.NET programming downloads

MSDN rolls out code search for CodePlex projects

Microsoft unveiled this week, with relatively little fanfare, a new feature on MSDN that lets developers search code samples. Users can go to a dedicated MSDN code search page to enter their queries or click on the “Code Search” button at the general MSDN search page. The new feature doesn’t appear to have any special branding, but its URL http://msdn.krugle.com, seems to at least imply a code name.

Krugle — if that is its real name — can filter source code samples by language, project, filename or where in the code the query is matched (within a class definition, function definition, comments, etc).

The search is listed as beta, and at least one user has already run into difficulties. In a thread on MSDN’s feedback forums, user “dmex” complained that searching for GetProcAddress doesn’t return code from that function’s documentation. When I queried “GetProcAddress” I got 763 matches, and the function’s page wasn’t in the top 15. The pages that were returned all seemed to be from actual code files — .h, .cpp, .vb, etc — for projects on CodePlex, indicating that Krugle queries CodePlex rather than code examples embedded in MSDN documentation.

Developing Windows 7 apps in managed code

Windows 7 has some great new UI improvements. I use it as my main (in fact, only) OS at home, and I downright miss it when I come to the office and muddle through on my XP laptop. I haven’t felt like this about a windowing system since I discovered virtual desktops on Linux and started yearning for them on Windows. (Ahem, Windows 8, I’m looking at you.)

There’s just one problem: many of the new features need application-level support to really shine, and the code samples in Microsoft’s beta Win7 SDK are mostly for unmanaged code. Microsoft has a “Windows Vista Bridge Project” that provides managed wrappers for unmanaged APIs, but it doesn’t include the Windows 7 APIs yet.

In short, learning how to use Windows 7’s newest features isn’t easy if you’re writing managed apps.

Come Microsoft to the rescue: the company has been putting out .NET interop libraries that provide just that wrapping. The libraries are unsupported, but developers itching to get a jump start on Windows 7 development should find them helpful. Microsoft’s Windows 7 technical evangelist Yochay Kiriaty highlighted some of these Windows 7 code samples on MSDN, along with copious links.

MIX09 recap: plenty for developers, designers

It’s sometimes hard at a conference to see the forest for the trees. With two-hour keynotes and session after session, it’s not easy to keep perspective on what’s big and what’s ancillary. And so, now that I’m back in Boston and recovered from the redeye, here’s my take on last week.

Most of the action was concentrated on the first day of MIX09: the biggest highlights were two new features in Blend Expression 3, SuperPreview and SketchFlow — but Silverlight 3 and Web App Installer also raised some eyebrows. On the other hand, the official launch of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday was a bit anticlimactic.

SuperPreview is Microsoft’s answer to a problem that has dogged Web developers for about as long as they’ve been around: browser incompatibilities. SuperPreview lets designers see how two browsers render a given page by viewing the comparisons side by side or overlaid. The tool can also send HTML to a server and get the rendered image back, letting designers compare browsers that aren’t installed on their computers. That’s useful for comparing different versions of Internet Explorer, for instance, or even seeing how IE on Windows compares to Safari on a Mac.

Selecting a component in one browser preview highlights that component in the other browser’s rendering, letting developers quickly hone in one problem areas. But for now, SuperPreview only shows developers where the inconsistencies are; it doesn’t tell them how to fix the problems.

You can download SuperPreview as a standalone from Microsoft.

SketchFlow, the other new feature in Expression Blend 3, lets designers quickly prototype UIs by defining a flowchart that describes an application’s screens. You can also assign behaviors to buttons that can change a screen’s state or transition to another screen, giving clients a good sense of an application’s flow without you having to write any code.

One nice touch in SketchFlow is that Microsoft has included a new “wiggly” theme for controls that makes them look hand-drawn. That should help cut down on clients that don’t understand the difference between a prototype and a finished product: SketchFlow prototypes look more like drawings on digital napkins than software applications. On the other hand, SketchFlow projects are full-fledged Expression Blend applications, so you can use them as a starting point when you’re ready to write the real program.

So far, SketchFlow is see-don’t-touch: Microsoft had plenty of demonstrations throughout the week, but the bits aren’t shipping yet.

I’ve already talked about Silverlight 3 and the Web App Installer in my coverage of the MIX09 keynote, but they’re worth a quick mention here. Silverlight 3 includes lots of eye candy as well some important tools for developers. For instance, you’ll be able to write one data validation method that will run on both the client and the server. Microsoft also complemented the new Silverlight preview with improvements to the IIS Media Pack, including DVR-type pausing and playback of live streams.

The Web App Installer is a quick and easy way to deploy Web applications to your server, including applications not built on ASP.NET. The installer takes care of dependencies, so installing WordPress will automatically download and install PHP on your Windows server, too.

If there was one disappointment last week, it was the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday. It’s not so much that IE 8 is a bad browser — although it still lacks the extensibility that FireFox’s extensions provide — but the browser has already been in beta for months. The most exciting feature for designers is IE 8’s Developer Tools, which we’ve already seen. The buzz seems to be giving IE 8 the Vista treatment: blogs are calling its launch a failure and arguing that it hasn’t brought enough to the table to quell Firefox’s steady gain on the market.

Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 arrive as new CTP

Microsoft parallel extensions to .NET have undergone an update in the form of a new Community Technology Preview. Included are Coordination Data Structures, now part of the extensions.

Coordination Data Structures join Parallel LINQ and the Task Parallel Library and other elements intended to address the  new era of mulitcore processors.

