DOCUMENT OUTLINE

Notes on DotNet

September 2006

Neil Rerup provided a quick review of Microsoft's Threat Analysis & Modeling tool released a couple of months ago. The tool is free, and according to Neil it helps a lot, although he also points out some shortcomings to keep in mind. In addition to the tool download, there are several video tutorials available describing how to set up your own threat models, and a intro overview video that answers the question: "What would Powerpoint look like with an 'Aqua' interface?"

Posted by John Dorsey at 07:24 PM  Permalink |

Microsoft announced the beta of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 on Tuesday. However, S. Somasegar, Microsoft's corporate vice president of the Developer Division, has posted a warning about the possibility of compatibility issues with Vista. He also warns that Microsoft "will not support Visual Studio .NET 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 as development environments on Windows Vista." Apparently the backward compatibility hassles in supporting VS.NET 2002/3 are too great.

Posted by John Dorsey at 08:19 PM  Permalink |

In Scott Swigart's latest video tutorial, he focuses on the benefits of using generics in C# including faster performance, better compile-time checking, and better Intellisense support. Starting with collections, he first walks through the limitations of a traditional collection, such as the perf hit from boxing and unboxing object references stored in a collection, then uses a generic List class that doesn’t require such casting. Scott also shows the benefits of using a Dictionary in place of a Hashtable.

Posted by John Dorsey at 04:03 PM  Permalink |

Fewer standalone apps actually stand alone these days. Most rely upon some distributed processes, which can make the UI unresponsive. Joe Duffy’s article, Application Responsiveness, details some scenarios that can cause UI sluggishness, and how the CLR, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Windows all work to mitigate these problems. He also takes a look at features that will be included in Vista to help maintain responsive UIs.

For more on WPF: Jeroen Ritmeijer recently posted some of his initial impressions in getting started with the WPF on Dotnetjunkies.

Posted by John Dorsey at 09:47 PM  Permalink |

Scott Swigart recently talked to Microsoft's VB Program Manager Amanda Silver about progress on the Language Integrated Query project. LINQ brings a SQL-like syntax to VB.NET and C# that may have a profound impact on .NET development. As Amanda puts it, "We're not only changing the way that you program, we're also creating a whole new way to interact with APIs so that they're easily queryable." Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie shares this view of the potential impact of LINQ on .NET: "LINQ is a super cool new technology, and is going to have an absolutely enormous impact on .NET developers and how they use data." Scott has posted some hands-on examples from his talks at TechEd New Zealand and Australia.

Posted by John Dorsey at 07:51 PM  Permalink |

The Vista Pre-RC1 release was announced earlier this week, but for the first group of testers, Vista RC1 is no longer "Pre-". Today Jim Allchin informed the TechBeta/TAP members that they could now download the real Vista Release Candidate 1. He also stated at a wider release on MSDN and Technet will follow next week.

Posted by John Dorsey at 07:11 PM  Permalink |