Visual Studio 2010–Before you begin

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

The saying above probably fits developers the most. More so if one happens to be a Microsoft technology developer, spending his day in and out of Visual Studio – the ultimate development experience (no offence intended to the Notepad developer). I am almost always amazed by the insane complexity that Visual Studio abstracts away from a developer, presenting it in a visually elegant and magnificent way. Before you even think of disagreeing, think of the top 3 features of the Visual Studio code editor according to you and try integrating it on a Rich Text Box in the language of your choice.

The bytes that follow intend to assist you in sharpening your axe, a.k.a Visual Studio 2010.

• Service Pack 1 – Looking beyond the bug fixes: Gone are the days when Visual Studio Service Packs were a means to provide bugs and stability fixes. The trend in general has shifted to providing users with considerable feature additions, providing a sense of fulfillment and extended satisfaction to the developer community in general. Entity Framework was included as part of the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. With Visual Studio 2010 too, apart from the huge number of bug fixes and stability enhancements to the core editor, several new features were added:
  
  • Help Viewer 1.1 – A stand-alone application for viewing locally installed help documentation.
    
  • Silverlight 4 – Pre installed support for Silverlight 4 with designer and project system support.
    
  • Silverlight Profiling – Performance Wizard for Silverlight allows profiling of Silverlight applications which were cumbersome, to say the least in Visual Studio 2008.
    
  • SQL Server CE 4 – Support for managing Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0 databases (SDF) added to Solution and Server explorer.
    
  • HTML5 and CSS3 – Support for HTML5 and CSS3 in the html editor.
    
  • IIS Express support – Visual Studio 2010 SP1 enables you to use the Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 Express as the local hosting server for the website and Web Application Projects. Scott Guthrie’s introductory blog post about IIS Express explains distinctively how you can leverage local IIS right from your development box.
    
    A complete description of the Service Pack 1 can be found here.
    
    
• Extend to conquer: Visual Studio 2010 not only sports a brand new managed code editor but it also includes a managed MEF based Extension Manager that lets you customize almost everything that comes by default with Visual Studio, including the Start Page. The following are few extensions that you wouldn’t regret installing:
  
  • Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft): By far the best (free) extension to Visual Studio 2010, developed by Microsoft, Productivity Power Tools does what its name implies, improve, rather boost the overall productivity of the IDE. A really slick looking Find box, a vibrant Solution Navigator and middle click scroll support, are some of the features that hooked me up instantly. More information and download can be found here.
    
    
    
  • Visual Studio Color Theme Editor: Customize the Visual Studio 2010 color palette for menus, toolbars, tabs, title bars and more. It comes in with predefined themes to choose from and allows you to customize the palettes or create new themes. Check out the Visual Studio blog post or download the extension here.
    
    

The Visual Studio Gallery has enormous number of extensions (quite a few of them are free) already listed for you to try out. Go ahead. Customize, extend Visual Studio. Super charge it.

Visual Studio – It amazes me. First time, every time!

Theme Up!

With the dawn of the last decade, user-centered design and end-user customization of literally every fragment of an application (web, client or phone) has taken a quantum leap. It has virtually become quintessential to have multiple ways of allowing end users to customize their experience with the software. With the advent of graphics cards and graphics accelerated hardware, pixels literally lit up, giving a whole new dimension to user experience and enabling creation of stunning user interfaces.

Abstraction, which is the dominantly prevailing concept, in every software methodology or framework today, impacted the design process as well, and what once was limited to selection of colors, got somewhat abstracted to selection of themes, even though the underlying idea was to only change the colors and at times, background graphics.

For business application (smart client or desktop) developers, the change was almost forced by popular applications like browsers, instant messaging tools and utility applications. It was amusing to note that even Antivirus applications themed their UI to better present their functionalities. The nail was hit by Microsoft’s Office suite v2007, when Office applications allowed users to select a theme for its UI.

Once Office themed up, jinx, if any, that existed, preventing business apps from looking attractive was broken. It almost made it conventional for business applications to expose sleek interface that enabled innovative user experiences, irrespective of the type of application. Also, it enabled data entry applications to look far less tedious and cumbersome; a snap from them Dynamics CRM follows.

The following is a list of some popular applications along with the associated resources to theme them. The list was never meant to be exhaustive, besides care has been exercised not to list untrusted sites to the extent possible.

Disclaimer: Users are informed to exercise caution before downloading third party extensions, themes and similar add-ons from untrusted sources.

• Windows 7 – Prior to Windows 7, Microsoft didn’t provide an active support for themes to the earlier versions of Windows, primarily XP (and yes I almost forgot there was Vista too). The support was mostly commercial in nature from vendors, mostly Microsoft Partners. With Windows 7, a change in strategy implied better and newer themes for end-users thanks to the Themes gallery.

• Visual Studio 2010 – Having a brand new code editor and huge chunks of it’s codebase in WPF enabled the extension developers of Visual Studio 2010 to incorporate themes into the most popular (I don’t care if you disagree) IDE of all times. Visual Studio color theme editor comes in with pre-defined themes and allows you to customize or create new themes.

• Mozilla Firefox – The leading (again who cares if you disagree) open source browser incorporated and provided themes right from its early versions and an active community meant Firefox users never faced any scarcities in terms of themes. However, with Personas, a graduated project of Mozilla Labs, themes became lighter and somewhat better.

• Twitter clients – The ever expanding universe of twitter clients is more of an amusing for me considering the fact that twitter is just slightly older than a toddler. Seesmic Desktop and MetroTwit surely standup for a mention with theme enabled sleek user interface.

• Mobile Phone Themes: I regularly use themes from Zedge for my Nokia phone (5800 XpressMusic), and have found some certificate issues with the themes they list. Hence, exercise your judicious half before installing or even downloading any themes on your mobile phones.

• Silverlight applications: If you are a Silverlight application developer, you may use the Silverlight toolkit from Codeplex.

• WPF applications: As a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) developer, a good collection of themes is available from Codeplex.

• Blogger themes: If you are like me and are overly uninterested by the default themes provided by blogger you may visit bTemplates for refreshing and mostly free blogger templates/themes.

• Website themes: Looking for free website themes for general usage? Try OSWD.

The above mentioned are just some of the common popular apps that enable you to theme up the experience.

To conclude, I would like to mention some apps that I wish had themes, the sooner the better:

• Internet Explorer – The most arrogant software ever sent to production tops my wish list for theme enabled apps. When the entire world embraced tabbed browsing, MS IE was arrogant enough to wait until v7 with undoubtedly the slowest implementation of tab switching. Continuing with its tradition, even now, with v8, it’s incapable of providing a simple downloads management snap-in. Microsoft has time and again ended up being complacent and literally handed over its market share to its competitors.

• SQL Server Management Studio – Like every other Microsoft technology enthusiast, the legitimate next step with Management Studio seems to be a T-SQL IDE based on WPF and then following up with themes. Awaiting SQL Server 2012 may be (who knows?). There surely wouldn’t be Office 2013, so SQL Server 2013 seems unlikely too.

Please feel free to enlist any application that you use which already provides support for themes or should provide them at the earliest!

The list above only limits to the applications I use to ease out my work/good life.

Theme Up!