Jason Zander's WebLog : .NET

Announcing VS2010 / .NET Framework Beta 2!

Jasonz — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:07:00 GMT

I’m happy to announce that Beta 2 is now ready for download! MSDN subscribers may download the beta immediately with general availability on Wednesday. Beta 2 comes with a “go live” license which means you can start using the product for production related work (see the license agreement with the product for more details).

Download Beta 2

I have a few tutorials queued up which I will be publishing over the next several weeks; stay tuned.

The biggest change you’ll see with these release is the change to the SKU line up. The goal with the new line up is to reduce the number of SKU’s you have to think about and install and make it a very simple set:

Visual Studio Express: the free Express SKUs for C++, C#, VB, and Web have been updated and released with this version and give you the basics for writing applications
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN: professional development tools as you are used to today with the addition of source control integration, extensibility, etc.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN: Premium has everything in Professional plus advanced development (including profiling and debugging), advanced database support, coded UI testing, etc. Rather than buying multiple “Team” SKUs, you can now get this combination of features in one box.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN: Ultimate has everything in Premium plus additional advanced features for developers, testers, and architects including features like Intellitrace (formerly Historical Debugging), the new architecture tools (UML, discovery), etc. All of the scenarios we’ve talked about are supported with this version of the product.

In addition to these changes, Team Foundation Server (TFS) is now available with all versions of Visual Studio 2010. You can get started with TFS Basic and work up to full multi-sever support, SharePoint integration, etc as your needs grow.

The new “Test Elements” SKU is designed for testers who don’t need to write code. You can manage your test cases, work items, and do manual testing using the SKU. Because everything is integrated through TFS, you can continue to collaborate with the entire team.

The UI has been refreshed with a new start page that gives you quick links to common tasks or background on programming tasks. I have TFS Basic installed on my laptop; you can see Team Explorer support for source control, work items, and builds:

Beta 2 now ships with several new project types we’ve mentioned before such as Windows Azure (under “Cloud Service”) and SharePoint, all available for C# and Visual Basic programmers:

In addition support for Silverlight 3 and ASP.NET MVC 2 are included in the build.

As an engineering team, the goal for Beta 2 was to work very hard on performance, stability, and the integration of the feature set. Our focus is now transitioning to getting your feedback on the product and preparing for the release candidate (RC) milestone which is our final milestone before shipping the product. Please download the beta and send us your feedback.

Enjoy!

Jason

Sample: Parsing Content in C# Using IFilter

Jasonz — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:09:06 GMT

I’m working on a 3 (or 4) part tutorial right now that requires parsing of PDF files. The code started to get big enough I decided to pull it out and turn it into a new post that I can use in the series (stay tuned).

There are several solutions for reading through various file formats. The IFilter interface was defined to help Windows do search indexing on files for this purpose. There are lot’s of filter providers for various formats, including several from Microsoft. If you want to parse PDF files you’ll need to have a provider installed for that as well. The FoxIt IFilter download page has a provider that according to their website is free for client use (my case).

In looking around for some sample code I found a few examples that did close to what I wanted but didn’t have a lot of luck finding a C# example. I’ve pulled together various pieces of code to create a basic implementation for my (simple) needs. You can find some interesting links here:

MSDN Documentation for IFilter
Codeplex IFilter sample code in C++ (under MS-PL)
P-Invoke definitions for IFilter and related members from www.pinvoke.net

The sample contains a class library for parsing the code and a console application that can be used to exercise the library against files. The code is built using a current internal build of VS2010 (stay tuned here for beta notice) but the key code (FilterCode.cs) should work fine on previous versions of VS and .NET Framework.

I’ve uploaded the solution to the MSDN code gallery here:

Download source code

To use the sample, include FilterCode.cs in your project, create a new instance of FilterLibrary.FilterCode, and call the GetTextFromDocument method against the file you want to parse. If you have a filter installed for that document type, you will get back a StringBuilder with the text contents of the file.

Enjoy!

VS2010 Tutorial: Build a WPF App (Step 1)

Jasonz — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:00:00 GMT

For this post I’m going to build a WPF application from scratch using VS2010 Beta 1. Along the way I’m going to show off a few new features of the product. I built this demo using the Beta 1 build on Windows 7 RC, but it should work fine on other systems as well.

