Tag Archives: .NET

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 Release Notes

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Release Date: August 18, 2017 – Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3.1

Issues Fixed in August 18, 2017 Release

These are the customer-reported issues addressed in this version:

Summary: What’s New in this Release

  • Accessibility Improvements make Visual Studio more accessible than ever.
  • Azure Function Tools are included in the Azure development workload. You can develop Azure Function applications locally and publish directly to Azure.
  • You can now build applications in Visual Studio 2017 that run on Azure Stack and government clouds, like Azure in China.
  • We improved .NET Core development support for .NET Core 2.0, and Windows Nano Server containers.
  • In Visual Studio IDE, we improved Sign In and Identity, the start page, Lightweight Solution Load, and setup CLI. We also improved refactoring, code generation and Quick Actions.
  • The Visual Studio Editor has better accessibility due to the new ‘Blue (Extra Contrast)’ theme and improved screen reader support.
  • We improved the Debugger and diagnostics experience. This includes Point and Click to Set Next Statement. We’ve also refreshed all nested values in variable window, and made Open Folder debugging improvements.
  • Xamarin has a new standalone editor for editing app entitlements.
  • The Open Folder and CMake Tooling experience is updated. You can now use CMake 3.8.
  • We made improvements to the IntelliSense engine, and to the project and the code wizards for C++ Language Services.
  • Visual C++ Toolset supports command-prompt initialization targeting.
  • We added the ability to use C# 7.1 Language features.
  • You can install TypeScript versions independent of Visual Studio updates.
  • We added support for Node 8 debugging.
  • NuGet has added support for new TFMs (netcoreapp2.0, netstandard2.0, Tizen), Semantic Versioning 2.0.0, and MSBuild integration of NuGet warnings and errors.
  • Visual Studio now offers .NET Framework 4.7 development tools to supported platforms with 4.7 runtime included.
  • We added clusters of related events to the search query results in the Application Insights Search tool.
  • We improved syntax support for SQL Server 2016 in Redgate SQL Search.
  • We enabled support for Microsoft Graph APIs in Connected Services.

Read more at https://www.visualstudio.com/en-gb/news/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes#15.3.26730.08

 

.NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0 Released

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Been busy past couple of weeks, but if like me you are catching up… on 14th Aug, Microsoft released .NET Core 2.0, including ASP.NET Core 2.0

.NET Core 2.0

.NET and C# – Get Started in 10 Minutes

ASP.NET Core 2.0

This release features compatibility with .NET Core 2.0, tooling support in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, and the new Razor Pages user-interface design paradigm.  For a full list of updates, you can read the release notes and you can check the list of changed items in the ASP.NET Announcements GitHub repository for a list of changes from previous versions of ASP.NET Core.  The latest SDK and tools can be downloaded from https://dot.net/core.

Read more at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2017/08/14/announcing-asp-net-core-2-0/

 

 

Cosmos DB Change Feed Processor NuGet package now available & Working with the change feed support

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Cosmos DB Change Feed Processor NuGet package now available

Many database systems have features allowing change data capture or mirroring, for use with live backups, reporting, data warehousing and real time analytics for transactional systems… Azure Cosmos DB has such a feature called the Change Feed API, which was first introduced in May 2017.

The Change Feed API provides a list of new and updated documents in a partition in the order in which the updates were made.

Microsoft has just recently introduced the new Change Feed Processor Library which abstracts the existing Change Feed API to facilitate the distribution of change feed event processing across multiple consumers.

The Change Feed Processor library provides a thread-safe, multiple-process, runtime environment with checkpoint and partition lease management for change feed operations.

The Change Feed Processor Library is available as a NuGet package for .NET development. The library makes actions like these easier to read changes from a change feed across multiple partitions and performing computational actions triggered by the change feed in parallel (aka Complex Event Processing).

Judy Shen from the Microsoft Cosmos DB team has published some sample code on GitHub, demonstrating it’s use.

