Strange VS 2008/Resharper behaviour (BuildAction property)

I’ve noticed one problem while added new classes to my MVC project. Whenever I add new class from VS templates -> Class, both Visual Studio and Resharper Intellisense is not working for such file. After some investigation I found that problem exists because of BuildAction property that wasn’t set correctly for this CS file.

So what you need to do, if you have the same problem, is to change BuildAction property of class file from “Content” to “Compile”.

 

One thing about Team Explorer

I was surprised with one funny stuff in VS 2008 Team Suite. When you try to get latest version by right-click on solution item in Solution Explorer it use file’s info from project files, not simply listing the TFS directories… So that if you checked out some project file for editing and then someone will add new files in this project to TFS you will never get them until project files isn’t up to date. Of cause this issue is not applicable if you have multiple checkouts switched off. So if you in the same trouble, better use Source Control View from Team Explorer pane and then include new files into the project.

 

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installation experience

I spent whole day fighting system on laptop I’ve obtained to correspond requirements of Visual Studio 2008 SP1. So I want to put some of ideas about this process here.

FYI: This laptop has Vista Business N installed and configured to receive and install all Microsoft Updates automatically and was constantly connected to internet.

First of all you should install .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 beta. As I know there are no special relations and requirements to installed soft. In fact I haven’t any problems with this installation.

Then it’s reasonable to install all available updates. In my case some updates inside Vista Service Pack 1 were critical for VS2008 SP1 beta installation.

After this step most insteresting part begins, you should unistall all system components and developer tools which are not compatible with VS2008 SP1 beta and its installation utility cannot help you even with list of conflicts. So the most helpful doc I’ve found is SP1 Beta Readme.

So if your system is configured on standard manner and you have the same conditions you should unistall these components:

• KB949325 (listed under the version of Visual Studio 2008) – Silverlight tools
• Silverlight Tools Beta 1
• SQL Publishing Wizard 1.2 (in some cases it’s not required to uninstall this one, but there’re can be conflicts with VS2008 in future)

 

Full list of changes in SP1 beta

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 includes:

• Improved designers for building WPF applications
• Full support for SQL Server 2008
• The introduction of the ADO.NET Entity Designer
• Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
• Improvements to Team Foundation Server to respond to customer feedback on version control usability and performance, improved e-mail integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
• Improvements for Web development including richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 includes:

• Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code
• WCF improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services
• Streamlined installation experience for client applications
• Improvements in the area of data platform, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and support for SQL Server 2008’s new features.

Additional Details

In addition, Service Pack 1 for the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2008 includes a number of new features:

• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Visual Designer Changes
• .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile
• New ADO.NET Data Features
• Team Foundation Server Improvements

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Visual Designer Changes

• Cold startup performance improvement ranging between 20-45% depending on application size without needing to modify any code.
• Additional WPF features for text, graphics, and media to deliver better performance. For example, effects like DropShadow and Blur were implemented using software rendering; with Service Pack 1 these are now implemented using hardware acceleration. Other examples include:
  • Text, especially when used in Visual and DrawingBrush, is substantially faster.
  • Data scalability improvements – Container Recycling, TreeView virtualization, and more to enable richer data editing support
  • Media performance improvements
  • A much improved WriteableBitmap that enables real-time bitmap updates from a software surface
• Visual Studio 2008 introduced a brand new designer for WPF applications. Since Visual Studio 2008 released many additional features have become available for inclusion in the designers. These include event tab support within the property grid for control events, toolbox support within source mode, and a variety of other common asks and improvements.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Workflow Foundation (WF) Changes

• New Hosting Wizard for WCF Service projects.
• Enhancements in Test Client such as support for RM Sessions, Message Contract and Nullable<T> types enables testing of broader set of WCF-based services.
• Expanding reach of DataContract Serializer by relaxing the need of having [DataContract]/ [DataMember] on types and by supporting an interoperable mechanism for dealing with object references.
• Improved Partial Trust Debugging Experience with support for Event Log.
• Support for ADO.NET Entity Framework entities in WCF contracts.
• Improvements in writing REST based services ranging from easily supporting ServiceDocuments publication and consumption to providing greater control and usability of UriTemplate.
• Significant performance improvements on large workflow-based projects in Visual Studio.
• Considerable scalability increases for hosted WCF services in IIS7-integrated mode.

.NET Framework 3.5 Optimized Client Runtime

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 provides an install version of the .NET Framework optimized for client development. The expected final size of this optimized runtime is less than 20 MB.

