Mix10 is starting today and we can expect many cool announcements during the keynote. You can watch the keynote online at live.visitmix.com. I’ll try to give feedback as soon as possible. Because I’m not lucky enough to be in Vegas, I’ll watch the keynote tonight (French time !) at home with some coworkers.

Last information before the keynote, it looks like we’ll have some announcements about Silverlight running on Symbian devices…

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

In my last blog post, I did a review of a PDC09 Session “Advanced performance tuning with WPF”. Today, I’m doing a review for another very interesting session “How VS2010 was built with WPF ?”. The video is available here.

Why did Microsoft choose WPF for VS2010 ?

• Technological: prove the capabilities of WPF4
• Architectural
  • Separated presentation
  • Support for long range road map (+10 years)
• Key VS2010 features need it: Editor, Architecture Editor, Parallel tools debugging
• Take an opportunity to give feedback for WPF4: when VS2010 development started, .Net 3.5 SP1 was just shipped and it was the right time to give feedback for the new features and fixes for WPF4.

It is worth noting that VS2010 is a project that is being watched carefully inside Microsoft. We can expect that more Microsoft applications will move to WPF in the next coming years.

What WPF features are used ?

• Declarative UI using XAML
• Databinding
• Styles and templates
• Application Resources
• Interop Win32 (because they did not have the time to rewrite everything using WPF or because features doest not need to use WPF for example de WinForms designer…)
• Integration with the message loop (to deal with particular focus issues)
• New text stack (part of WPF4) based on DirectWrite

Staged approach

• Define data models: a huge diagramming and architectural exercice
• Replace the main window with WPF (only the window not its content !) to start the mix approach (managed/unmanaged, WPF/Hwnds)
• Write new managed components: Window manager, command bar presentation
• Scout with other VS teams
• Test, Test, Test…

What were the challenges ?

• Mixed mode application: native and managed code; WPF and HWNDs (Win32 or WinForms)
• Keep existing extensions working and allow new extensions to take advantage of WPF
• Don’t “stop the train” other teams were working at the same time on the product to add new functionalities
• Text clarity
• Performance
• Focus management

You can watch the session here if you want more detail and demos of what I mention in this post.

I wasn’t sure about the cause of this problem, but I grab the source of Snoop and took a look at the code that list the available window:

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public void Refresh() {
	this.windows.Clear();
 
	foreach (IntPtr windowHandle in NativeMethods.ToplevelWindows) {
		WindowInfo window = new WindowInfo(windowHandle, this);
		if (window.IsValidProcess && !this.HasProcess(window.OwningProcess))
			this.windows.Add(window);
	}
 
	if (this.windows.Count > 0)
		this.windowsView.MoveCurrentTo(this.windows[0]);
}

I setup a breakpoint to find out what was wrong and discover that the window.IsValidProcess failed with the VS2010 process. Because I just wanted to check if it was the only reason why Snoop wasn’t able to inspect it, I hack the code to remove this test:

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public void Refresh() {
	this.windows.Clear();
 
	foreach (IntPtr windowHandle in NativeMethods.ToplevelWindows) {
		WindowInfo window = new WindowInfo(windowHandle, this);
		if (/*window.IsValidProcess &&*/ !this.HasProcess(window.OwningProcess))
			this.windows.Add(window);
	}
 
	if (this.windows.Count > 0)
		this.windowsView.MoveCurrentTo(this.windows[0]);
}

And it’s working:

Happy exploration with Snoop

Also, Visual Studio 2010 RTM will officially launch on March 22, 2010

I’ll try to give some feedback as soon as I’ll be able to grab my copy and install it on ma workstation !

Because I didn’t have time yet to write my own feedback, I’m sharing some links I found the last couple of days.

Download

• A full list of what is available to download (VS2010, .Net framework…) can be found here.

MSDN Documentations

• .Net Framework4 Beta1: here
• What’s new in .Net Framework4 Beta1: here
• WPF4 Beta1: here
• What’s new in WPF4 Beta1: here
• VS2010 Beta1: here
• What’s new in VS2010 Beta1: here

From Beta1 to Beta1 and RTM

• Jaime Rodriguez wrote a very nice article today and share his “insider view” of what’s on the road to RTM.
• Karl Shifflet explained on his blog what’s going to change in the DataBinding pipeline (no more dummy converter !)

Channel9

• Interviews of WPF and Silverlight program managers.
• Rob Releya is also talking on the new XAML stack available in the framework. More information can be found on his blog.

Other bloggers

• Patrick Smacchia gave us an inside look of the changes from .Net 3.5SP1 to .Net 4 Beta1 using NDepend.

And also, Blend3

• Unni’s wrote an article about updates that had been made to Blend regarding user feedback on Connect.

