Visual Studio 2010 Release Date and VS2010 Video Training

Visual Studio 2010 is currently at the Beta Test stage but already the excitement to the release date is growing. The actual official Visual Studio 2010 release date is still to be announced but it is currently expected to ship early in Q1 of 2010.

If you are looking to get ahead of the game and get to grips with some of the new features of Visual Studio 2010, then I highly recommend you head over to LearnVisualStudio.Net. As always, LVS have stayed with the latest cutting edge technologies and have already produced their first series of training materials for Visual Studio 2010 to get its members up to speed quickly.

In the first series there are 6 videos providing around 2 hours of video based training. The topics they cover are:

• Visual Studio 2010 .Net 4.0 Language Enhancements


• Visual Studio 2010 C#4.0 Specific Language Enhancements


• Visual Studio 2010 ASP.Net 4.0 Web Forms Routing


• Visual Studio 2010 ASP.Net AJAX 4.0 Binding


• Visual Studio 2010 ASP.Net AJAX 4.0 Observer

There is plenty there to whet the appetite and more are being produced as we speak. If you are not a member of LVS and would like to know more please ask any questions in the comment box below.

Here is the link for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta download.

As soon as the official Visual Studio 2010 Release Date is out I will put together a blog post about it.

So what are you looking forward to most in Visual Studio 2010?

Personally, I am very keen to check out the Microsoft Dublin component. If you have read any of my posts on Windows Workflow Foundation you will have seen the hassles I had in hosting the workflows. Well, Dublin is a component of Oslo (Microsofts new modelling framework), and it will be offered as a free tool shipped with VS2010 to enable you to host and monitor Workflows and WCF services.

If Dublin takes away a lot of the pain I went through with hosting Workflows in IIS then I will gladly look at using Workflow Foundation again. Since I first used it I have steered clear. Fingers crossed its all its cracked up to be.

Versioning Workflows

A while ago i had a project where i used Windows Workflow Foundation. Fantastic tool but i hit several issues with it that put me off using it since. One of these issues was the complexities of hosting in iis and the other was the versioning of workflows. At the time i could not find any information to help me with this so did what i though was best at the time.

Today i noticed a blog post which covers the perfect solution to workflow versioning. You can read it here over at the problem solvers blog.



Here was my solution to compare - which wasnt ideal but sufficed at the time.

What i thought i needed to do was create a new copy of the workflow (at design time) and deploy both versions. This was fine but the next issue i had was how do i copy a workflow and make some changes. Heindsight says this was a bad move but it didnt jump out at me at first. Anyway.. I ended up copying the workflow xaml xml and changing the xaml to a new type - V2. And this actually worked!

Now i had old and new versions of the workflow and could make my changes and deploy.

The next issue i came across was code that was hooked into the workflow, i.e. any services/classes that made use of the workflow. You had to change the code to tell it what version of workflow to create, that was easy but then if you had referred to the workflow at any point in your classes, and this had been removed/changed then it would obviously break.

Changing the namespace of a Windows Workflow project

Today i modified the namespace of a workflow project. A little further down the track when it came to hosting the workflow the workflow runtime puked with the following message:

"Cannot initialize 'StateMachineWorkflowActivity' that does not define a valid 'InitialStateName' property."

The state machine workflow had the initial state set but as i has messed about the with the namespace i had a hunch what it was.

If you come across this error simply open up the workflow.xoml file with an XML editor and change the 'StateMachineWorkflowActivity x:Class' attribute to match your newly modified namespace, save and close.

Now when you build it will run fine. Hopefully VS2008 will fix this as i see it as a bug in the IDE. Changing the namespace should change the namespace in the xoml.

Windows Workflow Foundation Activity Dependency Properties

I had been implementing a custom activity in WWF and added some dependecy properties to the actvity to allow binding. I tried and tried but for some reason i could not get the little blue i at the side of my properties to show it was bindable.

Here is what i had put in my activity:

Public Shared ToProperty As DependencyProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("To", GetType(String), GetType(SendEmailActivity), New PropertyMetadata(someone@example.com))

Public Property EmailTo() As String
Get
Return CType(MyBase.GetValue(SendEmailActivity.ToProperty), String)
End Get

Set(ByVal value As String)
MyBase.SetValue(SendEmailActivity.ToProperty, value)
End Set

End Property

As you can see i had ToProperty and EmailTo as the names. Even though they were pointing to each other the dependency property and the .NET accessor property need to be identical. They are even case sensitive!!

One to watch out for if you are doing any WWF and custom activities.