Earlier this year in February, I blogged about key software development trends. 

The second trend, The Web as a Platform, continues to grow at an astounding rate.  Browser-based applications such as MugTug show the increasing flexibility and power of web technologies.  New and experienced developers alike are anxious to learn everything they can about how to take advantage of the web to deliver experiences to their audience.

But learning HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and other web standards technologies can be daunting.  The languages, libraries, and interfaces can be complex, and successful development and debugging techniques can be difficult to find among the scrapyard of unsuccessful methods.

Enabling you to better navigate standards based web technologies is the goal behind Script Junkie, MSDN's newest developer hub. 

MSDN's goal has always been to help the developer get their job done more efficiently, and Script Junkie brings that assistance to web-based coding.  Script Junkie is the start of a new generation of centers on MSDN focused on offering the best of Microsoft and non-Microsoft resources to address real life and practical end-to-end developer scenarios.

Script Junkie offers a concise resource for the latest in web site development techniques by providing solutions-based articles, videos and code samples written by JavaScript community luminaries such as Christian Heilmann, Elijah Manor, Emily Lewis, Juriy Zaytsev, and Rey Bango.  And of course, new articles are posted on a regular basis.  Many articles contain code suitable for using in your own projects, such as Mani Sheriar's article on Scrolling Content with jQuery and HTML and Robert Nyman's article on Using Web Storage on the Client-Side.

Come check out Script Junkie, participate on the forum, and learn from the articles and tips.  Are you an expert HTML developer or designer?  If so, consider contributing articles, screencasts, or code samples for Script Junkie to share back with the community of HTML and JavaScript developers.

Namaste!

Managing the needs of a quality assurance lab can be quite challenging. 

A dizzying number of machines need to be set up, torn down, or restored to a particular snapshot so the software team can work at maximum efficiency.  Daily builds need to be available on schedule.  Multiple virtual machine environments need to be managed.  Managing a lab efficiently can be a significant task.

Today we are announcing the availability of Visual Studio Lab Management for Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN customers. 

Lab Management enables automation and optimization of the build-deploy-test process, while maintaining visibility into the process, using Hyper-V virtualization technologies.  Lab Management stores, manages, and lets you deploy to known configurations and test environments using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  Test Manager 2010 allows team members to create, start, stop, and view environments so testers and developers can collaborate without interrupting lab operations.

Getting an environment configured correctly just to reproduce a bug can take significant time and effort.  Lab Management allows testers to provide a link to a virtual machine snapshot directly in a bug report so developers can see exactly what testers see.  Developers can spend more time debugging and less time installing, configuring, and deploying.

To find out more about Lab Management, visit the Lab Management site. 

You can download a preconfigured VHD with all the lab management components here.

Namaste!

The MFC Class Wizard can also help you navigate your code by taking you to the files that contain your classes, header declarations, methods, and members.  Below, you can see some of the ways the wizard allows you to navigate your code.

Web Code Snippets

Even though you may build webpages commonly, sometimes the syntax for an HTML tag or ASP.NET control can elude your memory.  In Visual Studio 2010's webpage markup editor, the fastest way to add HTML, MVC, and ASP.NET controls and tags to markup is using the web code snippet feature.  Type Ctrl+K+X  and you'll get a small window offering a list of snippets from ASP.NET, MVC, and HTML. 

You can arrow around and use letters to navigate the list quickly, and then tab to insert the tag or control into your page.  Below, I chose to insert an ASP.NET ListView control.

JavaScript IntelliSense Improvements

Because JavaScript is a dynamically-typed language, it has lagged behind statically-typed languages such as C# and VB in IntelliSense and tooling support.  We've made a number of improvements to JavaScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2010 to make coding in JavaScript a smoother experience.

JavaScript now gets richer IntelliSense support for type-inferred variables.  Below, bike is declared with an object literal.  IntelliSense brings up its members when I refer to bike in the next line.  You can see make, model, and type all appear in the list below, as does year, although it's below our view.

But what about dynamic prototyping?  If I dynamically prototype a variable, IntelliSense picks up the prototype members and adds them to the selection dropdown list for me.  In this snippet, I've added the createNewBike function to Object.  createNewBike takes in an object as a parameter and uses it as the returned object's prototype, adding all of its members to the object.  Below, the returned newbike shows all the members of bike in IntelliSense.

Next Time...

In my next post on Visual Studio 2010's productivity improvements, we'll focus on extensions to Visual Studio 2010 that help you customize the IDE to fit your needs.

Namaste!

Here the resulting graph is filtered to show a dependency chain all the way from the Checkout.aspx web page through the Order business logic class and the Payment Data access class.

Try It

If you are an MSDN subscriber, download the Visual Studio 2010 Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack and try it out.

Namaste!

This solution will work just fine in the cloud, so let's introduce an error that we can debug later using IntelliTrace.

In MvcWebRole1, click to open the References node, right click on System.Web.Mvc and select "Properties".

Change the "Copy Local" property to False, which will cause the application to be deployed without its System.Web.Mvc dependency, causing a load time error in the application.  This load time error is the error we will find and trace using IntelliTrace.

Now we can deploy our project to the cloud.  Right click on the Cloud Service project and select "Publish":

This will bring up the deploy dialog.  Follow the steps to setup your credentials and pick a Hosted Service to deploy to.  If you are using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and .NET 4, you can click the checkbox option to "enable IntelliTrace for .NET 4 roles". 

This will deploy the cloud service to Windows Azure, packaging in the necessary IntelliTrace files along with an agent that Visual Studio will communicate with to retrieve the IntelliTrace data.  You can monitor the progress of the deployment from the Windows Azure Activity log and the status of the Hosted Service from the Windows Azure Compute node in the Server Explorer.

Because we added a load time error into this cloud service by changing the Copy Local property of one of our referenced assemblies to False, the web role never gets to the running state.  Instead, our web role becomes unresponsive.  You can see the activity log showing the web role as unresponsive above, and below, the Server Explorer shows the web role instance as unresponsive as well.

Now we can use IntelliTrace to debug the issue.  Right click on the instance that is unresponsive and select "View IntelliTrace logs".

This will communicate with the debugging agent in the cloud and create an IntelliTrace log that Visual Studio will display to you.  Once the file is open, navigate to the Exception Data and you'll see the error "Could not load file or assembly System.Web.Mvc".  Now you can change the Copy Local property of the assembly to false in your project, rebuild, and redeploy your web role to ensure you've fixed the problem.  While this is a simple issue with a quick fix, without IntelliTrace, this error could be very difficult to diagnose because it won't reproduce in your local development environment where you may have added the required assembly to your path or global assembly cache.

Additionally, you can historically debug your code browsing stack traces, local variables, exceptions and IntelliTrace events using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

Get the Tools

As with previous versions, Windows Azure Tools are freely available for Visual Studio customers and integrate into Visual Studio directly.  Download the June 2010 release of the Windows Azure Tools and let us know what you think.  To learn more about today's Windows Azure Tools release, visit Cloudy In Seattle.

Namaste!

4. Write Add-ins for Expression Web with HTML & JavaScript

As a web-savvy developer, you are probably comfortable with the languages of the web: JavaScript, HTML and CSS.  In Expression Web 4, we have provided a way to extend the app using only the languages you already know. You can now add your own menu items, toolbar buttons, panels and even dialog boxes using only HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a simple XML manifest file.  Do you have your own markup for creating online maps in pages?  How about a custom Twitter feed? Now you can easily extend Expression Web to make it simple to add this content to any site you are working with.

5. Improve your search rankings with SEO Diagnostics

Our new SEO analysis not only includes the usual checks for duplicate or missing titles, meta tags and headers, but it also checks the content of search sensitive text, like link text and page titles, to make sure they don’t have overly general values like “click here” or  “welcome”  which aren’t going to add any search value to your pages. 

We also include deep help topics that let you understand why these rules are important for getting a good search ranking.  This documentation makes our reports more than a simple checklist; it helps you learn and master the art of SEO.

6. Encoding and broadcasting live events

With Expression Encoder 4 you can now broadcast live video to the IIS Smooth Streaming format to ensure uninterrupted playback on Silverlight over HTTP. Select either H.264 or VC-1 output, configure the number and size of the streams then publish directly to servers running IIS Media Services. The redesigned user interface allows you to easily select from multiple live sources and file-based content to create high-quality broadcast output in real time.

We've also used this release as an opportunity to simplify the product line-up of Expression to more closely correspond to the Visual Studio 2010 product family.  These are the new Expression 4 products:

• Expression Web 4 Professional
• Expression Studio 4 Premium
• Expression Studio 4 Ultimate

Current owners of Expression Studio 3 or Expression Web 3 can upgrade at no additional cost to corresponding version 4 products: Expression Studio 4 Ultimate and Expression Studio 4 Web Professional. Please visit the Expression site to learn more.

Namaste!

You could say the code editor is the most important feature of any development experience.  After all, that's what lets you create, see, and change your code.  Without a code editor, no other features matter in an IDE.  Around the editor is built the rest of the development environment.

