Roundup of 11 Recent Microsoft Technology Releases

There have been quite a few developer and technology releases in the past couple of weeks, so in case you’ve missed any, I’ve collected pointers to 11 of them in this post:

• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1)
  • IE Team Post
  • Release Notes
• ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1 (RC1)
  • Many new improvements including tooling, view enhancements, form post handling, unit testing, file handling, AJAX and others.
  • Scott Guthrie’s Detailed Post
  • Phil Haack’s Post
• Updates for Windows Azure:
• Windows Azure SDK January 2009 CTP
  • “The Windows® Azure™ SDK provides developers with the APIs, tools, documentation, and samples needed to develop Internet-scale applications that run on Windows Azure.”
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio January 2009 CTP
• “Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure.”
• Live Framework Tools January CTP
• Read James Senior’s post for details and note that you’ll need to sign up for the appropriate services before you can download the CTP, described in Lynn Langit’s getting started with Azure post
• Microsoft Tag Beta
  • “With the Microsoft Tag application, just aim your camera phone at a Tag and instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, and more. Nothing to type, no browsers to launch!"
• Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1: BETA
  • "The Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1: BETA provides the documentation, samples, header files, libraries, and tools (including C++ compilers) that you need to develop applications to run on Windows 7 BETA and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1”
  • BTW, you can access all SDK’s from this portal.
• Managed Extensibility Framework Preview 4 Release
  • “The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can make the shift from being statically compiled to dynamically composed. If you are building extensible applications, extensible frameworks and application extensions, then MEF is for you.”
• Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint v1.3
  • “The Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint (VSeWSS) provide project templates for developers using Visual Studio 2008 to create, debug, package and deploy SharePoint projects including Web Parts, Data Lists, Content Types, Event Receivers, Templates, Modules and other SharePoint artifacts.”
• Microsoft Web Platform Installer 1.0
  • “The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft's entire Web Platform, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform.”
• Microsoft Visual Studio Learning Pack 2.0
  • “The Visual Studio Learning Pack 2.0 is a software package created by Microsoft to help students learn about computer programming. Improvements in this release include support for Visual Studio 2008 Express and more support for Visual Basic.”

Plus a couple of new guides for good measure:

• Patterns & Practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0
• XAML Guidelines Draft 
  • Rudi Grobler’s post (includes additional videos)

Enjoy!
-Chris