Working with the change feed support in Azure Cosmos DB

Aravind Ramachandran, Mimi Gentz and Judy Shen also just published an article Working with the change feed support in Azure Cosmos DB on the Azure docs site a few days ago…

2017-7-24

Azure Cosmos DB is a fast and flexible globally replicated database service that is used for storing high-volume transactional and operational data with predictable single-digit millisecond latency for reads and writes. This makes it well-suited for IoT, gaming, retail, and operational logging applications. A common design pattern in these applications is to track changes made to Azure Cosmos DB data, and update materialized views, perform real-time analytics, archive data to cold storage, and trigger notifications on certain events based on these changes. The change feed support in Azure Cosmos DB enables you to build efficient and scalable solutions for each of these patterns.

With change feed support, Azure Cosmos DB provides a sorted list of documents within an Azure Cosmos DB collection in the order in which they were modified. This feed can be used to listen for modifications to data within the collection and perform actions such as:

  • Trigger a call to an API when a document is inserted or modified
  • Perform real-time (stream) processing on updates
  • Synchronize data with a cache, search engine, or data warehouse

Changes in Azure Cosmos DB are persisted and can be processed asynchronously, and distributed across one or more consumers for parallel processing. Let’s look at the APIs for change feed and how you can use them to build scalable real-time applications. This article shows how to work with Azure Cosmos DB change feed and the DocumentDB API.

Azure Cosmos DB Change Feed.png

Note
Change feed support is only provided for the DocumentDB API at this time; the Graph API and Table API are not currently supported.

Use cases and scenarios
Change feed allows for efficient processing of large datasets with a high volume of writes, and offers an alternative to querying entire datasets to identify what has changed. For example, you can perform the following tasks efficiently:

  • Update a cache, search index, or a data warehouse with data stored in Azure Cosmos DB.
  • Implement application-level data tiering and archival, that is, store “hot data” in Azure Cosmos DB, and age out “cold data” to Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Store.
  • Implement batch analytics on data using Apache Hadoop.
  • Implement lambda pipelines on Azure with Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB provides a scalable database solution that can handle both ingestion and query, and implement lambda architectures with low TCO.
  • Perform zero down-time migrations to another Azure Cosmos DB account with a different partitioning scheme.

Lambda Pipelines with Azure Cosmos DB for ingestion and query

Lambda Pipelines with Azure Cosmos DB for ingestion and query

You can use Azure Cosmos DB to receive and store event data from devices, sensors, infrastructure, and applications, and process these events in real-time with Azure Stream Analytics, Apache Storm, or Apache Spark.

Within web and mobile apps, you can track events such as changes to your customer’s profile, preferences, or location to trigger certain actions like sending push notifications to their devices using Azure Functions or App Services. If you’re using Azure Cosmos DB to build a game, you can, for example, use change feed to implement real-time leaderboards based on scores from completed games.

…

Read more at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/cosmos-db/change-feed

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.NET Conf, a free virtual event for developers

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Are you ready to learn all about .NET? .NET Conf 19th to 21st September 2017 is a free virtual conference. #dotnetconf – http://www.dotnetconf.net/

More Details…

The .NET Conf is a free, 3 day virtual developer event co-organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. Some of the speakers lined up so far: –

Scott Hunter

Scott Hunter – Director of Program Management, .NET

Kasey Uhlenhuth

Kasey Uhlenhuth – Program Manager, .NET

Mads Torgersen

Mads Torgersen – C# Language Designer

Mikayla Hutchinson

Mikayla Hutchinson – Principal Program Manager, Xamarin

Scott Hanselman

Scott Hanselman – Principal Program Manager, .NET

What’s in store for you?

“Over the course of the three days you have a wide selection of live sessions that feature speakers from the community and .NET product teams. These are the experts in their field and it is a chance to learn, ask questions live, and get inspired for your next software project.

You will learn to build for web, mobile, desktop, games, services, libraries and more for a variety of platforms and devices all with .NET. We have sessions for everyone, no matter if you are just beginning or are a seasoned engineer. We’ll have presentations on .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, C#, F#, Roslyn, Visual Studio, Xamarin, and much more.”

Check out http://www.dotnetconf.net/ for more details…

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Amazon brings .Net Core support to AWS Cloud

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aws.jpg

Re-post from http://opensourceforu.com/2017/07/amazon-brings-net-core-support-aws-cloud/

Encouraging developers to massively build cross-platform applications, Amazon has added .Net Core support to its AWS Cloud services. The series that has been upgraded with the new support includes the AWS CodeStar and AWS CloudBuild services.

