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Monthly Archives: February 2010
Visual Studio 2010: The Next Generation Of The IDE From Microsoft
Visual Studio 2010 is bringing both greater quality and robust tools to the .NET software developer like nothing ever done before. As a .NET developer I have been using Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE since version 6.0 and I have continued with this IDE since the introduction of Visual Studio .NET roughly nine years ago. Microsoft has done a wonderful job at providing iterations of this IDE and with each new version came excitement but most importantly is the new features and the technology of .NET. Visual Studio .NET 2010 is changing the game for the software developer in a way that is both productive and challenging.
VS 2010 and .NET 4 bring a huge number of improvements and additions. They include big advances for ASP.NET web development, WPF and WinForms client development, SharePoint development, Silverlight development, data development, parallel computing development, and cloud computing development. VS 2010 also delivers a ton of improvements in the core IDE, code editors, programming languages, and enterprise design, architect, and testing tools.
At this time Visual Studio Release Candidate is available with a “Go Live” license which means you can get an early start on your .NET 4.0 application and be a leader in this area among your peers. Scott Guthrie has provided a great bit of detail on this blog about the progression of this IDE. To the left you will see a quote from Scott and what he said about VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 a few months ago.
Earlier this month I had conducted a poll to see how many individuals had downloaded and installed the Visual Studio 2010 IDE and .NET 4.0 framework. While there were not a large number of votes it is interesting to see that the majority had begun this transition.
If you’re wondering what new features this version brings to the table I think you will be pleasantly surprised. For one the interface is much more fluid and friendly than earlier versions. Of course the user experience is an important aspect but more importantly is what development features are available. Just a handful of features are:
- Cloud Development
- Parallel Programming
- Sharepoint Development
- Office Business Application Development
Of course along side Visual Studio 2010 is the .NET 4.0 framework which supports developing applications that target the Windows 7 platform. If you are primarily an ASP.NET developer much like myself, then I am sure you will find a great number of both exciting and long overdue features. Rather than going into any detail here I would refer you to ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Web Development Overview in order to get a clear picture first hand. Also be sure that you do not miss Scott Cate’s tips and tricks concerning VS 2010.
In closing my opinion is Microsoft is doing a great job in the area of Application Development and Visual Studio 2010 along side the .NET framework just reinforces my opinion. What are you thoughts and concerns here? Do you agree with me or does your opinion differ? I would love to hear what you think on this subject, just leave a comment.
How To Obtain Environment Details With .NET 3.5
Have you ever found yourself needing to obtain environment details concerning the server where your application resides? If so, take a look at the System Namespace and specifically the Environment Class which provides information about, and means to manipulate, the current environment and platform. A little later in this article I provide a working example. This class is an extremely useful way to obtain details on the following properties:
- CommandLine – Gets the command line for this process.
- CurrentDirectory – Gets or sets the fully qualified path of the current working directory.
- ExitCode – Gets or sets the exit code of the process.
- HasShutdownStarted – Gets a value indicating whether the common language runtime is shutting down or the current application domain is unloading.
- MachineName – Gets the NetBIOS name of this local computer.
- NewLine – Gets the newline string defined for this environment.
- OSVersion – Gets an OperatingSystem object that contains the current platform identifier and version number.
- ProcessorCount – Gets the number of processors on the current machine.
- StackTrace – Gets current stack trace information.
- SystemDirectory – Gets the fully qualified path of the system directory.
- TickCount – Gets the number of milliseconds elapsed since the system started.
- UserDomainName – Gets the network domain name associated with the current user.
- UserInteractive – Gets a value indicating whether the current process is running in user interactive mode.
- UserName – Gets the user name of the person who is currently logged on to the Windows operating system.
- Version – Gets a Version object that describes the major, minor, build, and revision numbers of the common language runtime.
- WorkingSet – Gets the amount of physical memory mapped to the process context.
