Visual Studio Lightswitch

I am starting to hear about a new tool from Microsoft called Visual Studio Lightswitch. At first I had trouble figuring out who the heck this tool was aimed at. Now it seems it is for lightweight developers who want to create a database app. Specifically it seems to work with SQL Server.

Lightswitch apps are built on Silverlight. You can extend them using Visual Basic or C#. If you know technologies such as WCF or Entity Framework, then you are going to be at home with Lightswitch. Personally I am a C++ developer. I do not currently do Silverlight. So this one does not seem to be for me.

Corrupt Visual Studio

I needed to quickly roll out a prototype app for my new idea. So I coded up the app using my Visual Studio 2005 Professional. Something weird happened. The linker would bomb every other time I ran it.

After a while, it did not happen every single other time. However it aborted on the average once every two runs. This was very strange. I needed a version of Visual Studio with Installshield anyway. To solve this, I decided to install Visual Studio 2010 Professional. It looks like the linker problem has gone away.

What the heck was that all about? I don't know. If it happpens again, I will have to consult Microsoft support.

Debugging

If you app does not handle an exception, a dump file will be generated. This gets done automatically by Windows Error Reporting. You are going to want some custom tools to work with this dump file.

You should start with Debugging Tools for Windows. This is a part of the Windows SDK. It is also part in parcel of the Windows Driver Kit, which you use compile additions to the tools.

Once you get into the WDK, the world is at your fingertips. I want to get to creating my own extension to the WDK. Unfortunately we have app crashes too frequently on our system. Time to investigate them and figure out what we need to do to eliminate them.

Nokia Partnership

Nokia has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Nokia will use Windows Phone 7 for its smart phones. It will also use Bing for search on its phones.

Nokia has a 31% market share in the mobile phone market. They previously partnered with Intel to produce the MeeGo open source mobile operating system.

The Windows Mobile operating system is being phased out. It is being replaced by Windows Phone 7. This o/s targets the consumer market. Other phone manufacturers using Windows Phone 7 include Samsung, LG, and Ericsson.

Visual Studio Plugins

Visual Studio 2010 has a lot of plugins that can make your IDE work easier. First off there is Wordlight. It will highlight all occurrences of some text in your code. Next there is the Color Theme Editor which can modify the color of everything in Visual Studio.

There are some package plugins that give you must bang for your buck. Powercommands is a bunch of tools wrapper into one. Power Tools by Microsoft is also multiple features bundles into one plugin.

Don't count out writing your own extensions to Visual Studio. Be reminded that you can't use these plugins in the free Visual Studio Express version. They work with the other versions of Visual Studio 10 though. Get cracking.

Internet Explorer 9

The Internet Explorer 9 Beta is out now. It has a lot of ground to make up. IE 6 used to own the browser market. But market share has been slipping. IE9 comes with the promise of actually supporting standards like HTML 5. Like other browsers, it attempts to make browsing fast.

Part of the performance improvement will be due to the new JavaScript engine. This is code named Chakra. It is similar to the V8 engine in the Chrome browser from Microsoft.

There are some other changes to the browser. The user interface has been simplified. I like that there will be more screen real estate used for the actual web page you are viewing. This comes at a cost though. Some features you are used to seeing on the screen in IE8 and prior have been hidden. They are still there. You just have to find the way to access them.

A strange fact about IE9 is that you must have Windows Vista or Windows 7 to run it. There is no Windows XP support. I guess Microsoft is positioning this browser for the future. They also don't want to encourage you to keep sticking with good old Windows XP. Or maybe people running XP don't want anything new, and will just stick with the ancient IE6 anyway.

Thanks to ArsTechnica for the 411 on IE9. That's where I learned the most about IE9 details.

The End of WPF

I read a post by a blogger that follows Silverlight product manager Scott Barnes on Twitter. Seems like Scott is sharing some insider scoops on the future of Silverlight. In turn, he exposes the mind of Microsoft. Or at least you get to hear what the Silverlight team hopes the future will be.

WPF is dead. The real question Microsoft is debating is whether the future rests with HTML5 or Silverlight. Naturally one would think that HTML5 should win. It is the future standard for HTML. At least nobody is debating whether XHTML has any future.

I am not unhappy. Never really learned WPF. So I might just be able to skip the darn thing and concentrate on the correct future technology. The future is tricky though. You never know what will win out. And it will most likely be replaced even further in the future.