Author: maartenvanstam

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2013 MVP Global Summit Starter

mvp-header

2013 will be my 8th year to be awarded as Visual Studio Tools for the Office System Most Valuable Professional (probably the most lengthy MVP title and therefore shortened by the acronym VSTO MVP) and for the 7th time around I’ll attend the MVP Summit.

In my first year as VSTO MVP, 2006, there wasn’t an MVP Summit planned as they just had one in the last months of 2005 and at the time a Summit was held with about one year and a half between each Summit. Accordingly my first Summit was in 2007.

You may think that if you have seen one Summit you’ve seen them all but that is not the case. Not all Summits are the same. We had Summits with SDR’s (Software Design Reviews), Summits with a lot of Executive keynotes, Summits without keynotes at all and just PGI (Program Group Interaction) sessions, Summits with lots of NDA information and Summits where they didn’t tell us a thing as it was too sensitive at the time of the Summit.

Best thing about the Summits in my opinion is the interaction with the ‘real’ people building the software, interact with the guys who designed and created it all from start to end (or state it is currently in). These guys (I say guys but there really are a lot of smart girls, sometimes smarter than the guys, too but its just easier to say ‘guys’) are in general very open to listen to comments of ‘outsiders’.

What I like to do, in a couple of blog posts, is to discuss some ‘smart’ tips that might benefit the ones going to the MVP Summit for the first time (and maybe also the ones who have been going there for before). How to get there, especially if you are overseas, what to do and where to go. What are the things you should be looking for and where to go to if you have questions.

So keep your eye on my blog the upcoming weeks before going to Microsoft and don’t hesitate to jump in and give me your comments if you thing it is completely off or thing I’m totally right! Let’s hear your opinion on the MVP Global Summit. Did you like it or maybe you didn’t for some reason and what was it what you liked or wanted to see changed this year. I want to hear it all!

Hopefully you will get some useful tips from it or just enjoy reading about it.

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Office templates not available in VS2012 with ‘converted’ project.

Some time ago I hit a somewhat strange issue where I opened one of our existing projects targeting Office 2010, .NET 4 Client in Visual Studio 2010 and moved this project forward to Visual Studio 2012. After the migration I did not see the Office templates in the Add New Item dialog in Visual Studio 2012.

When adding a ‘new item’ to the project it did not display the Office options to insert a Ribbon for instance:

OfficeTemplatesMissing1

When you create a -new- project, the Office Templates show up without issues:

OfficeTemplatesMissing2

What we see here is a minor issue in the migration code in Visual Studio 2012 and is relatively easy to solve by manually editing the .csproj project file.

What you need to do here to fix this minor issue is to go and look for the entry in the project file called AddItemTemplatesGuid. The migration code changed the AddItemTemplatesGuid property from

AddItemTemplatesGuid="{51063C3A-E220-4D12-8922-BDA915ACD783}”
TO
AddItemTemplatesGuid="{147FB6A7-F239-4523-AE65-B6A4E49B361F}”

Changing it back to the original value makes the Add Item dialog start showing Office category correctly again. So the right Guid should be: "{51063C3A-E220-4D12-8922-BDA915ACD783}”

You can easily check this by creating a small new AddIn project, open the project .csproj file in your editor and search for the AddItemTemplates Guid again. You will see that it is the “{51….” one as specified above. Even better, if you go back into your source control software (TFS or other source control option) environment and look at the value in your original file before migration.

So if you also encounter the fact that you don’t get the Office Templates when adding a New Item in your Office project, dive right in to your .csproj file and change the AddItemTemplatesGuid back to its original value the one that was there before migrating your code.

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Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook

One book I’ve been reading lately was “Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook” available from the Packt Library written by Richard Banks also Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP.

Visual Studio 2012 in itself is big enough to publish a whole range of books on each of the project types it supports and also the IDE has so many features that could be covered in a book. This book did not do that, it especially relates to the new areas in Visual Studio 2012.

Despite the fact that I have been working with Visual Studio 2012, provided early feedback and work with the product on a daily base the book allowed me to find several gems in the product that I had not seen or did not use before.

The book covers a lot of new items in areas such as Windows 8 Store Applications, Web Development, .NET 4.5, Debugging, Async, C++ (yes, C++ is back, blow the dust of your old book sets!) and also Team Foundation Server 2012.

As I said earlier, each areas covered in the book could be, and I’m sure in fact will be covered by individual books and dive deep in the subject matter but that is not the goal for this book. Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook provides a quick overview of ‘What is new’ to not only the novice user but also more experienced users can benefit from discovering all these new features and enhancements as are provided by version 2012.

So if you are looking for a book that quickly runs you down with an overview of the new things in Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 this book could be a big help to you. Just read it from cover to cover, or select the items you need, learn about the updates and deep dive from there as you now know where to look for it.

Here is the official link to the book with the complete Table of Contents, the sample chapter 6 “Asynchrony in .NET” and references to where you can buy it:

http://www.packtpub.com/visual-studio-2012-cookbook

If you also read it let me know what -you- thought of the it, what you liked and what you would like to see improved. The best way to learn is by working and discussing it with others!

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SDN+(plus) Event in Arnhem

SDE%20Banner%20december%202012

Tomorrow morning at our annual December event, December 3rd we are having our ‘extended’ Dutch Software Development Network event in the real Olympic sportcomplex Papendal next to Arnhem, NL.

With speakers like Rockford Lhotka, Shawn Wildermuth, Dick Moffat, Marco Cantù, Brian Long and Cary Jensen we managed to get an excellent choice of speakers from all over the place but obviously there are also the Dutch presenters added to that making it all complete with sessions, dinner, networking from 10AM to 9PM!

For a complete overview of all our sessions have a look and check it out on http://www.sdn.nl/SDN/SDNEvent/Events2012/SDE3december2012/tabid/217/Default.aspx

You can still join us if you like and we’ll see you tomorrow to actually learn some new technologies or meet new developer peers!

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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!

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WinRT Surface–experiences

Today we went over to the Microsoft Store again to review the WinRT Surface device and try it on our own.

Tablet Plus

The first impression of the Windows RT device is that it is more than just a tablet. As it contains Office 2013 it is also a productivity tool. It is easy to just write a letter, do some spreadsheeting or create a presentation using PowerPoint. Obviously you won’t be doing those sort of things by just using a tablet, you’ll need a tablet++.

Weight

It is hard to decide what the weight does to the machine. Yesterday I quickly touched Surface and somehow thought it to be somewhat heavier than expected. Today however, when in depth looking at the device I now thought the device to be a lot lighter.Especially when removing the keyboard, power chords etc it resulted much more as a ‘real’ tablet. Easy to hold, and excellent to carry around, stand included on the default machine.

Here are some pictures

 

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