For years Teamprise have provided integration between Eclipse and Team Foundation Server. Teamprise also works on mainframes.

The collaboration continues: At the European Eclipse conference Microsoft announced improved support for Eclipse and the Windows world. In short Eclipse will get better interop support for Windows 7, Windows Azure, Silverlight and others like ADO.NET Data Services.

“Microsoft teams with Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec on open source projects designed to foster interoperability and make Eclipse a first-class tool on the Microsoft platform.”

Source: Partnering to foster Eclipse and Microsoft platform interoperability

Press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/oct09/10-28eclipsepr.mspx

Grigori just posted about Enterprise Library being downloaded 2.000.000 times. As you may know I am a big fan of EntLib as it is a great way to reuse plumbing code and focus on business functionality. EntLib 4.1 is the most recent version, ready to use with Visual Studio 2008 SP1. EntLib 5.0 is under construction. Read all about it here.

Here it is! Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 have been released to the public. Soma made the announcement of the release to MSDN on Monday, but now all the goods are available to everyone too.

We have been involved in the Technical Adoption Program since early 2008 and it has been a great ride. Lots of good information has been tried and shared and earlier this year the TAP partners presented on VSTS 2010 during the APO Conference.

The VSTS installation experience is pretty straightforward: When you start the setup, select to install VSTS 2010.

Click next.

Accept the license agreement.

Select the .NET Development Environment.

Optionally click the Customize button to select components to install.

Click Next to start the installation.

The setup prompts to restart your machine after the .NET Frameworks have been installed. And so it does again after the installation is complete.

And then your favorite development environment is ready to be used! Select your environment settings.

The new start page.

And the new layout for project and file types.

Oh, and I am sure you noticed the new user interface in Windows Presentation Foundation.

Except for the startup performance I love every bit of it.

Now we are looking forward to using VSTS and TFS in a managed production environment.

While VS2010 Beta1 is still a few weeks out and we are using the CTP, the buzz is starting: New features of VSTS2010 are great steps for ALM and VS2010 will bring .NET 4.0 and parallel computing.

Today I saw the first publicly available screenshots of Visual Studio 2010 that show a new user interface based on Windows Presentation Foundation. At the VSX Dev Con Rico Mariano spoke about a good-looking Visual Studio, but no graphics were shown then. Below you can see the effects of WPF and I think it looks great.

This is also good for WPF applications, as this shows that WPF is ready for large systems in the enterprise.

Read more about today's announcement here.

If you are developing on an x64 machine, you may receive an error when installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1:

After opening the log you see this detailed message: “VC_IA64Runtime.exe - Exe installer's log file/hint (%temp%\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt|%temp%\..\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt) does not exist or is invalid”.

The solution for me was to uninstall the Remote Debugger from Add/Remove Programs and then install Service Pack 1.

For additional information on getting remote debugging back to work, see this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y7f5zaaa.aspx 

The long story was that:

• I started applying this recent download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=98e83614-c30a-4b75-9e05-0a9c3fbdd20d. Each of the three downloads was followed by a reboot. No luck.
• I tried downloading the Service Pack again and also tried the EXE installer.
• I tried copying the contents of the ISO to the harddisk when I saw an error stating that the installer tried to create a folder on the source drive. Obviously this does not work since the source drive is a read-only mounted ISO just as a DVD would be.
• I tried applying the C++ runtime separately as the above error message is related to that.
• I tried uninstalling the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 components that I installed while they were in Community Technology Preview, amongst which ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions.
• Also the Patch Removal Tool failed, pointing to an issue with the Remote Debugger: “CleanupBlock (UnAdvertiseFeatures) failed on product (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger - ENU).”

Good news: Today Microsoft announced the next version of Visual Studio Team System, previously known as "Rosario", will be called VSTS 2010. Some good information can be found on in Somasegar's post and in the official press release. In short the message is that Application Lifecycle Management will be taken to the next level to better facilitate architects, testers and project managers, but also new audiences such as application maintenance people. I am sure you know that Microsoft are very open in developing new products and receiving feedback, so you can already enjoy an early "Rosario" build, which is downloadable as a VPC. A new version is expected shortly, which would make sense since the most interesting conferences of all is about to kick-off in 4 weeks...

The Professional Developer Conference was last held in Los Angeles three years ago. Then Microsoft announced The LINQ Project, WinFX including workflow foundation and presentation foundation and the designer toolset we all know now as the Expression suite. This PDC is all about the cloud and Live, which sounds very promising.

Wow, that were two impressive days. There are so many ways that partners are extending Visual Studio, it is really inspiring. My presentation was one of two about how to Extend TFS. The conference ended by a bunch of partners getting 4 minutes each to present their solution: T4 Editors, testing and performance tools, game factories, controls, etc.

Are you interesting in VSX, check out this site and this book, that was handed out at the conference.

Today is the first day of the the Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Conference, about which I wrote some time ago.

There are some great sessions about Visual Studio, Shell, DSLs and VSTS, most of which are focused on product developers. This morning Rico Mariano, the Visual Studio Chief Architect, presented the kick off and talked about his pillars for the next Visual Studio versions. While Dev10 is underway, long term planning for Dev11 and Dev12 has already started. In general he said the teams will focus on Visual Studio being extensible (very relevant to this audience), scalable (Rico is a performance guy), modern, connected and frugal. The message was presented with some great anecdotes on the side from his years of experience on related teams since late 80s.

Each next version of Visual Studio should also be good looking, focused on a certain group of end users and obviously support the latest hardware and software.

Good stuff! Session decks are posted here

Last month has seen a lot of releases following the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and Team System http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-shipped.aspx , http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-team-system-2008-ships.aspx

The story around VS SDK and Domain Specific Languages toolkit http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2007/11/22/what-s-new-for-dsl-tools-in-vs2008-vs2008-sdk.aspx

VSTS Web Access has made access to TFS so much easier for non-technicians http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/30/vsts-web-access-power-tool-for-team-system-2008-released.aspx

The ASP.NET extensions provide a Model-View-Controller framework and VS2008 Silverlight support amongst others http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/09/asp-net-3-5-extensions-ctp-preview-released.aspx

And finally today the upgraded power tools for Team Foundation Server have been released http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/12/21/december-07-release-of-the-tfs-power-tools-for-tfs-2008-are-available.aspx

If you are building .NET 2.0 applications, you really should take a look at all of the above.