Jeff Beehler has compiled an excellent list of new features in Visual Studio 2008.

The last couple of weeks I've been working on migrating an ASP.NET application from using a Visual FoxPro database to using SQL Server 2005. My application has it's logic in library DLL and with some layering uses Typed DataSets to connect to the database.

Typical code within the data access layer looks like this:

internal ViewDataSet.RequestViewDataTable GetViewByPrimaryUser( string user )
{
    using ( ViewDataSetTableAdapters.RequestViewTableAdapter _adapter 
             = new ViewDataSetTableAdapters.RequestViewTableAdapter() )
    {
        ViewDataSet.RequestViewDataTable table;
        table = _adapter.GetByPrimaryUser( user.Trim() );
        return table;
    }
}

The method 'GetByPrimaryUser' is defined on the TableAdapter and using the GUI designer in Visual Studio I manage my typed datasets. All SQL is stored within the Typed DataSets. There is very limited use of stored procedures.

Migrating the .NET code from using a Visual FoxPro database to using SQL Server 2005 has involved the following:

• Change the connection string property on every datatable to use the SQL Server connection string instead of the FoxPro connection string.
• Opening every single query and changing the SQL parameters from question marks '?' to named parameters like '@user'.
• Rechecking the mapping of the columns in the datatable, sometimes these would get messed up. Especially in cases where non-database columns where added to the datatable.
• Rechecking column expressions.
• Some areas of the code accessed the OleDbDataAdapter and OleDbConnection within the typed dataset, this had to be replaced with SqlDataAdapter and SqlConnection.
• FoxPro does not support the .NET light weight transactions, so code to custom manage the transaction could be deleted and a simple 'using( TransactionScope tx = new TransactionScope() )' could be implemented.
• There where several areas where 'adapter.Update(row)' did not work with FoxPro, so the Insert/Update/Delete had to be called manually in the data access layer. With SQL Server there are no problems and this 'fix-it' code could be removed.

After following these steps some of the datatables would generate unexplicable validation errors. Not wanting to waste too much time I just re-created those typed tables and re-added the queries on those tables.

Since the advent of cheap web hosting, we have had more development in the field of SEM. Thanks to features like internet phone, managing internet network marketing is a lot more feasible now. Marketing strategies like cpc, ppi and pay per click can be managed with much more comfort now. Usually regular advertising agencies miss out on this since they concentrate more on building links through email marketing.

Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite has just become available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

Tudor posted a couple of pictures from my visit to Cluj, Romania on his website.

Update: Sorin Dolha also posted some photos from the presentations:


Windows Live Spaces

If you're looking at using Team Foudation Server, but your organization uses more than just Visual Studio, then perhaps Teamprise is a useful tool for you.

"Teamprise is a suite of client applications for accessing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server from outside of the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Teamprise enables software development teams to use the source control, work item tracking, documents, and reporting features of Team Foundation Server from within the Eclipse IDE, and from other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X."

Another gem in .NET 2.0. Parsing a string to get a datetime used to be pretty complex. But now with the DateTime.ParseExact(...) method you can specify the exact format of your string.

string s = "20071231T214559";
DateTime d = DateTime.ParseExact( s, "yyyyMMddTHHmmss", null );
this.textBox2.Text = d.ToString();  // this will print: 31-12-2007 21:45:59

Steve Tibbet has a post describing all the options for specifying the format.

The .NET Framework is huge and I still frequently find new things in .NET 2.0 which I had not seen before. Last week I stumbled across the update in Math.Round(...).
In .NET 1.x the .NET Framework would only support the American way of rounding numbers. This means that:

decimal y = 2.5M;
decimal x = Math.Round(y, 0);     // x = 2

For Dutch people this wrong. We would expect x to be '3'.
In .NET 2.0 there is a new overload, allowing you to specify how the Round method should work.

decimal y = 2.5M;
decimal x = Math.Round(y, 0, MidpointRounding.AwayFromZero);     // x = 3!

A Dutch buddy of mine has been running a (fun) website called 'Het Late Nieuws' (the late news). Check it out.

Earlier this year the C# team implemented a change in the design of anonymous types. It used to be possibly to create an anonymous type and then change a property on the anonymous type. The code would look like this:

var x = new { Name = "Mark", Age = 0 };
x.Age = 35;

In Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 this is however no longer possible since anonymous types are now immutable. There are apparently good reasons for doing this and Sree explains it in this post and there is an issue on MSConnect where Mads from the C# team explains the reasoning. Must say I don't completely get the reasoning, especially since VB.NET does not have this restriction.

The website www.hookedonlinq.com has an excellent article explaining the basics of LINQ to SQL. It's called LINQ to SQL - 5 minute overview.

If you want to join data which is in a list with data that is in the database, then you need to use the 'Contains' operation.