“The support for .Net Core in AWS CodeStar and AWS CodeBuild opens the door for .Net developers to take advantage of the benefits of Continuous Integration and Delivery when building .Net based solutions on AWS,” said Tara Walker, technical evangelist, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in a statement.

The AWS team launched the CodeStar service back in April for Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda projects using five programming languages, including JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby and PHP. Though the original list of supported languages was covering a large part, Amazon has now planned to target developers on Microsoft’s Azure by enabling .Net Core support.

Deploy code on Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda

Developers can leverage the latest support to build and deploy their .Net Core application code to both Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda. This ability comes through the CodeBuild service that brings two new project templates to AWS CodeStar for .Net Core applications. Also, there is sample code and a full software development toolchain to ease the development.

Importantly, the presence of Visual Studio 2017 is required alongside the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2017 to start building .Net Core applications for Amazon’s cloud solution. You can also deploy your existing .Net Core code enable your applications on AWS.

by  on July 13, 2017

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Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Released

Aside

Tip

To download for team sharing/network deployment, download web installer from the link, then at command prompt use the command: –

“<download path>\VS2012.2.exe” /Layout “<my save path>”

replacing <download path> and <my save path> as required…. This will download the full install (1.8GB).

The same also works for SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools) installers.

Download now from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-visual-studio-2012-update or http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=273878

Very nice code mapping features during debug and error tracing, watch the video below (or at here – about 25 minutes into video) for details.

Most of the following content has been extracted from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/visual-studio-update#story-update-2

46 minutes, 36 seconds

New Features include

Agile planning

Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new set of capabilities to support agile teams—on their terms. Update 2 adds new capabilities for your team to customize and get more out of its agile tooling. You can now add customizable columns to your Kanban boards so that they more accurately reflect your organization’s structure. Work item tagging helps teams to manage their work items by adding tags to get more out of their data.

Quality enablement

Maintaining quality throughout the development cycle is one of the key focus areas for Visual Studio 2012. In Update 2, you can continue to drive quality wherever you are through web access for Test Case Management. You can author and execute test cases remotely, making it easier for all members of your team to participate in test case reviews. You can also profile your unit tests to create better code by tracking the end to end flow of your code, including the unit test itself.

Line-of-business (LOB) application development

With Update 2 we continue to invest in making it easier for you to develop LOB applications. You can quickly create SharePoint apps and HTML5 client apps using LightSwitch. Just design your app and let the LightSwitch templates provide the fit and finish so you can get your LOB applications running quickly. With the addition of WPF, Silverlight and SketchFlow to Blend for Visual Studio, now you have everything you need for designing and coding your desktop applications in Visual Studio.

Developer experience

When you spend a lot of time developing software, you want tools that will provide an enjoyable developer experience. Update 2 includes enhancements and updates to improve the developer experience for Visual Studio 2012. Code map debugger integration gives you a visual representation of your code while debugging so you can identify issues faster. You can also create great apps for Windows Store using profiling enhancements to find issues earlier that could impact your users.

Plus more… Full description of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 can be viewed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2797912

Additional downloads for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (Visual Studio 2012.2) are also available for:

.NET Development :: Accessing Special Folders Location Across Different Windows Versions & Tightened Security Within Windows Environment

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I am writing this post as I know quite a few developers only now migrating apps from Windows XP environments, most of whom are spending a lot of time fighting with the new tighter security world that started to come in with Windows Vista.

As most know; the directory structure for user files and temporary documents has changed over the life of Windows (“C:\Documents and Settings\…” is now “C:\Users\…”, Program Files location changes for 64 bit, etc).

In addition to this many of the folders and registry keys, that as a developer, you used to be able to write files and values to are no-longer accessible. In addition to this areas of the event log are also locked down, and writing to it can crash your application if not handled correctly.

So now on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, as a developer you cannot and should not be writing to Program Files, the root of any of your drives, Windows folder, etc, etc. This can also include the traditional temp folder (C:\Windows\Temp or C:\Temp).

The only places you can write to with any certainty are the user specific Temp folder, the ProgramData folder, or the users document store.

