Will check out, but some nifty designer focused controls for both WPF & SL at http://blacklight.codeplex.com/
Check out the showcase at http://mightymeaty.members.winisp.net/blacklight.silverlight/
Josh Smith has created yet another set of tooling for MVVM - http://mvvmfoundation.codeplex.com/
And Sacha Barber has started his own MVVM Framework "Cinch'" & series of articles - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/Cinch.aspx and http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/CinchII.aspx
30 Great Posts and Tutorials on Silverlight and Blend 3
Use Cases and Visual Studio 2010 (part 1 of many)
Beginning Use Cases – Identifying the Actors (part 2 of many)
Building out Use Cases from User Stories (part 3 of many)
Expanding on Use Cases and User Stories (part 4 of 5)
A Comparison of Azure and Google App Engine Pricing
MVVM – Philosophy and Case Studies - Introduction - http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2009/07/07/mvvm-philosophy-and-case-studies-introduction.aspx
http://vwcmp.codeplex.com/ WPF KB control
http://textfileparsers.codeplex.com/ - text parsing
Check Out the Killer Apps for Surface - http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/07/08/check-out-the-killer-apps-for-surface.aspx + http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/killer-apps-microsoft-surface-complete-guide
Run a build, create some manual tests, run them. Change some code, rebuild and LabTest will recommend which manual tests should be re-run !
http://blogs.msdn.com/densto/archive/2009/06/29/test-impact-walk-through.aspx
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/IllustrativeProgramming.html
http://www.codethinked.com/post/2009/07/05/Why-Do-We-Keep-Building-Tightly-Coupled-Software.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/text/archive/2009/06/24/new-wpf-4-0-features.aspx
Charting is in the latest WPF Toolkit - http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117 and http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2009/06/25/wpf-charting-it-s-official-june-2009-release-of-the-wpf-toolkit-is-now-available.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog/archive/2009/06/30/silverlight-expression-3-australian-tour.aspx
WPF Localization Guidance Paper Posted on CodePlex
http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2009/06/ironruby-tutorial.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2009/06/23/so-what-is-a-dsl-anyway.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/06/22/announcing-entity-framework-feature-ctp-1.aspx - but don't get excited 'cos we won't see the features in .NET 4.0
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/22/application-skinning-in-wpf-and-silverlight.aspx - couple of videos - haven't looked at them
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/22/see-the-preview-of-office-2010-the-movie.aspx - ditto - haven't looked at them
http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/ Includes a series of EF tips
VS2010
http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/archive/2009/06/17/introduction-to-wf-designer-rehosting-part-1.aspx
WPF
http://huddledmasses.org/wpf-in-powershell-powerboots-02/
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/18/blend-3-great-feature-2-master-details-screens.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/06/19/deep-zoom-composer-june-2009-preview.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2009/06/18/wpf-data-binding-lookup-tables.aspx
UX
TFS2010
Matt Winkle introduces the updated designer - http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/archive/2009/05/20/introducing-the-wf4-designer.aspx
What's new in Globalisation in .NET 4 - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/dd890508.aspx
Odyssey WPF Controls - http://odyssey.codeplex.com/
http://dotnet.org.za/rudi/archive/2009/06/07/vs2010-help-for-the-wpfer.aspx - Rudi Grobler
WPF App Framework - http://waf.codeplex.com/
Why no VS 64 bit - http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx
How to make Layer Validation Diagrams work in the build - http://blogs.infosupport.com/blogs/marcelv/archive/2009/06/09/how-to-make-layer-validation-diagrams-work-in-the-build.aspx
http://teamsystemguides.codeplex.com/
http://blogs.teamsystemnotes.com/2009/06/08/build-automation-and-complexity/
Grassroots Innovation @ Microsoft - http://blogs.msdn.com/jackg/archive/2009/06/10/grassroots-innovation-microsoft.aspx
MVVM webcast - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032418084&CountryCode=US
F# scripts - http://blogs.msdn.com/chrsmith/archive/2008/09/12/scripting-in-f.aspx and http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2009/06/09/f-useful-for-scripting/
Oslo - part 2
Oslo in action - http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/GLenz/See-Visual-Studio-2010-and-Oslo-in-Action/
