted to searching through source code. It also has some helps that will let you zoom in on what you want. You can pick the language, or specify your search word needs to be in the class name, method name, or interface name. This kind of search is valuable when you are looking for an example, or trying to avoid reinventing the wheel.

A similar site is Krugle ( http://www.krugle.com/ ). It has similar paradigm to Koders, allowing you to search through code.

The final code search tool I’ll mention is Google’s new Code Search engine ( http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en ). It allows you to search using regular expression syntax, which is a nice feature (I just wish regular expressions weren’t such a pain in the underwear to use).

I have to give a quick thanks, most of these I learned about through either my listening of Dot Net Rocks ( http://www.dotnetrocks.com/ ) and HanselMinutes ( http://www.hanselminutes.com/ ) or through Scott Hanselman’s new forum site, which I blogged about yesterday.

Those are the list of place I go when I need to find something, how about you?

Arcane Links

Some miscellaneous topics to cover for today. First, I had the need to copy several thousand files from one machine to another, about 6 gigs worth. Explorer? No thanks, to slow and unreliable. Fortunately I had recalled reading a post on Scott Hanselman’s blog just the other day on this topic. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/XCopyConsideredHarmfulRobocopyOrXXCopyOrSyncBack.aspx

Since the machine I was using to do the copying was Vista, I used RoboCopy. Worked like a champ. The bad part was I didn’t even know I already had this tool until I’d read Scott’s post. Always nice when you go hunting for a tool only to discover you’ve already got it and it’s ready to go.

On the subject of SOA, Redmond Magazine released an article on Microsoft’s SOA strategy. http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=756

It was a long article and interesting, although it seemed to have an anti-Microsoft tone. I picked up a subtle, and perhaps condescending, knocking of Microsoft for not falling into lockstep with other industry players like IBM. While I do agree Microsoft sometimes comes a little late to the party, I don’t think it has to jump on the party boat to be an effective player in the industry.

Windows Communication Foundation Guru Jeff Barnes is planning on some new WCF posts in the near future, so be sure to keep an eye on his site if you play in the WCF realm. http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/08/08/coming-soon-wcf-3-5-posting-blitz.aspx

Jeff’s also working on a WCF Site (http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/08/06/planning-a-wcf-community-site.aspx), another good reason to keep an eye on his blog.

Finally, Scott Hanselman has opened up a forum area on his site, some good info and discussions can be found here. http://www.hanselman.com/forum/

Microsoft Goes Open Source

For years critics have been blasting Microsoft over their proprietary standards and applications. Over the last few years, however, Microsoft has slowly been answering those critics by adopting internet standards instead of insisting on their own, and releasing more things to the community.

The ability to save Office 2007 documents as XPS comes to mind, as does the ability for CardSpace to use open standards like OpenID. Now, in their next step they are embracing the open source community through the addition of a new Open Source page within Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/default.mspx

On this site you can find all sorts of information and resources for those wanting to do open source projects using Microsoft software. Links to articles, websites, and the Visual Studio Express editions can be found. I won’t try to reiterate the entire site here, but if you have an interest in Open Source it’s well worth your time to have a look.

In addition is another site called Port 25. It is the outreach site for Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab. Some really cool stuff here on Linux interoperability, as well as the new Dynamic Language support such as IronRuby and IronPython.

http://port25.technet.com/

I can tell right now I’m going to be spending a lot of time on Port 25.

Finally, I should mention a site that’s been around for a bit by the name of CodePlex. It’s Microsoft’s site to host open source project done by both Microsoft folks and those of us in the community. (Well, I say us, one day I keep swearing I’ll find time to crank out some cool project and put it on CodePlex.)

http://www.codeplex.com/

Currently they show about 2000 projects right now, so there should be a lot for you to check out.

No, I don’t foresee Vista going open source anytime soon. But I really have to hand it to Microsoft. Somewhere over the last few years they realized they weren’t the only game in town. Since then they have really made an effort to “play nice” with other communities, and embrace many new open standards. The creation of their Microsoft Open Source site is just another step in that journey.