Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

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

CTP15 of the GDR release of VSTSDB is available

Gert just announced that they just released a new CTP of the upcoming 2008 update, Microsoft® Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR.

You can download it from MSDN:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bb3ad767-5f69-4db9-b1c9-8f55759846ed&displaylang=en

Most important changes:

• Project upgrade is now in place.
• Mixed projects are no longer supported, from now on server projects represent only server creatable objects and user objects that need to be deployed to “master”. Another change is that server options will not get deployed; we only validate the settings as pre-requisites for a deployment. As such server options (sp_configure) have been added to the project system.
• The interpreter now understands temporary tables, table variables and select into column sources.
• The Static Code Analysis MSBuild task was added
• XSD Reference user interface support is enable, but it does not yet create XML Schema Collections
• And lots of fixes since CTP14

 

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VSTS 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools - July 2008 Release

The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.

The latest power tools release can be found here: TFS July 2008 Power Tools. 

See BHarry’s blog for an overview of all the great enhancements and make sure you download and install it.

The following tools are installed with the tfpt.msi package:

• Command line tool (TFPT.EXE)
• Team Explorer IDE menu additions
• Build Notification tool
• TFS Best Practices Analyzer
• Process Template Editor
• Work Item Templates
• Custom check-in policies
• TFS Server Manager
• TFS Users tool
• Alert Editor

Also available is the WssExt64Bit installer which provides the ability to install the Team Foundation Server WSS extensions into a 64-bit WSS instance. The RTM version of the WssExt installer that ships with Team Foundation Server 2008 does not support 64-bit WSS sites.

For more information, see Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools.

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LINQPad – Cool Utility For LINQ

Maybe you know about this, but I saw it first few days a go. I feel in love.

LINQPad is a cool little utility that was mainly created to allow you to test LINQ expressions and see them produce a  result and output the results in a nice easy to visualize format. It's great for running LINQ Queries without having to fire up Visual Studio.

LINQPad is also a great way to learn LINQ: it comes preloaded with 200 examples from the book,"C# 3.0 in a Nutshell" written by Joseph Albahari, the author of LINQPad.  There's no better way to experience the coolness of LINQ and functional programming.

LINQPad is more than just a LINQ query tool: it's a code snippet IDE. Instantly execute any C# 3 or VB 9 expression or statement block! LINQPad does a great job at LINQ execution and visualization, but it has a lot more uses than just a LINQ query tool. It's basically a snippet editor that allows you to save snippets and more importantly, execute just about any code that you can write as an expression or single function block.

For example, LINQ to SQL results:

Output can be displayed both as a result table view, the raw SQL (from .ToString()) and a useful code conversion from the LINQ Expression syntax to LINQ command syntax using command chaining of the various LINQ extensions methods.

Other example (from the preloaded examples):

There's no installation - it's a single self contained EXE you can copy anywhere assuming you have .NET 3.5 installed.

Download it here.

 

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Configure Team Foundation Build for an Incremental Build

A question I got today: "How can I configure my Team Build for an incremental build?".

So, it's simple.

Team Build 2005

Add the PropertyGroup definition to the end of the TFSBuild.proj file, before the closing </project> tag.

Set the following properties:

   <PropertyGroup>
      <SkipClean>true</SkipClean>
      <SkipInitializeWorkspace>true</SkipInitializeWorkspace>
      <ForceGet>false</ForceGet>
   </PropertyGroup>

 

Team Build 2008

Set IncrementalBuild property to true. To do it, add the PropertyGroup definition to the end of the TFSBuild.proj file, before the closing </project> tag.

   <PropertyGroup>
      <IncrementalBuild>true</IncrementalBuild>
   </PropertyGroup>

 

Source - msdn:

Team Build 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa833876(VS.80).aspx

Team Build 2008: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa833876.aspx

Templex-Sharing Team System Process Templates

We always asked for a library of process templates available and also easy way to share ones we created.

Templex is a new CodePlex project has just been created for this purpose. 

From the project’s page:

This CodePlex projects serves as a repository for open source Team Foundation Server (TFS) process templates, work item type definitions and report definitions. TFS uses process templates to configure new team projects. Each process template includes the following:

• TFS Security groups and permissions
• Initial set of Areas and Iterations
• Work item type definitions
• Initial set of work items
• Work item querys
• MS Project Mappings
• Version control permissions and settings for check-out and check-in
• Project portal document library settings, including an initial set of documents
• SQL Reporting Services report definitions

Once a team project is created, the following configuration items can be imported, exported and modified:

• Work item type definitions
• Work item queries
• Report definitions

 

 

http://www.codeplex.com/templex

VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR June CTP

Yesterday, at TechEd 2008 Developer, Data Dude team announced the immediate availability of the first public CTP of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR (General Distribution Release).

 

The GDR is available now for download but before you install it, make sure read the installation requirements. If you have DBPro Power Tools installed, uninstall it first. AND you'll need to have Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta installed

 

 

From Gert's post:

What is in the GDR?

In addition to enabling SQL Server 2008 database projects, the GDR release incorporates many of the previously released Power Tools functionality as well as several new features. The new features include explicit separation of Build and Deploy, separation of Database and Server project, improved project reference support, T-SQL Static Code Analysis and integration with SQL-CLR projects.

