Microsoft Techdays – 24 hour virtual event

Don’t miss Techdays, 24 hour virtual event! If you haven’t been on MIX in Las Vegas and you don’t plan to go to the TechEd in Los Angeles, you still have a chance to see some fresh presentations about the newest Microsoft technology and to be a part of the great event. This is the biggest virtual event this year. And of course it’s free! So if you haven’t registered yet, you can still do it. It’s a 24 hours event and probably some of the interesting presentations you will not be able to see in the real time, but , don’t worry, you can still see the recorded presentations. If you attend the event, there is also some other special offers for you:

• Get a second chance to pass your Microsoft Certification exam

• 50% off Microsoft Certification exam – exclusive offer for TechDays attendees!

• MSDN Premium Subscriptions – Attendees who complete one or more session evaluations during the day of the event will be entered to win one of several MSDN Premium Subscriptions.

Register now and build your own personal TechDays session schedule. I already did it and there is a list of presentations which are on my list:

1.       DEV301 Maintaining Resilient Code: Using Tools from Microsoft’s DevLabs and Research Sites

2.       WIN303 Using the Composite Application Guidance for Windows Presentation Foundation

3.       WIN305 How Windows Presentation Foundation and Databinding Are Best Friends

4.       WEB304 Microsoft Silverlight Applications Need Data…and Here’s How to Get It!

5.       DEV310 Let Dynamic Data Take Care of You

6.       DEV314 Beyond the Core Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming

7.       WEB401 In-depth MVC

8.       DEV309 Automating Task and Other Productivity Improvements for Windows Presentation Foundation Development

 

Code review with TeamReview

TeamReview is a codeplex project which idea is to enable and simplify the process of code review in a development team. Tool is working as a Visual Studio Add-in, connected to Team Foundation Server. The tool is actually very simple and lightweight. It uses Team System and Visual Studio extensibility and make the review process easy and transparent. The process of submitting feedback with TeamReview creates a new work item in the Team System project that includes the entered feedback, highlighted code, file name, line numbers, and names of the Project, Namespace and Type. The work item is a new work item type, Code Review Response, that is shipped as part of the TeamReview download . As you can see on the codeplex project site the advantages of TeamReview are:

• No/less code review meetings necessary
• Same place/Same time obstacles are overcome
• Makes code review analytics/forensics possible
• Easier to split up code reviews both over time and to many people
• Accountability – can easily determine if any review feedback was submitted and if that feedback was implemented
• Ability to create predefined in-IDE code walk-throughs by any developer on your project without requiring your attendance

More about business value of TeamReview read on JB Brown blog.

 

Mix 09 in Las Vegas

 

MIX 09

MIX 09 is a great conference specially focused on web and design. The keynote spekers this year are Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie. If you want to hear about vision for the standards-based web, next generation media, rich internet applications and the collaboration between designers and developers, go there.  if you can make to Vegas, lucky you! if you can’t,good news for you, all the sessions will be on line!

 

 

 

Check out the latest from the MIX09 core team and find out what to expect from this year’s event.

Mix 09 videos

 

 

 

Maro’s blog – a new blog about software development

Take a look at the Maro’s blog, a new blog about software development, specially focused on design pattern and coding quality. You can also expect to see some stuff about agile principles in software development, testing methods and refactoring techniques.

 

Code Contracts for .NET

DevLabs is a site  dedicated to software innovations for the Micosoft developer community developed by Microsoft Research organisation. DevLabs projects are Chess, Pex, Small Basic, Microsoft Popfly and Code Contracts.  Few days ago, Code contarcts was released on Microsoft Dev Labs site. Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs and provide the innovations of “design by contract” programming. They are in form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. Also, contracts improve testing via runtime checking and enable static contract verification and documentation generation.

Contracts are expressed using static method calls at method entries. Tools take care to interpret these declarative contracts in the right places. These methods are found in the System.Diagnostics.Contracts namespace.

• Contract.Requires takes a boolean condition and expresses a precondition of the method. A precondition must be true on entry to the method. It is the caller’s responsibility to make sure the pre-condition is met.

• Contract.Ensures takes a boolean condition and expresses a postcondition of the method. A postcondition must be true at all normal exit points of the method. It is the implementation’s responsibility that the postcondition is met.

More about Code Contracts on Somasegar’s Weblog.

 

A New Look for Visual Studio 2010

On the blog of the Visual Studio general manager Jason Zandar, you can find pictures of the new Visual Studio 2010, build on the WPF technology. The last CTP of the new Visual Studio did’t look much different than the old VS 2008, but now you can see how it will really looks like. In the post you can also find a picture of the new Extension Manager. With the Extension Manager you will be able to browse for templates and tools online and install them easily into the Visual Studio environment

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/02/20/a-new-look-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx

 

New code editor in Visual Studio 2010

Look at a short video about some cool new featuers of the new code editor in Visual Studio 2010. Look at the new code navigation features that make it easier to move around in your source code. Then look at how Visual Studio 2010 makes Test Driven Development a lot easier and finally, how you can extend the new editor with your own functionality.

10-4 Episode 5: Code Focused in Visual Studio 2010

 

Prism v2 released

 

Stock Trader Application

Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (Called Prism) is a set of tools, guidance, libraries and reference implementations. Especially interesting is a reference implementation that illustrates the baseline architecture implemented with the Prsim libraries. This is the Stock Trader Application which can be used as a web (Silverlight) and desktop (WCF) application. The reference implementation was developed using a “test driven” approach and includes automated (unit) tests for most of its components. You can modify the reference implementation and use the unit tests to verify its functionality.

 

Test planning using Camano

Camano is the codename of the new Microsoft testing product incuded in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2010 will be relased likeky this year and the testing tools and test management will be one of the biggest improvement. In this article you can read about Camano and test planning using Camano,  how testers plan and document their strategy to verify that products meet specifications and requirements.

http://blogs.msdn.com/amit_chatterjee/archive/2009/02/17/test-planning-using-camano.aspx