Since monday it is available to all MSDN subscribers, and will be avaible to the rest of the world on wednesday. Documentation has also been updated to show the new features of this release.

The download is on its way and I’ll try to post feedback as soon as I can, stay tuned !

Here are the results… If I want:

• to find a Type I hit Ctrl+T
• to find a File I hit Ctrl+Shift+T
• to find a Member (in a file) I hit Ctrl+Alt+T (Note: I setup this one on my own using Tools/Options/Keyboard)

A search box opens and I can start searching instantaneously.

Here are the basic scenarios :

• I want to open the ViewModelBase class, I hit Ctrl+T and then VMB (R# is able to search using capital letters)
• I want to go to the OnPropertyChanged, I hit Ctrl+Alt+T and then OPC (same as previous example)
• Finally, to open the file in the Solution Explorer I hit Shift+Alt+L

It’s simply amazing the time we can save using those simple shorcuts. Of course, you need to be quite familiar with your codebase (if you just arrive on a project it will be harder :p)

Anyway, new informations are available about VS2010 UI (which will use WPF !), more details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/02/20/a-new-look-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx

I can’t wait to play with a new beta

Installation

The installation process of Visual Studio 2010, is long, very long… Let me tell you why. First the download size, you’ll have to grab more than 7Go to play with the new visual. So, you should have a good internet connection, or at least be very patient.

You might ask what the hell make this new version weight more than 7Go, the reason is pretty simple: you’re not downloading Visual Studio 2010 itself, you’re download a virtual hard drive of a Virtual Machine that embeds Microsoft Server 2008 + Visual Studio 2010. Once you’ll have unzip the 11 archives file, you’ll have a virtual hard drive of about 23Go.

Is it recommended to have at least 2Go of RAM in order to run the virtual machine (1Go for the host system, 1Go for the virtual machine). At home, I tried with a Core2 Duo at 2.2Ghz with 2Go of RAM, and it was just enough…

After being all that patient, you’ll finally manage to open Visual Studio:

As you can see a new Welcome Page has been created and can be customized very easily (you can create a XAML file that will be loaded by Visual Studio during startup). What is also interesting is that this CTP is shipped with .NET Framework 4.0 (which means parallel extensions, and lot of very cool stuff !):

Editor improvements

The user interface of Visual Studio 2010 is built using WPF. Many enhancements are available such as line highlighting or zooming the source code using CTRL + mouse wheel:

Performance should be improved when working with large file which is also a good news. The API for manipulating the editor and extending its functionalities is entirely new and written in managed code. We can therefore except to have some very nice add-ins in the future.

Multi-monitor support

It’s finally here ! Visual Studio 2010 will enable the possibility to drag tool windows and document windows outside the main window of the IDE. That means that it will be possible to keep a clear main window is only the code editor, and tool window and designer on another screen.

WPF databinding

Databinding support was clearly a point where Visual Studio was less efficient than Expression Blend. Using Blend, it is possible to create databinding very easily using drag’n'drop between datasource (such as an XML file) and a ListView or other control.

This is now possible in Visual Studio 2010 and I think this is one more step to prove that WPF is ready for LOB (Line of Business) applications. It becomes very easy and straightforward to build a UI that consumes data from a database.

Here is a sample application that I built by following the walkthrough that comes with the CTP:

Add a data source to the project

Show the tables using the editor

Create a combo box and the form, and bind it to the data source using drag and drop

Generate a form by dragging a table on the form

Generate a listview

Run the application

It tooks me about 5 minutes to build this sample, I let you imagine the time that would be needed to create it from scratch

Agile development

The Visual Studio 2010 CTP uses a sample scenario that describes episodes in the software development lifecycles of two fictitious companies: Lucerne Publishing and DinnerNow. The DinnerNow team follows the Agile methodology and uses Scrum and eXtreme Programming (XP) to plan, organize and manage their workload. The scenario described in the CTP is composed of 21 guided walkthroughs.

• Formal 1: Design, planning and implementation
• Sprint 1 : Agile check point review
• Sprint 2 : Agile planning
• Sprint 3 : Agile construction
• Sprint 3 : Agile testing

Each walkthrough details how to use the new features of Visual Studio 2010 such as use case diagrams, activity diagrams or sequence diagrams. I hope I’ll have time to write about that in another posts.

Historical debugger

I already blogged about this new feature of Visual Studio 2010 and this time, I had the opportunity to play with it. I think this is a really huge improvements that will help us to debug our apps.

The historical debugger is available through a tool window with a link “Click here to break into the debugger”:

The historical debugger in action:

Setting up the historical debugger:

Other

There are many aspects of Visual Studio 2010 that I didn’t mention here. I think this new environment will give us a lot of new features that are really usefull. I would like to use in particular the agile tools in a real project to see how it can helps the management of the team and the project.