Thomas Freudenberg : Whidbey

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista

Thomas Freudenberg — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 03:56:00 GMT

It's finally there, my dear Vista developers:

VC Build included in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1

Thomas Freudenberg — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 20:09:00 GMT

Several month ago, Peter Huene introduced VC Build, a command line tool to build C++ projects and solutions. For building our product, we have a huge batch file, which spawns devenv for every project. You have to know that devenv loads lots of DLLs and consumes much memory, even if you're just building a project from the command line. The number of our projects is triple-digit, so devenv is started more than a hundred times. The entire build of our software took on my machine 1 1/4 hours.

Then I changed our build scripts to use VC Build instead of devenv. Now the build takes about 45 minutes, i.e. it's reduced to 60%!

(First it didn't work properly, because VC Build didn't return an error code of the build failed. Peter posted an update after I and someone else reported some bugs)

Today I discovered that VC Build is not a nice tool hidden in the 'net anymore. Now it's part of Visual Studio 2005, at least part of Beta 1. You can find it in <whidbey installation path>\VC\VCpackages\.

(I planned to post about VC Build for long time, but I've forgotten. Funny incidence that today I found VC Build in Whidbey, and Jamie "NUnitAddin" Cansdale mentioned VC Build in his blog).

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1... almost

Thomas Freudenberg — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 12:19:00 GMT

After waiting for two days that I can download Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, it's now available... but what the heck? There's no DVD image. Instead I have to download at least 5 CD images (2x VS 2005 Enterprise Architect (1 GB), and 3x MSDN Library for VS 2005 (1.8 GB)). Additionally you can download the Remote Debugger (18 MB), Visio Tools (230 MB), and Amberpoint Express (tool for monitoring, testing, debugging, diagnosing and fine-tuning Web services, about 3 MB). Yes, there's an ISO image abou 3 MB.

I'd prefer to get a single DVD image. However, I started the download of all 8 images.

Update 7/4/2004: I've just noticed that there is now a DVD image of about 3.6 GB available.

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 and Internet File Select and Upload Dialog

Thomas Freudenberg — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 10:58:00 GMT

*Sigh* You may have already read that today (06/29/2004) Visual Studio Beta 1 should be available to MSDN subscribers. I'm checking the Subscriber Downloads pages now for several hours every now and then, but until now (17:47, or 5:47 PM for my American readers) it's still not listed there. I suppose it's not replicated yet to Akamai's servers in Europe (or at least in Germany).

In the meanwhile, I recommend you to have a look at Daniel Fisher's Internet File Select and Upload Dialog. (Announcement) It's an ASP.NET component for uploading files to your server with a rich GUI.

Update: Daniel has added an online demo.

Update 2: Sam Gentile wrote: Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 will be available in a few days to MSDN Subscribers. *sigh*

Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2005

Thomas Freudenberg — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 14:45:00 GMT

Peter Provost wrote

I want to start a blog petition. I want everyone who agrees with me to blog the following sentence:

Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System.

Please link or trackback to this post so I can keep track of how well this works.

and I totally agree.

If you agree too, make sure you comment or tarckback Peter's original post.

Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview May 2004

Thomas Freudenberg — Thu, 27 May 2004 14:59:00 GMT

Ooops. I didn't notice the release of Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview May 2004 until I read Sam Gentile's posting:

I'm installing the “May” technical preview. With the new Burton tools, it installs to 2.3 GB!! Although it's listed as another “technical preview”, many parts of the product identify themselves as Beta 1 and it looks a lot more functional and polished.

Downloading...

What's new in Whidbey for VC++ IDE

Thomas Freudenberg — Thu, 06 May 2004 12:31:00 GMT

Peter Huene has compiled a list of new features in Whidbey related to C++.

The two features I like most are:

Multi-proc builds: if you have multiple processors in your machine, you can build your projects in parallel. This works through utilizing project dependencies. So projects that don’t depend on one another (directly or indirectly) can build on different processors at the same time. This greatly reduces build times for large solutions that don’t have a lot of linear dependencies.
Custom build rules: unlike custom build steps, which operate on a per-file basis, custom build rules allow you to specify how to build files of a particular type. So when you add a file of a matching extension to the project, the project system automatically associates the build rule with the file. Custom build rules are defined in XML files external to the project, so they can be applied to multiple projects easily. The best part of custom build rules is their ability to integrate into the project property pages like any of the other “built-in” tools (like the C/C++ compiler, the linker, etc). This means you can have friendly properties like “Include Directories” or “Warning Level” that gets translated into switches that appear on the command line. The look and feel of the integration into the property pages is completely configurable (from what appears in the property grid to what help the user gets when they hit F1 on each property in the property grid). I’ll go into this in more depth in my next post.

The first is great, because we have many multi-processor machines here at my company.

The second is even better. You know, we have developed our own programming language named E, which is a derivate of C. However, instead of classes we have states, i.e. each object is a state-machine. Having said that, in all our E-projects we have custom build steps to call our compiler. With the new Custom Build Rules, we are now able to configure only once how to handle the *.e files.

Yukon and Whidbey delayed to 2005

Thomas Freudenberg — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:44:00 GMT

Microsoft has delayed the release of SQL Server 2005 (formerly known as Yukon) and Whidbey (VS.NET 2005?) to H1/2005. I hope we get same betas till then.

VB.NET Refactoring With Whidbey

Thomas Freudenberg — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 20:47:00 GMT

Refactoring in VB.NET is somewhat different from C#...

[via David Stone]

Whidbey is soooo cool...

Thomas Freudenberg — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 11:09:00 GMT

... but I have to switch back to .NET 1.1 because of this ~~bug~~ issue:

I've already written about 2k lines, but this issue bars me from doing any UI development Additionally, I don't want to wait another year before releasing this project.

However, while porting back, I've noticed how much Whidbey will easen the developer's life:

Anonymous delegates make your source code much clearer.
Generics allow you do write more, well, generic code.
System.Xml.XmlTextWriter/Reader 2.0 implement IDisposable.

.NET 1.1 is so... yesterday.

Update: I'm missing the System.Windows.Form.WebBrowser control, too.

[TLS321] Visual C# "Whidbey": IDE Enhancement for the C# Developer

Thomas Freudenberg — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 23:52:00 GMT

Nice new features in the IDE:
Expansion, configurable via XML schema (e.g. automatic getter and setter for properties)
Code formatting (customizable)
Filter completion list (e.g. the list in catch( contains exception classes only)
Browse components (generates read-only source files, e.g. for System.String)
Find all references
Refactoring (e.g. Rename, Extract method, etc)
Watch window in debugger will use .ToString() method

BTW, about 64% of the PDC attendees state their preferred .NET language is C#.

P.S.: Eric Rudder said in today's keynote, that currently 27 languages are supported in .NET...

[TLS342] Visual Studio "Whidbey": New IDE Features for Building Windows Forms Applications

Thomas Freudenberg — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 00:54:00 GMT

In this session Steve Lasker presented the mainly the form designed in Whidbey. E.g. the alignment of control will be much easier, it will create guidelines for top, baseline, and bottom alignment automatically. Another enhancement is the data binding support. Finally, all features I've missed in the previous releases.