The June 2010 Release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit is available for download from the Microsoft Downloads web site. The Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including:

• C# 4
• Visual Basic 10
• F#
• Parallel Extensions
• Windows Communication Foundation
• Windows Workflow
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• ASP.NET 4
• Windows 7
• Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services
• Managed Extensibility Framework
• Visual Studio Team System

This version of the Training Kit works with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 and is supported on the following operating systems:

• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Vista

Download

On a freshly installed VM I would get these messages every time I start Visual Studio 2010 Premium:

To repair this, I mounted the Visual Studio 2010 installation ISO and I manually installed these packages:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Data-Tier Application Framework with this command:
  \WCU\DAC\DACFramework_enu.msi /log "%TEMP%\dd_DACFramework_enu_MSI.txt"
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Data-Tier Application Project:
  \WCU\DAC\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi /log "%TEMP%\dd_DACProjectSystemSetup_enu_MSI.txt"
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Transact-SQL Language Service:
  \WCU\DAC\TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi /log "%TEMP%\dd_TSqlLanguageService_enu_MSI.txt"

And another problem solved…

There are 2 SKU’s of Expression Studio 4 namely the Premium and the Ultimate. I noticed that for some reason Microsoft has decided to make SketchFlow only available in the Ultimate SKU.

Expression Studio 4 Premium:

Expression Studio 4 Ultimate:

As a MSDN Subscriber you are only going to be able to download the Ultimate SKU if you have any of the following subscription levels:

• VS Pro with MSDN Premium (Empower)
• Developer AA
• Designer AA
• BizSpark Admin
• BizSpark
• VS Ultimate with MSDN (VL)
• VS Ultimate with MSDN (Retail)

At one of my customers they have been using Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow to create prototypes and that is actually working very nice. This customer also recently purchased 30 licenses of Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN Premium and now it turns out that they will not be able to upgrade to Expression Blend 4 and use SketchFlow. IMHO this was a very strange move from Microsoft.

This is Microsoft’s Response:

With version 4, we have taken steps to simplify our design tool offerings for customers and align them more closely with other familiar Microsoft toolsets and resources like Visual Studio and MSDN. At the recent launch of Visual Studio, we also announced Professional, Premium and Ultimate tiers (each tier also containing differing/more features with each respective step-up) and Expression follows the same tiered model.

Customers who purchased Visual Studio Premium from a retailer will receive an offer to purchase Expression Ultimate at a special price of $249.95 within the next few weeks. Volume Licensing customers will receive a 50% discount on purchases of an Expression Ultimate License with Software Assurance. The volume licensing promotion will appear on the volume licensing price list in a few months and of course all MSDN Premium customers will continue to have access to SketchFlow in Expression Studio 3.

Jon Harris
Senior Product Expression

Microsoft released the RTM bits of the first version of Windows Server AppFabric.

Windows Server AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on IIS. Windows Server AppFabric targets applications built using ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).

It provides out-of-the-box capabilities for you to easily build and manage composite applications, including:

• Enhanced design and development tools in Visual Studio to build rich composite applications
• Management and monitoring of services and workflows via integration with IIS Manager and Windows PowerShell
• Distributed in-memory application cache to improve application performance

Windows Server AppFabric allows developers to build their next-generation composite applications, and for administrators to host and manage them. It integrates technologies previewed as code name "Dublin" and code name "Velocity".

Downloads:

• Windows Server AppFabric
• Windows Server AppFabric samples

For those interested, Microsoft released a new build of Silverlight. This build is versioned 4.0.50524.0 and is available for download here. A couple of issues were fixed in this build. The list of fixes can be overviewed here.

For some reason and suddenly every time I started Outlook 2007, this dialog popped up:

The fix is to run outlook.exe with the argument resetnavpane. For example on my Windows XP x64 machine, the command for Outlook 2007 is this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe /resetnavpane

This will clear and regenerate the Navigation Pane for the current profile. I have no idea how it got corrupted!

Microsoft released a new Process Template for TFS 2010 that combines SDL into the MSF Agile development Framework. It is available for download here.

MSF-A+SDL is a TFS process template that incorporates the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) for Agile process guidance into the MSF Agile development framework. With the MSF-A+SDL template, any code checked into the Visual Studio Team System source repository by the developer is analyzed to ensure that it complies with SDL secure development practices. The template also automatically creates security workflow tracking items for manual SDL processes such as threat modeling to ensure that these important security activities are not accidentally skipped or forgotten.

The Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployments Project is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects is an add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which provides compatibility with both Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects and Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects. Web Deployment Projects provides developers with advanced compilation options. A Web Deployment Project is an extensible msbuild script, enabling web developers to create pre-build and post-build actions.

Web Deployment projects do not change the way Visual Studio 2010 Web Sites or Web Application Projects build. Instead, they take an existing Visual Studio Web project as input and generate a precompiled Web as an output. A Web Deployment Project does not change the files in the source Web site project in any way.

Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects has all the functionality that Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects had. Developers can read more about this core functionality at Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft published a set of Hands-on Labs for EntLib 5.0. It is available for download here.

Use this set of Hands-on Labs as a guide to learn about the application blocks included with Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 and practice how to leverage their capabilities in various application contexts. It includes Caching, Configuration Sources, Cryptography, Data Access, Exception Handling, Interception, Logging, Security, Validation, and Unity Hands-on Labs.

As of today you can start downloading the ReSharper 5.1 Nightly Builds. Grab the bits here. Here is a quick list of fixes in build 1700:

• Typing latency in ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC is considerably reduced.
• Code-behind files in ASP.NET projects don’t disappear when saving files anymore.
• Splitting Visual Studio text editor tabs does not result in ReSharper features disappearing from one or both tabs.
• Silverlight 4 support is fixed: no more error highlighting when referencing Silverlight 4 code from a regular .NET assembly.
• Encoding issues when working with XAML files are resolved.

Source