.NET 3.5 SP1 Beta & VS2008 SP1 Beta

SP1 Beta for the .NET Framework 3.5 and the SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2008 have been released. You can read about the new stuff on ScottGu’s Blog.

There are two thing on the new release of .NET that interest me above others the GPU-based effects and the new WriteableBitmap class that I plan to use in future Pixa’s features and I will cover them in future posts.

If you want to learn more on GPU-based Effects for WPF, keep an eye on Greg Schechter’s Blog.

Introduction to custom designers

Yogev Cohen is writing a series about creating your own custom designers, which is useful if your create control libraries or you are just intrigued about how this things work.

1. Create your own Designer or Introduction To Custom Designers – Part 1- Designer
2. Create your own Designer or Introduction To Custom Designers – Part 2- UI, Glyphs

And he had promise me to post about custom designer for WPF controls in the future!!

Debugging .NET Framework Source Code

On October last year Scott Guthrie blogged about Microsoft plans to release the .NET Framework Source Code to enable debugging support with Visual Studio 2008, well the moment is come and now you can browse and debug the source code of the following libraries:

.NET Base Class Libraries:
System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections
System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics
System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO
System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime
System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc.

ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)
Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)
ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

And soon the LINQ, WCF and the Workflow Foundation will be added.

You can find a detailed post by Shawn Burke that explains the exact steps on how to enable this.

Visual Studio 2008 RTM is available for MSDN subscribers

The Visual Studio 2008 RTM is ready and available to download for MSDN subscribers.

Update:

if you are not a MSDN subscribers then you have the following alternatives:

1. A 90-day free trial edition of VS2008 Team Suite (here).
2. Visual Studio 2008 Express which is completely free (here).
3. or just the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime (here)

Visual Studio 2008 and Framework 3.5 to RTM in November

At last for all of you that were waiting… the Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 are going to be released by the end of November 2007.

Read the press release for more info here.