If you haven’t already downloaded the software, you can find a great walk through of how to do that on Channel 9 from Brian Keller. Brian explains how to install the entire product, including TFS. TFS is not required for Step 1 (this tutorial), but will be for Step 2.

First we’ll start off in Visual Studio 2010 and do a File, New Project. I’m going to select “WPF Application” and call my application PicViewer (this is the new Beta 1 dialog):

This will give us the default project template including a Window with a Grid and my default C# project code:

To start, I’m going to drag the Window out to be larger which you can do by dragging the actual window in the designer or you can edit the XAML Width=”” tag. I’ll make mine 700:

At the top of the application we want a button to display the Previous and Next pictures in the list. We also want to display the full path so we’ll need a label. Step 1 is to add a row to the grid. In this case I’ll select the <Grid> label and move the cursor to where I want the row:

When I make the row, it also adjusts the XAML for this page as follows:

Let’s adjust the first row Height to “35” instead of “29*” just to make sure my buttons are of reasonable size. The aesthetics are really up to you.

We want WPF to do the layout of the buttons and the label. To do this, create a <StackPanel> bound to Grid.Row=”0”. The StackPanel by default flows items vertically so let’s change the Orientation to “Horizontal”. You can do this either by using the XAML editor or by dragging the items from the ToolBox. Your final markup should look like the following:

Let’s drag a button onto the Row from the Toolbox:

I want this to be the Previous button. I’ll do this by editing the settings in the Properties window:

First change the Name field to “buttonPrev” and then change the Content setting to “Prev”. Repeat this process by dragging another button to the right of the Prev button and edit that item to Name “buttonNext” and Content “Next”. You should see the following:

This is functional, but doesn’t look good. We can add some white space around the buttons in the StackPanel by setting the margin which defines how much space should be around an item. Select the Prev button and change this setting:

which will give the button a Margin of 5 on all sides (you can independently set left|right|top|bottom as well). Repeat the same for the Next button. At this point you’ll see the following:

Finally drag a label to the right of the Next button making the Name “labelPath” and set the Width to “400”. When you are done, your XAML markup should look as follows (you can edit the text if it isn’t just right):

To display our pictures, we will need to have an Image control in the bottom. To do this, drag an Image control from the ToolBox to the bottom of the grid. This will do the following:

This is a case where having the Smart Tag feature of Windows Forms would be really handy. This is on the feature list but not yet in the WPF Designer. In this case I’m going to edit the XAML itself to remove everything the designer added except the Grid.Row, Margin, and Name settings. Make your settings look like the following and the image control will now fill the bottom of the grid with a nice white space border:

Now the look of the application is coming along and we need to add some code to make it work. To start, double click on the title bar of the Window to create a load handler:

Repeat this process by double clicking on the Prev and Next buttons. This will give you the following code outline:

For this picture viewer, I’m going to get a list of jpg files from my Windows 7 user directory and display those. What I’d really like to do is write the view code in Window1.xaml.cs in a way that makes sense to me, then go write the underlying logic. To get started, I’m going to declare a new instance of a class that doesn’t exist yet:

Because the class doesn’t exist yet, I am getting the red squiggles under the type. That’s ok, we’ll create the class in a minute.

The next step is to stub out all the view code in this file. We’ll start with the Window_Loaded() method. Notice that even though the class has not been defined, Intellisense will include the type after the new keyword so you can use it:

We want to initialize the list and display the first picture when the application starts. The code is as follows:

Once again I have parse errors for items which don’t exist which is ok. Move on to the Previous button handler and start typing in that method. When I get to the DisplayPicture function call, you’ll notice the function doesn’t show up in the IntelliSense window because it doesn’t exist yet.

