26 Jul 2011

Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Released

LightSwitch, Visual Studio
Today, Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 has been released for download from the MSDN Subscribers site.  General availability for download will start this Thursday, July 28th. From Jason Zanders’ blog post: Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is a simplified, self-service development tool that enables you to create business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and cloud. I first announced LightSwitch at the VS Live conference in August 2010 and have since written a few posts including detailed tutorials. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it starts with the premise that most business applications consist of data and the screens that…
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19 Jul 2011

Be Heard: UserVoice Site for Visual Studio/ALM

Visual Studio
Recently, Brian Harry blogged about a set of two new UserVoice sites: One for Visual Studio and one for Visual Studio ALM.  However, just about as quickly as the two sites were created, they were merged – one site to rule them all!  The merged site is available here. The intent of this site is to provide a forum where you can provide suggestions and ideas for future anything that lives within the Visual Studio brand – e.g. Visual Studio, Visual Studio ALM, Team Foundation Server, Test and Lab Management, etc.  So, if you have any ideas that you’d love to…
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23 Jun 2011

Visual Studio 2010 Extensions

Add-ins & Extensions, Visual Studio
Visual Studio 2010 is a great integrated development environment (IDE) for developing all types of applications in multiple programming languages.  One of the (many) advantages of using a mature IDE like Visual Studio is that it is highly extensible.  Visual Studio has had a great community of developer-built extensions for a long time now.  However, until recent times, it wasn’t always easy to locate and install the extensions you needed or simply wanted.  This has changed. About two and a half years ago (give or take – my history is a little fuzzy) Microsoft introduced the Visual Studio Gallery.  This…
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22 Jun 2011

Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Visual Studio
If you are using Visual Studio 2010 to create HTML 5 applications then you will appreciate the recently released Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  This update brings IntelliSense and validation to Visual Studio, based on the W3C specification, for HTML 5 and CSS3. As reported by Scott Hanselman, this update provides you with IntelliSense and validation for: HTML 5 features Video & related tags Audio & related tag New input types like email, url, date, etc. Drag & Drop support Accessibility standard WAI-ARIA Microdata Schema.org & more SEO friendly goodness Browser APIs Geo-Location - Location aware websites…
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21 Jun 2011

Visual Studio Lab Management Guidance

ALM Rangers, Guidance, Visual Studio
It’s been a busy week for the ALM Rangers!  Not only was the Visual Studio Build Customization Guidance (read post) released but the Visual Studio Lab Management Guidance was released as well. Here’s some quick information from the project home page: Project Description This Visual Studio ALM Ranger project has the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on guidance for the planning, setup, configuration and usage of Visual Studio Lab Management, backed by  custom VM Template automation for reference environments. Downloads The content is packaged in 3 separate zip files to give you the choice of selective downloads. The…
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21 Jun 2011

Visual Studio Build Customization Guidance

ALM Rangers, Guidance, Visual Studio
A few days ago, the Visual Studio Build Customization Guidance was officially released! Here’s some quick information from the project home page: Project Description This Visual Studio ALM Ranger project has the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on lab guidance for the customization and deployment of Team Foundation Build 2010 activities such as versioning, code signing, and branching. Downloads The solution is divided in separate packages to give you the choice of selective downloads. The default download is the first of the listed packages: Guidance contains scenario based practical guidance, frequently asked questions and quick reference posters Selected…
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16 Jun 2011

Visual Studio/TFS 2010 Videos

TFS, Visual Studio
If you’re looking for a great collection of videos for Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, look no further than this post on the Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server blog. The list of videos span the following categories: Testing Development Visualization, Modeling, and Architecture Team Foundation Server Lab Management Lots of great content for viewing.
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19 Apr 2011

Architecture Tooling Guide for VS 2010 Ultimate

Guidance, Visual Studio
The Architecture Tooling Guidance for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate has been updated to version 2.1. What is It? If you’re not familiar with the Architecture Tooling Guidance, here’s a quick description (as taken from the guidance): This guidance discusses scenarios of using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, primarily focusing on the Modeling tools, to help you understand the tooling and ensure that your software system meets the expected requirements. There is also some guidance included on building extensions using the Visual Studio 2010 Feature Builder Power Tool as well as the inclusion of a set of pre-built Visual Studio ALM Rangers…
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19 Mar 2011

Visual Studio Setup Projects being Sunset

Visual Studio
If you currently make use of Visual Studio Setup Projects (.vdproj), you may want to start thinking about a transition plan for the future.  As Buck Hodges stated on his blog yesterday (link), Visual Studio Setup Projects will not ship in the next release of Visual Studio. He recommends (and I agree) looking into WiX – the same installer technology used to create the installation packages for Visual Studio and other miscellaneous Microsoft tools.  If you’re interested in looking at other options, check out the MSDN page Choosing a Windows Installer Deployment Tool. I, for one, am not sad to…
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19 Mar 2011

OTSUG – What is Visual Studio ALM?

ALM, TFS, User Group, Visual Studio
Please join us on Tuesday, March 22nd as Mike Douglas presents on “What is Visual Studio ALM?”  If you are not familiar with the various ALM features in Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010, this will be a great opportunity to see these features demonstrated.  You will also have the chance to ask any questions that you may have regarding the Visual Studio ALM tools. Visit the Omaha Team System User Group web site for complete meeting details. We hope to see you there!
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