Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released on 19th November 2007 to MSDN subscribers and will be on general release early in 2008. I downloaded and attempted to install Visual Studio 2008 and this post describes the problem and the solution.

The problem is that Visual Studio 2008 stops at the very first pre-requisite (the .NET Framework 3.5):-

After a while it demands to know where to find dotnetfx35setup.exe (the .NET Framework 3.5 distributable):-

Like most software problems it really helps to know what it is asking. In this case it isn’t actually asking for dotnetfx35setup.exe because if you download it separately and tell it where to find it then it simply asks you the question again. The only way you can see what the problem is is to run the .NET Framework 3.5 installation by itself. This reveals that it has to connect with another server to continue downloading the rest of the .NET Framework. Of course on a laptop without a network connection it can’t do this and the installation fails. Unfortunately the Visual Studio 2008 installation process tries to install the .NET Framework 3.5 silently so this rather important nugget is never revealed and the false error is given instead. The only solution to this problem is to get an internet connection. I’m not sure if Microsoft intend to make the dotnetfx35setup.exe redistributable self contained (such as a dotnetfx35.exe) but I certainly hope so - the idea of software that only works when you have an internet connection is a very frustrating one for someone who travels with a laptop.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5

As many of you know I have been giving a presentation on Astoria a fair number of times over the last 8 weeks and it has been very interesting talking to everyone about the pros and cons of this client-side data access story for AJAX, Silverlight, XBAP and PopFly (etc.) applications. The good news is that at TechEd Developers Europe earlier this month Pablo Castro took time out to chat to me about some of the more architectural issues surrounding Astoria. You can download the 28 minute podcast here. Though the podcast should be useful for anyone it isn’t aimed at providing an introduction to Astoria. The assumption is that you have already gained some knowledge of this subject. For further background see the Astoria site and/or my slide deck.

The December CTP should be coming out, well, in December and this moves us away from the proof of concept and much closer to an actual product. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Astoria, Pablo Castro, TechEd Developers Europe, AJAX

On Tuesday 4th December 2008 Pete McGann, Dave Bonner and Andy Sithers are coming down to The .NET Developer Network to show just what can be done with XNA (details are here). In case you weren’t aware of how powerful XNA is and you were thinking it’s just for writing Tic-Tac-Toe games take a look at the games that Pete McGann will be showing:-


Here’s a couple of screen shots from Dave Bonner’s game developed just in time for the meeting:-


Technorati Tags: XNA, Pete McGann, Dave Bonner, Andy Sithers, DotNetDevNet, The .NET Developer Network

Yesterday (19th November 2007) Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 to MSDN subscribers. If you have a subscription you can download the 3.3GB for the Professional edition right now.

And also note that when Microsoft said "before the end of November" it wasn’t 30th November. Everyone with a cynical hat must take it off now and look sheepish for an hour.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, RTM

A few months ago I blogged about using Extension Methods To Extend The CultureInfo Class. To recap, this is an important technique because it allows you to extend an existing class when (1) you don’t have the original source code and (2) you do not control the code that creates objects of the class you want to extend (and therefore traditional inheritance is useless). What’s new here (to this blog) is that you can do this in the .NET Framework 2.0. This technique has been covered before (in Daniel Moth’s blog here in May 2007 and later in Adrian Bowles’ MSDN Magazine article "Basic Instincts - Extension Methods" in November 2007). I’m not going to duplicate that information here and I suggest that you refer to either of these links for the details. To summarise though the basic trick to making this work is that you add back the ExtendedAttribute class to the .NET Framework 2.0 and you’re done. (As the ExtendedAttribute class simply inherits from Attribute and has no other code there’s not much to it).

What I don’t think is so necessarily obvious though is what is meant by adding extension methods to the .NET Framework 2.0. For clarification, whereas the compiled code uses the .NET Framework 2.0 runtime the original source cannot be compiled using the .NET Framework 2.0 compiler; you have to use the .NET Framework 3.5 compiler. The .NET Framework 3.5 compiler is multi-targetting so it can compile code for the .NET Framework 2.0 but only this compiler understands how to interpret the extension method (in C# this means the "this" qualifier in the parameter declaration). So consequently you cannot use Visual Studio 2005 to compile your .NET Framework 2.0 application if you use extension methods; you will have to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 or else build your app outside of Visual Studio 2005 using the .NET Framework 3.5 compiler.

What also might not be entirely obvious here is the consequence for ASP.NET applications. As ASP.NET website applications are compiled on the fly they use the compiler that is available on the website’s server. For ASP.NET 2.0 applications this will be the .NET Framework 2.0 compiler and the code will not compile.