Architectural changes

• No more DesignDB; one of the most important architectural changes is that the Database Edition no longer requires a local SQL Server instance to host the "Design Database" to open and validate a database project.
• Single model, everything is now loaded in a single model representation. The model now represents all object types, which removes the need to have certain objects represented as Pre or Post Deployment scripts. This means that for example logins, rules, defaults, asymmetric keys, symmetric keys, certificates, etc. are now schema objects and therefore fully participate in schema comparison and build/deploy. Pre or Post Deployment scripts still exist, but are only used to perform none schema object related operations.
• The model is no longer 100% memory resident, in today's version all model information has to reside in memory, this change dramatically lowers the memory consumption of the product.
• Provider based, the underlying implementation of the project system and schema model are changed to be provider based. Providers are refer to as "Database Schema Providers" or DSP's for short. The GDR release will ship with 3 providers supporting SQL Server: 2000, 2005 and 2008. However if you watch the Tech*Ed keynote this morning, you saw that IBM is working on a provider to support DB2 and there are others that are working on providers for other database management systems.
  • Providers are not restricted to relational database systems, in the future we will be adding providers that support dimensional and hierarchal data stores.

Project System

• Database & Server project separation
  • We separated out the existing database project in to two project flavors: database and server. The server project represent those schema objects that are server wide, for example logins, linked servers, server side DDL triggers etc. Database projects represent the objects inside the user database. The split enables a team to define a standard a configuration for their SQL servers and reference it from their Database Projects. The goals is to have a single point of definition and to be able to share this definition between projects and deployments.
    • The separation is implemented using a property inside the project file. There are effectively 3 modes: server, database and hybrid. The hybrid project represents the overloaded project model as it exists today where server and database objects are mixed inside a single project. This model is there to support existing project upgrades.
• Partial projects
  • Allow code sharing between projects by including files from a different project, where the code is included "as-is" from the originating project and the source code control ownership remains with the originating project. This enables code reuse between projects and while resulting in a single deployment unit.
• Composite projects
  • Composite projects, enables database projects and/or .dbschema files to contribute to another project. This enables the separation of development roles and responsibilities and composition of Databases using multiple projects. It extends the existing database reference implementation, by allowing to contribute in to the same database, where the existing database projects have to represent 3 or 4 part name references.
• Single sourcing of external artifacts
  • You can now create a reference to a SQL-CLR (VB.NET or C#) project, or the binary output of a project and turn it in to a ASSEMBLY inside the project. This enables single sourcing of artifacts that are developed outside the context of the database project. For the final release we will also allow references to XSD files which will become XML Schema Collections inside the database schema.

SQL Server 2008 Support

• The GDR adds a new project for supporting SQL Server 2008. The June CTP has support of the new SQL Server 2008 data types, both intrinsic (date, datetime2, datetimeoffset, time), build-in SQL-CLR types (geography, geometry, hierarchyid), support for the new DML MERGE syntax and support for table typed parameters. The remaining SQL Server 2008 syntax and functionality will be added in future CTP's.

Build & Deploy

• One of the other main changes in the GDR is the separation of the build and deployment process. Build now produces a single portable artifact file, a .DBSCHEMA file. The DBSCHEMA file is an XML representation of your complete schema. The DBSCHEMA is then fed in to the redistributable deployment engine.
• The deployment engine now uses the exact same database model as Schema Compare, which guarantees the same results between the two parts of the system.

Refactoring

• The biggest change in refactoring is the addition of a patented implementation of a feature named "Preservation of Intent". This enables the deployment of refactoring changes as intended by the user. For users this means that renames are deployed as renames not as drop/add statements, move aschemas as move schemas etc.
• Besides that we are adding new refactoring types that we previously in the Power Tools:
  • Wildcard Expansion
  • Move Schema
  • Fully Qualify
• And we are enabling extensibility for refactoring which enables users to develop and deploy custom refactoring types and targets.
  • Types are the refactoring operations, where targets are the artifacts you want to apply the refactoring operation to. An example of a refactoring type is: table split or upper case all keywords. An example of a refactoring target is an Reporting Services RDL file, which contains references to database schema objects, which if you change thos, you want to update them as part of the refactoring operation.

Schema Compare

• Schema Compare now uses the same underlying database model as build and deploy, guaranteeing fidelity between the results. This allows the user to compare any combination of Database Projects (.dbprj), live Databases or .DBSCHEMA files.  So comparing project to project, project with a DBSCHEMA file, or a DBSCHEMA file with a live database.
• We added the ability to limited the schema comparison based on object types (Object Type Filtering) and we added additional Ignore filtering options.
• We also enabled the substitution of SQLCMD variables, allowing correct comparison when using SQLCMD variables for references or in other parts of your code.

T-SQL Static Code Analysis

• T-SQL Static Code Analysis, and the accompanying MSBuild task, are now part of the main product.
• And we added the ability to develop and deploy your own custom T-SQL Static Code Analysis rules.

Dependency Viewer

• The Power Tools to view the dependency relationship between objects inside your schema, is now part of the base product.

Database Unit Testing

• Database unit testing now supports execution of tests using different ADO.NET providers and it also enables unit testing when using multiple database projects.

• Data Generation

• We made some general design-time enhancements Data Generation like adding support for undo/redo and separation of the population status into new display window.
• The Foreign key generator can now be replaced by custom generator.
• And we made some runtime enhancements, by default the Data Generator now uses the SqlBulkCopy interface to populate target tables, which results in a general performance improvement during data load time.
• We also introduced the concept of Data Sinks which allow the user to register different outputs, for example we can generate data to files instead of to a live database, so data can be loaded out-of-band using BCP or BULK INSERT. 
• And last but not least we were able to significantly trim the size of the .DGEN file. 

Public extensibility:

• The last piece we changed in the GDR is to expose more extensibility points in to the system. In the GDR we are not allowing new providers to be plugged in this will be available in the next release, but we do allow users to extend the system by writing their own:
  • Data Generators
  • (Statistical) Data Distributions
  • Test Conditions
  • T-SQL Static Code Analysis Rules
  • Refactoring Types
  • Refactoring Target
• We also made the deployment engine a redistributable component, so you can deploy DBSCHEMA files programmatically.