New ADO.NET Data Features

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 includes two new frameworks, the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services framework, to provide developers with greater flexibility and options when creating applications that access and use data.

ADO.NET Entity Framework

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the next evolution of ADO.NET, raising the level of abstraction at which programmers work with data, and allowing the database structure or data source to evolve without significant impact to the application code.

Rather than coding against rows and columns, the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows the definition of a higher-level Entity Data Model over your relational data, and allows developers to then program in terms of this model. Developers get to deal with the data in the shapes that make sense for the application, and those shapes are expressed in a richer vocabulary that includes concepts like inheritance, complex types, and explicit relationships.

Use LINQ to Entities with the Entity Framework for queries that help create easy to maintain code that retrieves and works with strongly typed data objects or business entities.

ADO.NET Data Services

The Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services framework provides a first-class infrastructure for developing the next wave of dynamic internet applications by enabling data to be exposed as REST-based data services that can be consumed by client applications (e.g., ASP.NET, AJAX, and Silverlight) in corporate networks and across the internet. Easily build applications using a comprehensive set of Microsoft .NET libraries and client components, accessing data through uniform URI syntax and using standard HTTP verbs to operate on the resource.

ADO.NET Data Services provides a framework to build data services for relational data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, and Oracle, using the built-in support for the ADO.NET Entity Framework, or for non-relational data sources using the pluggable provider model.

Team Foundation Server Improvements

A number of improvements and additional features have been added to Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server including:

Version Control

• Simplified the user experience through cleaner “Add to Source Control” dialogs, drag and drop support to the Source Control Explorer and a much easier to use “Workspace” dialog for working folder mappings.
• Version control now automatically supports non-solution controlled files.
• Various changes to the Source Control Explorer such as a new checkin date/time display column, local path hyperlink support and en editable source location field.

Work Item Tracking

• Microsoft Office 2007 integration is now done using the standard Office “Ribbon” delivering a cleaner and easier to use integration to the different Microsoft Office 2007 products.
• E-mail integration for work items and links for Team system Web Access to make it easier to use e-mail as part of the development life cycle.

Visual SourceSafe Migration Tool

• The migration tool has been dramatically improved through many performance and reliability improvements. In addition Service Pack 1 provides support for the elimination of namespace conflicts, automatic solution rebinding, improves timestamp coherency and increases the amount of migration logging information available.

Performance and Scalability

• With Service Pack 1 a large part of the focus was to improve the performance and scalability of Team Foundation Server through changes such as faster synchronization with Active Directory, improved checkin concurrency, a faster way to create source tree branches, online index rebuilding for less maintenance downtime and better support for very large checkin sets.
• Improvements in the number of projects a server can support that make not only the scalability of the server better but also the client experience when connecting to a server with a large number of projects on it.

Additional Features

• Support for using SQL Server 2008 with Team Foundation Server.
• Team System Web Access provides “live” links to work items and checkin e-mail messages. This improves the customer experience for users who do not use Team Explorer.
• Scripting support for the creation of Team Projects.

This forum contains solutions of for some issues and errors during SP1 beta installation and new features using: Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beta) forum

 

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1 Beta

New service pack for .Net and VS has been released this morning!

Here is list of features most interesting for me in this public beta:

• ASP.NET: Dynamic Data now included in .Net 3.5 and all necessary project templates for VS also available
• ASP.NET: History support added. Now we can control AJAX pages behavior on Back/Forward buttons pressed in very simple manner that was shown previously on MS demos
• ASP.NET: Script Combining feature added to reduce the number of requests and improving page load time. Before this moment we used custom approach for client scripts combining

• VS2008: Added richer support of JavaScript code formatting and Intellisense, especially for separated .js files

• WPF: Data binding and performance improvements, interoperability with Direct3D

• ADO.NET: SQL 2008 support – all wizards, data wizards and data-driven features now tuned for SQL 2008 also
• ADO.NET: Entity framework and LINQ to Entity included in this SP
• ADO.NET: Data Services – rich framework to create dynamic data and publish them across different clients

• C#: Code editor now handles more semantic errors in your code and can highlight them during editing (some of cool ReSharper error detection heuristics are natively implemented)

Links for more detailed info:

1. ScottGu’s Blog
2. Scott Hanselman [more on "Astoria" and Data Services]
3. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Portal
4. Entities: EntityDataSource overview
5. Download them!

Start playing!