Technorati Tags: Extension Methods, CultureInfo, Daniel Moth, Adrian Bowles

Astoria Data Servers have an obvious comparison with custom written Web Services that include methods that return packets of XML data. In making the comparison people want to be sure that all of the boxes that are checked for web services are also checked for Astoria Data Services. One of these boxes is discoverability. Web Services expose WSDL so that clients can discover their methods, parameters and return results. Astoria Data Services expose some of this information in a ’root’ node of the service. For example:-

http://localhost:1234/Northwind.svc

This returns an XML packet listing all of the entities (tables, views, stored procedures etc.) exposed by the service. What it doesn’t expose, however, is custom methods. As custom methods might arguably be used more frequently this is rather important. The trick to discovering these methods is to know the undocumented (at the time of writing) switch, $sys_GetEdmSchema. For example:-

http://localhost:1234/Northwind.svc/$sys_GetEdmSchema

(Note that "$sys_GetEdmSchema" will change to "$metadata" or "$sys_metadata" in the release after the September 2007 CTP.)

The result is an EntityContainer element including a FunctionImport element:-

FunctionImport Name="CustomersByCountry"

This also includes a list of Parameter elements. Problem solved.

Technorati Tags: Astoria

Soma Somesgar opened TechEd Europe 2007 this afternoon with a 90 minute keynote. Mostly the keynote was a presentation of current or near current Microsoft technologies (visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, AJAX, WPF, Silverlight, PopFly) but here are a few of the points that I thought worth mentioning:-

• Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for download by MSDN subscribers before the end of November 2007. The official launch in the UK is next year but this is just a publicity exercise and has nothing to do with release dates.
• Over 90% of Visual Studio 2008 was built using msbuild. msbuild has been upgraded for Visual Studio 2008.
• The CTP of Microsoft Sync Framework (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=35E8F16E-AAA4-4919-8B3C-1CE4EA1F6552&displaylang=en) was released today. Sync Framework provides offline synchronization for web services and databases and serves a similar purpose to the ADO briefcase model of yesteryear.
• Visual Studio 2008 Shell (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/vstudio/bb510103.aspx) is available for free download and the release version will be available at the same time as Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2008 Shell allows you to build IDE shells.
• The first draft of Microsoft’s Software + Services blueprint became available today. This includes an Outlook add-in that exposes your Outlook data to consumers.
• Microsoft will allow Visual Studio to be localized by the community for cultures that are not currently serviced by the 9 official languages supported by Visual Studio. This appears to be one of the results of Microsoft’s research project into machine translation.
• "Jazzed" is the new "super-excited". It is true that Soma did say he was "super-excited" during the keynote but it is only fair to say that this was in a video that was intended to be humorous and it was clearly Microsoft having a laugh at themselves. However, when he said he was "really jazzed about this" it was quite straight. Want to be part of the "in" crowd ? Start being "jazzed" about stuff. (I strongly suspect that I won’t ever be jazzed about anything though).

Technorati Tags: TechEd, Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Microsoft Sync Framework, Visual Studio Shell, Software plus Services, Localization

I gave a presentation on ClickOnce and XBAPs at the VBUG Conference recently and I had a "Its never done that before" moment as ClickOnce failed to deploy. I was floored. It was my first demo in a presentation all about ClickOnce so it was difficult to ignore it and keep going. In the end I switched to a virtual machine and continued the presentation from there. However, that just avoided the problem instead of fixing it. The symptom, for the curious, is that after publishing the ClickOnce application and clicking on the Install button in publish.htm ClickOnce insists that the .NET Framework 2.0 is not installed (despite the deployment being performed on the same machine that Visual Studio 2005 published the app from and therefore had to have the .NET Framework 2.0 installed). publish.htm then offers to install the framework with "Would you like to download and install the Microsoft .NET Framework ?".

The answer comes courtesy of John Sinclair via Julie Lerman via Brian Noyes (the author of the excellent Smart Client Deployment Using ClickOnce) in Julie’s blog post ClickOnce on Vista installation problem SOLVED!. In essense the .application file association was pointing to the wrong application. Thanks, Brian, Julie and John.

Technorati Tags: ClickOnce, VBUG, Brian Noyes, Julie Lerman, John Sinclair

Earlier today (Wednesday 5th September 2007) Scott Guthrie announced that SilverLight 1.0 had been released. I don’t want to repeat all of his announcements again here so I recommend reading his post but some highlights are:-

• SilverLight 1.0 works with both Windows and the Mac
• Microsoft and Novell are jointly working on SilverLight For Linux (including a .NET programming model to run on Linux)
• work has already started on SilverLight 1.1

You can get the complete SilverLight story at http://silverlight.net.

Guess that gives everyone something to talk about at MIX:UK 07 next week.

Technorati Tags: SilverLight, Scott Guthrie, Mac, Linux, MIX, MIX UK

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am unhappy with Word 2007’s new and improved user interface. In short I lost all of my commands. I blogged about solutions to this problem before. As a different approach to this problem you could of course try to use the new and improved user interface instead of working out ways of avoiding it. With this in mind here’s an idiot’s guide video on how the ribbon works. It is certainly aimed at the hard of thinking but I found it useful. One quick tip: if you find marketing hype and false enthusiasm difficult to stomach bring a bucket.

Technorati Tags: Word, Word 2007, Office, Office 2007