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• Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released

  Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today.  You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine.  It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines.  These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out.  But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads.  You can download both of them here .  The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release.  UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup.  Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size).  Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download.  This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications.  This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately... Posted Jun 06 2008, 07:50 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, Silverlight, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News

• ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release

  This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release.  Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here .  You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here . Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release , along with some additional tweaks and adjustments.  You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method.  For example: which would render the below HTML when run: Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it.  This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything).  It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow. For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them.  The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object): One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required).  Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above:   We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action: When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red): Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning... Posted May 27 2008, 01:26 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, .NET, Community News, MVC

• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta

  Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.  These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November.  They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them). We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and install the beta here . Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form - so you should be careful about installing it on critical machines.  There are a few important SP1 Beta installation notes to be aware of: 1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta.  There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release.  These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta. 2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure).  You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things).  It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package.  We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta. 3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend.  This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running.  Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue. Improvements for Web Development .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain a bunch of feature improvements targeted at web application development.  The VS Web Dev Tools team has more details (including specific bug fix details) on some of the VS specific work here . ... Posted May 12 2008, 09:51 AM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, WPF, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News

• Unit Testing with Silverlight

  One of the important capabilities we shipped with the Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 was a unit test harness that enables you to perform both API-level and UI-level unit testing.  This testing harness is cross browser and cross platform, and can be used to quickly run and verify automated unit tests: In addition to shipping this unit test harness for Silverlight, we also shipped the source to ~2,000 unit tests built with it that provide automated coverage for the Silverlight control source that we also shipped under a permissive license (you can take the control source, modify it, run the unit tests to verify the behavior, then re-ship the controls however you want). Learning How to Unit Test Silverlight Jeff Wilcox (who developed the Silverlight unit test framework and harness) has a great blog post that talks about how to add a Silverlight Unit Test project to a solution here . You can download the chat application that he shows testing from this expression blend blog post tutorial I did last month.  You can also watch this cool video post that Jeff created where he walks through the unit test framework and test cases we've shipped. As Jeff shows in his post, you can now add a "Silverlight Test Project" to your Visual Studio solution which encapsulates unit tests for an application you are working on: You can then add unit test classes to the test project that test APIs or simulate UI action within the Silverlight controls (simulate button clicks, etc). You can then run the test project and execute the tests within it to verify and report their status. Jeff's test framework automatically provides a browser based test harness and reporting system (which means you can run it on any browser/OS combination that Silverlight runs on): Jeff's test framework supports quickly re-setting controls after each test (and avoids needing to re-launch a new browser instance for each test cases - which makes it really fast). You can quickly rip through hundreds or thousands of automated tests in seconds: Green results mean the tests passed.  Red results flag that a test case failed and log the assertion failure and/or runtime exceptions that occurred. Summary If you've ever struggled to try and come up with a strategy for doing automated unit testing or TDD with AJAX applications, I think you'll find Silverlight provides some much nicer test options.  Using Visual Studio you can also separate your tests into a separate project... Posted Apr 02 2008, 02:01 AM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: Silverlight, .NET, Community News

