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Avoid Much Talk

I wrote about Resharper 4 performance improvements in an earlier blog post today showing my VS Color Scheme including use of R# nightly builds. My friend Mohamed Tayseer pointed me out that Resharper 4 BETA was released yesterday. If you already know Resharper, skip the blah blah blah talk and get to the download.

Resharper, AKA R#, Who ???

Resharper used to be a must-have add-in for Visual Studio. It completes the features existing in Visual Studio like intellisense (not just smarter intellisense, but also available everywhere, like those areas in ASP.NET markup when you start typing non-standard code to Visual Studio to hook some properties and you get lost alone usually).

Of course it makes the expected enhancements to standard VS editor like parentheses and semicolon completion and other similar features, although it takes you w while to get used to stopping writing those after R# writes them for you!

It also has interesting stuff like SPEED find options (instead of this “Compiling the Solution” messages whenever you want to “Find Reference”) also extended for things like 2-way jump between the base classes / interfaces and their children classes/methods. ad also tons of “Guideline promoting” features like intellisense for  VARIABLE names (like when you type “MailMessage” for local variable type, it recommends names like “mailMessage”, “message”, etc…), and options to detect unused variables and “using” namespace directives, and many other features.

 I blogged my old Visual Studio settings before for Visual Studio 2005, using a dark color theme and optimizing it for Resharper features like Resharper colorings and “Current Line Highlight”.

Today I’m sharing with you my settings for VS 2008. Things have changed a bit since the first time, so, you’ll find the layout different and colors as well, although still dark as well.

The one thing to notice is using “Lucida Console” font instead of the popular “Consolas”. Also, if things look a bit small to you, this is because I’m using “Lucida Console” with size 9, and my entire Windows OS layout is using “Arial Unicode MS” font with size “7″. It’s killing for someone with sight shortage, but you never get enough of a 15 inch laptop screen, even if wide one!

By the way, the version of Resharper used with VS 2008 is the latest of the nightly builds of Resharper 4. The best thing I like about it besides supporting C# 3.0 of course is the performance improvements. Now “Solution Wide Analysis” is off by default and I still get most of the features I need of Resharper. Maybe This is the reason for the massive performance increase or whatever the reason, it’s just nice.

Microsoft .NET framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 now have public BETAs. The service pack of Visual Studio 2008 has really interesting stuff.

Highlights I’m interested in are performance improvements in HTML editor, collection of JavaScript intellisense hotfixes plus new ones enabling better JavaScript intellisense for libraries like jQuery, JavaScript Code Formatting, ASP.NET Routing engine (the one used in ASP.NET MVC, it is actually developed as separate component), new release of the Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities and ADO.NET Data Services, WCF tools, minor C# editor improvements and interesting LINQ to SQL debugging improvements.

Other improvements include ASP.NET AJAX history management (browser back button support), ASP Classic server-side code intellisense fix, new desktop applications installation model called "Client-only Subset", ClickOnce improvements, various WPF improvements, and some new WPF and Windows Forms controls.

This post is not for repeating the announcements, instead referring to other related content:

• Just in case you have not read it already, here’s Scott Guthrie’s announcement with details of what the service pack has to offer:
  http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/12/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-service-pack-1-beta.aspx
• Official homepage:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx
  • Downloads:
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/cc533448.aspx
  • Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta Readme (I personally recommend it)
    http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/F/D/8FD2A9F0-C3D4-4B0A-80AF-88D738DCDDF4/VSReadme.htm

It’s very nice to know that the launch event is not merged with EDC 2008, but comes before it. The 2008 launch event covers VS 2008, Win 2008 and SQL 2008.

It’ll be held March 24th @ Intercontinental City Stars Hotel (Register Now)

The agenda:

Found Via Amir Magdy.

With MIX, and meeting the announced MVC roadmap, the new versions of AS.NET Extensions are now publicly available.ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview 2 is available also as separate download, same as Silverlight 2.0 BETA 1 (and Expression studio, Silverlight VS 2008 Tools).

Download Links:

• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview 2
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 2
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1
  • Expression Studio 2.0 Beta
  • Silverlight 2.0 Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008
  • UPDATE: Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 SDK
• UPDATE: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is also available for download

Additional Resources:

• UPDATE: ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Quickstarts (Including MVC, Silverlight Controls)
• ASP.NET MVC
  • Official Videos Homepage
  • New Videos (More advanced than the earlier ones)
• Silverlight

• Feature Matrix: Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0
• Brad Abrams Silverlight Articles (including Expression Studio and ASP.NET Controls for Silverlight articles)
• Scott Guthrie Silverlight Articles (The latest two are focused on Silverlight 2.0)
• UPDATE: Silverlight 2.0 Video tutorials

Have fun :)