Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Learning Resource Center
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Welcome to our Visual Studio 2008 and.NET 3.5 Training Resource Center.
Visual Studio 2008 is Microsoft's latest edition of it's IDE. With it comes .NET
3.5.
On this page we will look at what is .NET 3.5 and what is new in Visual Studio 2008.
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Overview of the .NET 3.0 and 3.5 Framework
So, what is new in the .NET Framework 3.X. And what about backward compatibility
with .NET 2.0? First of all, let me assure you that .NET 3.X is fully backward compatible,
because it actually extends the .NET 2.0 framework with a number of new libraries.
.NET 3.0 add the Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation,
Workflow Foundation and CardSpace. The .NET 3.5 Framework add to this a series of
improvements of the .NET 3.0 libraries and LINQ - Language Integrated Query.
Windows Presentation Foundation
In todays day and age we all have computers containing very powerfull graphic cards,
capable of displaying real-live 3D graphics. Take games for example. Movies like
the Minority Report or The Island also show the actors using advanced windows systems
and superior user experiences. Windows Presentation Foundation is a framework for
making user interfaces capable of mixing 2D, 3D, text and media into state of the
art applications. Why? Because this allows us to display a lot of data using graphics,
enabling users to make better decisions (and make it a lot more fun to use these
applications at the same time.
Windows Communication Foundation
Networks now allow applications to work toghether and specialized services to arise,
consumable by a series of different applications. But how do you build services
now? You can choose between Web Services (great interoperability), Remoting (great
extensibility), Enterprise Services (great performance and security) and finally
messaging (decoupling in time of client and server). This great choice of technology
comes with a drawback: the fact that developers need to learn each technology because
overlpa is minimal. Windows Communication Foundation is Microsofts answer to this
problem: it gives developers a single API to build services which can be interoperable,
efficient and decoupled (not necessarily all at the same time). This API is also
very extensible allowing WCF to be used in unforeseen circumstances.
Windows Workflow Foundation
Every application in the world has some kind of workflow embedded in it, even if
it's a simple if then decision. Workflow Foundation is a library allowing you to
visually design workflows with Visual Studio, making collaboration between developers
and business architects easier, but it also allows developers to build applications
that, while waiting on some external input which may take a long time, can persist
their state and so release any precious resources in use. This comes with an added
bonus, the fact that the application can also continue running on another machine.
Load-balancing and fail-over become ease this way.
CardSpace
Phishing is a big problem these days. Apparently stealing one's identity can be
profitable. Todays web sites make phishing easy because they mostly rely on simple
username/password schemes to identify their users, and such username/passwords can
be easily stolen. CardSpace is Microsoft's implementation of an open standard that
doesn't pass any identity along a wire, making it very difficult to steal! Instead
it uses a claim (for example that you're an employee of the company) based system,
that uses tokens to pass claims from one machine to another. It is called CardSpace
because when a user needs to authenticate, he or she is presented with a choice
of electronic cards (who can be protected by additionel security like a pin-code)
which are then used to create claims. This card-based system is very simple for
the user because they simply select an appropriate card, just like you would do
with your wallet.
Language Integrated Query
Today every data store has it's own query system. Relational databases use SQL,
Active directory used LDAP, SharePoint uses CAML and XML uses XPATH or XQuery. For
developers this means a lot of studying these technologies in order to retrieve
the data they need. These technologies are also very error prone, for example a
SQL query is only checked at run-time, so having a compiler check your code doesn't
help because the queries are simple strings. Not to mention the security danger
of having strings built up into a query like many developers do (I mean SQL injection
attacks). Language Integrated Query now allows developers to write the query in
a language they already know (C# 3.0, VB.NET 9.0, ...), using compilable language
constructs and LINQ turns these into efficient queries for the backend system.
For example:
var listOfCategories = from c in dc.Categories
where c.CategoryID == 1
select c.CategoryName;
Then LINQ turns this into SQL if we're using LINQ to SQL.
What is new in Visual Studio 2008?
Visual Studio 2008 has a number of improvements which allow us to improve user experience,
collaborate better and in general be more productive.
Better User Experience
User expectations have grown; they have grown accustomed to sites like
maps.live.com. Building sites like these is now possible with ASP.NET and
AJAX, which is now integral part of Visual
Studio 2008. AJAX also requires using JavaScript, which is supported with intelli-sense
and debugging.
Building windows applications containing 3D histograms, zooming, rotating controls
etc... can easily (really!) be built with WPF. The bast way to
build these applications is with Visual Studio 2008 because of it's WPF designer
and XAML intelli-sense.
Collaboration
Developers don't live on an island. We have to work toghether with other developers,
managers, testers, customers and designers. Let's start with designers. Previously
web designers would create astonishing web sites through html and css designers.
Developers would then manually integrate this html and css, an intensive and error-prone
process. Now developers and designers can work toghether on a web site with Visual
Studio 2008 and Expression Web. Both tools understand the same project structure
making it a lot easier and productive for designers and developers to collaborate.
Same thing for WPF developers and designers. Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend
allow developers and designers to create professional, state-of-the-art WPF applications,
each doing what they can do best.
