Tuesday, 29 June, 2004

Well today has seen the release of the latest versions of a few pieces of software. Some of it from the OSS community and some out of Redmond.

The Mozilla crew released new versions of Firefox (0.91) and Thunderbird (0.7.1). As always with the Mozilla releated projects the quality of the software is pretty awesome. Technologically, it is light years ahead of Internet Explorer and suffers far fewer security problems. Needless to say, I'm a Firefox user and I'd recommend it to anyone.

However, Microsoft stole the Mozilla team's thunder today by releasing a swarm of betas of the highly anticipated Visual Studio 2005 which will be the development tools for the .NET framework 2.0.

They've released the IDE for all the major .NET languages, namely: Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, Visual C# .NET and Visual J# .NET. Each is a seperate download of approximately 50MB each. There are two notable additions: Sql Server 2005 Express and Visual Web Dev 2005. It's going to be while before I can pass judgement on these packages but my expectations are very high.

One thing I want to play around with is the database triggered cache invalidation. This will be crucial for providing scalable web application to replace the "well past its best" database we have at work. Now that I have ASP.NET 2.0 I'll include this in my ASP.NET Caching article which is coming soon Emoticon

On the C# front there are a few things like "partial classes" that I am really foaming for. One problem I have in work is that classes start to bloat pretty quickly. A class for a project I started last week already runs in to a thousand lines. Wouldn't it be nice if we could split a class across multiple files? This is the functionality that partial classes provide. This is a god-send in a number of ways that is only understandable when you develop these applications. It just serves to make the class more maintainable and easier to understand.

It's an interesting development to see a seperate application for web development. Is this an improved version of the web-matrix or is it going to replace the ASP.Net development tools in Visual Studio 2003?

At any rate there's a lot of cool stuff to digest today so i'm going to leave it there with this post and start playing with the new toys I've downloaded.

Cheers,

Simon.

17:55:55 GMT | #Programming | Permalink
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