EF database first is in 3.5, model first is coming in 4.0, also "code only" is coming for 4.0 beta 1 p://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/archive/2009/06/10/code-only.aspx
LINQ to SQL compiled queries http://peterkellner.net/2009/06/08/linq2sql-uncompiled-verses-compiled-iis-performance-aspnet/
Caliburn (WPF/SL framework) has gone RC - http://caliburn.codeplex.com/
TFS automated buids video - http://blogs.msdn.com/ukvsts/archive/2009/06/12/automated-build-video.aspx
TFS Rangers say what's cool in VSTS 2010 - http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2009/06/11/vsts-rangers-projects-using-vsts-2010-beta-1-as-part-of-the-tfs-migration-tools-initiative.aspx
Visualising Branch Hierarchies - http://blogs.msdn.com/mitrik/archive/2009/06/11/branch-hierarchy-visualization.aspx
Pex - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/documentation.aspx
Automated UI testing - VS 2010 Coded UI Test example - http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2009/06/12/automated-user-interface-testing-with-coded-ui-test.aspx
Mapping requirements to test plans & test cases in VSTS 2010 - http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2009/06/04/no-more-missed-requirements.aspx
Memory mapped files in .NET 4 - http://blogs.msdn.com/salvapatuel/archive/2009/06/08/working-with-memory-mapped-files-in-net-4.aspx
Code Contracts Primer -(new in .NET 4) - http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2009/06/08/code-contracts-primer-part-1-introduction.aspx
BizTalk 2009 - Enterprise Service Bus toolkit - http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir/archive/2009/06/09/microsoft-releases-biztalk-esb-toolkit-2-0.aspx
MEF primitives - http://blogs.msdn.com/dsplaisted/archive/2009/06/08/a-crash-course-on-the-mef-primitives.aspx
MVVM light toolkit - http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2009/06/14/mvvm-lsquolightrsquo-toolkit-for-wpf-and-silverlight.aspx
David Hill has posted about a prototype Prism Quick Start Kit - http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive/2009/05/29/prism-quick-start-kit.aspx
What's in and coming for WPF 4 - http://blogs.msdn.com/jaimer/archive/2009/05/27/wpf-4-and-net-framework-4-beta-1-list-of-features-totrack.aspx
IronPython 2.6 Beta 1 on Codeplex - http://ironpython.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=25126
The 2nd DLR language - IronRuby is up to 0.5 - http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2009/05/ironruby-05-released.html
DLR gets to 0.91 - http://dlr.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=0.91_release_notes
VS2010 walkthroughs - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/dd441784.aspx
What works with VS2010 (Blend/ SL) - http://dlr.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=0.91_release_notes
Great tutorial by Jason Zander
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/22/vs2010-tutorial-build-a-wpf-app-with-beta-1.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/26/vs2010-tutorial-testing-tutorial-step-2.aspx
The Lab Management Product – An Overview - http://blogs.msdn.com/amit_chatterjee/archive/2009/05/24/the-lab-management-product-an-overview.aspx
Architectural Inspections: Implemented in Visual Studio Team Architect 2010
Integrated and Isolated Shell for VS 2010 Beta 1
http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2009/02/03/silverlight-wpf-control-browser.aspx - App that let's you see demos of WPF & SL controls
The Role of Sketching in Software Development - http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/05/26/the-role-of-sketching-in-software-development.aspx
http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/sketchflow-rapid-prototyping-that-works/
Blueprints have disappeared - gone into "internal incubation" - http://blogs.msdn.com/mglehman/archive/2009/05/27/update-on-microsoft-blueprints.aspx
DSL Tools - VS2010 Beta 1 - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DslTools and http://blogs.msdn.com/jmprieur/archive/2009/05/22/announcing-the-visual-studio-2010-dsl-sdk-beta-1.aspx
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Chris-Sells-History-of-DevCon/
Press site for Bing - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/bing/default.mspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2009/06/01/7104846.aspx - GhostDoc has been acquired by SubMain, developer of tools like CodeIt.Right. The agreement covers the usage of GhostDoc's documentation generation technology in their products, as well as the availability of GhostDoc as a standalone product. SubMain will continue to maintain and distribute a non-crippled version of GhostDoc free of charge, and will make sure that it will work with future versions of Visual Studio like the upcoming VS2010. The first step is a new version 2.5 of GhostDoc that has been released just moments ago.
