Microsoft .Net 2010

Sunday, November 29, 2009

It’s always been fun watching how Microsoft has eased the whole SDLC to promote RAD, with the release of their programming framework and tool. Same had happened with .Net 4.0 video series, spanning over a week, one hour every day ahs finished last Thursday under the guidance of Naresh Sharma. His inputs were definitely helping to understand the concept.
Our strategy to learn new technology is to learn elements of .Net 4.0 first and then divide the team into groups to dig into more specialized features. So far the exercise of watching videos has prepared a ground for the developer to know the basics. I’ll just brief the things we have learnt. And then more detailed about the topics will be covered in upcoming posts.
I’ll begin with the feature that I liked most ‘Managed Extensibility Framework’. I liked the ability to reuse the components already built. Using MEF .net applications are composed dynamically instead of compiling statically. It tackles the problem of software maintenance in a much better way by providing built in extensibility points that can easily be discovered, and which supports discovery of extension.
Another feature is Type Equivalence which fixes the pain re distributing Primary Inter-Op Assemblies. Version independence can be achieved using “Embed Interop Types” compilation option. Entity Framework 2.0 allows you to Model your application first before you design your database. MEF 2.0 actually designs the database for you based on your entities in the model. It makes fairly smart choices in defining Data Types and relationships. So developer always focuses on entities alone not on the mechanism of data persistence. C# 4.0 comes with the feature of named parameters. This features prevent you from the headache of writing multiple overload of same method. Parallel Extension in



Visual Studio 2010 supports Test Driven Development (TDD) by enabling you to write your tests first and then it generates the template for classes, functions and properties. Also debugging has been made deeper to look into calls within .net classes. One simple but exciting feature “Camel Case Search” is also very helpful, if your solution is having a large number of classes spanning across multiple projects. VS2010’s editor is also customized to have your own extension. Deploying an application in different environment has been made easier than ever by maintaining different configuration settings for different environment. UI functional testing is capable of automating Web and Windows application. It records all state of application automatically and run.
While talking about .Net 4.0, I can’t miss ASP.NET to talk about. 4.0 version allows you to control the client side id of controls. So instead of programming against some complex ids that are generated by .net 3.5 or earlier version (something like _dlGenControls__ctl0_CtrlPrintPageInstructions1_lblSubSection ) , Control ids can be defined. Javascript intellisense is more intelligent to list functions available. Mark up editing in ASPX page is also quicker with the features like easy tabbing, auto populating of controls with their short name etc.
Other than C#, ASP.Net and VS 2010; we also covered elements of F#. All in all, it was a good exercise to watch in a group and discuss than distributing videos to individuals and ask them to watch. So by the time you read this posting we would have divide the team for specialization and get them ready for post on the specialized topics.

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