• New Log Reporting, Database Management, and other cool admin modules for IIS 7

  One of the core priorities we focused on when building IIS 7 was to enable a rich .NET extensibility model that provides developers with the hooks to easily plug-in and extend the web server.  These extensibility hooks are provided in the web-server pipeline (enabling scenarios like the new IIS7 Bit Rate Throttler ), within the configuration system (enabling developers to create new web.config schema settings), within the health monitoring system (enabling developers to add custom trace events), and within the admin tool (enabling developers to plug-in new admin UI modules). We added these extensibility hooks so that anyone can easily extend and enhance the web server using .NET.  We also selfishly wanted them so that we can ship regular feature packs that add additional features to the core web server. IIS 7 Admin Pack Preview 1 Released Last week the IIS team shipped the first technical preview of some really cool administration modules that I think web developers will find super useful.  This preview adds several new features to the IIS7 Admin Tool: Database Manager : Built-in SQL Server database management, including the ability to create, delete, and edit tables and indexes, create/edit SPROCs and execute custom queries.  Because it is integrated in the IIS administration tool it all works over HTTP/SSL - which means you can use the module to remotely manage your hosted applications (even with low-cost shared hosting accounts), without having to expose your database directly on the Internet. Log Reports : Built-in report visualization with charting support for log files data.  Full range selection and custom chart creation is supported, as well as the ability to print or save reports.  Like the database manager you can use this module remotely over HTTP/SSL - which means it works in remote shared hosting scenarios. Configuration Editor: This is a power module that provides complete control over editing all web.config settings within the admin tool.  You can configure it to track the changes you make using the UI and have it auto-generate configuration change scripts that you can then save and tweak to re-run later in an automated way. Request Filtering UI: This admin module provides more control over the new request filtering feature in IIS7.  Check out Carlos' blog post here for details on how to use it. .NET Authorization: This admin module provides a custom authorization rules editor which allows you to more... Posted Mar 26 2008, 01:47 AM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, .NET, Community News, IIS7

• ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available

  Last month I blogged about our ASP.NET MVC Roadmap . Two weeks ago we shipped the ASP.NET Preview 2 Release . Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team published a good blog post about the release here . Scott Hanselman has created a bunch of great ASP.NET MVC tutorial videos that you can watch to learn more about it here . One of the things I mentioned in my MVC roadmap post was that we would be publishing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and enable it to be easily built, debugged, and patched (so that you can work around any bugs you encounter without having to wait for the next preview refresh release). Today we opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex project that we'll be using to share buildable source for multiple upcoming ASP.NET releases. You can now directly download buildable source and project files for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release here . Building the ASP.NET MVC Framework You can download a .zip file containing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework for the release page here . When you extract the .zip file you can drill into its "MVC" sub-folder to find a VS 2008 solution file for the project: Double-clicking it will open the MVC project containing the MVC source within VS 2008: When you do a build it will compile the project and output a System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly under a \bin directory at the top of the .zip directory. You can then copy this assembly into a project or application and use it. Note: the license doesn't enable you to redistribute your custom binary version of ASP.NET MVC (we want to avoid having multiple incompatible ASP.NET MVC versions floating around and colliding with each other). But it does enable you to make fixes to the code, rebuild it, and avoid getting blocked by an interim bug you can't work around. Next Steps Our plans are to release regular drops of the source code going forward. We'll release source updates every time we do official preview drops. We will also release interim source refreshes in between the preview drops if you want to be able to track and build the source more frequently. We are also hoping to ship our unit test suite for ASP.NET MVC in the future as well (right now we use an internal mocking framework within our tests, and we are still doing some work to refactor this dependency before shipping them as well). Hope this helps, Scott Posted Mar 21 2008, 07:33 AM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, .NET, Community News, MVC

• IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module Released

  Video on the web is now one of those common scenarios that every user takes for granted, and increasingly every major site is incorporating in some form (product videos, training videos, richer advertising scenarios, user generated content, customer testimonials, etc). One of the challenges when adding video to a site, though, is delivering it in a way that doesn't cost a fortune.  Network bandwidth costs a lot of money, and the cost of high quality video usage can quickly add up. The blog post below provides a quick overview of some of the options you can use to reduce the cost of delivering video, and discusses a new free download - the IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module - that was released a few days ago and which enables you to easily save money when serving video from an IIS web server using any video technology (including Silverlight, Windows Media Player and even Flash). Option 1: Using a Video Hosting Service One approach you can take to reduce video bandwidth costs is to use a video hosting service like YouTube or the free Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service .  This allows you to use someone else's network to deliver the video content, and avoid having to pay the bandwidth costs yourself. If you aren't familiar with the Silverlight Streaming service, it allows you to upload up to 10GB of videos and download 5 Terabytes/year of video content (at up to a 1.4 Mbps bit-rate) for free.  You can build any custom Silverlight client player application you want to embed the video within it.  This means it doesn't require a specific video player look and feel, nor a service logo/watermark to play the video.  This allows you to fully integrate the video into your site and use whatever UI you want to host it. Option 2: Hosting Video on Your Own Servers Sometimes using a video hosting service doesn't make sense (for example: you want to use custom authentication to grant/deny user's access, you want to play really long video segments, or you want to serve up custom ads in your videos).  Instead you might want to serve the video up from your own servers and have complete control over it.  There are typically two options you can use to deliver the video from your servers: using a streaming approach or a progressive video download approach: Streaming Server Scenario In a streaming scenario a client (like Silverlight, Windows Media Player, Flash or Real Networks) connects to a streaming server.  The... Posted Mar 18 2008, 12:43 AM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: Silverlight, .NET, Community News, IIS7

