Jun 26
Microsoft has announced retail pricing for Windows 7 that includes an option to preorder the operating system at a substantial discount.
From today through July 11, U.S. consumers can preorder an upgrade from XP or Vista to Windows 7 Home premium for $49 or Windows 7 Professional for $99. However, XP customers must do a clean installation of Windows 7.
Also starting today, buyers of new PCs with Vista installed will receive a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available.
Retail boxed copies of Windows 7 go on sale October 22. Microsoft plans to charge $119 for Home Premium, $199 for Professional, and $219 for Ultimate.
In Europe, the EU’s anti-trust ruling has forced Microsoft to ship a special “E” version with the Internet Explorer web browser removed. Therefore, the European launch will be delayed, and all users must perform a clean installation, even if purchasing an upgrade.
Early reviews are generally positive and indicate that Windows 7 is much better behaved than Vista was when it was first released.
Story at CNN
Jun 24
If you encounter this warning while compiling a Windows Form application in Visual Studio:
The service System.Windows.Forms.Design.IEventHandlerService already exists in the service container. Parameter name: serviceType
The solution is not very obvious, and the help provides no guidance. After a little experimenting, I discovered an easy solution:
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May 29
Most programmers know that throwing exceptions takes a relatively long time to execute versus normal processing. Some say throwing exceptions is as much as two orders of magnitude slower than passing arguments (that’s 100 times slower for non-geeks). However, another article claims there’s almost no impact to throwing exceptions, unless you are running your software in a debugger.
Story at DevTopics >>
May 20
Documentation for the next generation of the Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is now publicly available at MSDN.
Visual Studio 2010 Docs
.NET Framework 4 Docs
WPF Docs
May 20
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for MSDN Subscribers. Visual Studio 2010 is a complete suite of tools for building both desktop and team-based enterprise Web applications. In addition to building high-performing desktop applications, you can use Visual Studio's powerful component-based development tools and other technologies to simplify team-based design, development, and deployment of enterprise solutions.
Visual Studio 2010 Product Highlights
MSDN Subscribers Download
More .NET News
May 05
Microsoft has just released the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1): Release Candidate (RC).
The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK.
The following is a small sampling of what’s new or updated in this SDK:
- Documentation – Approximately 80% of the SDK documentation set has been refreshed
- Headers/Libraries – numerous new and updated – please see What’s New in the Windows API under the top-level Getting Started section in the documentation
- Samples – Over 200 new and/or updated samples
- Tools – Several new tools added
- Visual Studio 2008 SP1 C++ command line compiler toolset and matching CRT
Windows SDK
More .NET News
Apr 29
Sometimes it’s important to understand the order of events that occur when a WinForms Form is opened, closed, shown or hidden. There are also a few “gotchas” that are important to know.
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Apr 22
The C# decimal keyword denotes a 128-bit data type. Compared to floating-point types, the decimal type has a greater precision and a smaller range, which makes it suitable for financial and monetary calculations.
Approximate Range: ±1.0 × 10−28 to ±7.9 × 1028
Precision: 28-29 significant digits
.NET Type: System.Decimal
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Apr 08
Two social networking news sites have emerged for .NET developers: DotNetKicks and the new .NET Shoutout. Both sites provide tons of .NET news and information, if you’re willing to spend the time to dig through it all. But for busy developers, there is a new .NET news site that cuts through all the clutter.
Dot-Net-News.com provides the latest news and information about the Microsoft .NET development environment including C#, Visual Basic and Visual Studio. No fluff, no spam, just the facts, man.
Here are some of the latest .NET news stories:
Subscribe to the feed today to get your steady-stream of .NET news!
Apr 06
It’s common UI courtesy to show the Wait cursor when performing a long operation that requires the user to wait. Here is how the Wait cursor appears in Windows Vista:
But developers often go about this the wrong way by setting the Cursor.Current property as follows:
Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;
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