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

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Scaling ASP.NET Application just got easier with a new technology that Microsoft has just released that they have dubbed codename “Velocity”. This product is still in the early stages of development, but it is meant as a direct competitor against memcached. If you are not familiar with memcached, here is how it is described in Wikipedia:

memcached (pronunciation: mem-cache-dee) is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in memory to reduce the number of times the database must be read. Memcached is distributed under a permissive free software license.

So basically it allows you to create a distributed memory cache across your server farm, that allows any computer in the server farm to access the data in the cache. So there is no more issues with storing session data on server farms, or worrying about setting up common SQL stores of temporary data. This is also very practical for reducing database stress on Web 2.0 sites, many of the top Web 2.0 sites use this to reduce reads on the database.   The biggest user of memcached to date is Facebook.  This diagram below gives a basic idea of how distributed caching works.

There have been many Open Source projects for getting memcached working on C#, and most have been pretty successful, but because memcached was designed for the UNIX environment, porting memcached to a Windows Service has always lagged behind the actual releases of the required libraries to get memcached working. Enter Velocity, as the Velocity team describes:

Velocity is intended to provide distributed caching (in memory) for all .NET applications – from enterprise scale to web-scale. We believe that there are many applications that need a distributed caching mechanism, and that there is, therefore, a need for distributed caching as a core part of the .NET platform. We expect to have more integrated support for this functionality with other parts of the .NET platform in our upcoming releases.

There is also a pretty nice Velocity writeup on MSDN that goes in depth about how Velocity works as well as providing some basic code examples on how to get data into and out of your Velocity Cache. The current set of features looks pretty nice, and I can’t wait for Velocity to become more stable so I can introduce it in to the IdeaPipe mix.

Here is a breif overview of the Current Features:

1. Support for different cache types, partitioned and local
2. Support for different client types, simple and routing
3. Load Balancing & Dynamic Scaling
4. ASP.Net Integration, currently there is only a Session Provider
5. Key and Tag based Access

And Beyond

1. Availability - support for Failover when machines go down
2. Replicated Cache - another cache type
3. Embedded Topology - run the cache embedded within you application instead of as a cache service
4. Notifications - Get notified when a object in the cache is updated
5. Consistency Models - Support for both weak and strong consistency when doing reads/writes
6. Native client access to the cache service (E.g - PHP, C++ etc)
7. Manageability & Administration

Tags: .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Distributed Cache, IdeaPipe, memcached, Velocity

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