Publisher's Point
This is an ongoing column written by Markus Egger
This is an ongoing column written by Markus Egger
Markus Egger discusses mobile development and mobile devices.
Markus Egger discusses the use of inheritance in Visual Studio .NET applications, in particular WinForms apps.
Markus Egger talks about the needs to learn about the latest development technologies.
Markus Egger talks about TabletPC development.
Markus Egger discusses team development with Visual Studio 2005 Team System.
.Net is a maturing platform. The first .NET alphas and betas went to a selected group of people years and years ago. At this point, we are approaching the third major installment of Visual Studio .NET (now called "Visual Studio 2005"). Surely at this point, nobody has to explain what .NET and the Managed Platform is. Or do we?
Markus Egger interviews Steve Ballmer
Wow, another year has gone by, and as you read this, you are probably returning to the office after a few more or less relaxing holiday time spent with friends and family and a New Year's celebration. Interesting things have happened in our industry in the last 12 months, but I predict that the next 12 months will be quite a bit more interesting! Seldom before have I been as excited about new technologies and developments as I am now.
If you have been involved in a new software development project during the last five years ? and if you read this article, chances are you have ? then you have probably been faced with the question "Web application or Windows® UI?" And in the vast majority of cases, the answer to this question was probably "Web application." For modern, enterprise-wide systems there were simply many reasons and issues that made it hard to implement the desired feature set in a conventional Windows application and deploy it in a reasonable manner. At this point, the advantages and disadvantages of each application type are well understood, and decisions are easy to make. Or are they?
Brian Kernighan [1] once said, "Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." This quote gets a little giggle out of most developers, but on the serious side, there is a lot of truth in it. Writing code that does cool or useful things certainly is much easier than writing code that does cool or useful things reliably.
Markus Egger discusses the new Aux Display feature supported in Windows "Longhorn".
Markus Egger discusses the importance of a solid basis of knowledge.
Markus Egger discusses the role of business logic in modern application architecture.
Markus Egger discusses user interface technologies developers should familiarize themselves with.
C# 2.0 just shipped with a number of interesting new features: anonymous methods, nullable objects, iterators, partial classes, generics, and others. But the innovation does not stop there! Microsoft (and Anders Hejlsberg in particular) have already allowed us a sneak peek at some of the new features that will be available in C# 3.0.
At PDC 2005, Microsoft announced a new technology called Language Integrated Query (LINQ), which will be available with Visual Studio “Orcas” (the next version of Visual Studio). A lot of exciting new technologies are announced at every PDC, and as a result, LINQ got some attention, but not nearly as much as I think it deserves. LINQ represents the ability to run queries right inside of Visual Basic, C#, or any other .NET language.
Markus Egger discusses tools used to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly "Avalon") interfaces, in particular, WinFX Extensions for Visual Studio as well as the Microsoft Expression product line.
Markus Egger discusses the need to create multi-threaded applications.
Markus Egger discusses screen resolutions.
As a .NET architect and developer I cannot imagine my everyday work without Visual Studio. I was always in a strange excitement when waiting for a new CTP, Beta or RTM of Visual Studio because I always expected some great new features with every release. During the years I have bought a few third-party add-ins and utilities for Visual Studio to make my development tasks easier and even created small add-ins to produce some useful piece of code. I knew that Visual Studio was extensible; I downloaded the SDKs and tried to get familiar with those hundreds of extensibility interfaces. However, due to lack of good documentation I often got frustrated.
There are some big, exciting changes happening around Visual Studio! Microsoft is shifting the focus of VS from being just a developer tool to being an entire platform. As part of that shift, the Visual Studio Gallery web site went live on Feb 27, 2008. The site is your one-stop resource for cool productivity tools called Visual Studio extensions. An addition to CodePlex’s repository of collaborative projects and CodeGallery’s place to find sample apps and code snippets, Visual Studio Gallery is THE place to find extensions targeted at Visual Studio. Extensions can be anything from macros to item, project or solution templates to add-ins to full-blown extensibility packages. You’ll find both free and paid extensions built by both professional companies and community members.