Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 11/14/2010

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Prism v4 - VB Style and Training Kit too

Microsoft Downloads - Visual Basic Prism 4 Reference Implementations, QuickStarts, and Hands-on Labs

“Prism provides guidance designed to help you more easily design and build rich, flexible, and easy to maintain WPF desktop applications and Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

File Name: PrismV4_VB.Exe

Size: 30.4MB

Version: 4.0

Date Published: 11/19/2010

Language: English

…

Prism provides guidance designed to help you more easily design and build rich, flexible, and easy to maintain Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications and Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and Windows Phone 7 applications.

This download is provided to help the Visual Basic developer use the Prism Library. It includes reference implementations, QuickStarts, the Prism Library binaries, and documentation. The documentation includes:

Visual Basic Content for Prism4.chm: The documentation for the reference implementations, QuickStarts, and Hands-On Labs in Visual Basic.

Prism4.chm: Documentation in C#.

Prism4APIReference-{platform}.chm: Library reference API.

…”

Damian Schenkelman - Prism Training Kit 4.0 Released

“This past week with Diego, Ezequiel, Guido and Matias we worked on updating Prism training kit to Prism 4.0. Following the trend from the Prism team guys, we updated the version number to Prism Training Kit 4.0. Download the latest version from here.

I really recommend downloading this release, as we put a lot of effort in getting out there what we believed would be the most useful content. You can get a set of detailed updates and features in Guido’s blog, but to summarize the main changes are:

Updated Modularity, Bootstrapper, Dependency Injection, Communication and UI Composition labs to Prism 4.0.

Created new labs for MEF and Navigation.

Fixed bugs from first version of the Training Kit.

…

…”

Good to see VB get some Prism love and I always love training kits… ;)

Friday, November 19, 2010

A glimpse at the future of Visual Studio ALM

notsotrivial.net - Highlights from the ALM Summit

“Just back from the ALM Summit in Redmond and wanted to share some of my takeaways. This was a small conference driven by the Visual Studio team and sponsored by a select group of vendors that sell products in the ALM space. There were approximately 250 attendees, mostly enterprise customers and partners serving in PM and Architect roles.

…

Key Messages

Here are the key messages and themes I heard throughout the three day conference:

Lean Thinking. …

Betting Big on Agile and more specifically the Scrum methodology. …

Autonomous cross-discipline teams work. …

Commodity Cloud. …

Visual Studio ALM road map. …

…”

An cool view into the recent ALM summit.

The very [very very very] tentative VS ALM roadmap was interesting. If I had my druthers, I think I’d swap a couple of the vNext and vFuture items, specifically I’d like to see Ops Integration and Release Management in vFuture swapped with ALM in the Cloud in vNext (but given the TFS on Azure announcement/demo made at PDC10, it seems ALM in the Cloud is mostly a done deal…). But that’s just me…. LOL :p

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Three T4 Cheat sheets (General Overview, @Template Details and Examples)…

rmaclean's blog - T4 Cheat sheets!

“I’ve been spending a lot of time working on two things recently: T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) and Windows Phone 7. Part of my work around T4 included creating some cheat sheets to make it easier to get to grips with it!

There is now three posters available (High res PDF’s below or on the DRP site):

General Overview

This provides a high level overview of the various components in T4. …

@template detail

The @template directive has a lot of options and this sheet provides detail on those. …

Examples

This sheet provides usage examples of various aspects directives in T4. …

…” [GD:Click through for the download links]

Been a while since I’ve done a T4 related post…

Here’s a snap of the three PDF’s

They can have your WinForms App when they pull if from your cold dead fingers? Don’t think WPF is “it” for you? Wish Microsoft would just ask you what’s keeping you from moving to WPF? Well they are! (asking that is)

10REM.NET (Pete Brown) - Windows Forms Developers: Tell me about your applications

“I want to help Windows Forms developers transition applications to Silverlight and WPF. To do that, it will help me to understand the types of applications that are being maintained or newly developed in winforms today.

