Personal Updates, VS2008/.NET 3.5 SP1 Information, and much more...

posted on 26 Aug 2008 | News | Visual Studio

Sorry for the long delay between posts, a lot has been going on in my world as of late. Here's a quick run down of the recent personal events that have kept me busy (and postless):

  • 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! (-;