VS2010 Code Gallery - some new add-ins for VS2010 - http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/
- RegEx editor, Insert Images in source files, custom intellisense presenter
ActiPro SyntaxEditor for WPF
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d9984737-275d-4919-b7c8-7a5f5f83c74c
SyntaxEditor is a powerful text editing control that is packed with features for efficient code editing, including syntax highlighting, line numbers, block selection, IntelliPrompt UI, split views, zooming, bi-di support, and much more. It has many of the same code editing features found in the Visual Studio code editor.
SyntaxEditor is built on top of our next-generation extensible text/parsing framework. While over 20 sample languages are available to get you started (such as C#, VB, XML, and more), custom language definitions can be developed and distributed with your applications as well. SyntaxEditor is designed for use in IDE (integrated development environment) applications, however there are many other applications out there than can take advantage of such a control.
Chris Sells says that Oslo May 2009 CTP Available Now
So what this Oslo stuff all about? - From DSLs and Models to “Quadrant” using “Oslo” May CTP – Part I
In this post, Brian Noyes describes what he calls composite extensions. It's based on Prism but is not tied to WPF, and describes a region manager like ability for Wonforms - http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/2009/04/22/CompositeExtensionsForPrism2.aspx
http://elegantcode.com/2009/04/22/code-cast-26-prism-20/
Build Outlook style app - http://blogs.msdn.com/erwinvandervalk/archive/2009/04/29/how-to-build-an-outlook-style-application-with-prism-v2-part-2.aspx
WPF Coverflow control released
http://blogs.msdn.com/ivo_manolov/archive/2009/04/24/9566644.aspx - WPF test api
http://blogs.msdn.com/ivo_manolov/archive/2009/04/28/9574933.aspx - WPF Application Quality Guide v0.5 Released!
Mindscape twitter http://twitter.com/MindscapeHQ
Software Factories - someone's doing it - http://vincenth.net/blog/archive/2009/04/24/factory-overview-part-1-a-bird%e2%80%99s-eye-view-of-the-macaw-solutions-factory.aspx
http://azuregrid.codeplex.com/
Learn SL - http://silverzine.com/
http://blogs.msdn.com/paulcornell/archive/2009/04/20/visual-studio-2010-model-first-development.aspx - model in VS210 - create an Entity Data Model
All in one code framework - http://cfx.codeplex.com/
http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/04/29/let-us-burn-all-those-pesky-util-amp-common-libraries.aspx - Ayende rant
Build a training course - http://coursebuilder.codeplex.com/
BizTalk 2009 released http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir/archive/2009/04/28/microsoft-releases-biztalk-server-2009.aspx
Poco, Mef, and custom type systems. Are you ready to take the red pill? - more from Glenn Block - http://codebetter.com/blogs/glenn.block/archive/2009/04/27/poco-mef-and-custom-type-systems-are-you-ready-to-take-the-red-pill.aspx
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/
http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2009/04/20/enterprise-library-5-0-and-we-re-off.aspx
http://wpfonyx.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Introduction
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/PrismLayoutManager.aspx
http://exceldatareader.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=26041
http://jmorrill.hjtcentral.com/Home/tabid/428/EntryId/403/Glass-Behavior-for-WPF.aspx
http://shapingsoftware.com/2009/04/13/performance-hot-spots/
http://dbxamlword.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=25872
http://elegantcode.com/2009/04/08/analyze-performance-issues-in-your-wpf-application-with-wpfperf/
http://marlongrech.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/mvvm-mediator-acb-cool-wpf-app-the-mvvm/
http://blogs.msdn.com/saveenr/archive/2009/04/20/visio-transparencies-and-soft-shadows.aspx
http://managedesent.codeplex.com/
http://witsynchronizer.codeplex.com/
http://weblogs.asp.net/whaggard/archive/2009/04/07/mef-preview-5-released.aspx
http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/a-mediator-prototype-for-wpf-apps/
http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2009/04/06/9534426.aspx
http://www.mindscape.co.nz/blog/index.php/2009/04/05/intro-to-wpf-flow-diagrams/
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/04/04/expression-blend-3-preview.aspx
http://blog.vuscode.com/malovicn/archive/2009/04/04/microsoft-unity-auto-mocking-container.aspx
Josh Smith has a new CodePlex project called Thriple - a library of 3D WPF components.