…

Help me help you. Answer as many of the questions above as you can, in the comments below. This is going to lead into content (talks, videos, posts etc.) and perhaps even tooling and templates to help make the transition easier for you. …

…”

I love seeing this kind of reaching out. They can’t help us/you move to WPF if then don’t know what’s keeping us/you from moving to WPF…

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Shiny! Sysinternals Process Explorer v14 released…

Sysinternals Site Discussion - Update: Process Explorer v14

“This major update to Process Explorer adds a slew of enhancements and new functionality including network and disk monitoring, an improved multi-tab system information dialog, additional memory statistics, a new column that shows aggregate CPU usage for a tree of processes, improved DLL scanning performance and accuracy, command-lines in process tree tooltips, support for more than 64 CPU systems, and more.” [GD:Post leached in full]

Windows Sysinternals - Process Explorer

“Process Explorer v14

Published: November 16, 2010

Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. …”

The latest Sysinternals utilities are just a URL away, Live.Sysinternals.com

Use the Sysinternals Utilities? The EULA bug dialog you? Then try this…

A handy PowerShell script to keep your Sysinternals Suite up to date

Windows Phone 7 Dev for Beginners… And we’re talking absolute, new to development/programming, just learned to spell IDE, beginners

Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson - Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners

“I’m excited about this. It is a series of videos designed as a four day workshop for learning Windows Phone 7 development. And it is for absolute beginners not seasoned professional developers. It’s from Microsoft’s Channel 9 team and so the production quality as well as the technical information is rock solid. May be just the thing for getting started in smart phone development in school, as a hobby or even eventually career work. Check it out.

…”

Cool Stuff - Windows Phone 7 development for absolute beginners

“We have just launched an all new series that teaches beginning developers with little programming experience how to develop applications for Windows Phone 7. This series assumes that they have absolutely no knowledge of C#, Silverlight, or mobile development. In just a few hours, they will understand the needed concepts to build applications.” [GD:Post leached in full]

Channel 9 - Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners

“This video series will help aspiring Windows Phone 7 developers get started. We'll start off with the basics and work our way up so in a few hours, you will know enough to build simple WP7 applications, such as a GPS aware note taking application. We'll walk you through getting the tools, knowing what an if statement is, to using the GPS built into the phone and much more!

…

…”

What I like about Channel 9 Series is how easy they make getting and subscribing to the content…

Note that you’ll want to start on the last page (currently 7) and work forward…

“Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone” - 1 zip, 6 samples and 26 pages

Windows Phone Developer Training Kit, now April and VS2010 RTM Fresh…

A one-stop-dev-shop for WP7 Dev, the “Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices” wiki.

Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices Wiki V0.1

“What is this page?

This document represents current consensus around development best practices for Windows Phone 7.

These best practices are collaboratively developed and discussed by the WP7 developers community. As such, anyone may contribute.

This wiki page was initially edited and will continually go through quality assurance by former Microsoft Silverlight program manager Justin Angel.

Who is the target audience for this wiki?

Experienced Silverlight, WPF or WP7 Developers.

If you're new to Silverlight, never explored WP7 or a professorial designer then you're unlikely to find this wiki to be a welcoming and promising start to your WP7 career.

Rule of thumb: If you do not understand these best practices, you are most likely not the target audience for this document.

"It's ruined! It's all gone terribly terribly wrong!"

If you have something valuable to add (like a super cool blog post you wrote), add it.

If you don't agree with what's on this page (like how a topic is represented), edit it.

If you think an advice is obsolete, delete it.

…

…”

Good bit of content already there… :)

(via Justin myJustin = new Silverlight.Expert.Justin(); - Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices Wiki)

Six C# Coding Guidelines from Microsoft and beyond…

amazedsaint's #tech journal - Top 6 Coding Standards & Guideline Documents For C#/.NET Developers

“Some time back, I collated a list of 7 Must Read, Free EBooks for .NET Developers, and a lot of people found it useful. So, I thought about putting together my “Top 6” list of Coding Standard guidelines/checklists for .NET /C# developers as well.

As you may already know, it is easy to come up with a document - the key is in implementing these standards in your organization, through methods like internal trainings, Peer Reviews, Check in policies, Automated code review tools etc. You can have a look at FxCop and/or StyleCop for automating the review process to some extent, and can customize the rules based on your requirements.

Anyway, here is a list of some good Coding Standard Documents. They are useful not just from a review perspective - going through these documents can definitely help you and me to iron out few hidden glitches we might have in the programming portion of our brain. So, here we go, the listing is not in any specific order.

[GD: Click through for the download links]

1 – IDesign C# Coding Standards

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2 – Encodo C# Handbook

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3 – Microsoft Framework Design Guidelines

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4 – Denni’s C# Coding Standards document

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5 – Brad’s Quick Post on Microsoft Internal Coding Guidelines

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6 – Mike’s C# Coding Style Guide

…

…”