We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release.

Last month I blogged about a patch we released for the VS 2010 RC that fixed a bad intellisense crash issue.  This past week we released two additional patches that you can download and apply to the VS 2010 RC to immediately fix two other common issues we’ve seen people run into:

Patch that fixes crashes with Tooltip invocation and when hovering over identifiers

The Visual Studio team recently released a second patch that fixes some crashes we’ve seen when tooltips are displayed – most commonly when hovering over an identifier to view a QuickInfo tooltip.

You can learn more about this issue from this blog post, and download and apply the patch here.

Patch that fixes issues with the Web Forms designer not correctly adding controls to the auto-generated designer files

The Visual Web Developer team recently released a patch that fixes issues where web controls are not correctly added to the .designer.cs file associated with the .aspx file – which means they can’t be programmed against in the code-behind file. 

This issue is most commonly described as “controls are not being recognized in the code-behind” or “editing existing .aspx files regenerates the .aspx.designer.(vb or cs) file and controls are now missing” or “I can’t embed controls within the Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer or the <asp:createuserwizard> control”.

You can learn more about the issue here, and download the patch that fixes it here.

Common Cause of Intellisense and IDE sluggishness on Windows XP, Vista, Win Server 2003/2008 systems

Over the last few months we’ve occasionally seen reports of people seeing tremendous slowness when typing and using intellisense within VS 2010 despite running on decent machines.  It took us awhile to track down the cause – but we have found that the common culprit seems to be that these machines don’t have the latest versions of the UIA (Windows Automation) component installed.

UIA 3 ships with Windows 7, and is a recommended Windows Update patch on XP and Vista (which is why we didn’t see the problem in our tests – since our machines are patched with all recommended updates).  Many systems (especially on XP) don’t automatically install recommended updates, though, and are running with older versions of UIA. This can cause significant performance slow-downs within the VS 2010 editor when large lists are displayed (for example: with intellisense).

If you are running on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and are seeing any performance issues with the editor or IDE, please install the free UIA 3 update that can be downloaded from this page.  If you scroll down the page you’ll find direct links to versions for each OS.

Note that we are making improvements to the final release of VS 2010 so that we don’t have big perf issues when UIA 3 isn’t installed – and we are also adding a message within the IDE that will warn you if you don’t have UIA 3 installed and accessibility is activated.

Improved Text Rendering with WPF 4 and VS 2010

We recently made some nice changes to WPF 4 which improve the text clarity and text crispness over what was in the VS 2010/.NET 4 Release Candidate.  In particular these changes improve scenarios where you have a dark background with light text.

You can learn more about these improvements in this WPF Team blog post.  These changes will be in the final release of VS 2010 and .NET 4.

Hope this helps,

Scott

I’ll be presenting in Glasgow, Scotland on March 25th

I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Glasgow on March 25th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.

You can learn more about the event and register for free here.  There are only a few spots left – so register quickly. 

When the event fills up there will be a wait-list – please add yourself to this as we’ll be encouraging people who won’t be able to attend to let us know ahead of time so that we can add more people to the event.

I’ll be presenting in Birmingham, England on March 26th

I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Birmingham (UK) on March 26th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and also potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.

You can learn more about the event and register for free here.

The event unfortunately filled up immediately (even before I had a chance to blog it) – but there is a waitlist.  If you’d like to attend please add yourself to it as hopefully a number of people will be able to attend off of it.

UK Party at MIX

If you are going to MIX and are from the UK send mail to phil@pixelprogramming.com (or tweet him @plip) for an invite to a party being organized for UK MIX attendees next Sunday (March 14th).  Knowing the people involved I’m sure the party will be fun. <g>

Cool MIX10 iPhone App

Speaking of MIX (and UK developers), Chris Hardy has posted a cool new MIX10 iPhone application on the Apple AppStore.  The free application helps track sessions, rooms, etc.  You can learn more about it from Chris’ blog post here.  The app works for everyone – not just those from the UK.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Patrick recently posted about something he found odd when installing the VS 2010 RC – which was that code intellisense for C# wasn’t working.  When he pulled up Tools->Options and checked under the Text Editor->C# settings he noticed that the reason Intellisense wasn’t working was because his profile had them turned off – and he couldn’t understand why it was configured to be off by default:

Why does this happen?