If you are having to deal with a legacy app you might have to manually (or programatically) override the security settings granting permissions to write files to the locations you need, though you should do so with caution, as Windows updates and security patches can reverse your changes.

All of these locations vary depending on the system setup and operating system, so what is the best way to handle it?

Well in any .NET App you can easily access any of these folders locations using the Environment namespace (System.Environment) and the SpecialFolder enumeration.

For example: –

Console.WriteLine(“Folder Path: {0}”,
System.Environment.GetFolderPath(System.Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData));

A full list of the special folders can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/system.environment.specialfolder.aspx

This is not a list of those accessible for writing to, it is a complete list.

In addition to these you can also access the traditional list of environment variables using: –

System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(string);

Though for this you need to know what is available as it will cause an exception if you call for a variable that does not exist.

You can get a full list of what is on your current system with: –

var s = System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariables();
foreach (System.Collections.DictionaryEntry item in s)
{
Console.WriteLine(“{0} = {1}”, item.Key, item.Value);
}

But you need to avoid app specific ones, and watch out for some that may have changed names over the years.

You can access the documentation (.NET 4.5) for the System.Environment class at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z8te35sa.aspx or via your Visual Studio help.

With regards to the Event Log, you need to make sure you create your event source during your app install (or have an admin add it into the appropriate event log). This may not be caught during development as most developers run as admin and may even turn off all the UAC protection.

If you don’t then the kind of error you might see in Visual Studio would look something like: –

Security Exception when trying to write to Event Log

Security Exception when trying to write to Event Log.
“The source was not found, but some or all event logs could not be searched. To create the source, you need permission to read all event logs to make sure that the new source name is unique. Inaccessible logs: Security.”

But all your users will see is something like: –

App crash when trying to write to Event Log

App crash when trying to write to Event Log

If you need to use the event log (which is good practice), then make sure you have created your source during your install and not during your exception handling.

As for the registry, unless your app is running in elevated mode, the only hive you now have access to is HKEY_CURRENT_USER, some of which itself may have been locked down, by specific apps to prevent changes. So if you need to read from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE then you should not be using CreateSubKey; but creating your keys/valuse during or app elevation and using OpenSubKey for reading… remember you exception capturing though, similar to Environment Variables, you’ll get an exception if you don’t have access or the key does not exist.

Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 on a Windows 8 Pro Dev Box

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Ran into an issue today trying to install “Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4”  (http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8279) on my Windows 8 Pro Dev Box.

The error given is: –

A problem occurred while installing selected Windows SDK components.

Installation of the “Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7” product has reported the following error: Please refer to Samples\Setup\HTML\ConfigDetails.htm document for further information.

Please attempt to resolve the problem and then start Windows SDK setup again. If you continue to have problems with this issue, please visit the SDKteam support page at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130245.

Click the View Log button to review the installation log.
To exit, click Finish.

and looks like: –

Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 error message on Windows 8 Pro system

Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 error message on Windows 8 Pro system

Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable

Before it tries to install it warns you that the “Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable – 10.0.40219” is installed, is newer than the one included and so will not be updated… however this is the cause of the failed install…

Before installing you need to remove all C++ 2010 components.

Note that this issue is not unique to Windows 8, also affects Windows 7 and probably Windows XP too, though not tried it there.

You can also install OK, if during the component selection process you de-select “Microsoft Visual C++ 2010” under  “Redistributable Packages” and “Visual C++ Compilers” under “Windows Native Code Development“: –

Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 Component Selection

Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 – de-select C++ bits…

Meet the new ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 release…

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ASP.NET tooling gets a little better, with updates to Page Inspector, IntelliSense, Publishing and the Editor; Along with a batch of updated project Templates. See: –

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Introduction-to-the-ASPNET-and-Web-Tools-20122-Release

for a short-ish (~25min) video on the details.

You can get the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 installer at: –

http://asp.net/vnext

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.NET Framework Documentation Improvements

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.NET Documentation Improvements“The CLR documentation team has been busy responding to feedback and making updates and changes to the .NET Framework documentation in the MSDN Library. We would like to tell you about the most recent set of document updates, which were published earlier in February.”

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2013/02/19/net-documentation-improvements.aspx