Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 available today!

I’m downloading it as we speak. So please wait until I’ve done :) Oh, for the first couple of days the download is only available through MSDN subscriber download, but then MS will make it public for everyone. Today Microsoft announced a new (albeit beta 2) release of their flagship developer software, Visual Studio 2010. I’m curious if Sharepoint development will be available now because we’re building our new Sharepoint 2010 course and I think this would be nice to have (I’ll check it out after downloading completes, look for details here). I’ll also be looking at improvement in the Workflow Foundation 4 designer, because some things didn’t work yet with the designer (but in code it did). Of course I’m loving .NET framework 4 with its WCF improvements. I’ve been looking over them and I’m impressed. Especially with the integration of the REST starter toolkit, because I’m sure REST will become more and more important for Web service development, thinking about Silverlight for example. And for MSDN subscribers we will get: Free develop hours with Azure Full access to Team Foundation Server 2010 40 hours of e-Learning Also the official date of the launch of Visual Studio has been released: 22 march 2010. So what’s with the 22 of the month (on 22 October MS is releasing Windows 7 to the public)? :)

Generate sequence diagrams with Visual studio 2010

Cool! I’ve just discovered this new feature in Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2) where you can generate a sequence diagram from your code. This should take the hard bit out of generating documentation from your code :) Here’s a screen shot: The only thing you need to to is to point to the method you want to see a sequence diagram for, right-click and choose Generate Sequence Diagram… Then Visual Studio will ask you how deep you want to go, which classes/methods to include in the sequence diagram: And then you can start making changes to the diagram: Nice!

Installing VS2010 Beta 2

So I’ve installed VS2010 today. Installation went quite well but you might want to uninstall the Silverlight 3 SDK because that gave an issue on my machine. The VS logo has changed colors: Usual license stuff… 5.6 Gb on disk required… And there we go… This took about half an hour on my machine. Please note that I first expanded the .iso to a directory. Doing this on an external disk might speed things up… Sharepoint developers: look at this! And for the Silverlight people, yes, we can now do drag&drop databinding using the data sources window:

Strange but true: using a keyword as a variable

Can you use a keyword as an argument, or any other kind of local variable? Why would you want to do that? That aside: how? Easy! Just use the @ in front of any keyword and you can now use it as a variable. For example: class Program {   static void UsingKeywordArg(string @string)   {     Console.WriteLine(@string);   }     static void Main(string[] args)   {     UsingKeywordArg("Hello world");   } }   I found this while digging through some generated code from workflow foundation 4. Cool!