"Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser.

Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences."

Read more: press release.

"IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of autocompletion, best known for its use in the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment. In addition to completing the symbol names the programmer is typing, IntelliSense serves as documentation and disambiguation for variable names, functions and methods using metadata-based reflection." (Wikipedia)

So, I can't quite remember when exactly Intellisense stopped working for me in Visual Studio 2008, but I know I have been without (automatic) Intellisense for quite a while.When typing a dot after an object or method, it used to just show up automatically... I could however have it come up by pressing <CTRL><SPACE> and eventually got in the habit of just doing that when I needed it, without attempting to find out exactly why it was broken in the first place...

So, several months later, I stumble upon an entry by Richard Fennell, who explains how to fix it. I thought I'd post it for when it breaks again, I know where to find the answer...

In Visual Studio 2008, select Tools > Options > Text Editor > All Languages. Ensure that the checkboxes in the Statement Completion section are actively checked (not grayed out).

That is it!. Click Ok and try it.

Here is an opportunity to take advantage of: DevExpress is offering single developer licenses for 60 of their controls free of charge – without royalties or distribution costs.

These are very high quality controls that should not be left out when considering any web (or windows) application development project. You see their ads in MSDN magazine every month and this is your chance to get them and use them without spending a cent.

"Once you register, you will be forwarded an Email with your login credentials to our product download portal. With this information in hand, you will be able to download and install all the controls and tools listed above free of charge. The applications you create with these controls can be distributed royalty free (see the EULA that accompanies the products for more information). Note that the installation you download will include evaluation versions of our entire product line. You can install these trials if you wish during the setup process. Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 are fully supported." (devexpress)

Read more: http://www.devexpress.com/...

We all know that you can ask for directions to the same destination multiple times and get different answers each time.

They will all lead you to your destination; however, some direction may get you there faster, some have a more scenic panorama, some with clear instructions and others are difficult to follow. 

The exact same is true for software development; each developer will write code their own way and have a reason as to why some function was written a certain way. However, with software, a key requirement is that we often don't want the elegance, the scenic nor the "pretty" code, but simply the code that executes efficiently, robustly and fast. How do you know if your code does exactly that...? You don't really know until you take your code for a test run and measure its performance...

There are a ton of tools out there that will assist in giving you a diagnosis of speed, performance, etc. 

Morgan at PHPVS.net has written a good article highlighting 9 essential tools that a developer ought to have to testrun their code and optimize it for deployment.

Read more: http://www.phpvs.net/2008/08/...

Visual Studio Service Pack 1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 have been released today. The downloads are available here: 

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe)
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)
  
  
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

"The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 includes a lot of improvements and especially TONS (literally tons) of performance improvements for WPF applications, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Data Services Framework and much more…

PLEASE NOTE: If develop Silverlight apps with Visual Studio, please note that after installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 you must update the Silverlight Tools (more info and download links are available here)." (via MSDN blogs - pblog)

Here is another example of my forgetfulness... I saw a small, addictive Flash game somewhere and I can't find it anymore. It involved an object that you could drag and then several other objects moving around the screen.

The goal is to avoid touching any objects or the walls.

Here is my attempt at recreating this small game in Silverlight 1.0 (click on the image). As usual, nothing refined, just a functional model.

You may wonder why I am not diving into Silverlight 2.0...? Well, that version is still in beta and although I have experimented with it, I don't want to post any example yet, as most folks still have the 1.0 version installed and may not want to install a beta version of the player.

Enjoy! 

Silverlight Chase Game 

Finally Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 has been released. This is a big release with lots of new features, as Scott Guthrie mentions: "Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser. 

Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby)."

Of course I w illbe posting some new experiments very soon.

Get the download, documentation, SDK and tools via silverlightexamples.net 

Silverlight 2.0 is about to be released in the next few days and I had yet to spend any time with version 1.0. I barely know how it works and thus decided to take a few hours here and there and put together a meaningless, but fun project, just to understand how it works.

