Visual Studio 2008 SP1

• 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

• 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

Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1

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.

During the install, of TFS 2008 SP1, I received the error: Failed to call WMI on the RS server.  I did some searching on Google and found a post that I did back in November on the same problem.  I followed my exact same steps and it fixed the issue.  I don’t know why this DNS issue continues to cause Microsoft problems, but I really wish they would fix this bug.

Tags: .NET 3.5, Team Foundation Server, TFS, Visual Studio

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Today I came across an interesting extension pattern that I didn’t know how the runtime would react. Normally when you do something like the following:

string s = null;
Console.WriteLine(s.Trim()); // throws NullReferenceException

You get a NullReferenceException meaning that you didn’t first check to see if the object was null before trying to call one of its methods. This is pretty common and results in patterns that usually look like this:

string s = null;
string result = null;

if (s != null)
    result = s.Trim();

Console.WriteLine(result);

This results in a ton of extra code to just verify you inputs. It’s a dirty task but somebody has to do it. So today it occurred to me that maybe extension methods were my answer to this code bloat. To better understand extension method, Scott Hanselman has done a great job explaining how they function and what they look like to the CLR.

So I whipped up the following console application and tested my theory out.

public static class Extension
{
    public static string TryTrim(this string s)
    {
        if (s == null)
            return s;

        return s.Trim();
    }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string s = null;
        Console.WriteLine(s.TryTrim());  // notice that I don't have the code bloat like above
    }
}

This works without a NullReferenceException because the code actually looks like this to the compiler.

public static class Extension
{
    public static string TryTrim(string s)
    {
        if (s == null)
            return s;

        return s.Trim();
    }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string s = null;
        Console.WriteLine(TryTrim(s));  // this is how the run time sees the code
    }
}

So with this new understanding of extension methods you don’t have to worry about checking if a variable is null or not before trying to use an extension method. The more I use extension methods the more I love them.

Tags: .NET 3.5, C#, Extension Methods

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Scott Guthrie has announced that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are now available for download and provides a tour of some of the new features.

• If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site (note: some of the builds are just finishing being uploaded now – so check back later during the day if you don’t see it yet).
• If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here. A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week. A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here.
• If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here.
• If you want to just install the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime, you can download it here.

Tags: .Net, .NET 3.5, C#, Framework 3.5, Microsoft, MSDN, Visual Studio

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