Last week, we looked at three new features in Visual Studio 2010: multi-monitor support, multi-targeting, and code navigation.  This week I'd like to spend a little time talking about improvements to the code editor in Visual Studio 2010.

Improved IntelliSense

IntelliSense is, in some ways, the most easily-accessible documentation of types and members.  Before IntelliSense, development commonly meant you had your favorite class browser close by to help you find the type or member you were looking for.  With IntelliSense, typing a period or Ctrl-J brings up everything you want to know about types or members.

In Visual Studio 2010, IntelliSense changes allow you to search based on any substring in the type or member, rather than strictly alphabetically.  As you can see below, when I type in "Aircr", I get suggestions of "Aircraft" and "AircraftStatus", along with "AddToAircraft" and other methods that contain, but don't start with "Aircr".

IntelliSense now also supports finding members through their Pascal casing.  Below, I can type in "ATP" to find "AddToPassengers", "AddToPassengerStatus", and "AddToPeople".

Block Select and Block Edit

Sometimes you have to make the same change to many consecutive, similar lines of code at once.  Perhaps you're changing an access modifier or string literal in C#, VB, or C++ code, or perhaps you're changing property values in HTML or ASP.NET.  Block select lets you select columns of text and edit them as a group, rather than one line at a time.  You can select columns of text in a box by holding down the Alt key while selecting with the mouse.

Once your block is selected, you can delete or insert text on all lines of the selection.  If you'd like to simply insert something (such as a folder in a path string or a keyword), you can create a block selection with zero width and start typing; your typing will be inserted on all lines of the block selection.  You can also use this feature to quickly add or delete a tab to a block of code as well.

Zoom

You may have used the zooming features in Word, your internet browser, or other applications to quickly find your way around a large amount of content or highlight an area easily for others.  Now, you can use the same gesture to zoom in the Visual Studio code editor.  Hold down the Ctrl key and scroll with your mouse wheel to adjust the zoom factor.  You'll see the zoom factor change in the lower left corner of the editor window at the same time.

If you sometimes present to others, conduct code reviews on projectors, share applications using LiveMeeting or other programs, or build videos using screencasting programs like Camtasia, zoom can be an indispensible way to help your audience see your code clearly.  For visual people, zoom can be used to quickly find a piece of code or understand the contents of a large file.  And, while this feature isn't new to Visual Studio 2010, collapsing code blocks in the editor can help with code understanding as well:

Next Time...

In my next post on Visual Studio 2010's productivity improvements, we'll focus on features built specifically for certain languages and tasks.  Don't miss the next one if you write for the web or build C++ MFC apps.

Namaste!

Multi-Targeting

Even though you are taking advantage of the latest .NET runtime, your customers may not be, or you may have applications that are built against a previous version that aren't quite ready to be upgraded to .NET 4 yet.  Visual Studio 2010 allows you to build projects that target .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, or .NET 4.  The New Project dialog lets you choose the version of the .NET Framework you'd like to target or find additional versions or profiles of the .NET Framework online:

You can change the targeted version on an existing project in the project properties:

Once you've set a particular targeted version of .NET for your project, you will get IntelliSense, toolbox controls, and properties in the property grid that are appropriate for the version you've chosen.  The debugger, profiler, and compilers have also been updated to support multi-targeting.  And .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 run side by side with previous versions so you can use the appropriate tools and frameworks for your project.

Code Navigation

What was the name of that method?  It's something like "state custom".

When you're working with a large codebase, sometimes you remember something about a piece of code you're looking for, but not the specifics.  The new Navigate To tool lets you find code from whatever you can remember. 

You can bring up the Navigate To tool using Ctrl + comma, then put whatever you remember into the Search terms box.  Visual Studio will do a fuzzy search and give you all matching members, functions, macros, etc., along with their location and scope. 

Items from referenced libraries will appear in the results as well, but if you're interested only in items from your code, you can check the "Hide external items" checkbox to filter to just your code.

More Coming Soon

This is just a taste of a few of the productivity enhancements in Visual Studio 2010.  Look for Part II, which will focus on editor improvements, soon!

Namaste!

Today, Microsoft announced our Technical Computing initiative. 

Through the Technical Computing initiative, we will enable scientists, engineers and analysts to more easily model the world at much greater fidelity.  The Technical Computing initiative will address a wide range of users.  One of the most critical elements is to help developers create applications that can take advantage of parallelism on their desktop, in a cluster, and in public and private clouds. 

