Scott Wiltamuth's Visual Studio blog : VS

VS 2010 videos

scottwil — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:16:00 GMT

Check out this new VS 2010 and .NET Fx 4.0 videos page on channel9. We're rolling out a set of videos for this week, including Jason Zander's keynote at Tech Ed in Barcelona, Anders doing q&a on C# 4.0, Lucien on VB 10, and others! If you're curious what we've been up to since releasing VS 2008, this content combined with the PDC videos give you plenty of choices.

If you don't have time to watch the videos, Jason has a good blog post summarizing key news.

--Scott

C# PDC videos

scottwil — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:22:00 GMT

With PDC going on in LA this week, we have a number of new C# videos available:

Anders' PDC talk on The Future of C#, where he describes the work we plan to deliver as part of C# 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010. There are six demos:

Silverlight C#/JavaScript interop improvements using the new dynamic programming extensions.
C#/Python interop using dynamic programming extensions.
Creating a dynamically typed property bag in C# using dynamic programming extensions.
Improvements to Office Automation (bye-bye “Type.Missing” and “ref missing”).
Parallel Extensions to .NET (Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ, aka TPL and PLINQ).
A sneak peek at read-eval-print loop using managed C# compiler.

We have a series of three videos that we did with informIT:

C# 4.0 with Anders Hejlsberg, Mads Torgersen, and Eric Lippert - Part 1 of 2
C# 4.0 with Anders Hejlsberg, Mads Torgersen, and Eric Lippert - Part 2 of 2
A video about the latest edition of our book, The C# Programming Language, Third Edition. The book is literally hot off the presses, so if you're ordering it, make sure you get the Third Edition.

Enjoy!

--Scott

F# Press Coverage

scottwil — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:39:00 GMT

Soma blogged earlier announcing our intent to productize F#, and we are seeing some press coverage of this:

Ars Technica: Microsoft to push functional programming into the mainstream with F# by Ryan Paul
BetaNews: Experimental 'Functional' Language Emerges from Microsoft Research by Scott M Fulton

Dr Dobb’s Journal: F# To Get VS Integration

eWeek: Programming Superstars Eye Parallelism by Darryl K Taft

eWeek: Microsoft to host language symposium by Darryl K Taft

InfoQ: F# to be Integrated with Visual Studio by Jonathan Allen

InfoWorld: InfoWorld Daily Podcast by Tom Sullivan

TechWorld: Visual Studio to use the F word by Paul Krill

VNUNet.com: Microsoft preps functional programming language by Tom Sanders

ZDNet: F# becomes a first-class citizen by Mary Jo Foley

--Scott

Second Life at OOPSLA

scottwil — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:28:00 GMT

There was an interesting session at OOPSLA yesterday called "Second Life: The World's Biggest Programming Environment" by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner, that covered two main topics.

The first part of the talk was mainly about the popularity of LSL (15% of Second Life users write scripts!), and the effort to move LSL to .NET and Mono, and also to enable other .NET languages like C# to be used to build Second Life scripts. This is very cool!

The second part covered how the LSL team uses Second Life as a communication and collaboration tool for their own software development. Since I had just blogged a few days earlier musing about unified communication for developers, this definitely caught my interest. Linden Lab folks have made what we at MS would call a dogfooding commitment -- all meetings are done in Second Life. The LSL folks use an interesting combination of tools for their collaborative development work, including Second Life features:

a meeting place
presence -- you can and hear see what your co-workers are doing
white board for shared task list
3D audio so you can hear what your co-workers are doing, both in meeting settings and less formal collaboration. E.g., you might overhear two teammates doing a code review on an are of code you know a lot about and decide to join them

and others:

Screen sharing
Twitter
Etc.

As an example, code reviews are done using a combination of Second Life (e.g., audio) and non-SL tools (e.g., screen sharing).

Software development is a social endeavor, and I expect more and more experimentation with social tools and environments like Second Life as part of developers' toolkits.

--Scott

New Position for Me

scottwil — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:43:00 GMT

I recently switched from managing a large group (VB, VC#, VC++, and Phoenix product units) to working in a staff role for Jason Zander, who is managing a larger group that includes the product units I previously mentioned plus a number of others that Jason mentions in his post. In my new role, I am working on planning for the next version (and beyond!) for VS Pro and below, which is essentially our traditional dev tools product, which consists of an IDE and a variety of languages, tools, and platform-specific tools.

We are very interested in getting your input for these future versions. It's our aspiration to build software that developers love, and to do that we need your input. Many of you have already done so by entering bugs and suggestions on Connect, and these are a great resource for us. We will be combing through these as part of our planning. An advantage of posting bugs and suggestions via Connect is that it is easier for us to follow up with you, and for you to check status. But if blog comments or email work better for you, feel free to do that as well. The important thing is that we hear from you so that we can build the best product possible.

--Scott