September 2008 Entries
from: Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - jQuery to ship with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio
Microsoft is going to make jQuery part of the official dev platform. JQuery will come with Visual Studio in the long term, and in the short term it'll ship with ASP.NET MVC. We'll also ship a version includes Intellisense in Visual Studio.
The Announcement Blog Posts
This is cool because we're using jQuery just as it is. It's Open Source, and we'll use it and ship it via its MIT license, unchanged. If there's changes we want, we'll submit a patch just like anyone else. JQuery will also have full support from PSS like any other Microsoft product, starting later this year. Folks have said Microsoft would never include Open Source in the platform, I'm hoping this move is representative of a bright future.
This is really good news for jQuery users. It means that it will just be there all the time and there will be a stable, supported reference to use when debating the reasons to use it to management.
jQuery makes developing with Javascript much easier and does wonders for manipulating CSS at runtime.
Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0 (Silverlight 2 RC0) is now available to developers for testing purposes
The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site
Time to get ready for the next release. There are some interesting breaking changes, the most important being a change to the Object reference from the web page hosting your Silverlight App.
I will sure write up some gotchas if I run across anything strange.
Damien Guard has made his T4 Templates Output to VB (yeah!).
LINQ to SQL T4 template for Visual Studio 2008
The latest update to my template for generating LINQ to SQL classes from DBML is now available.
If you want to customize the LINQ to SQL code generation phase in your project without additional tool dependencies this could be what you’re looking for.
I was looking for a better way to customize the Linq to SQL CodeSpit and this lets us do it from inside Visual Studio in a very painless way. No extra tools required. CodeSmith and CodeRush are still quite valueable, but this method integrates very nicely without requiring extra tools.
Thanks to Jim Wooley for pointing me to it, I was not aware how far this had come.
What's T4? In short, It's Native Code Generation inside Visual Studio 2008 (and 2005 with extensions)
Oleg Sych explains most of it here.
When I first saw this, I did not think it was what I needed, it turns out it was EXACTLY what I needed, I just didn't know it. This is well worth your time to investigate if you are doing any code generation for LINQ. (or anything else for that matter, T4 doesn't care, you can codegen a UI using XAML or HTML with it quite easily).
It seems that the Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview doesn't like extra bits in your .SLN file that it doesn't recognize.
I had a couple Silverlight Solutions suddenly stop opening in Blend.
One of my developers is using VisualSVN and committed his .SLN File.
Blend doesn't like the following lines at the bottom of the .SLN file:
GlobalSection(SolutionProperties) = preSolution
HideSolutionNode = FALSE
EndGlobalSection
GlobalSection(ExtensibilityGlobals) = postSolution
VisualSVNWorkingCopyRoot =
EndGlobalSection
Delete those lines and magically the solution now opens again in Blend.
I'm sure this is a Beta thing and hopefully the next release will rid us of these annoyances.
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