August 2008 - Posts

Want to Know More About Windows 7?

As you may have noticed, the Windows team at Microsoft have been quiet during the early stages of the design and development process for Windows 7 and there are good reasons behind this decision. You can find out more about the reasoning in the newly created E7 blog:

"Related to disclosure is the idea of how we make sure not to set expectations around the release that end up disappointing you—features that don’t make it, claims that don’t stick, or support we don’t provide. Starting from the first days of developing Windows 7, we have committed as a team to “promise and deliver”. That’s our goal—share with you what we’re going to get done, why we’re doing it, and deliver it with high quality and on time."

The E7 blog is hosted by Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky where they will talk about the project and receive feedback from the community so make sure you subscribe to the E7 blog.

Posted by Mehran Nikoo | with no comments
Filed under:

Visual Studio 2008 SP1, TFS SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

As we already know, apart from bug fixes, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 includes major product enhancements such as ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and enhanced LINQ to SQL (which now supports the new date and FILESTREAM data types in SQL Server 2008). Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list so please refer to the release notes for more information on the new features. It is also good to know that:

  • .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 introduces the concept of a client-only subset of the framework called ".NET Framework Client Profile". The size of the runtime in the Client Profile is only 26.5MB so it is much smaller than the full framework. This allows solutions based on the client components such as WinForms, WPF and VSTO to be deployed much easier. Clearly, when you are developing your application, you need to make sure that you don't use a feature that is not part of the Client Profile. When you install Visual Studio 2008 SP1, it adds a new property to the project settings in Visual Studio that will enforce the Client Profile policy. Enabling this option will prevent you from using the types in those assemblies that are not shipped as part of the Client Profile, which is exactly what you need.
  • The setup package for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installs .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 and .NET Framework 3.0 SP2 first, which means you "technically" need to retest your existing .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0 applications too.

More: Download Links, VS 2008 SP1 and NET 3.5 SP1 Dev Center

SQL Server 2008 RTM

SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing earlier today and the MSDN and TechNet subscribers can now download the following editions from the subscribers area:

  • Developer (x86, x64, ia64)
  • Enterprise (x86, x64, ia64)
  • Standard (x86, x64)
  • Web (x86, x64)
  • Workgroup (x86, x64)
Posted by Mehran Nikoo | with no comments
Filed under: