By Jack Hu As the word “code-first” implies, the EF 4.1 offers a code centric data programming paradigm. From a coder’s point of view, it requires little effort to map a very clean object model to a database. This style of programming is idea for explorative, bottom-up kind fsharp programmers. Since EF 4 CTP4 release, there have already been man...
We’re pleased to announce a new Quick Find (Ctrl+F) extension in the February release of the Productivity Power Tools. This is the first version of the Quick Find extension and we are planning to make some improvements to it in future Power Tools releases, but this blog post describes the reasons for the extension, its functionality, where we’re p...
As of this week, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available for download! The service pack was released to MSDN subscribers on March 8 and became generally available on March 10. SP1 includes fixes that improve reliability and address the most commonly-reported customer bugs. It also adds some of the most requested feature improvements, including a...
Reseting Your Extensions for the Last Time! We've heard a great deal of feedback on how each update of the Productivity Power Tools re-enables all of the extensions when it installs. If you are careful about installing the Power Tools via the extension manager or as long as an instance of Visual Studio is running, this version of the Productivit...
For those that haven’t seen it, Eric Lippert finished an amazing 8-part blog series in November on the new Asynchronous Programming APIs slated for the next version of C# and VB. He shows you how to get started getting started with the CTP and how to determine if async makes sense for your application. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archiv...
Not many books that are reviewed like this on Amazon: Now the heavily augmented second edition has just come out, written by several people at Microsoft and reviewed by the product team. If you need a reference to Team Build or MSBuild, you should get it. -- Dan, VS Solution/Project/Build dev lead Update: Here's a link to t...
UPDATE: This issue has been fixed in Visual Studio 11/NETFX45. As always, feedback is welcome! Please leave your comments in this blog post and report any bugs on Microsoft Connect. We've had a few reports of cases where Visual Studio, and previous versions of MSBuild, will build the projects in the solution in the correct order, but the 4...
We are pleased to announce the availability of Color Printing as a free extension for Visual Studio 2010! By default, VS 2010 prints only in black and white; this extension restores support for printing code in color. Installation and Setup Installing Color Printing requires Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium, or Ultimate (the Express editions...
by Yang Xiao Today we are announcing the release to web (RTW) of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This walkthrough demonstrates how easy and convenient it is to develop a VB Windows Phone application using the newly released tools. You’ll see that the many new IDE features in Visual Studio 2010, which help you navigate and write c...
In September, there was a post on the blog that introduced the VSPackage Builder, a tool for VS extension developers that provides a designer experience over the Visual Studio Command Table (VSCT) file. In particular, Package Builder makes it easy to add commands and UI to the VSCT incrementally – a task that’s proven somewhat challenging to...
