May 20
Documentation for the next generation of the Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is now publicly available at MSDN.
May 05
Microsoft has just released the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1): Release Candidate (RC).
The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK.
The following is a small sampling of what’s new or updated in this SDK:
- Documentation – Approximately 80% of the SDK documentation set has been refreshed
- Headers/Libraries – numerous new and updated – please see What’s New in the Windows API under the top-level Getting Started section in the documentation
- Samples – Over 200 new and/or updated samples
- Tools – Several new tools added
- Visual Studio 2008 SP1 C++ command line compiler toolset and matching CRT
Apr 08
Two social networking news sites have emerged for .NET developers: DotNetKicks and the new .NET Shoutout. Both sites provide tons of .NET news and information, if you’re willing to spend the time to dig through it all. But for busy developers, there is a new .NET news site that cuts through all the clutter.
Dot-Net-News.com provides the latest news and information about the Microsoft .NET development environment including C#, Visual Basic and Visual Studio. No fluff, no spam, just the facts, man.
Here are some of the latest .NET news stories:
- .NET RIA Services
- Help Shape the Future of ASP.NET
- ViewModel Tool 3.0
- MVC Contrib v1.0
- Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK 0.5
- IronRuby 0.3
- Microsoft Ajax 4.0 Preview 4
- ASP.NET MVC v1.0 Source
- Silverlight 3 Tools Beta
Subscribe to the feed today to get your steady-stream of .NET news!
Mar 03
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) simplifies the creation of extensible applications. MEF offers discovery and composition capabilities that you can leverage to load application extensions.
MEF presents a simple solution for the runtime extensibility problem. Until now, any application that wanted to support a plugin model needed to create its own infrastructure from scratch. Those plugins would often be application-specific and could not be reused across multiple implementations.
Dec 19
It’s that time of the year to reflect, analyze and compile our lives into a series of Top 10 lists. As with every other Top 10 list, the items on this list and their order are highly subjective. For example, some companies may not care about future versions of .NET — version 2.0 works just fine, thank you. Other companies may need to develop a web application, so Silverlight 2.0 is their top story of the year. So please comment below with your Top 10 List.
Following are the Top 10 stories in 2008 about software development with the Microsoft .NET Framework:
Nov 11
This is part 6 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.
Many .NET fans will recognize F# as anything but obscure. F# (pronounced “F-Sharp”) is a succinct, expressive, efficient, type-inferred, functional and object-oriented programming language for the .NET platform. Although F# is a research language, it can also serve as a quality environment for large-scale symbolic programming commonly used to implement verification, analysis, optimization and transformation applications.
Nov 10
Nobody knows better than Microsoft that programming can be a drag. Even with all of the amazing advances in software development, computer programming is still a relatively solitary process that requires deep expertise, logical and creative thinking, and lots of patience.
So Microsoft comes to the rescue with Small Basic, a project that’s “aimed at bringing fun back to programming.” Small Basic provides a small and simple programming language in a friendly development environment. Small Basic is targeted to both kids and novice adults, allowing them to “take the first step into the wonderful world of programming.”
Oct 27
The .NET development team at Microsoft has created a new .NET logo (shown above). Their goal was to create a logo “that was in sync with the key values that we want .NET to stand for: consistency, robustness and great user experiences. The result is a design we refer to as the ‘wave.’ The design is strong, simple and distinctive. The suggestion of the letter ‘N’ in the design will become instantly recognizable over time as shorthand for the .NET brand name.”
Oct 07
Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for Linux, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems. Mono v2.0 was just released and represents a major milestone in the Mono project.
Sep 29
Microsoft announced the next version of its developer platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft said VS10 will focus on five key areas (in marketing-speak): riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).