IliaJ on .NET

Along with Visual Studio 2008 RTM Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit. The kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos, which help to learn the newest Microsoft technologies such as LINQ, C# 3.0, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX and Application Lifecycle Management. Most of these technologies are parts of .NET Framework 3.5

Recently Microsoft published .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit. This kit includes information on

• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET AJAX History
• ASP.NET Silverlight controls
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Entity Framework.

According to Microsoft this is an intermediate release, and the full kit follows.

Recently Microsoft released Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2008, which gives developers more control over the build process and can be used in advanced scenarios. The features remain generally the same as they were in the Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2005 and are described in this MSDN article. Some additional information can be found in the blog of the Visual Web Developer team.

There is an important (especially for users of JavaScript) rollup of hotfixes for the Web Editor in Visual Studio 2008. The details of the rollup are described in MSDN KB 946581 and in the blog of Visual Web Developer team.

We use the excellent Ext JS JavaScript framework in the development of some ASP.NET Web Applications. Unfortunately the JavaScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2008 cannot work with the library. There were some possible workarounds like using a special .js file only for the IntelliSense (here is an example).

This week the Visual Web Developer team published a better workaround:

In a file that runs before ext-base.js, or on the first-line of ext-base.js itself, add the following code:

window.addEventListener = false;

geoffrey.mcgill wrote some important comments on the original post:

• The fix must be added to an external .js file. Adding the line of code to an inline script block does not work.
• The fix disables events from attaching in Firefox and Safari and should be a design-time only fix.
• It takes a while (10-30 seconds) until Ext shows up in IntelliSense the first time the page loads in Visual Studio.

The official fix for the problem will be available in the next Visual Studio service pack.

Visual SourceSafe 2005 is still the official source code management product for Visual Studio 2008. Sure, it is possible to use the Team Foundation Server 2008, but the TFS can be an overkill for some small projects.

It is important to install the latest rollup of hotfixes for Visual SourceSafe 2005 as described in MSDN KB 943847 to solve incompatibility problems with Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2008.