Tech QQ

Today I attended Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 - The Ultimate Tour, as they call it. This is the promotional tour from Microsoft, detailing what's new in Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net 4.0 framework.

My general impression is that not a lot have happened with C# and VB.Net languages this iteration.
For C#, Optional and Named parameters seems to be good for eliminating a lot of overloads. Also the new type Dynamic was brought up, it works like var pretty much, only the binding isn't done at compile time. Also the new data type, Tuple, that's being brought in from F# was mentioned.

More of interest was the Task Parallel Library(TPL), containing API's and data types to support easier implementation of parallelism. Introducing things like Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach loops. Also some constructs for parallelism combined with LINQ seem pretty good.

Then there were a lot of discussion about the improvements to the Studio itself, then about WFF, WCF, ASP.NET and finally Team Foundation Server. A lot of that stuff I find less interesting. But I must say I was impressed by the test recording and then being able to connect the recordings to bugs in Team Foundation Server, this looks very good for helping the communications between testers and coders. The tester-coder blame game get's so tedious after a while.
Other than that, I think I was most pleased by the addition of Multi monitor support in the Studio itself. Maybe this is incentive enough to get a new Radeon graphics card with Eyefinity for three screens of delicious code!

I hadn't looked at the agenda before I went to the show, so I got a bit surprised when there was not a single word mentioned about developing for Windows Phone 7. I had been hoping for a fair bit of info, since it's one of the things that interest me the most now days. But looking at the American agenda for the tour, it seems the one we got here in Sweden was a shortened version. And while the American one indeed contained a segment about Windows Phone Developer Tools, that segment had been removed here in Sweden. Such a pity :(

At the end we all got a memory stick with the presentations on it, so tomorrow it's time to test out ReadyBoost on Windows Vista!

But overall it was a good presentation and a good effort from the guys from Microsoft. Thanks for the info and the cookie!