About the Author

John Bowen is a Lead Software Engineer with InterKnowlogy. In this role he both develops software and provides technical leadership for large scale projects with larger teams, usually in the areas of WPF, Silverlight and Surface. These include projects which have been the subject of Microsoft case studies and received awards for technology innovation. John is also a Microsoft MVP for Client Application Development and provides training for both clients and at community and Microsoft sponsored events across the U.S. John has been writing software since majoring in computer science at the University of Southern California and at Boston University where he graduated in 2001. He has also pursued an interest in computer graphics since high school, where he won awards for both still and motion graphics. Before joining InterKnowlogy he also worked creating software for the printing and health care industries and writing public facing web and ecommerce sites.

Presentation Materials for Fullerton Code Camp 2012

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Additional downloads to try out the demo code:

Download the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/hh127353

Or get the Async CTP for 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx

Windows 8 Developer Preview for all WinRT/Metro samples: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516

Easy Async with .NET 4.5: Slides

Code: .NET 4.5 Code (requires VS11 Preview) | Same Code for .NET 4 CTP

Windows 8 Metro Code (requires VS 11 on Windows 8 to build)

The Future of XAML: Slides

Code: Sample Metro App (requires VS 11 on Windows 8 to build) | Sample Silverlight 5 App (shows some things that either don’t work or change in Metro)

Visual Studio 11 Solution Upgrading

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If you’re an early Visual Studio adopter like me you’ve probably gotten used to running into a similar problem every few years: upgrading your code. Although VS usually handles the job of converting files to work in the newer version, the big problem has usually been trying to go back to the old version. If you’re the only one working with the code that might not matter, but if you work on a team that has a mix of, for example, VS 2008 and VS 2010 Beta clients, the conversion process causes problems for one or the other.

Finally in VS 11 this problem is being addressed. The ultimate goal is to be able to open a VS 2010 solution in VS 11 with minimal conversion and applying no breaking changes to the project or solution files that would prevent it from still opening directly in 2010. There will of course be some restrictions, like not upgrading to .NET 4.5, but in general seems like a pretty reasonable goal.

To see how it’s working so far with the Developer Preview I tried upgrading a few of my own projects, including a 50+ project solution with lots of complications. The good news was that the upgrade process did succeed without preventing VS 2010 from opening the converted solutions that I tried. There were, however, some issues.
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Presentation Materials for NE Code Camp 16

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Thanks to everyone for coming!

To try out the code we looked at:

Download the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/hh127353

Or get the CTP for 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx

Easy Async with .NET 4.5: Slides

Code: .NET 4.5 Code (requires VS11 Preview) | Same Code for .NET 4 CTP

Windows 8 Metro Code (requires VS 11 on Windows 8 to build)

Presentation Materials for San Diego Code Camp

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Thanks to everyone for coming!

Harnessing XAML Templates: Slides | Code (WPF, SL4, SL5)

Easy Async with Async CTP: Slides | Code

Look at the AddingAsync section for the multi-step conversion from synchronous to async with cancellation and error handling that we didn’t have time to walk through.

Get the Async CTP at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx

Help improve Visual Studio performance

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If you get frustrated by mysterious hangs and long-running operations in Visual Studio 2010 (yes ToolBox, I’m looking at you) there’s often not much you can do about it but sit and wait…

Luckily the VS team wants these problems fixed as much as you do (they write their code in VS too) so to help them identify where people are running into these problems they’ve released a new VS Extension called PerfWatson. It sits in the background and polls VS every few seconds to make sure it’s staying responsive. If VS stops responding, the extension gathers up a report of what you were doing and how long the hang lasted and sends it off to be analyzed and hopefully fixed.

The next version of VS is fast approaching, so the earlier data gets in on things to fix, the better. Go get it now at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/fa85b17d-3df2-49b1-bee6-71527ffef441?SRC=Home