The above situation occurs because:

1) When you run VS 2010 the first time on a machine that has had VS 2008 installed on it, it asks you if you want to import your existing VS 2008 profile settings.  By default this checkbox is checked – which means you by default automatically import your existing settings.

2) Some VS plugins – for example Resharper – turn off the built-in C# code intellisense within VS and instead replace it with their own implementation.  If you’ve installed Resharper on VS 2008, the above VS code intellisense profile settings are turned off.  When you import your existing profile during VS 2010’s first time run experience the code intellisense settings import over in a disabled state.  If you haven’t installed Resharper on VS 2010 (which is a separate install) – then by default you’ll end up with intellisense turned off.

How to Fix this?

Fixing this situation with the VS 2010 RC is pretty easy.  Just do one of two things:

1) Use the Tools->Options menu command, select the Text Editor->C# settings, and then check the two circled check boxes above (Auto-list members and Parameter information).  Intellisense will then be turned on and work fine.

or:

2) Install the version of Resharper that works with the VS 2010 RC. It then enables intellisense using its own mechanism.

We are modifying the profile import behavior in the final release of VS 2010

We’ve heard reports of a few people running into this – and since the behavior is pretty confusing we are modifying the profile import behavior with the final release of VS 2010 to avoid it.  If a plugin has turned intellisense off with VS 2008, by default when you import the profile into VS 2010 we will re-enable it.  This will ensure that on a clean VS 2010 install intellisense always works by default. 

Hope this helps,

Scott

Last week I blogged about an intellisense crashing issue that is unfortunately in the VS 2010 RC. 

Crash Symptom

If you are encountering frequent VS 2010 crashes when you are typing in the editor while Intellisense is popping up and/or being dismissed then you are running into this issue.

Patch Now Available

This morning we made available a VS 2010 RC patch which fixes this issue.  You can download and run it here. 

Please apply it if you are encountering any crashes with the VS 2010 RC, or if you have a tablet, multi-touch, screen-reader or external devices attached (including Wacom tablets, phones/ipods, and others that connect via USB).

Please make sure to submit any issues you encounter with the VS 2010 RC to us via the connect.microsoft.com web-site.  Once you’ve entered the issue there please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) with a pointer to the issue and I’ll make sure the appropriate team follows up quickly.

Hope this helps,

Scott

We shipped the VS 2010 RC on Monday, and have seen some great feedback regarding performance and stability with it.

One issue, though, that we have seen a number of people run into is an intellisense crash that happens very frequently on machines that have UI Automation enabled and certain devices connected.

Crash Symptom

If you are encountering frequent VS 2010 crashes when you are typing in the editor while Intellisense is popping up and/or being dismissed then you are running into this issue.

Why does the crash happen?

The most common cause of the crash happening is that you are running a machine that:

• Is a Tablet PC (even if you aren’t using the pen)
• Has multi-touch screen drivers enabled
• Has an external input device like a pen or Wacom tablet
• Has a screen-reader enabled

It turns out that a late fix right before the RC shipped modified a UI input code path that unfortunately exposed this bug.

A patch is coming to fix this issue

We are working on shipping a VS 2010 RC patch that we’ll release next week that will fix the issue and prevent it from occurring.  I’ll blog a pointer to the patch once it is available.

How to work around the issue now

There are two ways you can work around the issue now.  One is to disable your Tablet services (read this article for details on how to do this) and/or disable Multi-touch/Pen drivers on your system.  The other is to set a registry key.

You can read about both of these workaround in this VS Team Blog Post.

What if you still see crashes?

Please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) if you are still seeing any crashes after trying out these steps (or encounter crashes for non-Intellisense scenarios) – we’d like to make sure we investigate and follow-up any others you encounter.

Hope this helps,

Scott

As I mentioned in my blog post about the RC on Monday, please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) about any bugs or issues you encounter – that way I can make sure to connect you with someone who can follow up and investigate them quickly.

