Month: November 2012

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Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Now Available!

VisualStudio2012Logo

Earlier the Visual Studio team in Redmond announced that as of Visual Studio 2012 their update frequency would go up and planned to release an update with bug fixes but also with new features. By doing so the development team is able to respond in a more dynamic manner to changes in direction and respond to feedback on a shorter notice.

This is how they expressed it:

“Microsoft is planning to update Visual Studio 2012 periodically to provide new and improved tools and capabilities. These improvements will be aligned with the latest software development trends so that you will always have access to the best solutions for building modern apps. The updates will also contain bug fixes and other enhancements.”

Today their first update was released to the Web and you can install it today from the download page (see “Visual Studio 2012 Update 1” under the “Additional software” section.

You can read more about it on Somasegar’s blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2012/11/26/visual-studio-2012-update-1-now-available.aspx

or at The Visual Studio Blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/11/26/visual-studio-2012-update-1-is-here.aspx

Download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-visual-studio-2012-update

Have Fun!

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sale

Traditionally in the US stores tend to provide huge discounts on all sorts of stuff that you don’t need or don’t want to buy. There are however a couple of offers that I don’t want to hold back on as I either already use the product or just purchased it myself and think could be a benefit for you as well:

Crashplan

The first offer that I just purchased myself is the CrashPlan+ or CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited plan (I purchased the Family plan). It offers you a backup plan in the cloud to ensure your valuable files are in a safe location just in case something bad happens to your local storage. You can get the offer at http://www.crashplan.com/bigsale and it started today for free but it will become more expensive as time goes by. I got it for  $8, it’s now $12 as I write this down and will go up to the 42% discounted price on Monday! Still not bad … after that it will go up and discount is dropped.

Axialis

The second offer, and you’ve seen it here in the years before, is a 50% discount on everything and this offer ends Monday 26th. Axialis offers great tools to build your custom icons and integrates with Visual Studio. If you want to save time Axialis also provides a shipload of stock icons ready for you to use in your applications.

http://www.axialis.com/

Both offers are only valid between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so if you want to enjoy the products and save a lot of money on some excellent tools there is only one thing you can do … Hurry!

 

 

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An update rollup is available for Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime 4.0

Today a rollup update for Visual Studio 2010 for Office Runtime 4.0 that was auto-magically released November 13th has been deployed to (at least one of) my machines.

This rollup fixes about four issues with the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime and one fix in particular of a bug that I found and posted on Connect:

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/705610/cached-data-storage-fails-in-protected-documents

We worked close with the VSTO development team to identify and isolate the issue and they were able to solve it for us to allow us to continue working with the runtime.

The issue isn’t touched a lot beside our organization (it is a specific user scenario not used by many others) so distribution of the fix was ‘delayed’ until deployment of yesterdays rollup (a hotfix could be requested for in case you ran into it).

So as of yesterday the fix became available for everyone along with a couple of other fixes. Again, probably not many of you will notice any differences but I’m sure the users using one or more of the fixed features will be pleased to see it released in the main branch of the product.

If you want to download the VSTO Runtime on your own, not waiting for Microsoft Update or WSUS you can download it at the Microsoft Download Center.

On a side note, also Office 2013 tooling was released this week to enable you to build VSTO solutions targeting Office 2013 but I will spend some time on that in a separate blog post.

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Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools

Remember Visual Studio 2010? Visual Studio 2010 had a couple of Power Tools available that provided you some productivity options that made life within Visual Studio just a little bit better. Some of the tools ended up in the next version (2012) such as the Find option, Solution Navigator and the References Dialog.

With Visual Studio we lost some of the options available in the 2010 version. Personally I really liked the Enhanced Scrollbar feature showin a little outline of your source document where you immediately could identify where issues are located in the code.

But now it’s back! Microsoft deployed a Visual Studio 2012 (November) edition to the Visual Studio Gallery:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/3a96a4dc-ba9c-4589-92c5-640e07332afd

Visual Studio 2012 (November) edition features:

New additions for Visual Studio 2012

  • Quick Tasks
  • Power Commands
  • Color Printing

In Addition to

  • Enhanced Scrollbar
  • Middle-Click Scrolling
  • Organize Imports for Visual Basic
  • Custom Document Well
  • Tools Options Support
  • Auto Brace Completion
  • HTML Copy
  • Fix Mixed Tabs
  • Ctrl + Click Go To Definition
  • Align Assignments
  • Move Line Up/Down Commands
  • Column Guides
  • Colorized Parameter Help

Go to the Visual Studio Gallery (Tools/Extensions and Updates and search Online for “Productivity Power Tools”) and try it.

For more information on each of the features and a full description go to the Visual Studio Gallery page and read all about it:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/3a96a4dc-ba9c-4589-92c5-640e07332afd

Do you know more great tools our readers should know about? Leave a comment!

Have fun!

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Download all Build 2012 videos

Earlier I created a custom downloader to download videos from //Build (2011) and was thinking about creating another one for //Build 2012.

I did however remember there was a batch download tool for Channel 9, where the //Build and other events are hosting their videos and searched for it and found it:

Select your //Build 2012 videos and download them here:
http://dayngo.com/channel9/Events/2a7a1747-b3e7-4e55-96f5-a0f9002298dd/Build_2012

It creates either a PowerShell script or a WGET script for you to use and download the videos in one batch. Saves me some work to create another downloader.

The number of sessions this year was a lot lower than last year. Compared to last year //Build 2012 had only 60% of the number of sessions at //Build 2011 (275 last year against 164 this year). This is probably related to the fact that the venue in Anaheim in 2011 was much bigger and Microsoft Campus has only limited space to host their sessions.

Enjoy downloading and watching the //Build 2012 sessions!