It’s been a while since the last goodie bag so I felt it was time to post some new goodies I’ve found on the net.

The Visual Studio Documentary

This is an hour long documentary that takes you behind the scenes of Microsoft's "Visual Studio".  It goes back to the very beginning when Alan Cooper sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates in 1988 and takes you into the future of the yet to be released Visual Studio 2010.

10 Must-Know Topics for Software Architects In 2009

There are some key trends emerging this year that will have ramifications for our work over the next decade. This article describes 10 topics that every developer should understand and have conversational knowledge about. Make sure you’re up to speed.

dev{shaped} eBook

All the great content from {You Shape} IT MSDN is now available for free as a compelling eBook for offline reading! Over the course of one year we assembled a collection of outstanding articles and resources for developers on www.microsoft.com/youshapeit/msdn and compiled them into a nice and consumable format for offline reading and forwarding that is really useful, interesting and fun to read too.

Snoop

This awesome tool was made to simplify visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime. It allows you to attach to a running WPF application and view a visual tree of the user interface control hierarchy, the property values of every control, and list of routed control events as they happen.

Vischeck and Daltonize

These two web based apps help you to adapt your applications to support people who are color blind. Vischeck simulates colorblind vision and Daltonize corrects images for colorblind viewers. Amazing and informative stuff.

Database Downloads

I learned about about this site at a geek meetup last night. They aggregate and sell several hundred databases of reference data across a variety of industries. Prices vary from tens to hundreds of dollars depending on the volume and nature of data. I highly recommend a browse through their collection – you might find just the some valuable data you can use on your current project.

I'm still catching my breath from being on the road the past few weeks. Hence the lack of new postings. In an effort to catch back up, I thought I'd highlight a few exciting announcements from last week’s MIX 09 conference:

Silverlight 3 Beta

Tons and tons of new stuff but the big story here is the ability for Silverlight applications to run outside the browser. By setting an attribute on your Silverlight object tag in the hosting page, users will be able to take a Silverlight 3 application in a page and run it offline from the desktop or start menu (works on PCs and Macs). The applications will literally launch from the temporary internet folder where they were downloaded. There's a new property and event into the application framework to detect if the computer is running on or offline. The Silverlight autoupdate facilities still work normally if the computer is online. They are tentatively calling these "lightweight data snacking applications". Also of note, there is a new SDK to enable Virtual Earth mapping from within Silveright applications.

Expression Blend 3 Beta

Two big features coming in Expression Blend. The first is an expanded library of prebuilt behaviors for wiring navigation to UI elements. Building the basic navigation pathways in an application will be as easy as clicking an element (tab, button, etc) and choosing the "Navigate to Page" behavior and selecting another page within the project. I predict that this will DRASTICALLY decrease the time to get your UI up and running.

And speaking of mock ups, there's a nifty new feature coming in the next beta of Blend 3 called SketchFlow. This is reminiscent of the ProtoXAML tool that's been floating around the net for a while. It sets the UI theme to what looks like a back-of-the-napkin style hand drawn user interface. The idea is to force your customer to review the application flow and not the pretty pixels. Combined with the new behaviors I mentioned above I expect this to dramatically accelerate the creation of prototypes and mock-ups. In addition to the look and feel, Sketchflow embeds a small utility into your Silverlight or WPF application that let's your end users see the full page/form structure of the application and mark up each screen with annotations that can be sent back to the development team for review.

Internet Explorer 8 RTM

This has been a long time coming and worth the wait I think. I’ve installed it on my machines and so far everything looks and works great. There are tons of new features. Web slices and accelerators are the head liners. Web slices let you take regions of a web page and host them on the toolbar in small drop down viewers. Convenient for quickly looking at information from a site such as current traffic conditions, weather, stock tickers, etc. Web accelerators let you highlight text on a page with the mouse and get a list of context sensitive actions such as Blog, Email, Search, or Map what you’ve highlighted. So far my favorites are the new find on page bar (ctrl-f) and the color coded tabs to let you know which tabs contain related pages. I do wish inactive tabs could be closed without activating them (ala Firefox).

Azure Services Platform

Two key announcements here: First, Azure will run .NET applications in full trust mode to allow support of native code and non-.NET languages via Fast CGI (PHP anyone?). Second, the recently announced SQL Server Data Services will support full relational database capabilities and will use the TDS wire protocol for speed and to allow developers to connect directly to their cloud databases from within Visual Studio Server Explorer. The first production release of Azure will drop by the end of this year.

Windows Web Application Gallery

This is a new hub that will host the installation bits of the most popular open source and community web applications that run on the Windows platform.  Featured apps include DotNetNuke, Umbraco, BlogEngine.NET, WordPress, and Drupal.

ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) 1.0 Released

Yep, that’s right. The MVC framework is FINALLY released. Head on over here to learn more and download it.

Those are my highlights. You can see recordings of all the MIX sessions here. I encourage you to check them out, especially the keynote by Debra Adler on the second day. It’s an incredibly inspirational story of how one person can change the world. In Debra’s case, she rewrote the rules for prescription delivery and convinced a major industry pharmacy to be the instrument of change. Highly recommended viewing!

Some cool things I’ve encountered over the past couple of weeks…

Code Contracts for .NET

This is a preview from the visual studio developer labs group that implements Design by Contract (DBC) principles as espoused by Bertrand Meyer in the Eiffel language. Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions. The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and invariant object states. The preview uses a small class framework and some compiler hooks to perform runtime and static compile time DBC rule checking. The preview will work with VS 2008 and the CTP of VS 2010. I’m a huge fan of DBC and from what’s said in the interview, it looks like DBC will be integrated into the 4.0 release of the .NET framework. Wohoo!

Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

Experts from more than 30 US and international cyber security organizations jointly released this consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime. Shockingly, most of these errors are not well understood by programmers; their avoidance is not widely taught by computer science programs; and their presence is frequently not tested by organizations developing software. Every member of your development staff needs to read this bulletin.

UI Design for Developers Video Series

Building an application with a good user experience is about more than pretty pixels and is every bit as important as the business logic in most applications. Here’s a link to some outstanding tutorials on the principles of graphic design produced by the Microsoft Platform & Tools Team. They’re short, very informative and cover the essential elements of graphic design.

Five Step UML: OOAD for Short Attention Spans

I’m a huge fan of UML and I was thrilled when we announced UML support in Visual Studio 2010. If you’d like to get a head start, this book excerpt will wet your appetite. FYI - I’m planning a series of screen casts that show the basics of OOAD using UML in VS 2010 and will highlight the architectures described in the recently updated Application Architecture Guide 2.0 book.

Modular Data Centers

This is just plain wild and for those of you who don’t think cloud computing is coming, think again. Data centers are becoming more and more modular and pluggable as the industry evolves towards a utility computing model (which I think is the right direction) and ALL the major players are banking on it. This article showcases one of the first offerings from HP.