I am downloading the release candidate of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 right now. It is available for MSDN subscribers. Yet another reason to subscribe to MSDN. According to the download manager in just 3 hours I will be able to install the release candidate and start playing with all the new goodness. It’s like Christmas in February.

Scott Guthrie blogged that the launch date for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will be delayed. They are delaying the release to fix some performance problems. Also according to the blog there will be a release candidate in February with

a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment

I think this is a win-win-win situation for most developers. Let me explain.

The first win is that we get a much better product. Most developers I know want to work with the latest and greatest tools. They are willing to suffer through poor performance or some bugs to be on the bleeding edge. With the extra time we won’t have to curse our tools under our breath waiting for service pack 1.

The second win is that we can actually put code into production faster. Since the RC will have a “go live” license I can deploy my applications sometime in February with the RC rather than waiting for the launch in March.

The third win that I see is that we get more say into shaping the future of the tool that most of us live in each day. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Microsoft will be slipping in new features but we have the ability to comment for a longer period and possibly influence what will go into the version of Visual Studio after this. Scott Guthrie has graciously posted his e-mail address for feedback and there is the connect site as well. I am sure that Microsoft tries to listen to feedback all of the time but human nature being what it is and scheduling and all I am sure they are more focused on gathering and prioritizing feedback during the beta cycle.

The people who stand to loose the most from this announcement are those who either by choice or company policy are not allowed to use beta software in production. Since Scott’s post states the launch will be moved back a few weeks I don’t think it will be that much longer to wait.

It is also nice to see Microsoft reacting to our feedback and changing something as public as the launch date to make sure that the product is stable and usable. I can think back not too many years when the reaction might have been very different and they would have just moved up the date for the first service pack.

I have been working with a lot of really good people at Microsoft and we have come up with a poster that lists the important namespaces and classes in .NET Framework 4.

You can download the PDF version of the poster from http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/6/A/E6A8A715-7695-493C-8CFA-8E0C23A4BE1D/098-115952-NETFX4-Poster.pdf

If you have a plotter or a printer that can handle 24” x 36” paper you will have a good looking poster. If not you can print it and do the cut and tape the printed pages together. If you are attending PDC we are planning on having copies of the poster available there.

I have a list of resources to help you learn more about .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. You can check these out and find out more about the beta release.

• Channel 9 10-4 show – This show has 20 episodes on the different features of the beta. This covers a wide variety of topics.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit – May Preview – This training kit has presentations, hands-on labs, and demonstrations on a variety of topics as well. I haven’t had time to go through it all but it appears that “there is something for everyone” in the release.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 Walkthroughs – This covers a few scenarios and has links to additional resources and forums for you to ask questions and get community support around the beta release.
• In addition there are language specific resources. The pages for Visual C# 2010 Resources and Visual Basic 2010 Resources have language specific information and samples. These will help you to come up to speed on the changes to the language that you prefer (or both if you use both).

I am sure there are other resources that are available. A good place to check for additional information is your local user group. The INETA web site has information about user groups around the world. The members of the user group all have different experiences and areas of focus so it is likely that you will find someone with answers to your questions or that you can answer others’ questions.

Today Microsoft released beta 1 of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 to MSDN. You can read a little bit about it on Somasegar’s blog. I also wrote a short article on the highlights of .NET 4 and it is posted on MSDN here. There has been a lot of work put into the products and a lot written about the new features. I am excited to see the new bindings in WCF and see how much easier it will make developing simple services. There are some other things I would like to play with like the WF integration and after watching some cool demos of XAML based workflow services I would like to see some of them in action. There will be plenty of things to keep me busy for the next few weeks and months.

I hate it when error messages have error messages. I got the error you can see in the screenshot below.

I closed the blank pop-up window over 50 times before I finally opened task manager and killed the instance of IE. After restarting IE I was able to get to the site and complete my work so it was a transient error.

The worst part of these errors is that it is difficult if not impossible to test all of the error handlers in all the ways that they will encounter problems in the real world. As a developer you might try opening the page, shutting down the web server, and then trying a postback. I would say that should be a normal test although to be honest I have usually done the test once and then did a copy/paste on the error handler so I didn’t test each one individually. The bigger problem come in when the error might occur half way through a response. If I get part of the javascript but not all of it there might be strange, spurious errors that would be very difficult if not impossible to test for.

I guess I don’t have a good answer on how to handle these problems but if someone does please add a comment and share how I we can all make our code better.

I was reading Steve Martin’s latest blog post about Microsoft being named in the leaders quadrant of three different Gartner reports. Microsoft was certainly in the business of providing the building blocks of SOA at the start with ASP.NET web services and we have seen that evolve to support different standards and eventually to become WCF and all the continually evolving standards like REST. I think this is great for Microsoft and validates their approach to SOA. I feel it is a good, practical approach to implementing SOA and gaining business value. I guess I should back up and explain what I mean by the Microsoft approach to SOA.

I see many organizations trying to implement a SOA solution and the solutions tend to fall somewhere along a continuum. At one end is the side that emphasizes the architecture and operational purity. They want to design the entire architecture with the interfaces and the interactions and business processes. At the other end of the spectrum is the group that just starts creating web services and calls that SOA. Of course there are a lot of different shades in between.

The Microsoft approach as I call it has always been to lay plans for grandiose implementations but to make sure that you are getting value out of those plans. The catch phrase that I hear often is “plan, but don’t boil the ocean”. I certainly can relate to this as one of the projects early on in my career was to help a large company standardize a bunch of different databases into a single consolidated database to reduce redundancy and help with reporting. The project spent almost 2 months trying to get everyone to agree on how to create the customer table and where the data would come from in the different systems. In the end the project was cancelled because it was going nowhere fast and eating up a lot of time and money. We ended up creating a reporting database to give them the value they wanted without all the arguing and planning. (This was before data warehouses were mainstream.) The Microsoft approach has also tried to avoid long cycles of analysis followed by implementation but has instead concentrated on creating a SOA implementation for new projects and adding a SOA interface to existing systems. By tackling the architecture a piece at a time you can run into problems where your implementations or standards evolve and become incompatible. (This is where the ESB comes in but that is a different post.) For some reason Microsoft didn’t do a really good job of explaining their value proposition so the lack of an ESB and other “required” pieces of SOA would leave them ranking low in the various analyst reports.

It is nice to see that a pragmatic approach to SOA is being recognized as being a viable approach and just one of many on the continuum.

Make sure that you check out the list of webcasts for .NET 3.5 at http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnnetframework35.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=liveall. There are several webcasts scheduled for this month by a bunch of good speakers.

In all the news and hectic schedule of last week at TechEd I forgot to post this but Micosoft has released version 2.0 of the .NET Stock Trader application. You can get information and download it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/stocktrader. The application is an implementation of the Stock Trader 6.1 application by IBM and is functionally equivalent. The major changes over version 1.0 of the application is that it has been upgraded to the .NET Framework v3.5 and takes advantage of some of the new features. The application has been benchmarked and is faster than the IBM implementation. In addition to being a showcase for a faster application it also shows interoperability. At TechEd this week there were demos of this application and other vendor's implementations working together.

A lot of the press around the application centers on the configuration service that allows you to visualize the nodes in your distributed application as well as changing settings that are then distributed to all the nodes. While that is cool technology and certainly useful I am excited by having an application built for several different vendor stacks that allows me to compare and contrast how each vendor does the same thing so I can learn from the industry in an apples-to-apples type comparison.