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Employing the Environment Class is straight forward. Here is an example:
using System;
using System.Management;
///
/// Summary description for EnvironmentDetails
///
public static class EnvironmentDetails
{
///
/// Name of the machine
///
public static string MachineName
{
get { return System.Environment.MachineName; }
}
///
/// Gets the user name that the application is running under
///
public static string UserName
{
get { return System.Environment.UserName; }
}
///
/// Name of the domain that the application is running under
///
public static string DomainName
{
get { return System.Environment.UserDomainName; }
}
///
/// Name of the operating system
///
public static string OSName
{
get { return System.Environment.OSVersion.Platform.ToString(); }
}
///
/// Version information about the operating system running
///
public static string OSVersion
{
get { return System.Environment.OSVersion.Version.ToString(); }
}
///
/// The service pack running on the operating system
///
public static string OSServicePack
{
get { return System.Environment.OSVersion.ServicePack; }
}
///
/// Full name, includes service pack, version, etc.
///
public static string OSFullName
{
get { return System.Environment.OSVersion.VersionString; }
}
///
/// Fully qualified path of the current working directory
///
public static bool Is64BitOperatingSystem
{
get { return System.Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem; }
}
///
/// Gets the current stack trace information
///
public static string StackTrace
{
get { return System.Environment.StackTrace; }
}
///
/// Returns the number of processors on the machine
///
public static int NumberOfProcessors
{
get { return System.Environment.ProcessorCount; }
}
}
Upon executing the web form you are presented the following detail:
As you can see the Environment Class is both powerful and at your disposal.
Charting Controls In ASP.NET
Recently I inherited a legacy Microsoft .NET 1.1 web application that employed charts via a third party vendor. Since I am working to best support this project I thought I would turn my attention to the Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 that I recalled first reading about from Scott Guthrie, aka @ScottGu. As I begun to download this control I realized that it was released on 9/8/2008 and I started to feel ashamed that I had not looked closer at this product before now. The truth is I just never had the time or it most likely was I just never made the time. In either event this will be my first experience with this Charting Control. Be sure to download the documentation which also includes the API and you also want to grab the samples from MSDN Code Gallery. Now that I have downloaded everything it is time to fire up the Visual Studio IDE and test drive these controls. Putting these charts to work out of the box was fairly straightforward.
Example Bar Chart
Example Pie Chart
While I took the examples and demonstrated the superiority that .NET exhibits you could always flip the switch and bind the data to external data source such as a database. Scott Mitchell wrote up a great tutorial titled Using Microsoft’s Chart Controls In An ASP.NET Application: Getting Started . It is a multipart series so be sure to check out the remainder of his tutorials.
double[] y2Values = { 45, 35, 15, 5 };
string[] x2Values = { ".NET", "Java", "PHP", "HTML" };
Chart2.Series["Default"].ChartType = SeriesChartType.Pie;
Chart2.Series["Default"].Points.DataBindXY(x2Values, y2Values);
If you application needs to kick out charts for the client then you may want to look closer at this option. The cost of this product is $0.00 whereas other commercial products can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Five Free Technical eBook Sites
If you are anything like me free is good and free technical books are better. Over the years I had collected a number of printed material and more often than not I always end up donating the books to organizations that can better use the material rather than sitting on my bookshelf and collecting dust. I thought I would share ten sites that I am familiar with. Are you aware of anything that you may be willing to share? If so, please leave a comment.
FreeTechBooks
This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.

Zillr.org
This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books.
FreeComputerBooks
Consists of a huge collection of Free online Computer, Programming, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technical Books, Lecture Notes and Tutorials. It is very well categorized by topics, with 12 top level categories, and over 150 sub-categories. It has both pattern and keywords search engines for you to find the titles quickly.
OnlineFreeEBooks
The most imitated free ebook site.
Free Programming Books
Here is a categorized list of online programming books available for free download. The books cover all major programming languages: Ada, Assembly, Basic, C, C#, C++, CGI, JavaScript, Perl, Delphi, Pascal, Haskell, Java, Lisp, PHP, Prolog, Python, Ruby, as well as some other languages, game programming, and software engineering.
Do you have a favorite resource? If so what is it?










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