The Technical Computing initiative builds on investments and inroads we’re already making in areas like simplifying parallel programming. For example, Visual Studio 2010 contains the Parallel Patterns Library, user level tasks, a parallel debugger and profiler, and other tools.  These features enable the developer to extract maximum performance from multicore and many-core systems.  You can learn more about some of our parallel developer features in my recent blog post. 

For those building multi-core and many-core applications for Windows HPC Server, the highly-tuned Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation allows developers to create applications that span multiple systems, and Visual Studio supports debugging MPI applications as well. 

As with everything we do, partners are an essential part of our solution, and the challenge of parallelism is no different.  The leading tools in the industry are part of the Visual Studio ecosystem.  For example, NVIDIA’s Parallel Nsight allows the developer to debug and analyze codes running on GPUs and Intel’s Parallel Studio lets developers extract full performance from multicore systems.

To better understand our vision and get more details, you can read the announcement.

We’re also bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia, and science at www.ModelingTheWorld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities.  If you are interested in this space, I invite you to tune in and join the conversation.

Namaste!

While code, the language of software, is universal, developers and end users speak in different tongues across the globe.  For software to meet the needs of all customers, it must interact in their languages, currencies, times and dates, and accommodate layouts that feel natural to the user. 

In Developer Division, we put a great deal of thought and effort into building products for developers around the world.  For some languages, we do a complete translation of our products.  We also work closely with the community to offer a much broader range of languages than we could do ourselves.  Today I’d like to tell you a little about how our localization process works and what languages will be offered in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.

I’m happy to say that Visual Studio 2010 will be available in more languages than ever before and these languages will be available to our customers around the world faster than ever before.

Microsoft-Localized Languages

Just over 2 weeks ago, I announced the availability of the English version of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.  Today we are announcing the availability of the first of our localized versions of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.  You can access them from the following links:

·         French

·         German

·         Japanese

With over a million words in the user interface and about 20 million words of documentation, producing localized versions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework represents a massive engineering, testing,  and translation effort.  This is just the first wave of localized releases; several more are following soon.  The following languages will be available later in May:

·         Spanish

·         Italian

·         Russian

Arriving in June are:

·         Traditional Chinese

·         Simplified Chinese

·         Korean

Community-Localized Languages

Through a close partnership with community and various universities around the world, we will also release free language packs for the following languages this summer:

·         Czech

·         Polish

·         Turkish

·         Brazilian Portuguese

These language packs switch your English Visual Studio Professional user interface into any of these languages and will have a majority of the user interface localized.  Brazilian Portuguese, Czech and Turkish users will also be able to access the online translated Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 documentation in the MSDN Library from within Visual Studio and download it to their machine.  The documentation is a combination of machine translation and human translation, presented side-by-side with the English content (in Classic view).  The localized documentation is also editable, which allows everyone to make translation improvements.  Localized content in this translation wiki environment will also be available in Arabic for the very first time.

This summer, we will also release a Captions Language Interface Pack (CLIP) for Visual Studio 2010 in 10 additional languages.  CLIP is a free tool that displays translations in a tooltip and discrete dialog, as the user moves the cursor on top of the various user interface elements.  Our CLIP languages will be:

·         Arabic

·         Greek

·         Hebrew

·         Hindi

·         Hungarian

·         Malay

·         Malayalam

·         Oriya

·         Tamil

·         Thai

While I didn’t play any favoritism in terms of what languages we support, I am indeed thrilled to see my mother tongue, Tamil, on this list J.

All these community localization efforts have been made possible thanks to a close collaboration with various universities around the world, Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), Microsoft Student Partners (MSPs) and other community members.

Thank you to all those who have made this possible. 

For more information about language packs, translation wiki, and CLIP, check out Scott Hanselman’s blog on the subject.

Namaste!

I am very excited to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 on April 12^th. 

This represents the biggest tools release from Microsoft in many years.

To celebrate this with our customers and partners, we are holding 5 major launch events on April 12^th in Beijing, China; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Bangalore, India; London, UK; Las Vegas, USA; and in over 150 local events around the world.

The new release of Visual Studio 2010 has plenty of compelling new features and updates that will make every developer more productive.

·         Visual Studio 2010 allows users target of the right platform for their application, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint. Office, Windows Azure, and Windows Phone 7 applications using their existing skills.

·         Visual Studio 2010 is a rich, personalized development environment.  We know that software developers spend much of their time in the IDE, and features like the new editor and multi-monitor support make your time in Visual Studio more productive and enjoyable.

·         Teams are able to work more efficiently using Application Lifecycle Management tools.  We’ve done a great deal of work in Visual Studio 2010 to improve testing and debugging tools.  Features like IntelliTrace and easy project management help your team ensure high quality.