Rudi Grobler describes Karl's XAML Power Toys - Extract Properties to Style feature. He also points to a cool sample app called PhotoSuru.
Jaime Rodriguez shares his list of WPF blogs.
Sacha Barber describes what he calls the MVVM Mediator pattern.
Charles Perzold has an article in MSDN magazine about writing more efficient ItemsControls.
And our own Tarang Waghela writes about Implementing M-V-VM pattern in WPF.
New article in MSDN magazine on Strategies For Designing Application Navigation
Cory Schuman has a generic XAML loading control
Dax Pandhi has a free WPF theme
Solution Factory is a Visual Studio Addin that exports a solution as a Visual Studio multi-project template
Brian Harry has "lots of news" about VSTS2010/.NET4.0.
Brad Abrams shows off what's coming in Sliverlight 3 for Business Applications.
Our current project is almost finished, so I've at last had a chance to browse my blog feeds.
Here's the list of interesting items that attracted my attention over the last few weeks.
Tim Sneath Announcing Family.Show v3 – Our WPF Reference Application - http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/02/23/announcing-family-show-v3-our-wpf-reference-application.aspx
The guys from Mindscape have announced WPF Flow Diagrams 1.0 released
Josh Smith has an article Using ContentControl3D and Panel3D in a ListBox
Josh Smith Two Model-View-ViewModel Screencasts
Learn Prism - from Blaine Wastell - http://blogs.msdn.com/blaine/archive/2009/02/28/learn-prism.aspx
How to build an outlook style application using Prism - http://blogs.msdn.com/erwinvandervalk/archive/2009/03/02/how-to-build-an-outlook-style-application.aspx
Shane Morris has pointed to New Video Series- UI Design for Developers Series, by Total Training
Mark Miller has as series of posts on Great UI. Here is the first one I came across - Clarity and Color on the Presentation Layer - http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/markmiller/archive/2009/02/26/great-ui-clarity-and-color-on-the-presentation-layer.aspx
Tip: Invoking Blend from Visual Studio - http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2009/02/26/tip-invoking-blend-from-visual-studio.aspx
Bling- easy animation and interaction in C# and WPF
Event Aggregation with MEF (with and without EventAggregator)
Rob Relyea - what's coming in .NET 4 for XAML - XAML State of the Union – Feb 2009 - http://blogs.windowsclient.net/rob_relyea/archive/2009/02/26/xaml-state-of-the-union-feb-2009.aspx
Somasegar announces DevLabs: Code Contracts for .NET http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/02/23/devlabs-code-contracts-for-net.aspx
Talking Points: ADO.NET Entity Framework http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2009/02/23/talking-points-ado-net-entity-framework.aspx
NaturalSpec is based on NUnit and completely written in F# - http://code.google.com/p/natural/
NCalc - Mathematical Expressions Evaluator for .NET
Rockford Lhotka has a summary article on Parallel and Concurrency Futures for Microsoft Developers - http://www.devx.com/SpecialReports/Article/40965/1954?pf=true
http://www.codeplex.com/wpfthemes
http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL
http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/UndoRedoPart1.aspx
http://www.codeplex.com/StyleFix
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles_Sterling/UI-Automation-Testing-with-Visual-Studio-2010/
http://davybrion.com/blog/2009/02/performance-rules-of-thumb/
http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/gabrielschenker/archive/2009/02/13/the-open-closed-principle.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/dmckinstry/archive/2009/02/15/outlook-add-in-for-tfs-work-item-alerts.aspx
http://www.codeplex.com/wpfpropertygrid
Make Your Application Extendable Using the DLR
http://www.notionsolutions.com/Products/Pages/NotionTimesheet.aspx
Building lightweight dashboards using Excel
UX Patterns Explorer - really neat patterns site from Infragistics
Implementation Patterns of User-Centered Design, Development and Agile
http://www.codeplex.com/ManagedEsent
ESENT Managed Interop
ESENT is an embeddable database storage engine (ISAM) which is part of Windows. It provides reliable, transacted, concurrent, high-performance data storage with row-level locking, write-ahead logging and snapshot isolation. This is a managed wrapper for the ESENT Win32 API.
