Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 Released

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Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.  This update patches numerous bugs, improves performance, and even adds a few new features. 

As a .NET commercial software developer, I am most excited that SP1 provides a .NET Framework installation optimized for client applications.  The optimized download is less than 28 MB, compared to the original 200 MB download that all but ensured consumers would not download .NET 3.5 and hence forced us to remain on .NET 2.0 (see FAT .NET).

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Disable the Ctrl+Tab Navigator Window in Visual Studio 2008

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One of the many changes in the upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 is how Ctrl+Tab switches between open documents in the IDE.  Ctrl+Tab used to show the previously viewed document.  But in VS 2008, the IDE Navigator window appears as shown below, and you must press Enter to show the previous document.  An additional Enter key doesn’t sound like a big inconvenience, but if you do this hundreds of times each day like most developers, you will quickly find the extra step irritating.  This article describes how to disable the Ctrl+Tab navigator window in Visual Studio 2008.

IDE Navigator

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Hide Visual Studio Macro Balloon

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When you execute a macro in Visual Studio, a balloon pops up in the system tray to indicate the macro is running, and it’s accompanied by the typical balloon “pop” sound.  The problem is on most fast development PCs, the balloon is visible for only a fraction of a second and therefore of little use.  And the pop sound can become annoying if you use macros extensively.

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Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released

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Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework v3.5. These upgrades enable .NET software developers to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and reliable applications and take advantage of new features found in Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

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Microsoft to Share .NET Framework Code

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Microsoft has announced that it will release the source code for the .NET Framework with .NET version 3.5 later this year. Microsoft will release the code under its Reference License. This is essentially “read-only mode,” meaning that you can view the source code for reference and debugging, but you cannot modify or distribute the code. This is Microsoft’s most restrictive shared-code license and should not be confused with “open source” code such as Linux and the projects on SourceForge.Net. Read the rest of this entry »

Adding Assemblies to the Visual Studio “Add Reference” Dialog

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When you attempt to add an assembly reference to a Visual Studio project, the Add Reference dialog appears with a list of registered global assemblies in the .NET tab:

Add Your Assembly to Visual Studio

Unfortunately, adding your assembly to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) does NOT make it automatically appear in the Visual Studio list of installed assemblies; you must add your assembly manually as follows:

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Embedded Image Resources

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If you use images in a .NET application, chances are you will find it more convenient to embed those images as resources in your project, rather than leaving them as separate files and trying to locate and load the images from disk when the application runs.

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Visual Studio “Orcas” and .NET 3.5 Beta Available

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Microsoft has released a beta version of the next major release of Visual Studio and the .NET framework.

Visual Studio “Orcas” will enable developers to write programs that can run on Windows Vista, Longhorn Server, Office 2007 and the Web. The .NET Framework v3.5 will provide better support for Web 2.0 and AJAX applications. Microsoft has been planning to release Orcas this year, but a corporate VP recently told ZDNet that it may not happen until 2008.

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