Joining the party are the Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5 Betas along with the Windows Server 8 Beta.

Links:

• Windows 8 Customer Preview – Main Site
• Windows 8 Customer Preview – Setup
• Windows 8 Customer Preview – ISOs

• Visual Studio 11 Beta – Main Site
• Visual Studio 11 Beta – Ultimate
• Visual Studio 11 Beta – Visual Studio SDK
• Visual Studio 11 Beta – .NET 4.5

• Windows 8 Server Beta – Main Site
• Windows 8 Server Beta – Download (MSDN Subscribers Only)

Note: To install the Windows 8 Customer Preview from an ISO image, you will still need to run the Setup download in order to get a product key.

Happy downloading!

Update (2012-03-06): Zain Naboulsi has posted a fairly awesome (and much more complete) Windows 8 Consumer Preview link list on the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks Blog.

- Open the Visual Studio macros IDE by navigating to Tools –> Macros –> Macros IDE (or pressing Alt+F11).

- Right click on “MyMacros” and select Add New –> Add New Item.

- Select the Module template, name the module “Search”, and click Add.

- Paste the following code directly before the “End Module” line:

Sub Search()
    Dim strUrl As String
    Dim selection As TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection()
    If selection.Text <> "" Then
        strUrl = "www.google.com/search?q=" + selection.Text
        ' strUrl = "www.bing.com/search?q=" + selection.Text
        DTE.ExecuteCommand("View.URL", strUrl)
    Else
        MsgBox("Select Text first to Search")
    End If
End Sub

- (Optional) If you prefer to use Bing for your search, uncomment the Bing line and comment out the Google line.

- Your macro editor window should now look something like this:

- Save and close the Macro Editor window and IDE.

- Right click on the Visual Studio toolbar and select Customize.

- Under the Toolbars tab, check the Context Menus option and the switch to the Commands tab.

- Select the Macros Category, and then select the “MyMacros.Search.Search” macro.

- Drag the selected macro onto “Editor Context Menus” -> “Code Window” and then drop it where you want it in the context menu (I place mine below the Paste command).

- Right click on the new context menu item and change it’s name to “&Web Search”.

- Click close on the Customize window.

- You are now done! If everything has gone according to plan, when viewing a source code file you should now see a new context menu item that will do a web search on any selected text when you click it:

Step 1: Open the Visual Studio macros IDE by navigating to Tools –> Macros –> Macros IDE.

Step 2: Double click on “MyMacros” and then on “EnvironmentEvents”. You should now be looking at a VB code editor window.

Step 3: Paste the following code directly before the “End Module” line:

Private Sub BuildEvents_OnBuildProjConfigDone(ByVal Project As String, ByVal ProjectConfig As String, ByVal Platform As String, ByVal SolutionConfig As String, ByVal Success As Boolean) Handles BuildEvents.OnBuildProjConfigDone
 
    If Success = False Then
        DTE.ExecuteCommand("Build.Cancel")
    End If
 
End Sub

Step 4: Save and close the Macro Editor window and IDE.

All done!

The official 1.3.0 documentation was posted this weekend as well and is also available from the downloads link above, or this Google Code download page.

Keep your eyes peeled for a jQuery 1.3.2 release anytime in the next few days as John Resig has mentioned there is still one last 1.3 regression they are working on fixing.

For those interested, the regression has to do with the $(document).ready() function waiting until images are fully loaded in Internet Explorer 6 & 7. The jQuery bug ticket ID is #3988 and here’s a Stack Overflow question in which John Resig talks about the issue in some detail.

• FxCop 1.36 download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9aeaa970-f281-4fb0-aba1-d59d7ed09772&DisplayLang=en
• Whats new in FxCop 1.36 can be found in this post on the MS Visual Studio Code Analysis Team Blog.

For those who haven’t used it before, FxCop is a tool to analyze .NET assemblies based on a set of rules in order to find potential defects or design issues. The tool comes with a lot of very helpful built in analysis rules that are broken out into seperate categories (e.g. Performance, Design, Globalization, etc..). A lot of Continuous Integration tools have the ability to include FxCop analysis as part of a build so that the warnings FxCop generates can be tracked over time (hopefully in the *downward* direction).

And on a somewhat related note, I also wanted to add the download link for StyleCop, which ironically, is easy to find even though I’m pretty sure a lot more people are using FxCop.

• StyleCop 4.3 download: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx
• Updates and news about StyleCop can be found on the StyleCop Blog.

StyleCop is a tool which analyzes C# source code using a set of rules (much like FxCop) in order to enforce code styling guidelines. It can be used in Continuous Integration projects to verify code style rules are being met. The rule documentation is also available at the link above. I have found reading the rule justifications to be quite educational at times, especially since many of the StyleCop rules run counter to common .NET programming practices that I’ve seen.

Happy jQuerying!

• I was promoted to “Software Engineer II”.
• I got married (I love you Erika!). The wedding was wonderful. Many thanks to all who were in attendance.
• Spent a week on honeymoon in Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, Canada (4 days and 3 days respectively).

So, enough of the mushy stuff.

This last Saturday was the Jacksonville Code Camp and it was a very nice event despite the last minute change in location due to after effects of Tropical Storm Fay. There were a lot of great sessions and the speakers all did a great job. (I even won a copy of CodeSmith Professional Tools in the raffle… woot!) This was my second year in attendance.

For those in the Jacksonville area, the Jacksonville Developers User Group website can be found at http://www.jaxdug.com/ and contains information on Jacksonville area Developer events. I have agreed to do my first user group talk in October and well be covering what free tools are available to make .Net developers’ lives easier. (I will be posting the slides here on my site afterward.)

VS2008 & .NET 3.5 SP1 Fun!: Service Pack 1 for Microsoft .NET 3.5 and Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 have been released! (about a week ago…) Information on the updates included with the service packs can be found here, and for the impatient, you can download the service packs directly from here. If you have trouble with the installation of the service packs, try running the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool. Microsoft has also released the Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit which has even more information about the new features in the service packs and how to use them (This is in addition to the regular Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 Training Kit.) Another important release that got lost a little in the hype over .NET 3.5 SP1/VS2008 SP1 is the release of SQL Server 2008. This includes SQL Server 2008 Express Edition which you can grab here for those interested.

Now if that wasn’t enough for one post…. on with the show!

XAMLPad 4.0 has been released and can be downloaded from here. But wait.. what is XAMLPad?:

“XamlPad (xamlpad.exe) is a basic visual editor for Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML). XAMLPad is installed with the SDK and can be found from the start menu at All Programs/Microsoft Windows SDK/Tools/XAMLPad. ”

While you’re downloading XAMLPad, be sure to grab LINQPad if you don’t already have it.

And there’s still more…
NHibernate 2.0 Final has also been released! It can be downloaded here. And while the main NHibernate page doesn’t have the link up yet, the release notes for this release can be found here.

Finally, bringing up the rear on the notable release train is the official release of Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth. If you’re not familiar with Microsoft’s Photosynth technology, Photosynth’s About Page and this CNET Article about the launch should give you a good head start.

My very last news item for today (I promise!) is that Sara Ford has announced the pre-sale of her first book, “Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity“. If you’re not familiar with Sara Ford and her blog… then you have a lot of reading to do… Sara has an almost daily piece of information about Visual Studio IDE and its various components. Well worth the read if you can squeeze just one more item into your daily blog diet.

Wooo! Hows that for an “I’m not dead, just busy” post! (-;