Also, I know that the newer version 1.1 is in alpha and readily available, but I wanted to however still learn with the first version and understand the core basics of it.

This technology has tremendous potential and will be key in many, many future applications, especially with its close integration to .NET as it is basically a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation. Unlike (formerly Macromedia) Flash which uses Actionscript and a propietary editor, Silverlight uses standard languages such as XML, Javascript and any of the .NET languages in the next version. 

My first humble attempt at this technology produced a slide puzzle, like we all used to have as kids, but instead of a static image, its pieces contain a fraction of live video. Check it out!

Silverlight 1.0 Video Slide Puzzle. 

Visual Studio 2008 had several issues in its first release of slowing down or even freezing temporarily when developing web applications, especially large ones.

This hotfix addresses some fo these issues.

A readme file included in the download details every issue covered in this hotfix.

For more details check out Scott Guthrie's post on this release.

You can find the direct download here.

I noticed this section recently in MSDN on how to accomplish certain tasks shown in brief 2 - 15 minute videos. There are many categories that range from ASP.NET to SilverLight to Visual Studio, etc. and each category contains a many topics.

This is a link I will definitively store in my favorourites.

Especially useful for those of us sometimes too lazy to read...

Check it out: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/...

Visual Studio 2005 is probably one of the most complex pieces of software ever developed. It has so many features, so many tools to (try to) satisfy every developer that is trying to accomplish such a wide variety of tasks, that it is easy to see how a product lile that could become very bloated and sluggish.

So, how do I speed it up? Here are some tips I have collected over time:

• Disable the Splash Screen
  Add the following parameter to your VS2005 shortcut: "C:\Program Files\...\devenv.exe" -nosplash
  Note: the same trick applies to Business Intellgience Managment Studio and SQL Management Studio....
  
• Install Visual Studio Service Pack 1
  get it here.
  
• Turn off any IDE animated windows
  Go to Tools | Options | Environment and uncheck Animate environment tools.
  
• Get a faster hard drive - seriously
  Scott Gu writes: "What you are much more likely to block on is the Seek and I/O speed capacity with which your computer accesses your hard drive.  If you are using an application that needs to read/write a lot of files, it is not atypical for your CPU processor utilization to be really low - since the application might be spending most of its time just waiting for the disk operations to complete."
  
• Disable Startup Page
  Visual Studio tries to download the MSDN rss feed from the Internet at startup. Turn this feature off. Go to Tools | Options | General | Startup | Download content every and uncheck the box. 
  
• Set the Environment to empty at startup
  Go to Tools | Options | General | Startup | select Show Empty Environment
  
• Disable Navigation Bar
  If you are using ReSharper, you don't need VS2005 to update the list of methods and fields at the top of the file (CTRL-F12 does this nicely). Go to Tools | Options | Text Editor | C# and uncheck Navigation bar.
  
• Turn off Track Changes
  Go to Tools | Options | Text Editor and uncheck Track changes. This will reduce overhead and speeds up IDE response.
• Turn off Track Active item
  This will turn off jumping in the explorer whenever you select different files in different projects. Go to Tools | Options | Projects and Solutions and uncheck Track Active Item in Solution Explore. This will ensure that if you are moving across files in different projects, left pane will still be steady instead of jumping around.
  
• Turn off AutoToolboxPopulate
  There is an option in VS 2005 that will cause VS to automatically populate the toolbox with any controls you compile as part of your solution. This is a useful feature when developing controls since it updates them when you build, but it can cause VS to end up taking a long time in some circumstances. To disable this option, select the Tools | Options | Windows Forms Designer and then set AutoToolboxPopulate to False.
  
• Install the Public Hotfix Patch
  for VS 2005 F5 Debugging Performance Issue with ASP.NET. You can get it here.
  
• Keep MRU Lists Under Control.
  One sure way to slow down the startup of Visual Studio is to have a lot of files and projects in the recent file and recent project lists. This is especially apparent if you have any projects in the MRU list that are located on a networkshare. consider this handy MRU cleaner add-in.

