Maíra Wenzel's Blog

Visual Studio and .NET Framework Content Survey

mairaw — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:03:00 GMT

Give Your Feedback on the Documentation

Help us improve the developer documentation by taking the Visual Studio and .NET Framework Content Survey. This survey will give us a better understanding of the type of applications you are developing as well as how you use Help and how we can improve it. The survey takes only 10 minutes, and we appreciate your feedback!

CLR Videos on Channel 9

mairaw — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:41:00 GMT

The CLR team is posting a series of Channel 9 videos mainly about the new CLR 4 features.

You can access all the videos posted, by clicking here.

This is the list of videos published so far:

CLR Through the Years : CLR Architect Vance Morrison talks about some of the history of the CLR, a look inside the upcoming version and some insights into the future.
Inside .NET 4: Meet the BCL Team : Get to know the people behind the base class library and some of the innovations coming in .NET 4.
CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC : Software developer Maoni Stephens and PM Andrew Pardoe explains how GC has evolved over the years and talk about Background GC, an evolution to concurrent GC.
CLR 4: Debugging and Profiling API Enhancements : Developers Thomas Lai and David Broman join Program Manager Jon Langdon to share with us some of the new debugging and profiling enhancements in CLR 4
CLR 4 - Inside No-PIA : Principal Architect Raja Krishnaswamy, Program Manager Jesse Kaplan and team have created a new way to streamline and simplify PIA-based COM Interop. Understand what this new feature is and get some questions answered.
CLR 4 - Inside the new Managed Security Model : Senior SDE Shawn Farkas digs into the new security model in CLR 4.
CLR 4 - Resilient NGen with Targeted Patching : PM Surupa Biswa talks about what the NGen (CLR's Native Image Generator) team will be delivering in CLR 4 to enable resilient NGen via targeted patching.
CLR 4 - Inside the Thread Pool : Developer Eric Eilebrecht and PM Erika Parsons talk about thread pool’s significant advances in performance and support for concurrency and parallelism.
CLR 4 - Side-by-Side In-Process - What. How. Why. : Developers Simon Hall and Rick Byers explain exactly what went into the SxS In-Proc design, the challenges and opportunities.
CLR 4 - Inside Type Equivalence : Architects Raja Krishnaswamy and Vance Morrison dig into the thinking behind the technology.

You can download the Channel 9 videos in different formats so that you can even watch them at your Zune or IPod.

Enjoy!

.NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 documentation is online

mairaw — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:07:00 GMT

Soma, senior VP of the Developer Division, just announced on his blog that today we are releasing Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4! If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download the Beta today from here. For the rest of the world, the Beta will be publicly available on Wednesday.

And we’re also shipping today the documentation on MSDN online!

For .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 documentation, click here.

For Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 documentation, click here.

As usual, send your feedback on the documentation so we can get your comments and suggestions incorporated before we ship the final release.

More is on the way for the next releases, so stay tuned!

Fixing the problem of memory could not be read on IE8

mairaw — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:58:00 GMT

When IE8 was released, I went ahead and installed it in all my machines at home and at work. In one of my machines at work, I started to get an annoying memory error message whenever I would close the browser or sometimes while browsing. The error message was the following:

“The instruction at "0x749860a0" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "read". Click on OK to terminate the program.”

Today we had a presentation from a Program Manager of the IE group and I asked him about this error after he finished. What he told me is that usually is an add-on that is causing the issue. So he suggested me to go to Tools –> Manage Add-ons, select all add-ons and click on Disable all. Close the browser, reopen and close it again. If the message box disappears (in my case it did), I’d know that is one of the add-ons that was causing the issue.

Adding back one add-on at a time (closing, reopening and closing again after I enabled each one to see if the message would show up) , I was able to find some culprits. ;-)

I hope this helps!

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 version is available

mairaw — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:59:00 GMT

Microsoft has just released the Release Candidate 1 for Internet Explorer 8 that you can install from here.

Some of the new features include:

· Mapping a location: Highlight a street address in your Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or other web mail account, right-click on the blue button that appears, and hover over “Map with Live Search.” Presto! You’ll see the map with the location right there—no more copying and pasting street addresses from web mail to a mapping site. Plus, you can choose what mapping service you want to use.