I always say that our partners play a key role in the success of our platforms and tools.  With Visual Studio, it is no different.  Between the tools that we deliver in Visual Studio and what our partners build on top of Visual Studio, we have a very comprehensive tools offering for our customers.  I do want to take this opportunity to thank the approximately 50 partners who announced availability of products and solutions built on this latest wave of technologies. I am also very appreciative and thankful of the customers, MVPs, and others who provided us valuable feedback and made Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 such an amazing release.

I am also thrilled to say that Silverlight 4 will be released to the Web later this week. When Silverlight 4 is released, you will be able to download an update for Visual Studio 2010 to support Silverlight 4 development.

I hope you will join us at one of our events, or watch the keynote live.

I look forward to your participation as we strive to reach a million developers on April 12 through our world-wide launch events. To purchase Visual Studio 2010 now, visit here.  If you are an MSDN subscriber, later in the day on April 12th you can download Visual Studio 2010 from MSDN.

Namaste!

As we get ready for the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, I find myself looking back at the project to think about some of the critical factors that lead to our success. 

One of the things that stands out clearly for me is our practice of dogfooding the various pieces of Visual Studio throughout the product cycle.  Here at Microsoft, we use the term “dogfooding” to refer to the internal use of a pre-release product in our daily work - after all, until our product is good enough for us to use every day, it’s not good enough for the rest of the world either!

Microsoft teams have a long tradition of dogfooding their products long before releasing them to external customers for their own adoption and Developer Division is no exception to that.  In fact, because we are in the same business as many of our customers (namely writing software products) I would say that dogfooding is an especially important practice for us to embrace.  I’m happy to tell you that with Visual Studio 2010 we have redoubled our efforts in this area. 

One of the first things we did during the VS2010 project cycle was to convert the entire division over to using Team Foundation Server for bug tracking and source control.  We had used TFS to track features across the entire project during previous product cycles.  We had also used TFS for source and bugs for the Team System teams.  So, switching over the entire division was a big step for us in terms of using our latest tools on such a large project.  Here are some statistics from our instance of TFS towards the end of the project:

·         3,668 active users in a 14 day period

·         896 builds per month

·         828,978 work items, including bugs, tasks and other work that we track

·         25,170,852 source code files under version control

·         15.5 terabytes of data

Brian Harry runs the TFS team and has reported extensively about our use of TFS during this product cycle.  I’d encourage you to follow his blog if you’re interested in learning more about what we’ve done and what we’ve learned as we use TFS internally. 

The other big thrust of our dogfooding effort for the VS2010 and .NET 4 project was to ensure that we had broad adoption of the latest builds of Visual Studio itself.  Unlike with TFS where the service is centrally managed, the tools developers and testers use on their desktops are not.  As such, we built telemetry into dogfood builds of VS to help us understand how many folks were using the product daily and what builds were deployed throughout the team. As of today, we have over 12,000 people inside Microsoft running VS 2010 for their day-to-day development.  In addition, employees installed pre-release versions of .NET Framework 4 to their desktops more than 35,000 times, and Microsoft.com and MSDN deployed pre-release .NET Framework 4 on 112 servers.

Early feedback from our internal adopters has provided us significant help in ensuring that our product works well in many different real world scenarios for different sized teams, projects and application types. 

As you can see, dogfooding plays a very significant role in our product development phase and one that we in Developer Division embrace fully.

Namaste!

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) in .NET 4 is designed to make it easier for new developers to learn, addresses a wider range of customer scenarios, and is more efficient. 

WF is a programming model for composing application logic and coordinating execution, allowing developers to abstract complicated code while leveraging a set of runtime services.  Activities are the building blocks that are composed together to build workflows.  The runtime provides the ability to save the state of the workflows, track information about the workflow, and manage the coordination of multiple workflows executing at the same time.

Design your Workflow

Visual Studio 2010 represents a significant update to the WF design experience.  Performance and extensibility have been dramatically improved, and the designer surface has an improved, WPF-based look and feel.

The new designer has significant productivity enhancements for authors composing large workflows, including the ability to expand and collapse child activities, a breadcrumb trail along the top of the designer that allows users to drill in and out of deep workflows, and better visualization capabilities to discover and address validation errors.

The workflow designer in WF4 is a WPF control that you can use to host the designer within your custom applications with a few lines of code. This allows you to create a custom workflow-editing experience within your application and allows your users to visualize an executing workflow within your applications. 

