Martin Kulov's Blog

In less than 12 hours is starting TechDays Developer 2009 – Defy All Challenges – 24-Hour virtual event!  For the first time, it is gathering developers from all over the world in one continuous 24 hours of learning around the clock on April 1, 2009. 

Through the TechDays virtual event portal, attendees will be able to access more than 95 sessions in person or on-demand later at their convenience with renowned technology experts.  TechDays Virtual 24-Hour event provides an online environment for developers to learn to be more productive and increase their skills during these changing times. 

Register and go to Session Builder to select your list of sessions.

Labels: Events

There are known problems in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 related to breakpoints and debugging experience with multithreaded applications. Since these days almost everything that you write is multithreaded app, I would recommend you to install the hotfix from MSDN Code Gallery.

Here are the possible symptoms:

• Breakpoints in parallelized loops are eventually ignored after multiple hits
• Stopping and starting threads causes breakpoints to be missed
• Visual Studio may crash when you debug multiple processes at the same time
• Stepping over a disabled breakpoint when you debug a native application turns into a "go"
• Stepping when you debug a managed multithreaded application can randomly turn into a "go"
• Visual Studio crashes when you use the "Step Into" command to start an MPI program
• Running the "Step Over" command while you are debugging multiple processes causes a deadlock
• Disabled breakpoints are not visible after you install Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

Labels: Debugging, Tools and Tips

Today at MIX09 ScottGu announced the availability of Silverlight 3 Beta. I am very excited about the new databinding capabilities and the HD streaming support. Microsoft definitely put a lot of efforts in this release. Check out the Silverlight 3 Beta release page.

Interesting fact – although all the new features that are added, the download distributive of Silverlight 3 Beta is 4.4MB, with 40Kb less than Silverlight 2.0 – says ScottGu.

Check out Silverlight 3 Beta Development Center.

Here are some of my highlights in this release:

• Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming
• IIS Media Services
• Native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio
• True HD playback in full-screen
• Bitmap Caching
• New Bitmap API
• 60+ controls with source code
• Element to Element binding
• Data Forms
• New features for data validation
• Support for business objects
• Enhanced Deep Zoom
• Internet connectivity detection
• Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator import
• Team Foundation Server support allows easier integration of the Blend user into Team System

Labels: Events

Check out MIX09 keynotes and live sessions as they become available. Video on demand will be provided also soon.

Labels: Events

I experienced some downtime on my blog due to some problem with Blogger FTP publishing feature. It is unfortunate to see that Blogger is not able to handle forum support anymore except major percent of the blogs stop working.

My atom.xml and rss.xml files were having 0 file size although the internal blogger rss feed for my site was working. I fixed the problem by going to Settings/Site Feed and placed a leading dot (.) before the slash. So your path will start with "./".

I hope this works for you!

Labels: Tools and Tips

A little know fact is that you can install a proxy server for your TFS server. This is extremely helpful if you want to boost your remote TFS experience, or your build machine performance. The way the proxy works is that it caches all downloaded files in a cache folder, so your team does not have to download it every single time from the remote TFS server. In other words – TFS proxy does not cache Work Item requests!

There are two caveats though. First one is that the proxy is only a helping the real TFS instance to do its job. That means that you still need to make sure that the client has access to the real TFS instance and can authenticate correctly there. The second issue is licensing :). The license price for an instance of the proxy is comparable with the price of a full blown TFS instance. Another option for the second issue is to use TeamPrise’s Remote Accelerator for only $99. A service based installation is promised to be released this year.

More information about the inner work of the TFS proxy you can find in tsyang’s post “How Team Foundation Server Proxy 2008 works”.

Labels: TFS

MS Days 2009 registration is open. This year the conference will have IT and Dev sessions held in different days (IT sessions: 14, 15 April – Dev sessions: 16,17 April). Along with the great line up of speakers, I would like to point to you two of them - Dean Vitner and Dino Esposito. They will deliver sessions on SQL 2008 and Architecture Practices.

I will be also delivering two sessions on “Visual Studio Team System 2008 Overview” and “A Lap around Software Quality in VSTS 2010 with Team Test”.

If you haven’t registered yet, do register now and save your seat since space is limited.

Labels: Events

Time is coming when there will be just one language used for programming .NET framework. With the new features in C# 4.0, it gets closer and closer to VB.NET. I would expect that in the recent years we will have one language to rule them all – Basic C# :)

here is a short excerpt:

Better support for dynamic programming:

a.       objects from dynamic programming languages, such as Python or Ruby

b.      COM objects accessed through IDispatch

c.       ordinary .NET types accessed through reflection

d.      objects with changing structure, such as HTML DOM objects

Welcome to the era of “dynamic” types!

Labels: .NET