· Instant Search Box: Go to the search box in the top right, and type a search item—see how the enhanced Instant Search Box is more helpful, providing real-time search suggestions, including images, from your chosen search provider.

· InPrivate Browsing: Click on a new tab, and see the options that are presented there, including “InPrivate Browsing.” Click InPrivate Browsing and watch what happens—you are now in a browser session that is leaving no trail behind, so research gift suggestions for your significant other to your heart’s content without worrying about who might pick up the crumbs after you.

Also, IE8 is supposed to be faster, easier to use, safer and more reliable. It is worth to check it out!

Interop Best Practices in the .NET Framework

mairaw — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:10:00 GMT

The CLR team has a column inside the MSDN magazine called 'CLR Inside Out'.

This month’s article is about Best Practices For Managed And Native Code Interoperability. It was written by Jesse Kaplan, the PM for Managed/Native Interoperability on the CLR team. The article provides high-level architectural guidance and discusses the three techniques available in the .NET framework for managed-native interoperability: P/Invoke, COM Interop and C++/CLI.

To see a list of all articles already published on the 'CLR Inside Out' column, go here.

New blog in town

mairaw — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 05:18:00 GMT

Just a quick note to announce that the CLR team has created a blog to post about interesting subjects about - of course - CLR! In the coming weeks, the posts should be starting pouring over there. Be sure to add to your favorites or RSS readers.

Check it out at http://blogs.msdn.com/clrteam/.

MSDN Translation Wiki

mairaw — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:42:00 GMT

The Visual Studio documentation is localized into nine languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish. To expand the availability of relevant technical content to a wider, global audience of developers, Microsoft has launched two years ago the MSDN Translation Wiki. The first language available for this was the Brazilian Portuguese. The Translation Wiki was a combined effort of Microsoft and local universities to get a good machine translation in place and some tech reviews in the most popular topics. So Brazilian developers now have the MSDN documentation in their native language. The automatic translation is not always great, that's why is in a wiki format. Users can suggest a better translation and the moderators (like myself) will review it.

Because it's a translation wiki, the default view has both languages side-by-side (English and Portuguese). For me, as a moderator, that is great because I can review the original sentence and the translation. What struck me today is that I've never realized that you could choose to show only the English frame or only the translation frame, which is very helpful for someone that is not interested in the English version. And I only realized that because of a customer feedback bug that I was translating today!

So I'll switch to Portuguese now to try to help our customers facing this issue...

Se você está visualizando uma página em português no MSDN, como por exemplo Guia de Programação C#, observe que tem um filtro no menu superior chamado Exibir Conteúdo. A opção pré-selecionada é Lado a Lado, que vai exibir o conteúdo tanto em inglês como em português, o que pode dificultar a leitura. Por isso, você pode selecionar entre as opções Apenas em Inglês ou Apenas Tradução.

Syncing Blackjack II with Windows Vista using bluetooth

mairaw — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:15:59 GMT

This post is a little bit off-topic in my blog, but since I had to spend some time trying to make this work and I saw some foruns where people are having the same problem with no solution I thought I would put here what I've done to make my Windows Mobile 6 to synchronize with my Vista machine via bluetooth. I hope I can remeber the steps right.

1. Download Windows Mobile Center

According to Windows Vista help, ActiveSync was replaced with Windows Mobile Center in Vista. After this, I tried connecting my phone with Vista via bluetooth, but I still couldn't.

2. Follow the instructions on the Windows Mobile Device Center help for "Connect using Bluetooth".

You can also see the steps online, although I prefer the formatting in the offline help. The most important note there is that you have to attach your device to the computer using a USB cable first.
Also, if you have added a device following the cellphone manual before getting to this step (as I did), delete the device from the cellphone and add it again.

It seems simple, but I just got at this point after I tried a couple of different things.

Silverlight 2 documentation - learning resources

mairaw — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:50:00 GMT

Today is a great day! We shipped Silverlight 2!

If you're looking for resources to learn more about the technology and how you can get started, these are some useful links:

Get Started page on Silverlight.net Web site: you have learning resources there, but you can also download Silverlight 2 and other tools from here.
The Silverlight documentation on MSDN. For those looking for reference material, they are divided on MSDN in Managed reference and Unmanaged reference.
Silverlight quickstarts
Documentation download (CHM file)

If you have any feedback on the documentation, please let us know.