The code below shows that we have a list containing two values, next we want to join this list with some data in the database. This data has an Id and an Description.
You might be tempted to use the join operator, but that will fail, instead, call the Contains() method.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    List<int> l = new List<int>();
    l.Add(1);
    l.Add(2);

    CustomerInfoDBDataContext db = new CustomerInfoDBDataContext();
    var result = from pi in db.PersonalInfos
                 where l.Contains(pi.Id)
                 select pi.Id + " - " + pi.Description;

    foreach (var info in result)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(info);
    }
    Console.ReadLine();
}

Niels confirmed it for me. Yes, it is possible to run a LINQ to SQL query in SQL Server 2008 using a .NET managed stored procedure.

As he puts it: "yes you can - but as soon there are any transactions invloved things will go pear-shaped".

Note that there will also be an optimized LINQ to SQL provider as part of SQL Server 2008:

"Language Integrated Query (LINQ) enables developers to issue queries against data by using a managed programming language such as C# or Visual Basic.NET, instead of SQL statements. LINQ enables seamless, strongly typed, set-oriented queries written in .NET Framework languages to run against ADO.NET (LINQ to SQL), ADO.NET DataSets (LINQ to DataSets), the ADO.NET Entity Framework (LINQ to Entities), and to the Entity Data Service Mapping Provider. SQL Server 2008 features a new LINQ to SQL Provider that enables developers to use LINQ directly on SQL Server 2008 tables and columns."

Yesterday I spoke at the iSDC and Ronua Community Workshop. We had a great day and it was a pleasure meeting the people at iSDC, meeting the developers in Cluj and surroundings (some drove over 200km to make it to the meeting) and Petru Jucovschi (the DPE for Microsoft Romania).

Here are the two presentations that I did:

11-09-2007 - Developing Windows Vista gadgets.pptx (431.43 KB)

11-10-2007 - 2008.NET.pptx (252.91 KB)

In the Visual Studio 2008 presentation I also talked about the work I've done for AOL. The AOL developer site can be found at http://dev.aol.com and for more reference material on Vista gadgets you can visit my AOL blog.

During my session yesterday at the iSDC and RONUA Community Workshop I received a question on how to do a group by together with calculating the sum of the group.

I couldn't remember the right syntax and had to go and look it up. There is actually a sample included on the 101 Linq Samples page (thanks Dragos!).

The query looks like this:

public void Linq80() {
   List products = GetProductList();

   var categories =
      from p in products
      group p by p.Category into g
      select new {Category = g.Key, TotalUnitsInStock = g.Group.Sum(p => p.UnitsInStock)};

   ObjectDumper.Write(categories);
}

If you've been using Team Foundation Server 2005 and created one or more branches then you'll probably have noticed that when you look at a files history it will only show it to you for the current branch. When determining the history of a file this is definately not good enough. Luckily Yonatan Leonov created a little Visual Studio Add-In which allows you to see the complete history of a file. It's available for free on CodePlex. Go here.

The article I wrote for AOL, 'Xdrive as Data Storage Device for Windows Vista Gadgets', got published on their site this week. I'm pretty happy with it. It gives a step by step account of how to create a Vista gadget and also shows how to use AJAX to upload a file, which had me up debugging stuff for quite some time.

Sometimes you just run into something so geeky, yet so cool that you just have to post a link

Andrew Dugdell experimented and found out he can use his iPod to store a VHD file (the file format used by VirtualPC) and run the virtual machine from his iPod. Excellent!!!

Somasegar has told the audience at TechEd 2007 that Visual Studio 2008 is on schedule for RTM before the end of November. Huh? Wasn't the release date set for February 2008? Yes it is. There is a difference between RTM, which means Release To Manufacuring and 'launched' in terms of marketing effort. It used to be that software was not available until the CD/DVD was in your hand. Nowadays RTM means: 'send to DVD factory AND make available for download'. So when VS2008 goes live this month it will be available to MSDN subscribers on via their MSDN Subscription account and it will be available on DVD in February 2008.

Our (=SDN) quarterly event is coming together. The session schedule is complete and registration is open. The topic this time is 'Usability'. Want to learn, share, see, meet and have fun? Sign up now!

Sessions

Typed DataSets offer a great way to implement the interaction with a database. When using typed datasets in conjunction with source control, like Team Foundation Server, then things get a little tricky. TFS offers optimistic check out (a.k.a. side by side checkout), which means that multiple persons can work on a file at once. If a conflict is detected upon checking in, then the user has the option to use a mergetool to resolve the differences. This works great for most source files, but not so good on designer generated files. This problem manifests itseld a lot around typed datasets, where merging the designer generated files can wreak havoc on your sources and 'break' the designer.

Instead I prefer to use exclusive checkout when editing typed datasets.

To set your source control to allow exclusive checkouts go to the Options page in Visual Studio and set 'Editing' to 'Prompt for exclusive checkouts':

Next time when you are editing a source controlled typed dataset you will get the following question:

Choose the second option (outlined in red) and you'll be fine when checking in.