Testing features:

• Use Microsoft Test Manager to capture and playback action recordings for Silverlight 4 applications.
• Create coded UI tests for Silverlight 4 applications with Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.
• Edit coded UI tests using a graphical editor with Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.
• Use action recordings to fast forward through manual tests that need to support Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6.
• Run coded UI tests for web applications using Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

Code visualization and modeling features (requires Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate):

• Use the Generate Code command to generate skeleton code from elements on UML class diagrams. You can use the default transformations, or you can write custom transformations to translate UML types into code.
• Create UML class diagrams from existing code.
• Explore the organization and relationships in C, C++, and ASP.NET projects by generating dependency graphs.
• Import elements from UML sequence diagrams, class diagrams, and use case diagrams as XMI 2.1 files that are exported from other modeling tools.
• Create links and view links from work items to model elements.
• Create layer diagrams from C or C++ code and validate dependencies.
• Write code to modify layer diagrams and to validate code against layer diagrams.

Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Available For Download is a post from: Therefore Systems

Few days ago I finished reading Programming Entity Framework Second Edition by Julia Lerman. This is a review of the book.

Julia has written a book which targets a broad spectrum of EF expertise. If you are a beginner then this book is for you to learn Entity Framework. If you are an expert then this book is for you to learn advance Entity Framework concepts. Her writing style is seldom found in technical books these days. The ability to write chapters that just flow one after another is not something many technical authors these days can accomplish. The book was very easy to read with sensible examples and well balanced code to content ratio.

I am a LINQ To SQL kinda guy and I’ve always had something against Entity Framework. I guess a part of it was my first benchmark which I did with Entity Framework version 1.0 and I was shocked to see abysmal performance. My second reason for staying away from EF was the fear of learning LINQ To Entities. This book took that fear away after one reading of the chapter on LINQ To Entities. BTW: Entity Framework 4 is a much better ORM than its predecessor and it is my preferred choice now.  Microsoft has addressed most of the issues with performance.

Back to the book review. One thing which underwhelms me about programming books is either they have too much code or they don’t have much code at all. Julia maintained a perfect balance between code examples and explanatory text.

Chapters on Customizing Entities, POCOs and performance optimization are by themselves worth the money and time you’ll spend reading this book.

Overall a well written, highly enjoyable and substantially informative book.

Julia also maintains a site for this book LearningEntityFramework.

Book Review Programming Entity Framework Second Edition is a post from: Therefore Systems

Rocket SVN which is integrated with Visual Studio provides easily access information on pending changes.

You also get a repository explorer and a working copy explorer.

Also within the Solution Explorer, Rocket SVN indicates with little icons the files that have changed and the files which have not.

I’ve been running Rocket SVN for last 3 days and I’m very happy with the tool.

Rocket SVN is available for free download. Axosoft has indicated that sometime in future they will start charging for the product.

Announcement: Rocket SVN From Axosoft Free Download is a post from: Therefore Systems

As always, I thank the visitors and hope that content on ThereforeSystems has been helpful.

A Little Milestone in ThereforeSystems Journey is a post from: Therefore Systems

1. It did not ripple through masses.
2. The tide was not on it’s side.
3. It did not create waves in hearts or minds of people.
4. The sail was in opposite direction.
5. The product itself was shallow.

So it is finally time to wave it goodbye.

For the record this was getting way out of hand for our geeky minds and we were attracting unwanted attention at the restaurant. We decided to abandon the idea of coming out with more reasons.

Five Reasons Why Google Wave Failed is a post from: Therefore Systems

Problem Statement

At present we have Ctrl + . which opens intellisense and lists all methods, properties events available for the corresponding object. There are times when I and I assume other users are only interested in looking at either events, methods or properties.

Proposed Solution

I suggest the following shortcuts which will filter the list:
Ctrl + . + p – Display only properties
Ctrl + . + e – Display only events
Ctrl + . + m – Display only methods

And the response from Microsoft today is:

Thanks for taking the time to submit this suggestion! I sincerely apologize for the amount of time that has taken to get back to you.
When we locked down on our final feature set for the next version of Visual Studio, IntelliSense completion set filtering for member types didn’t make the cut–though it was considered. However, his is a commonly requested feature, and we’ll consider it for a future release of Visual Studio. Please feel free to contact me directly at … if you have any further thoughts.

I am glad to know that this will at-least be considered for a future release. I’ll be happy if it ever gets implemented.

Intellisense Enhancements I want is a post from: Therefore Systems

Download link for Productivity Power Tools.

Download Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools is a post from: Therefore Systems

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2
4. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition
6. Microsoft Office Web Applications
7. Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
8. Microsoft Project Server 2010
9. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010
10. Microsoft Visio 2010
11. Microsoft Project 2010
12. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

So fireup your free download manager and download this absolute SharePoint 2010 nirvana. If you are contrained on bandwidth then just to let you know that full download will set you back by approximately 18GB.

Here is the download link.

Mother Of All SharePoint 2010 Virtual Machines is a post from: Therefore Systems

Windows 7 Commercial – More Happy Is Coming is a post from: Therefore Systems

The best presentation of the day which I attended was by Damian Edwards on ASP.NET MVC. Well structured and full of useful information. ASP.NET MVC is my current focus and that made the presentation even more interesting for me . Well done Damian.

I also attended a talk on BizSpark by Rog42 and Christian Longstaff. Biz Spark is a great program for startups and if you are one then you should definitely look at it. Where else can you get a suite of world class software at $100 which is payable in third year. I’m thinking that I might consider it for my company.

I also enjoyed Sharepoint presentation by Andrew Coates and Jeremy Thake. Their presentation was well synchronised and full of Sharepoint goodness. I’m not too much into Sharepoint but even I picked up points which I could use if god forbid I have to do any Sharepoint work again.

TechEd Australia Day 2 is a post from: Therefore Systems