Online Chat with Me Thursday February 11th at 10am PST

I’m doing a virtual webcast chat Thursday February 11th from 10am to 11:30am (PST timezone).  The chat is open to everyone and sponsored by the LIDNUG user group.  The format of the chat is open - and you can ask anything while you listen in as I try and answer as many questions as possible.  I expect I’ll spend a lot of time talking about VS 2010, .NET 4, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2.

You can register and attend the chat for free here.

Hope this helps,

Scott

This afternoon we made available the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release candidates.  You can find download links here.

Right now the downloads are available only to MSDN subscribers.  Starting Wednesday (Feb 10th) everyone will be able to download them (regardless of whether you are a MSDN subscriber or not).

Background on the Release Candidate

I blogged about us deciding to ship a public VS 2010 release candidate last December.  The primary motivation behind releasing a public RC was to ensure that we could get broad testing and feedback on the performance and stability work we’ve been doing since the last public VS 2010 Beta 2 release.

Over the last few months we’ve been releasing interim builds to a small set of folks who have been helping us validate fixes and measure very large projects and solutions.  The feedback from them has been extremely positive the last few weeks – which is why we are now opening up today’s build to a much wider set of people to people to try out.

The RC has only been out a few hours so far – but the feedback so far on Twitter has been nice to see:

• @DanWahlin: The performance improvements with Visual Studio 2010 RC compared to previous builds are huge. Really happy with what I’m seeing so far.
• @peterbromberg: VS2010 RC: I must admit, I am impressed. Major speed and performance improvements. They are obvious immediately!
• @Nick_Craver: RC performance is ridiculously faster, can’t wait to switch over full time!
• @Rlz2cool: Just tried VS2010 RC. One word incredible. Super fast, great build with things I saw in earlier releases fixed. So awesome.
• @ddotterer: Trying out VS2010 RC: Snappier UI, much faster intellisense, significant build time reduction, etc. Overall: AWESOME JOB
• @tomkirbygreen: Oh my goodness, VS2010 RC is much, much faster. Kudos to the VS perf team and everyone else. Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008
• @JoshODBrown The developers on the Visual Studio 2010 RC must have had their usual beverages replaced with unicorn tears or something. #VS2010 #awesome
• @jbristowe: Holy Butterball! VS 2010 RC is crazy fast. It makes me feel like this: http://bit.ly/cPaOvE

Reporting Issues

Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix.  If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it.  I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).

If you do install and use the VS 2010 RC we’d also really appreciate if you would fill out this survey about your experiences.

Answers to a few questions and known issues

Here are a few answers to some questions/known issues:

• If you have previously installed VS 2010 Beta 2 on your computer you should use Add/Remove Programs (within Windows Control Panel) to remove VS 2010 Beta2 and .NET 4 Beta2 before installing the VS 2010 RC.  Note that VS 2010 RC can be installed on the same machine side-by-side with VS 2008 and VS 2005.
• Silverlight 3 projects are supported with today’s VS 2010 RC build – however Silverlight 4 projects are not yet supported.  We will be adding VS 2010 RC support for SL4 with the next public Silverlight 4 drop. If you are doing active Silverlight 4 development today we recommend staying with the VS10 Beta 2 build for now.
• We recently identified a crashing bug that can impact systems that have multi-touch and some screen-readers enabled.  We are working on a patch for people who are impacted by it.
• We recently found an issue where project upgrades from VS 2008 can take a long time to complete if the project has .xsd files within them.  If you think VS is taking a long time on a project upgrade give it a few more minutes to complete before assuming it has hung – you might be running into this slow upgrade issue.  Note that once the project is upgraded the performance should return to normal. We are working to fix this with the final release.

Hope this helps,

Scott

A few people have emailed me recently asking about the availability of a Visual Studio –vsdoc intellisense hint file for jQuery 1.4.1. 

I blogged about –vsdoc files in the past – they provide additional intellisense help information for Visual Studio, and enable you to get a richer intellisense experience with dynamic Javascript libraries.  If you are using VS 2008 SP1 you’ll want to download and install this patch in order to have VS 2008 automatically use –vsdoc files with intellisense.  VS 2010 has support for –vsdoc files built-in.

jQuery 1.4.1 –vsdoc download

The good news is that you can download –vsdoc files for jQuery directly from the jQuery web-site (look for the “Documentation: Visual Studio” link under each major version).  Here is a direct pointer to the recently released –vsdoc file for jQuery 1.4.1 that you can use.

