Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview

Welcome to the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview Feedback page! You can now get an early look at the new features we are working on for the next release by downloading the CTP from the Download Center. The CTP release is available in English only as a Virtual PC image

Download Page

New features in C# 4.0

“It is now close to a year since Microsoft Visual C# 3.0 shipped as part of Visual Studio 2008. In the VS Managed Languages team we are hard at work on creating the next version of the language (with the unsurprising working title of C# 4.0), and this document is a first public description of the planned language features as we currently see them.
Please be advised that all this is in early stages of production and is subject to change. Part of the reason for sharing our plans in public so early is precisely to get the kind of feedback that will cause us to improve the final product before it rolls out.”
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/csharpfuture
New features in C# 4.0

V

Microsoft to distribute JQuery with Visual Studio

Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

Additionally Microsoft will be developing additional controls, or widgets, to run on top of jQuery that will be easily deployable within your .NET applications. jQuery helpers will also be included in the server-side portion of .NET development (in addition to the existing helpers) providing complementary functions to existing ASP.NET AJAX capabilities
Link

Productive Teams Are Business Assets. Recognise Your Investment In Building Them

Interesting post from Jason, which may be worth thinking about for some…..

“in reality – the (productive development )team itself is every bit as valuable a business asset as the software they’ve created.”

V.

Separate Assemblies != Loose Coupling

Interesting piece from Jeremy Miller about coupling.

“Here’s what’s important about coupling between two things (class/module/infrastructure/subsystem/whatever) named X and Y:

Can I understand X in isolation, or do I also have to understand Y at the same time?
Can I change X independently of Y? Or to put it differently, will changing X likely break Y or vice versa, ’cause that would be bad?
Can I test X in isolation without Y hanging around and getting in the way? Or can I verify that X works independently of Y?
Can I use X with a Z instead of a Y?
If I want to reuse X in another context, even if it’s in the same application, can I do that without having to drag Y along with me? And all of the things that Y needs for that matter?”
Link

Amazon ec2 now with windows server

“Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server.
Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications.”

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

Some useful System.Diagnostics attibutes

DebuggerStepThrough & DebuggerDisplay
Link

Release Candidate 1 of Open Office 3.0 Out now

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Release Candidate 1 Download screen

NHibernate 2.0.0.GA

Version 2.0 of of NHibernate was released on 23rd Aug 2008. NHibernate is an ORM tool. This release includes support for .NET 3.5, whilst removing support for .NET 1.1. View the release notes and grab the download here

Via leftshift

Estimating Hell.. Why getting better isn’t always better

Great article on estimating from Mike
When someone says ‘we need to get better at estimating’ what they really mean is: ‘Can I have an estimate that is so good it will cover all the things than can possibly happen on the project, irrespective of their cause, so there is never a cost overrun’.
Via Rob