• My Presentations in Arizona this Tuesday

  This week I'm visiting Scottsdale Arizona and will be presenting at a free user group event during the day.  I'm presenting two sessions myself: 1) Developing Applications using Silverlight 2 : This will be a drill-down into the new Silverlight 2 Beta1 release, and how you can build applications with it using VS 2008 and Expression Blend.  You'll leave this session with a good understanding of the basics of Silverlight programming and how to start building applications with it. 2) Developing Applications using ASP.NET MVC : This session will be a drill-down into the new ASP.NET Model-View-Controller framework option (which last week was updated .  You'll leave this session with a good understanding of what it is, how it works, and how to start building ASP.NET web applications with it. In addition to my sessions above, there will also be great sessions at the event from Microsoft employees on "Consuming Web Services with Microsoft Silverlight", "Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight", and "Serving Applications with Microsoft Silverlight Streaming".  You can sign up and attend the sessions for free.  Click here for more details on the events, and click here to register online to attend.  Hope to see some of you there, Scott Posted Mar 09 2008, 02:04 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, Silverlight, Community News, Talks

• First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2

  Last week I did a First Look at Silverlight 2 post that talked about the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta1 release.  In the post I linked to some end-to-end tutorials I've written that walk through some of the fundamental programming concepts behind Silverlight and WPF, and demonstrate how to use them to build a "Digg Search Client" application using Silverlight: Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008 Part 2: Using Layout Management Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details Scenarios Part 7: Using Templates to Customize Control Look and Feel Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Version of our Application using WPF In this first set of Silverlight tutorials I didn't use a visual design tool to build the UI, and instead focused on showing the underlying XAML UI markup (which I think helps to explain the core programming concepts better).  Now that we've finished covering the basics - let's explore some of the tools we can use to be even more productive. Expression Blend Support for Silverlight In addition to releasing the upcoming Beta1 of Silverlight 2, we are also going to ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support for targeting it.  These tools will offer a ton of power for building RIA solutions, and are designed to enable developers and designers to easily work on projects together. In today's post I'm going to introduce some of the features in the upcoming Expression Blend 2.5 March preview.  After demonstrating some of the basics of how Blend works, we are going to use it to build a cross-platform, cross-browser Silverlight IM chat client: The above screen-shot shows what the application looks like at runtime on a Mac.  Below is a screen-shot of what it looks like at design-time within Expression Blend: We'll use Expression Blend to graphically construct all of the UI for the application, as well as use it to cleanly data-bind the UI to .NET classes that represent our chat session and chat messages. All of the controls we'll use to build the chat application are built into Beta1 of Silverlight 2. Disclaimer: I am not a designer (nor am I cool) Let me say up front that I am a developer and not a designer.  I'm also not very cool. ... Posted Feb 28 2008, 09:36 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: WPF, Silverlight, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News

• First Look at Silverlight 2

  Last September we shipped Silverlight 1.0 for Mac and Windows , and announced our plans to deliver Silverlight on Linux.  Silverlight 1.0 is focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser, and supports a JavaScript/AJAX programming model. We are shortly going to release the first public beta of Silverlight 2, which will be a major update of Silverlight that focuses on enabling Rich Internet Application (RIA) development.  This is the first of several blog posts I'll be doing over the weeks and months ahead that talk in more depth about it. Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser.  Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).  We will ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer / designer workflow and integration when building Silverlight solutions. This upcoming Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 provides a rich set of features that enable great RIA application development.  These include: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich WPF-based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier.  In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning.  The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications.  This upcoming Beta1 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc).  The built-in controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes... Posted Feb 22 2008, 06:41 AM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: Silverlight, .NET, Community News