Hope this helps,

Scott

This is the fifteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s post covers a nice addition to ASP.NET and Windows Forms with .NET 4 - built-in charting control support.

ASP.NET and Windows Forms Charting Controls

A little over 14 months ago I blogged about how Microsoft was making available a free download of charting controls for both ASP.NET 3.5 and Windows Forms 3.5. 

You can download and use these runtime controls for free within your web and client applications today.  You can also download VS 2008 tooling support for them.  They provide a rich set of charting capabilities that is easy to use.  To get a sense of what all you can do with them, I recommend downloading the ASP.NET and Windows Forms sample projects which provide more than 200 samples within them.  Below is a screen-shot of some pie and doughnut chart samples from the ASP.NET sample application:

Charting Controls Now Built-into .NET 4

With .NET 3.5 you had to separately download the chart controls and add them into your application.  With .NET 4 these controls are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and Windows Forms 4 – which means you can immediately take advantage of them out of the box (no separate download or registration required). 

Within ASP.NET 4 applications you’ll find that there is now a new built-in <asp:chart> control within the “Data” tab of the Toolbox:

You can use this control without having to register or wire-up any configuration file entries.  All of the charting control configuration is now pre-registered with ASP.NET 4 (meaning nothing has to be added to an application’s web.config file for them to work).  This enables you to maintain very clean and minimal Web.config files.

Learning more about the <asp:chart> control

Scott Mitchell has written a great series of articles on the www.4guysfromrolla.com site on how to take advantage of the <asp:chart> control:

1. Getting Started - walks through getting started using the Chart Controls, from version requirements to downloading and installing the Chart Controls, to displaying a simple chart in an ASP.NET page.
2. Plotting Chart Data - examines the multitude of ways by which data can be plotted on a chart, from databinding to manually adding the points one at a time.
3. Rendering the Chart - the Chart Controls offer a variety of ways to render the chart data into an image. This article explores these options.
4. Sorting and Filtering Chart Data - this article shows how to programmatically sort and filter the chart’s data prior to display.
5. Programmatically Generating Chart Images - learn how to programmatically create and alter the chart image file.
6. Creating Drill Down Reports - see how to build drill down reports using the Chart control.
7. Adding Statistical Formulas - learn how to add statistical formulas, such as mean, median, variance, and forecasts, to your charts.
8. Enhancing Charts With Ajax - improve the user experience for dynamic and interactive charts using Ajax.

His articles are written using .NET 3.5 and the separate ASP.NET charting controls download – but all of the concepts and syntax work out of the box exactly the same with ASP.NET 4.

Michael Ceranski has also written a blog post demonstrating how to use the ASP.NET Chart control within an ASP.NET MVC application.  I’m hoping someone will create some nice ASP.NET MVC Html.Chart() helper methods soon that will make this even easier to do in the future.

Hope this helps,

Scott

I’ve been working on a series of blog posts the last few months that cover some of the new features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010.

Earlier today someone pointed me at some nice “quick hit” videos that have been published that also provide quick first looks at some of the new features coming with ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010.  These videos aren’t an exhaustive list of everything new – but do provide a great way to quickly learn about many of the cool new things coming with the release. 

ASP.NET 4 Videos

You can learn more about some of the new ASP.NET 4 features by watching these 22 ASP.NET Quick Hit Videos.

VS 2010 Videos

You can learn more about a few of the new VS 2010 features by watching these 8 VS 2010 Quick Hit Videos.

ASP.NET Team Member Interviews

In addition to the feature demo videos above, you can also watch these ASP.NET team member interviews done by Scott Hanselman.  In them various ASP.NET team members talk about a few of the new features they’ve worked on.

There are a lot more features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010 not covered by all of these videos.  But hopefully the above clips provide a good way to quickly get a sense of some of the new capabilities.

Hope this helps,

Scott