Category Archives: Visual Studio

MSDN Ultimate Subscription Giveaway

.Net, Events, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Windows Phone
IMG_0833 As a Microsoft MVP for this year, I got 3 MSDN Ultimate Subscriptions to share with friends and co-workers. I already gave 2 of them to co-workers and I’d like to offer the last one to one of my reader !

The “official” pricing for the MSDN Ultimate Subscription is $11,899. The subscription is valid one year and is not restricted to US only. The MSDN Ultimate has the following items (among many others – you can see the detailed list here):

  • Windows Azure Platform
  • Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
  • Visual Studio TFS 2010
  • Expression Studio Ultimate
  • Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008
  • Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Project Professional 2010, Visio Premium 2010

In order to take your chance to get this subscription:

  • let a comment on this blog post
  • explain what you would like to do with the subscription
  • share you blog address, community website or whatever to show how you’re involved in the .Net community

Contest is now over. The winner of the MSDN Ultimate License is Mike Strobel. Thank you all for letting a comment, I which I had more subscriptions to giveaway…

Mix10 starting today !

.Net, Events, Silverlight, Visual Studio

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…

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