.NET

I previously talked to you about LightSwitch, now you can download the Beta 1 version.

Go ahead, have fun!

Microsoft has just unveiled LightSwitch, a tool for developing business applications without having to touch the code. Jason Zander provides an excellent introduction on his site.

There will be a template for C# and VB. At first glance, the generated application seems to run on WPF for the Desktop version, and probably Silverlight or XBAP for the web version.

The beta will be available on August 23rd.

Stay tuned

StyleCop is a free tool from Microsoft that allows you to check the style of your code (or others’). Additionally, StyleCop is now available as Open Source (on Codeplex), so I strongly recommend looking at the default rule implementations to help you create your own.

Create Your Rules

Here are some steps to create your custom StyleCop rules:

• Install the latest version of StyleCop
• Download the SDK of StyleCop (documentation .chm file)
• Start Visual Studio
• Create a new project of type “Class Library”
• Add the following references - Microsoft.StyleCop - Microsoft.StyleCop.CSharp - Microsoft.StyleCop.CSharp.Rules

The Visual Studio 2010 keyboard shortcuts posters (in English only) have been updated (C++, C#, F#, and VB).

Source of the information

I have uploaded two source files that allow you to add a “Progress Bar” type column to a DataGridView.

While retrieving a list of multimedia files, I ended up with a list of files with 4-character names that meant nothing. Grrr…. So I decided to create a small utility to rename the files according to a pattern I already had on my machine based on the artist, album, and song title.

But a problem quickly arose: How to retrieve this metadata (mainly from MP3 files)?

So I did what I often do when I have a question, I did a little search. And I found on this StackOverflow result a link to TagLib# (also working on Mono)! This library from Novell does all the work for me! It allows me to access metadata for many different types of files. Here is the basic example among several provided on their site:

I encountered a situation while developing a WPF application that used the ObservableCollection class. Here is the description:

Problem:

A collection of items that contains several items (which themselves implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface). I need to perform certain calculations: total items to be completed, total completed items, remaining items, etc. But when one of these items changed status and became completed, it was impossible to push the information (push) to a higher level.

For some time now, I have had the chance to experiment with PRISM and I really like what it brings to the table. But I also use some Telerik controls for WPF, and after doing some research, I noticed that Telerik has included in its documentation some elements about PRISM.

Here are some interesting links:

• Telerik Sales Dashboard White Paper: Example of applications using PRISM and the MVVM pattern
• Introduction to PRISM with the RadControls for WPF on TelerikTV
• PRISM on the WPF forum by Telerik

If you have other interesting articles, let me know via the comments or my contact page

Here is a collection of tools/plugins/utilities that allow you to work even more efficiently with VS2010. Here are the three that I install with VS2010. While you’re at it, take a look at the Visual Studio Gallery, you’re sure to find something interesting!

Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools

Newly arrived, the Pro Power Tools offer better tab management (by project, color coding, scrolling, stacking, …) as well as search in the Add Reference menu, which is quite nice, and I even noticed an improvement in the performance of this dialog.

Éric Moreau wrote an article about an interesting component that I didn’t know about (available since 2.0): the TextFieldParser. It provides methods and objects for parsing structured text files (i.e. .CSV).

Unfortunately, Microsoft included it in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll extension. Even though you can add this extension in C#, it is not really specific to VB.

Happy reading