For a preview of the next TFS Power Tools release, please read Brian Harry’s blog.

The next version is really amazing!

From Brian’s post:

There are 3 major new components to the October Power Tools release and the usual incremental improvements.

• Team Members - We’ve added a new node to the Team Explorer called "Team Members".  It appears under each Team Project and is used to identify who are the people who work on the project.  It serves as a "pivot point" for information about and operations on people and teams.
• Windows Shell Extension - We’ve built a Windows shell extension that allows you to do the core version control operations directly inside the Windows Explorer without using the Team Explorer.
• PowerShell Support - We’ve started working on a PowerShell pipeline and commandlets for TFS.  Our initial set support basic version control operations but over time we plan to add work item tracking, administration, build and more.

This is one of the best Power Tools releases so far.

Read Brian’s post for full details.

Introduction

Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 enable developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver high quality and rich user experiences. Visual Studio 2008 enables organizations of every size to rapidly create secure, manageable, and reliable applications that are optimized for Windows Vista™, SQL Server, the Microsoft 2007 Office system and the Web.

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 continue Microsoft’s investment in market leading development tools and developer platform. SP1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customer and partner feedback, as well as internal testing. These service packs offer customers improvements in responsiveness, stability and performance.

Overview

.NET-based Windows application development benefits from increased Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) designer performance and updated components for Visual Basic and Visual C++ (including a MFC-based Office 2007 Ribbon).  Web development improvements include enhanced the client-side script tooling (JavaScript IntelliSense). In addition to IDE performance improvements SP1 fully supports SQL Server 2008 and the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for client development and rich data scaffolding, improved AJAX support, and other improvements for Web development. Additionally it introduces support for the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which simplify data access code in applications by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any data source and enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 delivers:

• Improved WPF designers
• SQL Server 2008 support
• ADO.NET Entity Designer
• Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
• Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
• Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements

The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 delivers:

• 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

WPF and visual designer improvements

Cold startup performance improvement ranging between 20-45% depending on application size without needing to modify any code.

Additional WPF support for text and graphics, and media to deliver better performance. For example, effects like DropShadow and Blur were implemented using software rendering; with SP1 these are now implemented using hardware acceleration. Other examples include:

• Text, especially when used in Visual and DrawingBrush, is substantially faster,
• Scrolling improvements with Container Recycling, improved working set with TreeView virtualization
• A much improved WriteableBitmap that enables real-time bitmap updates from a software surface,
• Designer support for the event tab within the property grid for control events,
• Toolbox support within source mode.

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Optimized Client Runtime

SP1 provides a .NET Framework install version that is optimized for .NET-based client applications. The size of this optimized runtime is less than 28 MB.

New ADO.NET Data Features

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 (ASP.NET, AJAX, 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.

TFS improvements

A number of improvements have been made to Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation 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.
• Email integration for work items and links for Team system Web Access to make it easier to use email as part of the development lifecycle.

Visual SourceSafe migration tool

• The migration tool has been dramatically improved through many performance and reliability improvements. SP1 provides support for the elimination of namespace conflicts, automatic solution rebinding, improves timestamp coherency and increases the amount of migration logging information available.

Additional Features

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

Performance and scalability

• With SP1 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.

from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx

Microsoft announce the public release of a new developer tool -  Source Analysis for C#.

Inside Microsoft this tool’s name is StyleCop and it enforces code style guidelines on the code we write

Source Analysis comes with a set of default rules analyzers covering approximately 200 best practice rules. These rules are full compatible with the default layout settings in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.

Specifically, these rules cover the following, in no particular order:

• Layout of elements, statements, expressions, and query clauses
• Placement of curly brackets, parenthesis, square brackets, etc
• Spacing around keywords and operator symbols
• Line spacing
• Placement of method parameters within method declarations or method calls
• Standard ordering of elements within a class
• Formatting of documentation within element headers and file headers
• Naming of elements, fields and variables
• Use of the built-in types
• Use of access modifiers
• Allowed contents of files
• Debugging text

After installation, Source Analysis can be run from within the Visual Studio IDE. You can set this up to be run as a part of your build process as documented here. Since this is plugged in as a MsBuild project you can use it in as a part of Team Foundation Build process as well.

Running Source Analysis:

And the results are:

Download it from: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis

Read full details:http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/05/23/announcing-the-release-of-microsoft-source-analysis.aspx

A new version of the Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison Guide is now available. Version 1.08 includes updates to a number or line items, but in particular it includes a lot of fixes in the debugging section and adds a section on 64-bit development features.