If you hit <Ctrl>+<Alt>+Space you’ll change the mode into “consume first” which means I want the editor to give me these names while I’m typing. Now when I start typing, my new (and undeclared) function shows up in the list so IntelliSense doesn’t auto-complete on items already in the completion list:

My code then looks like the following:

I’m happy with this basic view logic. Now I need to actually create the support class that finds my pictures. Let’s start by placing the cursor on the PictureList class declaration then press the <Ctrl> key and the period (<Ctrl>+.) at the same time to expand the smart tag. You’ll get the following pop up:

Select the first menu item, “Generate class for ‘PictureList’”. This will add a new file, PictureList.cs, to the project and generate the class PictureList in that file. Now that the class has been defined, the squiggles go away:

You will then notice all the methods you have invoked on the class are showing up as syntax errors. Put your cursor in the Init() method and press <Ctrl>+. to get the following:

Select the menu item so the code is generated for you. Repeat this process for the Peek(), Prev(), and Next() methods. If we then open PictureList.cs file, you will find the following code stubbed out for you:

Notice that because the code we wrote to consume methods like _PicList.Peek() expect a string back, the editor has automatically given the methods a return type of ‘string’.

Now I’ll add the logic to retrieve a list of jpg’s from the Windows install and give me the ability to walk through them:

The last step is to write the DisplayPicture method in Window1.xaml.cs. I can do this once again by selecting the method name and hitting <Ctrl>+. and then fill out the code as follows:

This code will take the jpg and convert it into a BitmapImage that can be displayed. The next line of code sets the Source of our XAML image contorl to this bitmap so it can be displayed on the screen.

The program now builds cleanly. I will set a breakpoint in the Peek() method as well as the DisplayPicture method. Do this by placing the cursor on those functions and hitting the F9 button (notice the red breakpoint circle in the margin):

Now let’s run the application by hitting the F5 button. Our first breakpoint in the Peek() method is now hit:

You’ll find your breakpoint marked in yellow where we stopped. In addition you’ll find the traditional Call Stack view in the lower right. Because I’m using Visual Studio Team System, I also have the “Debug History” view on by default:

The default settings have captured interesting information about the execution of my program so far including all of the Registry accesses my program has made (either by me or the underlying system) and system events (like breakpoints, exceptions, etc).

If I hover my cursor over the _PicList variable in the editor, I get a pop up watch window. If I hover my cursor over the little square at the end and click:

then you will get a sticky DataTips window in the editor (the arrow is just to demonstrate the result, it isn’t in the editor):

This is a simple example of using the new WPF editor. The sticky DataTips window is a WPF adornment to the text buffer tied into the debugger. You can use it like a normal watch window by expanding the array contents, etc.

Let’s hit F5 and continue the program. My application now works including the Prev and Next buttons:

The only issue is the name of the file is not being updated. Click the Next button again to our break point in DisplayPicture(). There is no code to update the label in this method:

To fix this, let’s add a new line of code:

With the Edit & Continue feature you can make new code changes while the application is running. Update the code to the following:

Now press F5 to continue and the path is updated:

There are a couple of fit and finish things I’d like to change. Let’s stretch the image to fit by adding Stretch=”Fill”:

Next let’s add a rectangle to frame the picture:

You can then select the rectangle and set the Fill property to give it a color. This brings up the new inline color palate:

I chose a blue/black color and you get the following:

The final XAML markup then looks like the following:

This sample could be improved in a number of ways, including using data bound controls to enumerator classes, adding all the proper try/catch logic, etc. But my main goal here was to show off some editor / designer features so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the user.

Enjoy!

General Download of VS2010 / .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1

Jasonz — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:54:35 GMT

On Monday I posted a detailed walk through of Beta 1 here. Beta 1 has been available to MSDN subscribers since Monday and will be available to everyone as of 10 AM PST today (Wednesday May 20). I’m about to catch a plane from JFK to Seattle so I’m posting the links now:) They will be live after 10 AM PST:

This beta does have full setup available so you can provision it yourself. The product is designed to work cleanly with VS2008, however like any pre-release software you should be careful about using the product on your main machine. We are not (yet) opening the product up for general ‘go live’ usage; our goal is to get your feedback on the feature set and direction we are headed.

I really want to hear your feedback! I will definitely follow blog comments, but the best way to give us that feedback is through the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 site. You can get your issues and suggestions routed to the teams directly by going through this route.

Over the next week I’ll be posting a couple of tutorials that you can use to try out new functionality. Stay tuned…