Visual Studio 2010 after installation

Well I got Visual Studio 2010 installed and the first thing I tried out was the entity framework designer. I really enjoy the pin and remove feature of the start page. I'm always building ConsoleApplication24 so i can test an idea. Now I can finally get rid of them without having to delete or move them. It appears to handle more complicated associations and inheritance better but still seems a little shy of prime time. It handled the following class hierarchy:


The above hierarchy was built all from one table. With a condition on the child classes specifying an expected value for a TransactionTypeId column. This compiled with only one error. Something about the TransactionTypeId requiring a default value. I opened up the edmx file and added, to my suprise, a DefaultValue attribute with the assistance of intellisense. After that it compiled fine.

My new tables do not have primary keys on all of them yet. The designer tried to infer the keys for each entity from something, but it did not get them correct. I had to go and remove extra columns from the entity keys.

Hopefully I will have more information in the future. I'll post again on VS 2010 when I find or use something interesting again. Until then, happy coding.

VS 2010 Beta

I've decided to download and install Visual Studio 2010 Professional (Beta 1). The download page says it will run on Windows 7, which is what i've been running at home for about a month now. I chose not to get the team suite edition due to the fact that I don't get to use that version at work. I don't want to be upset that my development environment at work is inferior to what i'm used to at home, since (unfortunately) I spend more time doing development at work than at home.

It actually downloaded a web installer. While i'm waiting for it to download, not only VS 2010, but .NET 4.0, Microsoft Help 3.0, and a whole bunch of other stuff (I'm guessing they are all required components). I noticed they also have a Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - May Preview. I'll download that if I need it, but I think I'm just going to try and figure things out on my own first.

Another interesting thing I notice in the downloader is that it has VS 2010 64-bit prerequisites. I hope that speeds up the environment.

.NET Source Stepping

Visual Studio 2008 has a feature that lets you step through the source code of the .NET framework when you are debugging. This can come in handy when you are trying to, for example, inherit from asp.net server controls to customize them, or figure out why a class is not operating as expected. This is not a feature that you will want turned on all the time because it will be inconvenient when debugging to have almost all of your errors stop in a .NET source file. Such as a KeyNotFoundException stopping in the Dictionary class. So be aware that this also turns off the Enable Just My Code (Managed only) option. You may want to turn this back on for regular development. However, To access this feature follow the steps below.

1. On the menu navigate to Tools -> Options


2. In the tree on the left inside the Options dialog that appears, navigate to Debugging -> General


3. Scroll down and check the option Enable .NET Framework source stepping

the screen shot below shows the sections in the Options dialog where you need to make changes