Tim Ewald, one of my closest friends and the guy I think deserves to be much more famous (the first chapter of his criminally under-selling Transactional COM+ is worth the price of a Hawaiian honeymoon and is just as fulfilling) is blogging.

In fact, he’s been blogging for a few weeks now, but he’s teased me before, so I didn’t want to point people his way if he was just going to break my heart again. Still, he seems to be on a roll. My most favorite post is XmlSerializer sans XSD, but his recent post on why he cares about the angle brackets on the wire pushed me over the edge.

Don’t disappoint us by going away again, Tim!

BTW, Roger Searjeant built some tools to support Tim’s ideas.

Tim Sneath has a nice, concise list of what’s new in Windows Forms 2.0. By far and away, ClickOnce deployment as an order of magnitude improvement over No-Touch Deployment is my favorite advance, but the new controls are cool (you can drop the standard buttons on the menu and toolstrips from the context menu), the BackgroundWorker is very cool (and eliminates about 2/3rds of the code in my threading chapter) and the designer layout assistance for helping with the layout and spacing of controls sounds like it'll reduce a bunch of monkey work in the designer.

Cool piece by Andrew Troelsen on the new refactoring features in Visual Studio 2005 for C#. Now I just have to train myself to think to use the refactoring operations instead of letting my fingers do it as they've been forced to for lo these many years...

Right now, I'm holding the shared source Genghis library back. I'm acting as sole arbiter of what makes it into Genghis and how and I'm not able to keep up with the flow. I'm looking for someone who's interested in sharing this duty with me. Only proven contributors to the Windows development community need apply.

MSDN shipped their part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 at about 12:30am on Tuesday morning. Sara has a nice summary of the new MSDN Product Feedback Center that I think folks will find particularly satisfying:

“At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You can share workarounds. And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams. Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes.”

In other words, developer feedback to the product teams for the supported products is no longer just an email or a post, but an entry in a database that the product team and you can track. I can’t wait to get this for Longhorn.

Also, Kent has announced the new Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center, complete with next-gen personalization features that we’re testing on this content before we push them out site-wide. My favorite part of the site is the bit where the product teams that contribute to .NET 2.0 point out what’s new (and the Windows Forms team even tell you how they’re progressing on the features they’re implementing).

Kent also points out the site for the new Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, the beta of a slim and trim VS05 for students, hobbyists, etc. that you can download immediately. There’s even a contest for Express users where the prizes include an XBox and a copy of Halo 2.

Duncan also has a post where he addresses our current philosophy on coverage of shipping vs. future content on MSDN and why TechEd is going to throw it “out of whack” for a while (except me, of course, who’s going to be out of whack for a good long time : ).

NOTE: Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 will not install on Longhorn. Hopefully the next community drop of Longhorn will include a matching drop of VS05, but as of today, they remain incompatible.

I look at Krzysztof Cwalina’s post on delegated-based APIs in combination with generics and I think of the best parts of STL-like template-based programming without all the STL or templates causing the blinding pain just behind your eyes.

Joe Nalewabau has one very important addition point to make about the new key bindings in Visual C# 2005: while the VC# team will be providing a bunch of key bindings based on how things are arranged, e.g. Ctrl+W, S to show the Solution Explorer from the Window menu, 90+% of the old key bindings will continue to work, e.g. Ctrl+Alt+L to show the Solution Explorer. I worry that the 90% coverage won't be like uptime, where 90% is generally just fine, but more like speech recognition, where anything less than 99.9% just bugs people. I'm keeping my key bound fingers crossed...

Joe Nalewabau, a Lead PM on the Visual C# team, admitted today that he was responsible for the VC# keyboard randomization process for Visual Studio 2005 and describes the thought process that he went through to get there. I admit that Joe makes a good case for changing the key bindings, but I hate the idea of learning a whole new set (especially since, because I’m a keyboard boy, I’ll be crippled until I learn the new bindings). If Joe would swear on a stack of user manuals that the key bindings would never, ever change again, I’d be happier about it. (Rocky: “Again? That trick never works!“ Bullwinkle: “This time fur shure!“)

Of course, what I think doesn’t matter (it stopped mattering when I signed that damned employment contract : ). It’s what you think that matters and you should feel free to let him know what you think about the new VC# 2005 key bindings.