Have fun programming!

New challenges

mairaw — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:44:00 GMT

It's been two years that I've been at Microsoft and I can say what an amazing 2 years I had! At the ASP.NET UE team, I shipped ASP.NET Ajax 1.0, Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (that it was much more than a simple Service Pack!).

They say that at Microsoft you're responsible for your career and this is absolutely true. When I saw the opportunity to become the Documentation Manager for the Common Language Runtime (CLR) User Education (UE) team, I just jumped right on it!

I still love ASP.NET and the ASP.NET User Education team rocks! People there are really dedicated to create great documentation and bringing innovation to the table.

But more importantly, I just love .NET in general and I am really passionate about our documentation! So the CLR team was a great match. I am truly excited about this opportunity and look forward to blog more about the CLR!

Feel free to send me any comments, feedback, any advice for a first-time people manager and reading suggestions including blogs and books!

I'm already adding the BCL team blog to my list.

Handling Null Database Values Using Data Source Controls

mairaw — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:38:00 GMT

This topic Handling Null Database Values Using Data Source Controls has now been updated on MSDN to fix the sample based on various customer feedback. You can still see the old version here, in case you're curious to compare both versions.

What has changed:

In the previous sample, the two-way data-binding was not in place, so editing was not working. If you noticed that and tried to replace the Eval() statement by a Bind() statement in the EditItemTemplate, it wouldn't work either. Bind() statements don't support being encapsulated by other method calls as Eval() statements do. (A good explanation for that can be found in Eilon's blog).
The previous sample was already using a great technique for handling null values, the AppendDataBoundItems property was set to true in the DropDownList control. The AppendDataBoundItems property enables you to populate the DropDownList control with both static items and data generated from the data source. However, the value for the null entry was set to zero. So every time a null value was read from the database, it had to be converted to zero. Changing the item list to an empty value did the trick here. The empty value is now automatically converted to null without the need to use a function for that (because the ConvertEmptyStringtoNull property of both the TemplateField and the data source control parameter is set to true).

Take a look and let us know if you think this has improved or if you still think it needs some work!

ASP.NET Dynamic Data documentation is released!

mairaw — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:59:00 GMT

Soma, senior VP of the Developer Division, just announced on his blog that the Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 are released!

That means that Dynamic Data is released and the documentation for Dynamic Data (and for the entire SP1) is now published on MSDN!

This is how the Table of Contents for Dynamic Data looks like for this release:

Using Dynamic Data

We introduced some new cool features with this release for the ASP.NET documents.

Video tutorials

Runnable samples

The runnable samples are nothing new for the ASP.NET team, but this is the first time we are publishing them outside the ASP.NET site. Some topics that include runnable samples are the following:

Well, now you can tell us what you think of the documentation and the new features. The easiest way to do it is just to send your feedback through the rating system on the MSDN site (the stars on the right-upper corner of the topic).

Enjoy it!

ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Tips and Tricks #3

mairaw — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:06:00 GMT

You've created a custom attribute to use in your Dynamic Data application that has the AllowMultiple property set to true. When you read the MetaColumn.Attributes property (if the attribute is applied to a data field) or you read the MetaTable.Attributes property (if the attribute is applied to a table), you don't see the multiple attributes of the same type in the list, only the first one is returned.

Why?

The TypeDescriptionProvider class internally constructs a collection of attributes and filters out identical attributes. It determines whether an attribute is identical or not by examining the TypeId property. By default, the TypeId property returns the type of the attribute. Since both attributes are of the same type, only the first one is retrieved and the remaining ones are considered identical.

To fix this problem, you need a way to distinguish each attribute instance. The easiest way to do that is to override the TypeId property in your custom attribute implementation and simply return the current instance, like the following:

public override object TypeId
{
  get
  {
    return this;
  }
}

ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Tips and Tricks #2

mairaw — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:42:00 GMT

If you're running into a problem similar to this one:
"My Dynamic Data Web site is not working properly. My tables are read-only and no Edit/Delete/Insert buttons are displayed.",
you might want to check the primary keys in your database.

One of the main reasons for this to happen is when you don't have the primary keys set in your database. Make sure you have primary keys defined for all your tables; otherwise, Dynamic Data doesn't enable the read-write mode. After you set the primary keys in your database, you must regenerate your data model.