One of the most important features I look for in an enterprise application is the ability for a developer to take the products and customize it to fit and fill the business need. In simple words, it needs to be extensible and it needs to be able to integrate with other existing applications.

SharePoint 2007 has greatly enhanced its capabilies in these two fields with something called SharePoint Features. In essence, "SharePoint Features" is a plug-in framework, that allows a developer to extend SharePoint in any way that he wants to.

In this tutorial we will be walking through the entire process from the very beginning in easily explained terms.

Read more: http://www.miguelmoreno.net/sandbox/...

I had to do some simple form validation the other day and thought to myself that, in our current Web 2.0 world, I should do it with AJAX since it is really everywhere and it didn't even cross my mind todo it the old fashioned way with plain Javascript, which might do the job just a good. 

So, I stumbled upon Live Validation which offers a lightweight, open source javascript library to do just that: realtime form validation with some very useful features. They have some excellent examples here and the code is decently commented. Definitively a must have in my toolbox!

Read more: http://www.livevalidation.com/

Resizing an image is nothing new, and if you maintain the aspect ratio, it will look exactly the same but smaller or larger: smaller, you'll see less of it and larger, you'll distort the image.

But what if you could in some way, intelligently resize an image without distorting the content of it...? What if that intelligent technology could identify the less important background pixels in an image and delete those to shrink the image without touching the main object in the middle?

That sounds crazy, but that is exactly what this technology will offer. (Imagine this technology built into your browser...)

"Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers.

The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure."

It seems very flexible (hence the name, I guess...) and the pricing is surpisingly decent as well.

There are several companies out there doing this this, PayPal being one of them, but I think this will offer some serious competition.

Read more:  http://www.amazon.com/...

The new Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is ready to be downloaded.  You can get it here: 

Visual Studio 2008 (formerly called "Orcas") is Microsoft's new flagship software development product for computer programmers. With features like multi-targeting support, Javascript Intellisense, AJAX support and LINQ, it sure promises to be a fully featured and exciting release. You can find the complete feature list in this white paper.

Read more: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/...

I read a post somewhere (truly can't remember where...) about the tools one uses to develop software and thought to myself: do the software tools or programs we use identify us?

I think it would it be safe to say that you can tell a lot from a person from what he is wearing or which software products he/she uses. Would you think doifferent of someone who told you they used x application...? maybe because you preferred another one?

Interesting questions, but I'd thought I'd post some of my own tools I use on a daily basis...

Here they are:

1. Visual Studio 2005 (IDE)
   
2. SQL 2005 Management Studio (Database)
   
3. Virtual PC / VMWare (PC Virtualization)
   
4. Winmerge (File/Folder differencing)
5. Fireworks / Paint.NET (Image editor)
6. Dispatch (VS FTP add-in)
7. SyncBack (FTP Syncronization)
8. Fiddler (HTTP debugger)
9. Axosoft Ontime (VS bug track add-in)

Most of the times when I have to make the choice it really depends on the case...maybe I have only to check one or two cases, in which case, I choose if/else.

However, I knew there was some sort of performance issue with one over the other, but never really knew the details. Well, the folks at BlackWasp have doen some extensive research and determined the pro's and con's, in terms of speed, of each of these two approaches.

The .NET framework and the C# language provide two methods for conditional processing where multiple discrete values can be selected from. The switch statement is less flexible than the if-else-if ladder but is generally considered to be more efficient.

Read more: http://www.blackwasp.co.uk/...

When needing a particular Javascript function, I know where to find it....usually Google it or any of my many reference books. However, Googling it may not return the most accurate results and my reference books have many other topics, which may make it difficult to find.

I keep a collection of links to many topics with useful tips, tricks and frequently used functions. This here is a large collection of quick How-To's of you most common Javascript questions.

Read more: http://www.faqts.com/...

I Stumbled across this article by Ali Khan with some good guidelines for developing fast and efficient ASP.NET applications.

Some I knew, others I did not, but nonetheless a comprehensive guide to things to keep in mind writing your next web application.

Read more: http://www.codeproject.com/...