Call Hierarchy is only available in c#

Annoying Discovery :(

Just a helpful bit of information for any VB.NET programmers trying to use the new Call Hierarchy feature in VS2010 and wondering why they cannot see it in the Popup Menu.

I have been working on some old VB.NET Code in VS2010 and attempted to make use of the new Call Hierarchy feature and unfortunately discovered the painful way that this feature is only available in C#

I thought this would be an IDE feature of .NET rather than something specific to a language. Hey silly me.

I guess that is just another reason why I need to port this code to c#. Now a handy little plug in from Microsoft would make that useful??? Maybe something for VS2012 guys.

UK Techdays Content and Resources are available

The highly sought after Videos and Resources are now available for the UK Techdays Event.

You can find them all here : http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techdays

Click the Resources link and away you go.


Thanks Microsoft :)

Techdays 2010 - Windows Phone WP7

Microsoft announced the Windows Phone 7 at the Microsoft MIX show in Vegas earlier in the year. During the week there were severial sessions where the Windows Phone 7 was demonstraighted and there was a special day allocated specifically to this on the Friday.



The phone supports the following applications:

• XNA
• Silverlight
• HTML

Microsoft are encouraging programmers to embrace the Windows Phone 7 and start developing for it now. The SDK is available and comes with a WP7 Emulator - basically this should be all you need to start producing applications for the phone.

To release an application to the WP7 you will need an account with Microsoft, the application will be uploaded and will go through a validation process before it will then appear on the application store.

In terms of a release date, it looks like Microsoft are targetting f Q4 2o10 - possibly in time for Christmas sales.

Microsoft Techdays 2010 - Silverlight 4.0

The following is a summary of points I collected during the Techdays event in London.

Silverlight 4 - Microsoft are pushing this platform and emphasising an awful lot. Huge emphasis given to flexibility and reach.

Platform Flexibility, however this comes with restrictions and the need for platform aware code.

Microsoft have a rapid development schedule for Silverlight 4.o. This can be seen from the following time line.

The following slide shows some highlighting technologies available in Silverlight 4.o

There are now three types of applications in Silverlight:

• Browser Based


• Out of Browser


• Trusted

Trusted applications can access the local file system.

Should I write a Silverlight application or a WPF application?

I guess the answer is down to you, however if you can accomplish your "Application" requirements in Silverlight without the need of WPF additional capabilities then you would be daft to rule Silverlight out as it provides you with additional flexibility and reach which you just won't get with WPF.

A quote from the event was "Make Silverlight the default for your business applications unless you require specific WPF features"

A good checklist for Silverlight app development, if your app needs the following silverlight has a tick in the box:

• Data Access


• Data Binding


• Easy Styling & templating/layout support


• Rich Control Set


• Charting


• Printing


• Tooling & Productivity


• Easy of Deployment


• Reach

The following slide shows some of the companies currently using Silverlight for their business needs:

Microsoft Techdays 2010 - Key Headlines

I was fortunate to attend the Developer section of Microsoft Techdays 2010 in London last week.

Having attended and collected a large amount of notes I went about putting together a presentation for our company on the things discussed during the event.

This section is a brief summary of some of the key headlines during the week

Visual Studio 2010 Release to Manufacture

• Improvements for c/c++ programmers. VS2010 was what VS6 was for c/c++ programmers
• Productivity Improvements
• XAML Designer has been massively improved
• Visualization - Ultimate Edition
• Intellitrace
• Test Manager and Lab Manager

.NET 4.0

Silverlight 4.0

• Released on 15th April 2010
• Microsoft were pushing Silverlight technology

Windows Phone

JQuery

All the techdays material will be published to the Microsoft Techdays website in the coming week. The videos and slides will all become available. http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techdays

Attempting to prepare for TechDays 2010 London

I find myself preparing for the Microsoft TechDays event in London today on this wonderful sunny afternoon.

Hotel - Check
Location - Check

Event Tickets - Unable to find email. I didn't print the ticket or details off at the time as I didn't have a printer handy!

Having searched my inbox I remembered that I havn't seen an email. Having searched around the microsoft websites, tech days site and others I have found it increasingly difficult to locate the view all my events I have registered option on my Microsoft Passport.

Eventually located it, for anyone who is also struggling here is the link:

Link