Dan Fernandez's Blog

* Updated with follow up post on technical information in response to the comments. While I’m not a lawyer, my team owns Visual Studio Express and I wanted to respond to the concerns expressed by some over our recent communications with Jamie Cansdale...

As I mentioned in my previous post , we are redesigning Coding4Fun and we want *you* to help choose the new design. Redesign Summary The current content on Coding4Fun is disorganized and primarily structured by author or event. This makes it frustrating...

Dear Visual Studio Express community, We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19 th , 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will...

Edit #1 - Based on feedback, fixed grammatical errors... I recently ran across an article written by Richard Grimes in Dr. Dobbs Journal titled Mr. Grimes farewell . I wanted to respond to some of Richard's assertions and points in the article. You should...

I quickly wanted to respond to questions or misconceptions raised in the comments of my previous blog post . A common question or misconception in the comments is saying that if didn’t want extensibility we should have provided technical limitations...

Object Test Bench is a new Visual Studio 2005 feature that helps you understand objects at Design Time, rather then runtime. How many times have you walked up to a code base and created some simple test console/Windows/web applications just to run a couple...

Juval Lowy showed me an amusing code sample at TechEd - "That". What is "That" you say? "That" is "My" for C#. Confused yet? Good. As Duncan Mackenzie explains in this MSDN Magazine article "My" is a new feature in Visual Basic 2005 that is a speed...

**Updated with Crime Links I believe the majority of the residents in the Greater Seattle Metro area during the summer live a lie. The lie in question is that Seattle is temperate enough to not require air conditioning. It’s a complete and...

* Update: fixed wrong hyperlink On Friday, an alert reader emailed me about a new article by Michael K ö lling , the creator of BlueJ, about a patent issued by Microsoft for features in Object Test Bench that are comparable to BlueJ's Object Bench...

In the comments of Scott Hanselman's blog posts on why VB developers don't switch/migrate/convert to VB.NET , someone replied with the following: So what application has Microsoft written totally in .NET that is worth a [expletive]? Visual Studio - NO...

I'm probably the last person to blog about this, but in case you didn't know, Whidbey will officially be Visual Studio 2005. Date Slip I wanted to take a second to respond to Frans Bouma and other bloggers who are “hooked“ on Whidbey and...

Dan Mosely from the VSCore team wants to know how many of our developers are using dual processor development (not production) machines. Please respond in the comments: Q1: Are you using a dual processor developer machine today? (Yes/No) Q2: Do...

In the TechEd Europe keynote today we officially announced the new Express products that are available to download right now: Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition ( download ) Visual C# 2005 Express Edition ( download ) Visual C++ 2005 Express...

In our team meeting this week, Jay Roxe , the beloved VB Product Manager was nice enough to bring in some Halloween candy. But alas poor Jay brought what is, in my opinion , the absolute worst Halloween candy there is - candy corn . The nice and well...

Visual Studio Express 2008 is now available for download !!   Our new Web site is http://www.microsoft.com/express !   Below are my top 15 things to love about Visual Studio Express 15. Free hosting for client-based Web sites with Popfly Explorer...

I'm way, way late on this, but w e have officially released the Shareware Starter Kit on Channel9!! Download: ( C# download , VB download ). The Shareware Starter Kit is a sample application of the common features in all shareware applications....

Probably one of the most religious issues for developers (at least those using the same platform and programming language) is bracing style.  There are several styles available, with the two most popular being K&R style & Allman style. ...

[Please read my Disclaimer ] NOTE : I don't own Object Test Bench, I just happened to blog about it as I thought it was a hidden feature in VS 2005 and only discovered it when playing around with Class Designer. Recently, Michael Kölling, one of...

*** Updated Jan 23, 2006 *** I finally got around to updating this for the final release of Visual Studio 2005. Download the updated code here . ****** My Channel9 video that uses Visual C# Express to pull images from images.google.com is...

RSS Screen Saver Starter Kit in C# Express One of my favorite features of C# Express is the built-in RSS Screen saver Starter Kit. If you’ve never built a screensaver before, or if you have never written code that uses RSS, then you’ll...

The LINQ Project On Tuesday September 13, 2005, Anders Hejlsberg did the first public demo of the LINQ Project in the Jim Allchin keynote. What is LINQ you might ask? LINQ stands for L anguage IN tegrated Q uery and in a nutshell, it makes...

I'm proud to announce that AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is now available to download from CodePlex ! This was one of those personal projects done in my "free" time, but its amazing to see how well it turned out, kudos to our extensibility...

It's highly recommended that you install the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005 on a clean machine. But...but...we realize a lot of people have installed some pre-release version of Visual Studio 2005, and to that end, the setup team has created our...

* Update : Added Mike Swanson as Matthew Perry based on Brian Keller's suggestion * Update #2 : Added Wes Hutchins as Peyton Manning now that I got a picture of Wes * Update #3 : Added Chris Flores as Ralph Macchio based on John Hipsher's suggestion ...

* Update March 6th (+1 month after surgery): It's been about a month and Bambino is doing amazingly well. The first couple of weeks were very shaky, but in the last week, we've seen him remarkably improve. He's gained back his interest in playing with...