Introducing Flowchart: The New Control Flow Style

WF4 introduces a flowchart style of control flow, which allows you to create flexible workflows that require the ability to loop back to previous steps, as well as skip steps based on conditions within the workflow.  This is coupled with new tooling that allows for flowcharts to be constructed visually. The new flowchart control flow in WF4 allows for business logic to be composed in a way that feels more natural to the workflow author and in a way that is more visually compact.  Below, the flowchart style is used to build a hiring process workflow.

A Simplified Activity Model

At the heart of WF is the authoring of custom activities for use in higher-order workflows, and WF4 makes creating custom activities easier than ever. WF4 dramatically reduces the amount of code that developers need to write to implement custom application logic for a variety of scenarios. As the activity model has been simplified, the performance of the runtime has dramatically increased.

The way activities are authored has also been updated to provide options that are optimized for specific scenarios, supplying a variety of activity base classes that enable the developer to make the authoring experience only as powerful or complex as required.  The activity model also supports asynchronous execution, allowing a workflow to compose and coordinate multiple concurrent branches of asynchronous logic.  In addition, the model now includes an ActivityAction feature, which enables you to write an activity that can be customized by offering the consumer of your activity the ability to plug in type-safe callbacks for custom logic.  This would, for example, allow you to create a ProcessOrder activity that allows the consumer to provide their implementation of HandlePayment.  

Building a Workflow

To demonstrate WF, let’s construct a workflow to retrieve the syndication feeds from a number of blogs.  Here we will build a workflow that will use a GetWebPage custom activity to retrieve a number of feeds in parallel.  Additionally, we use the CompletionCondition of the ParallelForEach in order to stop retrieving feeds once half of the requests have completed.  This lets my workflow move forward once the first half of requests are successfully processed (and gracefully handle cancelling the other outstanding requests).

Now that we’ve built the workflow, we can incorporate it into an ASP.NET MVC application.  Here we’ll use the WorkflowInvoker to execute the workflow from a controller. 

public ActionResult GetBlogs()

{

    var results = WorkflowInvoker.Invoke(

        new GetSomeBlogs(),

        new Dictionary<string, object>

        {

            {

                "Urls", new List<string>

                {

                    "http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/atom.xml",

                    "http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/atom.xml",

                    "http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint/atom.xml",

                    "http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/atom.xml"

                 }

             }

        });

    var feeds = results["Feeds"] as List<SyndicationFeed>;

    ViewData["Message"] = "You received " +

                          feeds.Count.ToString() +

                          " feeds with a total of " +

                          feeds.Sum(feed => feed.Items.Count()) +

                          " posts.";

    return View("Index");

}

Workflows and WCF Services

As we talked with customers, we found that many were interested in using WF with services to compose and coordinate messaging in their application.  In .NET 4, we set out to make it easy to use workflows with services to compose and coordinate messaging by integrating WF with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).  

WF comes with messaging activities that allow you to expose service operations as part of the workflow, and can be used to enable fine-grained control over the way inbound messages are correlated to workflow instances.  Additionally, you can use WorkflowServiceHost to host your services within IIS7 and Windows Server AppFabric, eliminating the need to write custom hosting logic. If you are writing a workflow that uses web services to communicate, WorkflowServiceHost frees you from writing an application around your workflow service.  WorkflowServiceHost and the workflow runtime will ensure workflows are automatically persisted and restarted when needed, with the correct state information loaded.  The runtime addresses the complexities of managing the resources and state of the workflow, including managing the flow of transactions into and out of the workflow.   

Find Out More

Visit the WF MSDN Dev Center and the Endpoint team blog to learn more, or connect with the Workflow team on the MSDN forums.  To get started with Workflow Foundation, check out following whitepapers: The Workflow Way: Understanding Windows Workflow Foundation and A Developer’s Introduction to WF4.

Namaste!

Today at MIX10, we are introducing the Windows Phone 7 Series development story.  At the heart of Windows Phone 7 Series development is Silverlight.  This enables you to bring your existing development skills in building Windows Phone 7 applications.

Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, Microsoft’s developer toolset for Windows Phone 7 Series, is now available for download.

The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP contains what you need to get started with Windows Phone 7 development.  Specifically, it includes the following:

-       CTP of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – This allows you to develop and debug your phone application in a familiar development environment.  If you are already using the release candidate of Visual Studio 2010, the Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio lets you create applications alongside your web, cloud and desktop applications. 

-       Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator – This is integrated with Visual Studio so you can see your app in action and debug it as you would with any other VS project.

-       Silverlight - Microsoft has extended our platform technologies from the web, desktop and console to the phone giving developers a broader application development experience.  With your existing development skills you can start developing applications for the phone today.  Or if you have a great app already, Silverlight lets you write once and optimize everywhere, including the phone.