Microsoft released a nice training kit (~126MB) (it’s a real treasure!) for the latest technologies.

This package covers a bunch of technologies and includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including:

• Visual Studio Tools for Office
• Visual Studio Team System
• Application Lifecycle Management
• C# 3.0
• VB 9.0
• LINQ
• WPF
• WCF
• WF
• Silverlight
• ASP.NET
• AJAX
• CardSpace
• Mobile

Download here.

Few week ago, I’ve been asked by Patrick Smacchia, a C# MVP to try this tool. I really want to thanks Patrick to give me the chance to evaluate a professional edition.

I installed it and start working with. After using this tool, it’s my most favorite tool to reviewing my code!

NDepend is an excellent tool that is designed to provide a very deep analysis of your compiled code to help you understand and control your development effort by managing both the quality and the complexity of your code. NDepend works in a very similar way as the Microsoft FxCop tool, by analyzing your compiled code and calculating different metrics and statistics on that code.

NDepend analyzes your code against more than 60 different metrics and can be customized to a particular application. These metrics measure things like:

• Lines of Code, Comments and the percentage of comments
• Number of IL instructions
• Number of Assemblies, Namespaces, Types, Methods, Fields
• Coupling (both Afferent and Efferent), Cohesion and Cyclomatic Complexity
• Instability
• Abstractness
• Depth of Inheritance

NDepend’s start page:

NDepend’s analyzing result and projects loaded:

A great feature is the NDepend’s CQL (Code Query Language). It is the one of its main features that I love.  It’s a query language for code so one can issue statements like:

SELECT TOP 100 METHODS ORDER BY NbLinesOfCode DESC

Its great to query your code this way, besides we’re all familiar with T-SQL…

Visual NDepend also has this metrics view which graphically represents any criteria from number of lines of code such as represented below, to number of methods, parameters, coupling, etc.  The bigger the square below means more number of lines of code.

Another feature for the professional edition (not available in the free edition) is the build comparisons.  It basically analyzes two build versions, analyze what’s been deprecated, broken, etc.  It’s useful to easily know if an upgrade to a component you’re using will break your app.  It also provides easy access on the details of what has been changed.

The binaries also include extensions for MSBuild, NAnt and CruiseControl.NET so you can readily include NDepend tasks in your build scripts for your continuous integration setup.

NDepend is great for architects or even team leads who wants to have a quick overview of their project rather than diving into the code and scratch their heads.

Addins of NDepends available to VS2008, VS2005 and Reflector.

NDepends web site: http://www.ndepend.com/

I often visit customers and work outside the office, means I work disconnected for a while.

It’s laborious when I open VS (2005 or 2008) and waiting for VS to connect automatically to TFS.

Colin Beales has an excellent tip that explains how to stop Visual Studio from automatically connecting to a TFS server when it starts up.

• Backup your registry
• Navigate to Team Foundation key:
  • For VS 2005 navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\TeamFoundation
  • For VS 2008 navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation
• Add a registry key “AutoLoadServer” (type DWORD)
• Setting the value to be 0 (Do not connect automatically or 1 to connect automatically).

It’s here and you can give it a try now! To step through .NET Framework Source code, here’s what you need to do.

1. Install the Visual Studio 2008 QFE.  This Hotfix just updates a DLL that’s part of the Visual Studio debugger that fetches the source files, more details on the download page. (64-bit users: read the description as there is a single manual step for 64-bit)
2. Go into Tools > Options > Debugging > General and turn off “Enable Just My Code” and turn on “Enable Source Server“
3. Go to Symbols and add this URL http://referencesource.microsoft.com/symbols and a local cache path. Make sure “search only when symbols are loaded manually” is checked.

That’s it.

Great post by Shawn gives you more detail.

Note: This functionality is not available on the Express versions of the Visual Studio 2008 products.

You won’t find it.

There’s no horizontal scroll bar in the schema view window like there is in the solution explorer (or other views).

The problem relevant for VS 2005 as also VS 2008.

When you try to build VS 2008 solutions with Team Foundation Build 2005 you get:

MSB5014 - File format version is not recognized.

I posted about it and one of the comments (by Eran Kampf) linked to Mitch Denny’s approach. Customers ask me about it a lot and this is the best approach to deal with the problem.

Buck Hodges says that the best “workaround” is to upgrade to TFS 2008. But not all of you will upgrade soon to 2008. For you, Mitch’s approach is the best.