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VS Publish dialog Update Database dialog disabled
If you have tried out our new Web Publish experience in Visual Studio you may have noticed that the Update Database checkbox is disabled. See the image below. The intended behavior of this checkbox is to enable you to incrementally publish your database schema from the source (the connection string in web.config) to the destination (whatever connection string is in the text box). The difference between an incremental publish and a typical publish is that for incremental publishes only changes are transferred from source to destination. With a full publish the first time that you publish your DB schema everythi...
Async in 4.5: Enabling Progress and Cancellation in Async APIs
The apps developers want to develop today are fast and fluid and the async features in .NET make this easier than ever. The world is also highly connected now which makes waiting for data a real concern for building great customer experiences. Alok Shriram from the .NET Base Class Library program management team continues his discussion on the async programming model by showing how to achieve both fast-and-fluid and connected scenarios. – Brandon In this post, we will look at how you can enable your users to interact with async tasks, introduced in the Task Parallel Library (TPL), specifically by adding...
Performance consideration for Async/Await and MarshalByRefObject
In the previous "What's New for Parallelism in Visual Studio 2012 RC" blog post, I mentioned briefly that for the .NET 4.5 Release Candidate, StreamReader.ReadLineAsync experienced a significant performance improvement over Beta. There's an intriguing story behind that, one I thought I'd share here.It has to do with some interesting interactions between certain optimizations in the BCL and how the C# and Visual Basic compilers compile async methods. Before I describe the changes made, a bit of experimentation will be useful to help set the stage. Consider the following code. The code is simp...
What’s New for Parallelism in Visual Studio 2012 RC
In September, I blogged about what was new for parallelism and asynchrony in the Visual Studio 2012 Developer Preview, and in February I followed that up with a post on what was new in the Beta. Now that Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate is out, I want to share a few thoughts on what’s new in the Release Candidate.Most new features for a release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework show up prior to a Release Candidate, which is typically focused on polish, performance, and the like. That’s true for our work around asynchrony and parallelism in Visual Studio 2012, with a fair amount o...
Introducing the .NET Framework 4.5 RC
Update (2017): See .NET Framework Releases to learn about newer releases. This release is now unsupported. Today, we are announcing the .NET Framework 4.5 RC. We are also announcing Visual Studio 2012 RC, as you can read on Jason Zander’s and Soma’s blog. Please visit the Visual Studio 2012 RC downloads page to install both products. We have made many improvements since we released the .NET Framework 4.5 Beta in February. Let’s talk about the changes at a high level: Take a look at What’s New in the .NET Framework 4.5 RC to learn more about the new features. We also made significant update...
New Features for Web Development in Visual Studio 2012 RC
Visual Studio 2012 RC is now available to download. Please visit Jason Zander's Blog for detailed announcement. We have more web development enhancement and features in RC. We’ll discuss some of them in future blog posts. Here are a few web development enhancements and features in Visual Studio 2012 RC since Beta. Updated Web project templates MVC4 RC included More discoverable UI to choose default Browser in VS CSS editor enhancements HTML editor enhancements Publish Enhancements Page Inspector ...
ConcurrentQueue holding on to a few dequeued elements
Since .NET 4’s release, I’ve received several questions about a peculiar behavior of ConcurrentQueue<T> having to do with memory management.With Queue<T>, List<T>, and other such data structures in the .NET Framework, when you remove an element from the collection, the collection internally wipes out its reference to the stored element, e.g. class MyQueue<T> { private T[] m_data; private int m_head; ... public T Dequeue() { ...
Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 now available for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5
We’re happy to announce that you can now download an Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 that lets you target .NET 4 and Silverlight 5. The included DLLs address the previously discussed issue of the Visual Studio 11 Beta compilers being incompatible with the AsyncCtpLibrary* DLLs from the Async CTP; with this targeting pack, you can use the async/await keywords with Visual Studio 11 Beta to compile for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5. The DLLs are available via a NuGet package, with installation details available here. Enjoy!
Using await with WinRT async operations
Over on the Windows 8 app developer blog, I've written a blog post about using await with WinRT. I hope you enjoy it!