Microsoft

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

For some time now, I have been experimenting with Silverlight and PRISM. If you are curious like me, here are some links to help you get started:

• The source code on Codeplex
• To evaluate the Composite Application Guidance
• The development activities, a more visual representation of all available modules/functions. In fact, it is a large list of well-explained How-To’s.
• Enterprise Library on Codeplex
• And most importantly: download the Composite Application Guidance, Project Linker, and sources.

Good luck, and if you have other links, feel free to leave a comment!

As I say in a previous post, VS2010 RC won’t last forever, it’s look like all RC version will be expiring on June 30 2010. So make sure to upgrade your version or go get theExpress editions (C#, VB, C++, Web developper and Windows Phone) !

The keyboard shortcuts posters (in English only) for Visual Studio 2010 are now available (C++, C#, F#, and VB).

Source of the information

VS2010 is now available (Trial, Express and for MSDN subscribers). Scott Hanselman has written an excellent article summarizing all the new features of this new version, now it’s your turn to play!

If you show the About form of VS2010 RC, you will see that your version will expire soon, and for me it will be just in time to buy (or download) the RTM version!

The Orchard Project aims to create an application and reusable components using ASP.NET. Additionally, in the short term, it will provide a CMS application based on .NET.

Having tested it several times, it seems very promising, but still too immature to consider using it as my Blog engine. But we’ll see….

The source code is available on CodePlex

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 RC 1 (release candidate) version. This free version is available here. You can start experience this new version before the official release.