All posts by Jeremy

Mix10 is coming : Windows Phone 7 series sessions announced !

Events, Silverlight, Windows Phone, ,

Next monday, Mix10 will start in Las Vegas. Even though it’s a little bit far from my place here in France I’ll try to give feedback after the keynotes and as soon as first videos will be available. I’m sure you’re aware that major announcements this years at Mix will be about the Windows Phone 7 series.

To make the long story short :

I’m sure you realize that we are going to a very capable and powerful mobile platform here:

  • all existing .Net and Silverlight developers are going to be able to write apps for the Windows Phone (this is HUGE)
  • we are going to finally have the 3 screens version of Microsoft: develop once and then run on your mobile, your PC and your TV (XBox)

Mix10 website now contains the name and the description of the sessions which are dedicated to the Windows Phone 7 series:

If you’re using Twitter, make sure to watch the #wp7 hashtag. It make not any doubt the next week is going to be very informative about Windows Phone 7 series.So stay tuned !

Using Reflector to debug a .Net app in Visual Studio without the original source code

Tools, Visual Studio, ,

Many .Net developers use to say “if you’re a serious developer, then you MUST Reflector”.

I would like to add another statement: “if you want to have an insight and powerful look at how things works internally, use Reflector Professional”.

Last Wednesday, RedGate released a new version of Reflector. You’re probably going to download it soon or later because your actual version is going to expire. When you’ll download the free version, you’ll automatically get a trial (14 days) of the professional edition. Nice, but what’s so special about this edition ?

Let’s see a demonstration of what can be done using Reflector Pro. The following is not an ad for RedGate, I’m just totally amazed by their new feature 🙂

1. Reflector is now integrated into Visual Studio (2005, 2008 and 2010 RC):

2. Select the “Choose Assemblie to Debug…” option to select .Net assemblies for which you don’t have the source code. In this example, I’m using one of the Blend3’s assemblies:

3. Once the process is completed, select the “Explore Decompiled Assemblies” option:

4. Browse to your target assembly and select an interesting type:

5. Put a breakpoint in the code, like you do every day when you debug an app:

6. Run the executable

7. Debug Blend3’s source code ! Use breakpoints, step into methods, inspect variables…

And that’s it. With Reflector Professional, you can:

  • Decompile third-party assemblies from within Visual Studio
  • Step through decompiled assemblies and use all the debugging techniques you would use on your own code. This is incredibly powerful as we saw by debugging Blend3″s source code !

Reflector Professional is available for about 195$ on RedGate website

Minor update to the Silverlight MVVM frameworks explorer

Silverlight, WPF, ,

Thanks to the readers who gave me feedback on my Silverlight MVVM frameworks explorer I updated the application this morning in order to fix some problems.

Here is the change set:

  • fix incorrect URLs
  • fix incorrect “Silverlight Support” options. As Laurent Bugnion said in the comments, his MVVM Light framework was the only one supporting Silverlight which was strange…
  • links now open in a new window

Click on the following image to launch the Silverlight application.

About adding new frameworks, I’m not sure to add those which targets a much larger domain than MVVM itself. CompositeApplication guidance for example is a lot more than MVVM…