Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools

Here are few features I liked from the VS 2010 Power Tools released last week :

Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools

• Close button in tab as well
• Pinned Tabs
• Searchable Add Reference Dialog
• Triple Click to select a line
• Align Assignments (Ctrl + Alt + ] )

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools

• Sandbox Visual Webpart

(Although there are few limitations which are mentioned in the tool description tab here)

Diving & Exploration

Here are some gems I found last month and half:

LINQ

• DevDays 2010 - Tips, Tricks and Optimizations by Scott Allen
• DevDays 2010 - Beyond Queries by Scott Allen

SharePoint 2010

• Hard Limits / Configurable Limits / Soft Limits of SharePoint 2010 by Sahil Malik
• Technical diagrams (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Setting Custom Error Page in SharePoint 2010
• Deployment Overview (SharePoint 2010)

Zion Rebuild . . . . . . . . Again !!!

Right from the RFP meetings to the daily scrums and the final PROD release calls/emails, it has been a tremendously exciting journey once again with this project. I am immensely happy to announce the launch of our new SharePoint site: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com

The entire team learnt & applied a ton of exciting stuff in SharePoint 2010 including :

• LIVE ID Integration with SharePoint 2010
• 2010 Media Player Integration
• Localization using Variations + lots of Hack
• [PageQueryString] in Content Query Webparts
• SharePoint Tools in Visual Studio 2010
• Caching API’s for accessing SharePoint List Data
• Bing Maps Geo-code service
• HTML Compliance / Accessibility standards
• jQuery

SharePoint 2010 is a huge successor of 2007 and since last 1 year I have been enjoying more and more working on this product . . . . . .

Diving & Exploration

After a long time, here are some gems i found in last couple of months :

SharePoint 2010

• MSDN Client Object Model - Retrieve List Items
• MSDN - Deployment overview (SharePoint Server 2010)
• CodePlex - SharePoint Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (including Visual Webpart for Sandbox)
• SharePoint’s Sasquatch Memory Leak
• Certification exam details for SharePoint 2010 published

Azure

• Azure’s Service Bus and EnergyNet (PDC Day 0)

General

• J.D. Meier’s - Mapping Out the Microsoft Application Platform at a Glance
• 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without
• Three Dimensions of a Software Programmer: How to get things done

First Look at Windows Phone Developer Tools (CTP)

I just downloaded the Windows Phone Developer Tools and tried the Code Samples on my Windows 7 PDC Laptop. Here are few snapshots of the emulator:

If you want to get your hands more dirty than here is the Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Training Kit

First Look at IE9 – GPU-powered HTML5 graphics

IE9 Developer Platform Preview : http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

 

Border Radius

T-Shirt Designer

SVG-oids

Business Charts

Atlas

SharePoint 2010 Branding

Just saw these interesting Tips from Randy Drisgrill on branding SharePoint 2010 sites and also a Starter Master Page for SharePoint 2010, with all the detailed comments to understand each and every section of the 2010 Master page. . . . .

Diving & Exploration

I was busy with PDC so this post is coming a bit late. Here are some of the gems that I had explored lastly:

• Developing SharePoint Applications : A series of articles from the patterns and practices developer center on building Collaborative Applications using SharePoint. One of my college Todd Baginski has also contributed to these articles
• SharePoint 2010 Sandbox Solutions : Yet again excellent article series from Sahil Malik explaining all the details that you would possibly need to develop Sandbox Solutions in SharePoint 2010.
• ASP.net Performance and Microsoft AJAX CDN.
• ASP.net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Web Development Beta 2 Overview:  Whitepaper explaining the new changes coming in ASP.net in .Net framework 4.0.
• What’s new in WCF 4.0 : 3 Part series explaining some of the new features of WCF 4.0.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course: Yet another **FREE** training course form channel9 with lots of videos and hands-on-lab.