• .NET 3.5 Client Product Roadmap

  A few months ago I did a .NET Web Product Roadmap blog post where I outlined some of the product plans we have to build on top of the web development features we’ve shipped with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Over the next few months we will also be releasing a number of enhancements specific to client development as well.  We have put a lot of effort into addressing some of the biggest areas of customer feedback, while also trying to really push the envelope on the capabilities developers have when building Windows applications. All of these improvements build on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, and will make .NET client development even better going forward. Below is a roadmap of some of the upcoming releases we have planned for the months ahead: Improved .NET Framework Setup for Client Applications One of the biggest asks we’ve had over the years from customers and ISVs building client applications is to make the setup and installation of the .NET Framework easier and faster. This summer we are going to ship a new setup framework for .NET that makes it easier to build optimized setup packages for client applications. This setup framework can be integrated with existing installation frameworks (for example: products like InstallShield), and enables a smaller and faster end-user setup experience of the .NET Framework. Windows Forms and WPF client applications will be able to use this setup framework to cleanly “bootstrap” getting the .NET Framework installed onto machines. The setup “bootstrap” utility will support automatically downloading the minimal set of .NET Framework packages needed to enable .NET 3.5 client applications on a machine. For example, if a user already has .NET 2.0 installed on their machine, setup will be smart enough to automatically download only the upgrade patches necessary to update .NET 2.0 to 3.5 (and not have to re-download the components already provided by .NET 2.0). This will significantly shrink the payload size of client setup programs, and speed up the installation experience. We’ll also be delivering improvements that enable a more integrated application install experience for both MSI and ClickOnce based solutions, and support a more consumer friendly user experience that is easy to build. Improved Working Set and Startup Improvements for .NET Client Applications One of the other common asks we receive is to enable .NET client applications to launch faster in “cold startup”... Posted Feb 19 2008, 11:57 AM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: WPF, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News

• VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available

  One of the things we are trying to do with VS 2008 is to more frequently release public patches that roll-up bug-fixes of commonly reported problems.  Today we are shipping a hot-fix roll-up that addresses several issues that we've seen reported with VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 web scenarios. Hot Fix Details You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download).  Below is a list of the issues it fixes: HTML Source view performance Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties. “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects. Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents. Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup. The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections. Design view performance Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations. HTML editing Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled. Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page. JavaScript editing When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds. JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing. JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used. Web Site build performance Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects. Installation Notes For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here .  In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error). To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item.  Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’.  If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ... Posted Feb 08 2008, 05:24 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News

• MIX08

  MIX is a Microsoft web development conference we hold in Las Vegas each year.  MIX tends to be a pretty fun event, both because it covers cutting edge content (we used MIX07 to announce our Silverlight plans), and also because it tends to attract a really diverse set of attendees (including both those who use Microsoft technology today, and a large % of attendees who don't).  The conference structure includes a healthy blend of sessions and interactive panels, and the layout and organization is designed to facilitate great conversations. This year's MIX is being held March 5th-7th in Las Vegas.  Ray Ozzie and I are both giving keynotes the first day of the event, and Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki will be doing a keynote the second day of the event. The conference (and especially my keynote) is going to cover a lot of new web technology.  Attendees will be able to attend sessions covering: IE 8 IIS 7.0 ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data)  VS 2008 and Expression Studio WPF Silverlight 2 And much more.... Channel 9 recently did an interview with me where I talked about some of these new technologies.  In Part 1 of the interview I talked about IIS7, and in Part 2 of the interview I talked about ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight 2. Register Soon Or You'll Miss Your Chance MIX is held at a smaller venue then some of our larger events like TechEd and PDC.  This gives the conference a more intimate feel (which is fun).  It also means that it sells out each year, and once it is sold out it is really sold out.  Last year I received about 50 emails from people begging for tickets after it was full, and many people even flew to the event hoping to somehow be let in at the door (only to be unfortunately told they couldn't get in).  Unfortunately because of size constraints (and fire marshal restrictions) once it is sold out there really are no more tickets to be had.  Even my own team members get turned away if they haven't registered in time. This year's registration is filling up faster than any of the previous MIX conferences.  If you want to attend I highly recommend registering really soon to ensure you can go.  You can learn more about the event and register online here . Hope to see some of you there - it is going to be fun.... Scott Posted Jan 31 2008, 09:38 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News, MVC, IIS7