I’m not sure how many people know that Windows comes with an embeddable, transactional database engine which is available to developers through the Windows SDK. The ESENT database engine can be used whenever an application wants high-performance, low-overhead storage of structured or semi-structured data. This can range from something as simple as a hash table which is too large to store in memory to a complex application with many tables, columns and indexes. ESENT is used by the Active Directory, Windows Desktop Search, Windows Mail and several other Windows services and a slightly modified version of the code is used by Microsoft Exchange to store all its mailbox data. The ESENT API is available through the SDK and can be used on all versions of Windows from Windows Server 2000 on up.
The significant technical features of ESENT include:
· ACID transactions with savepoints, lazy commits and robust crash recovery.
· Snapshot isolation.
· Record-level locking — multi-versioning provides non-blocking reads.
· Highly concurrent database access.
· Flexible meta-data (tens of thousands of columns, tables and indexes are possible).
· Indexing support for integer, floating point, ASCII, Unicode and binary columns.
· Sophisticated index types including conditional, tuple and multi-valued.
· Individual columns can be up to 2GB in size. A database can be up to 16TB in size.
· Can be configured for high performance or low resource usage.
· No administration required (even the database cache size can adjust itself automatically).
· No download. Your application uses the esent.dll which comes with the operating system.
Caveats: ESENT should only be used for applications which have simple, predefined queries; applications that want to do ad-hoc queries should investigate a storage solution that provides a query layer. The database file cannot be shared between multiple processes simultaneously.
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2008/12/23/f-to-ship-with-visual-studio-2010.aspx
Don Syme has announced that F# would ship as part of Visual Studio 2010 in his blog entry, F# to ship as part of Visual Studio 2010. F# combines the succinct, expressive, and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET.
F# gives you:
The development in the first Visual Studio 2010 community technology preview focused on F# for exploratory programming with F# Interactive, programming with data and implementing parallel and asynchronous components.
S. Somasegar who leads Developer Division at Microsoft had announced a year ago that F# was to become one of Microsoft’s supported languages on the .NET platform. He wrote, "Language features such as lambda expressions in C# and generics in .NET 2.0 have roots in functional languages, and LINQ is directly based on functional programming techniques. Through LINQ and Parallel FX, ideas from functional languages are helping us address some of the biggest challenges facing the industry today, from the impedance mismatch between data and objects to the challenges of the multi-core and parallel computing space."
Luca Bolognese has released a .NET library that provides the full set of financial functions from Excel. You can download the library from Excel Financial functions for .NET.
Code generator, Entity Framework to any Layer using Text Transformation Templates in Microsot Visual Studio, and other tools for .edmx diagram.
A couple of months ago, we unveiled Visual Studio 10 at several conferences and provided attendees a copy of a VPC with Visual Studio 10. We also made the CTP available here.
Thanks to a lot of partners, customers, and hobbyists, we got a ton of great feedback on our bits and look forward to hearing more from the community. Unfortunately, the CTP came with a timebomb and expired at the end of 2008. We have not shipped another CTP since then so if you still want to play with the CTP VPC but have run into the expiration problem, follow the steps in Jeff Beehler's blog to disable the synchronization between your VPC and the host machine, then turn back the clock :)
Zeeshan Hirani has written a 500 pages book about the Entity Framework and has released it as a free eBook. Wow!