-       XNA Game Studio – This enables you to build games spanning the phone, desktop and Xbox 360.

Expression Blend for Windows Phone, a professional design tool for building immersive mobile experiences in Silverlight, is not a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, but you can download it today as well.

Getting Started

Developing phone applications for Windows Phone 7 Series is similar to developing Silverlight or XNA applications in Visual Studio.  The Start Page in Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone offers learning resources to help you get started.

Your application can be in Silverlight or XNA.  You might be wondering when to use each technology.  Silverlight allows you to develop rich internet and out of browser applications and contains device-specific functionality giving you the ability to create a broad range of applications.  For game developers, XNA provides a great solution for building games that span from phone to desktop to Xbox 360.  When developing your application Visual Studio provides project and item templates to get you started with either Silverlight or XNA projects.

Developing the App

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone extends the VS design, coding, and debugging capabilities with phone-specific extensions and features. The designer surface is skinned with the phone’s visual theme so you can see how your application will look on the device.  As controls are added to the app, they automatically adopt the Windows Phone Design System look and feel.  Of course, you can change the style if you prefer a different theme for your application.

When you’re ready to run your application, you can use F5 to run it like any other application developed in VS.  You can debug your application using the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator.  The emulator supports adjusting the orientation and has phone buttons available on the device. Windows Phone 7 Series phones won’t be available until later this year, but the emulator helps you get a head start on developing your apps now.

Download the Tools

Starting today you can download the Windows Phone Developer Tools from the Windows Phone or Microsoft Express sites.  To learn more about Windows Phone 7 Series development, please visit the Charlie Kindel on Windows Phone Development blog.

Namaste!

Last November, I posted about our acquisition of the assets of Teamprise, a partner who provides access to Team Foundation Server from Eclipse and non-Windows platforms. 

The Teamprise products have been very popular with TFS customers who were developing applications across Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms.  Often customers want to standardize on a single enterprise-wide solution for Application Lifecycle Management because of the cost savings and increased transparency this provides. The Teamprise technology is key in enabling cross platform TFS access.

Since welcoming the Teamprise technology and the development team into Microsoft, we’ve been hard at work introducing the essential features of TFS 2010 and working towards a high quality release. 

Today we are announcing a broadly available beta of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010.  This release includes the Team Foundation Server Plugin for Eclipse as well as the Team Foundation Server Cross Platform Command Line Client.  It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and multiple flavors of UNIX, providing access to the same source control, work item tracking, build automation, and reporting features that Visual Studio customers have benefitted from.

Below, you can see a TFS user story work item in Eclipse.  The story’s implementation is described by a set of child tasks that are linked to that story.  It also shows the Pending Changes view with two source files checked out, the Team Explorer view with a set of work item queries organized into folders and the Eclipse import wizard connecting to TFS to import Java source into the Package Explorer. 

You can download the beta of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 here, and as always you can provide feedback through the Microsoft Connect site.

Namaste!

Last October, we announced a new packaging lineup and licensing options for Visual Studio 2010 to provide customers with simplified ways to purchase and license Visual Studio.  The new lineup includes three main versions of Visual Studio with appropriate MSDN subscriptions to go with Ultimate, Premium and Professional.

Many of you have asked what this meant for Standard Edition customers looking to upgrade. 

Today, I’m announcing our Standard Offer promotion to ensure current Standard Edition customers can easily and affordably move up to Visual Studio 2010.  The Standard Offer enables customers who purchased Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard Edition to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 at the previous Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition $299 retail price. Standard customers can take advantage of this offer April 12-October 12, 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 provides significant new benefits, such as the ability to optimize your development environment with multi-monitor support, and the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework with one tool. For Standard customers this functionality represents a substantial step up in tooling.

Today, we’re also unveiling an offer for customers who purchase Visual Studio Professional at retail. To help these developers fully realize the power and benefits of a MSDN subscription, I am announcing MSDN Essentials, a one-year trial MSDN subscription that will be included with every retail copy of Visual Studio Professional sold.

MSDN Essentials subscribers will have access to three of the latest Microsoft platforms: Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and SQL Server 2008 Datacenter R2 for development and test use, as well as 20 hours of Windows Azure.  Subscribers will also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, Priority Support in MSDN Forums, and will be included in special offers from partners.

For the first time ever, we are giving developers the opportunity to pre-order Visual Studio 2010. The Microsoft Store and select online resellers will pre-sell Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN Essentials from March 9^th until the product launch.

Namaste!

More than ever before, today’s developers are open to considering and using multiple technologies to enable them to build solutions smoothly and deliver them to their customers quickly.  There are an increasing number of choices available for developers in terms of programming styles.  Our goal is to provide fantastic support for all programming styles within our tools to enable our customers to build great software.

Several trends are emerging within the area of software development.  Below are some of the most important trends I’ve been thinking about recently.  This list isn’t comprehensive of all software trends, but each one represents an area that Microsoft is currently or will be investing in to bring to our customers.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing allows companies to leverage just the computing resources they need today, scale up to handle peak loads, and avoid the overhead of managing hardware.  Cloud computing levels the playing field for small companies to compete against large, established companies at a reasonable and predictable cost.  Windows Server, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and services such as Windows Live, Office, and Xbox Live are now live in the cloud.   Microsoft has committed to bringing the best cloud computing platform and services to the Windows ecosystem.   The cloud is just one example of a virtualized computing platform, and the next generation of developer tools must enable developers to build software that deploys and performs well in cloud and other virtual environments. 

The Web as a Platform

The browser provides a rich runtime environment and friction-free access to applications.  Developers are increasingly choosing the web as their platform of choice for software and software development.    Increasingly, developers and designers are using tools that offer a rich development, debugging, and profiling experience designed for the web.  JavaScript libraries allow web developers to get more done with JavaScript than ever before while reaching a wide audience, and immersive internet applications, such as those written for Silverlight, allow developers to break free of the limitations of HTML and take advantage of a range of resources and features while guaranteeing compatibility across platforms.

Parallel Computing

Moore’s Law, the prediction that CPU performance would double every eighteen months, is now fulfilled by adding more processor cores rather than by increased performance of a single core, bringing the power of multi-core processing to low-end machines.  New trends in computing take advantage of inexpensive and widely-available desktop graphics processors for certain tasks.  At the high end of processing ability, supercomputing centers are leveraging clusters to perform complex computational tasks.  Today, a small handful of programmers have the skills to write code that performs well in multi-core and many-core environments.  In the future, parallel libraries, debugging, profiling, and diagnostic tools will enable more developers to take advantage of parallel computing resources.

Proliferation of Devices

With the increasing availability of inexpensive devices that connect to the internet, we all want to access and interact with our data in ways that are appropriate to our devices’ capabilities.  We expect to access our online identities and data easily and securely on all our devices.  Today, Microsoft provides access to users’ data via Windows Live and Xbox LIVE.  With the proliferation of devices has come a proliferation of user interface paradigms that enable natural and intuitive interaction with those devices.  As touch-based, speech-based, and camera-based solutions become available and cost-effective, Microsoft is evolving software to take advantage of these capabilities to build intuitive user interfaces.  Windows 7 provides great support for touch-enabled applications in the platform.  Silverlight and WPF have embraced camera-based interactions and multi-touch, as has MFC.  I expect user interface paradigms to continue to evolve and become more intuitive and powerful.

Agile Development Process

Agile development processes, including Scrum, test-driven development, and continuous integration are commonly used in the enterprise and smaller development shops, often in combination with other development practices. Within Microsoft, many teams have integrated elements of Agile development practices to their process.  Visual Studio 2010 opens the door for Agile methodologies, offering support for some Agile processes such as unit testing and iteration planning.  We will continue to support more Agile methodologies going forward as well.

Distributed Development

Distributed development enables team members to work closely despite geographic separation from each other, bringing together worldwide talent to seamlessly work toward a common project or goal.  The experience of a team working across time zones and borders should be as good as the experience for a single developer, but also includes supporting cloud-based development activities such as distributed code reviews, remote paired programming, developer/tester collaboration and resource sharing.  Great distributed team development tools will enable developers to build the next generation of software, leveraging the worldwide talent pool.

In Closing…

These trends don’t represent a complete list of influential factors for all areas, but are some of the areas we feel can move software development forward.  I welcome your perspective: which of these trends do you feel will be most important in the future?  Are there trends you think should be included in this list?  Leave a comment with your perspective.

Today, we are making available the Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 to all MSDN subscribers.  The RC will be made available to the world on Wednesday, February 10th.  The RC includes a go-live license for people who want to deploy in their production environment.

Thank you for all the feedback you’ve sent our way so far.  The goal of this RC is to get more feedback from you and ensure we’ve addressed the performance issues in the product.  We have made significant performance improvements specifically as it relates to loading solutions, typing, building and debugging.

I encourage you to download the RC and let us know what you think.  For more information on the RC, check out Jason Zander's blog.

Namaste!