Coordination Data Structures are said to contain lightweight and scalable thread-safe data structures and synchronization primitives. Apparently there is more than one way to skin a cat or facilitate communications between threads.

The Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 libraries are downloadable  now.

VC++ gets update, VB6 gets heave

Microsoft development honcho Soma Somasegar reports that a Visual C++ 2008 Feature pack has shipped. In January the pack came out in beta.

MFC components included in the pack allow developers to create applications with the look and feel of Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. The VC++ 2008 pack can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Download Center.

That’s the good news. The bad news is VB6 has reached end-of-life status in terms of Microsoft formal support. The company has recently created a webcast explaining what that means, and what avenues are open for application migration.

Bill Gates has been popping up a lot lately

Bill Gates has been popping up a lot lately - at the Office Developer Conference, at the SharePoint Conference, and so on. An interesting leg on his journey - this is, after all, a farewell tour - was his stop at Stanford University on Feb 19.

The Stanford visit is one of many he’s made in recent years to drum up added interest in computer science among students. 

Programming seems less and less to be a career of choice, and this worries Gates. So he goes to colleges and addresses the students frankly about why he loves software.

It is not all together unlike his speeches to certified geeks. There is plenty of ‘neat’ stuff, ‘really cool’ stuff, and the funny video. But I’d recommend the Stanford transcript as a good entry point to a view on the state of computing today and over time.

Gates glosses over a few facts - there were, for example, software businesses before Microsoft. But he is right in saying his company was the major one to take the low cost-high volume approach to business software.

He discussed a dream ”required some heroic assumptions. ”

We had to believe that the cost of the hardware would come down. We had to believe that the volume would go up. And only then would the economics of being able to spend tens of millions of dollars to write a software package, and yet being able to sell it for say $100 or less, actually make sense.

Much software today is free. Microsoft does not mind that, if it is free too students who will go on to do way cool things, including perhaps becoming a Windows developer some day. At the same time Gates spoke at Stanford, the company announced its DreamSparks free software program, which Ed Tittel recently wrote about in ”Microsoft sparks creativity with DreamSpark student developer program” on SearchWinDevelopment.com.

Power Tools for VSTO now available

Microsoft has released a set of Power Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office. It’s called v1.0.0.0 and it’s available at the Microsoft Download Center.

The download includes a set of reusable class libraries and a Ribbon IDs ToolWindow tool.

The following operating systems are supported:

• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Vista
• Windows XP

It is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007.

DreamSpark: Free Microsoft software for students

Microsoft’s efforts to attract young developers entered its latest, and biggest, stage this week with the announcement of the DreamSpark program.

Through DreamSpark, certified students can get free versions of the following products:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• XNA Creators Club Online

As the DreamSpark site indicates, thus far the program is open to residents of 11 countries; alphabetically, they are Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

DreamSpark represents a huge expansion of Microsoft’s free product push, aimed primarily at students but at more casual developers. The move began with the Visual Studio and SQL Server Express editions and had been extended with the Web mashup tool Popfly.

Guidance Automation Toolkit for architects and teams using VS

As part of their job, software architects often try to establish best practices for developers working on a project within an organization. Recently released Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) for Visual Studio help architects and teams achieve this goal. The extensions can be downloaded from MSDN.

Atop GAX runs the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT),l also downloadable. This is described as a package that enables architects to create reusable assets including Software Factories, frameworks, and patterns. The resulting templates and wizards help developers “build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture guidance,” according to posted material on the MSDN site.

Key parts of the toolkit include:

Recipes. These automate activities usually performed manually;

Actions. These are atomic units of work called in a defined sequence by recipes;

Text Template Transformation Templates. Such templates combine text and scriptlets that, when run, return a string that is directly inserted into the output stream of the template;

Type Converters that validate the value of a field and convert this from its user interface representation to a type representation; and

Visual Studio Templates.  These can be associated with recipes, are written in XML, and can be expanded by the Visual Studio template engine.

GAX and GAT must be downloaded and installed separately, notes Microsoft blogger Grigori Melnik. GAT requires that GAX is installed first.

MSDN Code Gallery — Yet another place to find stuff

Remember GotDotNet? Miss it?

Well, Microsoft has rolled out yet another place for programmers to post stuff. It’s called MSDN Code Gallery, and it was formally unveiled a couple weeks ago.

In a blog announcement, Soma Somasegar described it as “a portal for snippets, samples and other resources.” From the home page, programmers can browse the existing library or upload their own resources and, thus, add to the library. New releases and most popular releases are aggregated under separate headings on the bottom of the page.

We half-sarcastically call this “yet another place to find stuff” because it is not the first code and resource repository Microsoft has rolled out since it phased out GotDotNet. As Somasegar pointed out, there’s CodePlex, which is meant for live code projects, and there’s the Microsoft Download Center, which is for formal releases like SDKs and Service Packs.

In contrast, he said, “Code Gallery is a pure storage site with no project management capabilities.” Basically, it’s a place to share code you’ve written, with the hope that others in the community will benefit from it. We think folks will appreciate the egalitarianism — and, as the Shameless Plug Dept. tells us, the popularity of our own VBCode.com site suggests the same. In contrast, he said, “Code Gallery is a pure storage site with no project management capabilities.”

Basically, it’s a place to share code you’ve written, with the hope that others in the community will benefit from it. We think folks will appreciate the egalitarianism — and, as the Shameless Plug Dept. tells us, the popularity of our own VBCode.com site suggests the same.