LightSwitch is the fastest way to build database applications for the desktop and the cloud. In this episode, Robert shows you how to make developing with LightSwitch even faster with the LightSwitch Starter Kits. These Starter Kits cover common business needs like expense reporting and issue tracking. All you need to do is download and install one of the kits and then create a new LightSwitch project based on it. LightSwitch creates data tables and screens and writes some basic code for you. You can press F5 and run or customize the application to meet your needs. And because you built it with LightSwitch, the application is well architected and scalable.

                                             

Mei Liang is our guest this week. She is here to talk about the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, a code sample library provided by the Microsoft Community team. The Microsoft Community team monitors the MSDN forums, as well as other developer hangouts, and then creates code samples that address the issues developers run into. In this video, Mei shows us how to search for samples using the All-In-One Code Framework Sample Browser, which runs as a Visual Studio extension. She then shows us that the Sample Browser runs stand-alone! Good news for our viewers who are using Visual Studio Express.

What is Visual Studio PerfWatson?

Would you like your performance issues to be reported automatically? Well now you can, with PerfWatson extension! Install this extension and  assist the Visual Studio team in providing a faster future IDE for you.

We’re constantly working to improve the performance of Visual Studio and take feedback about it very seriously. Our investigations into these issues have found that there are a variety of scenarios where a long running task can cause the UI thread to hang or become unresponsive. Visual Studio PerfWatson is a low overhead telemetry system that helps us capture these instances of UI unresponsiveness and report them back to Microsoft automatically and anonymously. We then use this data to drive performance improvements that make Visual Studio faster.

Here’s how it works: when the tool detects that the Visual Studio UI has become unresponsive, it records information about the length of the delay and the root cause, and submits a report to Microsoft. The Visual Studio team can then aggregate the data from these reports to prioritize the issues that are causing the largest or most frequent delays across our user base. By installing the PerfWatson extension, you are helping Microsoft identify and fix the performance issues that you most frequently encounter on your PC.

To allow PerfWatson to submit performance reports to Microsoft, please make sure that Windows Error Reporting (WER) is enabled on your machine, please see how to configure WER setting session. PerfWatson employs the WER service to send the collected data to Microsoft.

Using PerfWatson

PerfWatson is an automatic feedback service.  Once it is installed, all you need to do is use the product, and it will automatically create an error report for every UI delay you experience in the product.  It stores these error reports  in %LOCALAPPDATA%\PerfWatson. This data is then submitted to Microsoft on next Visual Studio launch.

If your Windows Error Reporting permissions are set to Automatically check for solutions and upload data, the performance reports will be submitted to Microsoft automatically. Otherwise, PerfWatson will prompt the user for permission to send the collected data. This prompt can be disabled by checking “Do not show this dialog again. Report problems automatically” on the dialog.

We are excited to announce that Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 Release Candidate (EF 4.1 RC) is now available. This is a fully supported, go-live release. In approximately one month we plan to release the final Release to Web (RTW). We are not planning any changes to the API surface or behavior between RC and RTW, the release is purely to allow any new bugs found in the RC build to be evaluated and potentially fixed.

 

What’s in EF 4.1 RC?

ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 RC introduces two new features:

• The DbContext API is a simplified abstraction over ObjectContext and a number of other types that were included in previous releases of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The DbContext API surface is optimized for common tasks and coding patterns. DbContext can be used with Database First, Model First and Code First development.
• Code First is a new development pattern for the ADO.NET Entity Framework and provides an alternative to the existing Database First and Model First patterns. Code First is focused around defining your model using C#/VB.NET classes, these classes can then be mapped to an existing database or be used to generate a database schema. Additional configuration can be supplied using Data Annotations or via a fluent API.