January

• XAML guidelines: interviews of WPF masters
• photoSuru: a WPF application with spectacular user experience
• Model-View-ViewModel, Commands and InputBindings
• Filtering with or without ICollectionView ?
• Why do I love Extension Methods in System.Linq ?
• Using extension methods to raise an event

February

• Very simple MVVM demo application
• VS2010 UI

March

• French article about MVVM posted !
• Thinking with MVVM: Data Templates + ContentControl
• MIX09 starts today !
• First look at Expression Blend 3 !
• The future of WPF at Mix09

April

• Adding transitions to a MVVM based dialog

May

• Browse your codebase like a pro with ReSharper
• Visual Studio 2010: Beta1 available with .Net4 and WPF4 included
• .Net4, WPF4 and VS2010 interesting links

July

• BezierSegment demo application

August

• Learn how .Net manages memory in 15min
• WPF possible memory leak with EventManager.RegisterClassHandler

September

• How to close a View from a ViewModel ?

October

• A quick tour of existing MVVM frameworks
• The cost of building Visual Trees
• Announcing the “WPF internals” series
• Analyzing events usage using a R# plugin
• WPF internals part 1 : what are the core WPF classes ?
• VS2010 Beta 2 coming today !
• How to measure rendering time in a WPF application ?

November

• Using Snoop to take a look at VS2010 !
• PDC09: some announcements
• PDC09: some WPF sessions are available !
• PDC09: Advanced WPF Application Performance Tuning
• PDC09 : How VS2010 was built with WPF ?
• Discover and compare existing MVVM frameworks !

• January 7-10th: CES (Consumers Electronic Show) in Las Vegas

• February 8^th – 10^th: Microsoft TechDays in Paris. I’ll be there  for the event and I’m hoping to be recruited by Microsoft for the ATE (Ask The Expert) stand where I’d like to share my WPF experience with other developers

• March: release of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 RC

• March 15-17th: MIX10 in Las Vegas. We can expect more announcements about Silverlight4 and hopefully some information about the future of Silverlight on mobile and demos of Windows Mobile 7 as well

• April: release of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 final

• Autumn : release of Windows Mobile 7

I think 2010 is going to be an exciting year with VS2010, .Net4, Silverlight4 and hopefully a mobile version of Silverlight too. Stay tuned

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

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 !

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.

To give more details about the new features, a “Visual Studio 10″ week was set up on Channel9, and every day new features were described. You can find a list of the available screencast here.

I didn’t have time to watch all the videos, but I take a look at the historical debugger video and I must admit I was really impress by this new tool. Basically, using the historical debugger feature we will be able to “record” a debug session, and then, as using a “time machine” we will be able to step back in time through the debugger and find out what goes wrong.

I think this is a very cool feature and we can hope to improve the time we need to fix a bug (no more need to set multiple breakpoints to get closer to the bug iteration after iteration). I’m looking forward to play with it !