Visual Studio 2010 IDE

I’ve now had a little over a week to play with the beta of Visual studio 2010. Overall I think the improvements are a step in the right direction. I like the new WPF editor, although it seems sluggish in the beta, I hope that Microsoft will address it before release.

One of the nicest IDE enhancements is the Call Hierarchy browser. This window allows you to see all of the calls in and out of a method. It’s definitely helpful during refactoring and debugging.

Another interesting window I stumbled upon is the debug history window. The debug history window gives you a view of calls made made during debugging.

The biggest issue I think in the near term will be with third party vendors since the underlying visual studio extension API has been completely changed. I know that Code Rush will not work and according to a post in their forum, it will be a total rewrite to get it working in VS2010. So it will be some time before we see third party vendor offerings for Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 2010

On Monday, May 18th, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server) will be available to MSDN Subscribers through MSDN Subscriber Downloads and to the general public on Wednesday, May 20th through Microsoft Downloads.

Windows 7 XP Mode supported processors

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the Intel chipsets that support XP Mode. Essentially the CPU must support hardware virtualization. There are several ways to see if your CPU supports hardware virtualization, the easiest way I’ve found is the Intel CPU ID Utility, which you can grab from here. After installing and running the utility you’ll have no doubts a to whether your CPU supports hardware virtualization.

WCF and WWF 4.0

I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the beta of Visual Studio 2010, which I hope they’ll release during Tech-Ed in LA this month. In the meantime I ran across this post on Cliff Simpkins blog about the upcoming features.

The workflow service host’s durable delay functionality is a great feature. Currently this is nearly impossible to implement out of the box with WWF 3.5. I really needed this on a recent project and ended up rolling a different solution. May be time to revisit it  when the beta is released.

The WCF routing is another interesting feature. Rather than have dozens of services hosted you can use a single routing service to filter and route messages to the correct service.

Although I won’t be able to attend tech-ed this year I’ll be closely watching for the beta release.

Windows 7 XP Mode Follow Up

Well Windows 2008 works just fine with Windows 7 Virtual PC. The integration components installed and worked fine. Although that was not the case with Windows 2003, it’s not listed as supported so no big deal.

I did encounter a blue screen when connecting to an external USB drive, but I wasn’t able to make it happen a second time.

So far so good…

Windows 7 XP Mode

I’ve just got done installing the Windows 7 XP Mode updates. This appears to be more than windows in windows, more like a supped up Virtual PC. I configured it as per the instructions on the Windows 7 site and it started XP as advertised. I attempted to add a Windows 2003 virtual machine, which was fine until I tried to add the integration features. The integration features do not play well on Windows 2003. Issues included corrupt graphics, a max resolution of 1027x 768 and failure to install drivers. To be honest though the setup clearly states Window XP, Vista and Windows 7 are the only supported OS’s.

Right now I’m trying a Windows 2008 virtual machine, we’ll see how that goes. At least initially it seems to be installing without problem. I’d really like to see this work, from a dev standpoint it would be nice to have an integrated Virtual PC given the torrent of CTP’s and beta’s coming out of Redmond these days. I’ll post my luck (or lack of) with Windows 2008.