From the category archives:

Visual Studio

Angus McDonald on User Stories

January 28, 2010Elcom

I really liked Angus’ recent post on User Stories (Wikipedia link about User Stories here) and how he grapples with question of whether they are even needed. User Stories feature prominently in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 releases, so you’re sure to hear more about them (in the Microsoft space that is).
The value in Angus’ [...]

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Microsoft Visual Studio and Quality

December 20, 2009Visual Studio

I was pleased to see Somasegar’s blog post last week announcing that the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 release is being delayed. The reason: quality. The Beta 2, whilst good, isn’t up to the standard they wanted in order to meet the current release schedule. Thus, they’re going to extend the beta period in [...]

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Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

October 20, 2009Visual Studio

I love the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 pitch – no namby-pamby here:
This is no namby-pamby beta. It’s a full-octane beta release with a “Go Live” license that you can use to concept, build, test, and deploy* your next project.

The Beta 2 has just been released, and whilst it seems to be downloading/installing OK, [...]

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Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio Getting Started Guide

January 14, 2009Live

As Nick has mentioned we’ve released a Getting Started guide for the Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio controls. The November CTP (details here, download here) has a bunch of controls for implementing Live Services in your web apps.
It includes ASP.NET controls for Contacts, Login status, Maps, Messenger chats, Silverlight streaming etc. The November [...]

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Team System Web site clean up

December 12, 2008Community

I’ve always liked how the Team System team work hard to provide details on what they’re up to. This is becoming more the norm on Microsoft assets (just check out the great job Beth Massi has been doing on the VSTO site for example), and so I shouldn’t be surprised to see just how serious [...]

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VSTO in Visual Studio 2010

November 22, 2008Main

One of the biggest hurdles with VSTO is deployment.
As you probably know, the pre-requisites for running a VSTO app (even of the simplest Hello World variety) include:

.NET Framework 3.5
Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs)
VSTO Runtime
(Plus Office of course)

Now, packaging these isn’t the issue, since the Visual Studio team have worked hard to [...]

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What’s changed in Visual Studio 2008 SP1?

August 17, 2008Link

Maarten van Stam has a nice tip for isolating specific changes made in SP1. Check out his post here, or just run this search and you’ll see the list of 902 pages worth of doco changes.
You can then narrow that further by selecting one of the one of the Refinement options:

Refining by Visual Studio [...]

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Visual Studio Gallery

August 9, 2008Link

Thanks to Deepak Kapoor for alerting me to this one – the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery – a list of add-ins and extensions for Visual Studio. It’s been around for a little while now, so you may already know about it. But if not, start here with the list of Highest Rated add-ins for Visual [...]

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SQL 2008 Support in VS2008 SP1

August 9, 2008Link

A nice little interview with Milind Lele by Beth Massi, uncovering some of the nice data sync enhancements coming in SP1 (especially if you are connecting to SQL Server 2008). If you haven’t seen this stuff covered before, then this 15 minute overview is worth watching.
But treat this as a ‘what’s possible’ not a ‘how [...]

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Corneliu – Anti-spam email encoding tool

August 2, 2008Community

I’ve been meaning to blog link this for ages, because I use it all the time but always have to go searching for the URL…
So here it is, Corneliu’s most excellently helpful Anti-spam email encoding tool. Put in your email address and it’ll return a nice encoded one that most spam bots won’t recognise (sure [...]

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