• VS 2008 Web Deployment Project Support Released

  This past Friday we released the final RTW (release to web) support for VS 2008 Web Deployment projects.  You can learn more about it and download it for free here .  Web Deployment projects can be used with either the "ASP.NET Web Site" or "ASP.NET Web Application Project" options built-into VS 2008, and provide a few additional build, packaging and deployment options for you to use.  You can read an old tutorial post of mine here to learn more about they work. The VS 2008 Web Deployment Project version supports all of the existing features provided by the VS 2005 web deployment download.  It also adds additional support for: Easily migrating VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects to VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects Replacing output only if web deployment builds succeed IIS7 Support This RTW (release to web) version fixes bugs and adds some small features that people requested in the December CTP version we released last month.  Please make sure to run setup and uninstall any older version of the VS 2008 Web Deployment Project support you have installed before installing this final version.  VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects can be installed side-by-side with VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects - so there is no need to uninstall the VS 2005 version if you are still using it with older projects. More Deployment Features In my last link-listing post I pointed at the new Web Deployment Tool being released by the IIS team.  This tool works with both IIS6 and IIS7 and enables automated copy deployment, file synchronization, and migrating of applications onto web servers.  If you are looking for a great way to automate the deployment of your ASP.NET applications onto remote servers then this tool is definitely one to check out.  You can use VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects as a post-build step within your build environment to fix up last minute deployment settings - and then use the IIS Web Deployment tool to copy them remotely onto server machines.  Alternatively you can also use the IIS Web Deployment Tool to copy vanilla "ASP.NET Web Site" or "ASP.NET Web Application" projects to remote machines (no VS 2008 Web Deployment Project required). To learn more about the new IIS Web Deployment tool, read the walkthroughs at the bottom of this page (in particular the "Introduction to MS Deploy" one).  I will also be doing a blog post in the future that talks more about how to use... Posted Jan 28 2008, 10:02 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News

• .NET Framework Library Source Code now available

  Last October I blogged about our plan to release the source code to the .NET Framework libraries , and enable debugging support of them with Visual Studio 2008.  Today I'm happy to announce that this is now available for everyone to use. Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries: .NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc). ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions) Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms) Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows) ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml) We are in the process of adding additional framework libraries (including LINQ, WCF and Workflow) to the above list. I'll blog details on them as they become available in the weeks and months ahead. Enabling Reference Source Access in Visual Studio 2008 Enabling .NET Framework source access within Visual Studio 2008 only takes a few minutes to setup. Shawn Burke has a detailed blog post that covers the exact steps on how to enable this in more depth here . If you run into problems or have questions setting it up, please post a question in the Reference Source Forum on MSDN here . Stepping into .NET Framework Library Source Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .NET Framework libraries and step into the source code. VS 2008 will download both the symbols and source files on demand from the MSDN reference servers as you debug throughout the framework code: Developer comments are included in the source files. Above you can see an example of one in the Dispose method for the Control base class. Sometimes you'll see comments that reference a past bug/tracking number in our bug/work-item tracking database that provides additional history about a particular code decision. For example, the comment above calls out that a particular field shouldn't be nulled to maintain backwards compatibility with an older release of the framework, and points to a backwards compatibility bug that was fixed because of this. Reference License The .NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license. When we announced that we were releasing the source back in October, some people... Posted Jan 16 2008, 02:50 PM by ScottGu's Blog Filed under: ASP.NET, .NET, Visual Studio, Community News