Visual Studio Team System was first released with Visual Studio 2005, allowing developers
to collaborate with other developers, testers, managers and customers. That stays
the same with VSTS 2008, but with a lot of improvements. First of all unit testing
is now part of Visual Studio 2008 professional, no longer requiring Visual Studio
for Testers. Team System for Database Professionals (aka Data Dude) has also been
integrated into Visual Studio. Data Dude allows the database development to proceed
in the same manners as other developments. Before Data Dude the database would always
be the last version of the current development, making it a lot harder to work with
several developers on the same database. Now the database is fully scripted and
stored in version control. But it doesn't stop there, you can deploy changes to
another database, where data dude will automatically generate scripts to upgrade
it to the current version. Database Unit Testing is supported and Data generation
plans allow you to fill the database with realistic sample data. Team Build has
also had a lot of improvements, including support for Continous Integration, where
developers checking in automatically starts a new build. This build will get all
source files, compile them, run tests and build a report on the quality of the build.
Data Dude has also been integrated into this process allowing automatic deployment
of the latest database schema with changes in code.
Productivity
Visual Studio has always been one of the most productive development environments.
But now with a series of additions it has even become better. Developers working
on existing .NET 2.0 projects can use Visual Studio 2008 because it can target .NET
2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 projects, and makes sure that it will run on the intented runtime
without problems. For example it will prohibit using .NET 3.0 assemblies if the
target is set to 2.0. Debugging has improved. You can now debug Microsoft's .NET
framework classes (such as System.Threading.Thread) at the source level, making
your debugging even more effective. AJAX developers will be happy to hear JavaScript
can also be debugged and that JavaScript now has intelli-sense.
Articles
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.NET 3.0, formerly known as WinFx, uses XAML for describing and building object
graphs. Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Avalon), for example, uses XAML for
building the next generation user interfaces. In this article we will look at the
XAML syntax (which is a lot more than simply XML) by building a maze sample, such
as can be found in old-fashioned adventure games like Zork, etc... Please note that
this article is not about Windows Presentation Foundation, it is all about XAML
and how you can use it for your own applications. Some examples will use WPF when
appropriate, but only to explain some of the concepts.
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Anders Hejlsberg, chief designer of C#, unveiled C#’s newest version at PDC2005.
Some of the most notable innovations are extension methods, lambda expressions,
anonymous types, type inference, and LINQ (.NET Language Integrated Query). In this
article we are going to look at these new features of C#, focusing on LINQ.
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Most developers on the windows platform learned source control using Visual Source
Safe (VSS), and for those of you who are wondering: Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005)
will still come with VSS. However, VSS was originally designed for small teams,
so some features don’t work well when you start using VSS with more than (let’s
say) 5 developers. Now with VSTS, large teams will be happy to hear that Team System
Source Control is a complete new product, designed for large teams - easily handling
500 or more developers on the same team - and Microsoft is already using VSTS internally
to develop VSTS. In the near future they even intend to use it for all development
within Microsoft! VSTS has support for distributed development, allowing teams to
work together - no matter where they are based on our little planet - in a safe
and efficient way. So read on if you want to learn more about the new source control
management features of VSTS.
Courses
This course introduces the new features in Visual Studio 2008 and in the .NET Framework
3.0 and 3.5, the next generation of technologies to build rich clients, connected
systems and workflow applications. You will learn about: the Windows Presentation
Foundation, Communication Foundation and Workflow Foundation. This course will also
present an overview of the new programming language features in C# 3.0 and VB.NET
9.0 and LINQ, Microsoft’s framework for working with databases, XML documents and
.NET collections in a uniform way.
Today's customers are used to applications that not only work great, but they also
expect them to look great. This course covers in depth the Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight, how to build the next generation of rich windows
applications and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using animations and other high-level
effects. You will learn in depth to build WPF and Silverlight applications using
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Expression
Media Encoder.
LINQ is Microsoft's .NET 3.5 framework for working with databases, XML documents
and .NET collections in a uniform way. This course introduces LINQ but also dives
deep into all LINQ features: you will learn how to write queries, how to update
data and how to work with the Object Relational Mapper included with LINQ.
Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX is the AJAX framework for building a new generation of richer,
more interactive, highly personalized cross-browser web applications using ASP.NET.
Topics: Overview of JavaScript and AJAX programming ; Client Script Library ; Debugging
Client Script ; ASP.NET AJAX Client Controls ; The ASP.NET AJAX Server-Side Framework
;Components and Behaviors ; Accessing Web Services with ASP.NET AJAX; Data Binding
and Validation; Using Server Data; Extending Controls; The ASP.NET AJAX Control
Toolkit; Displaying Maps using ASP.NET AJAX.
Programming .NET 3.5 Enterprise
Applications with Visual Studio 2008
This 5-day course will cover the whole development process needed to create successful
distributed and service oriented .NET enterprise applications using .NET 3.5 and
Visual Studio 2008. Students will be guided through the end to end creation of a
complete enterprise application. You will study in-depth and practice the latest
.NET technologies that are required to develop an enterprise application. This course
provides participants with technical guidelines on design and implementation in
.NET making participants skillful and ready for action.
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