Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Lots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday.

I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish.

.NET 4

This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release.

Shouldn't every release be that way? Sure, and in this case there's a really clear focus on, as I like to say, "making the Legos the right size." This is as much about tightening screws as it is about adding new features.

There's more goodness that I can put in one post, but some personal favorite highlights are:

• Quicker to Install - A smaller Client Profile with a much smaller initial download (down to 0.8 megs from 2.8) for bootstrapping .NET client apps faster than ever)
• Side by Side - .NET 4 is a side-by-side release that doesn't auto-promote, meaning you won't break existing apps and you can have .NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4 apps on the same machine, happily.
  • Side-by-side CLR support for managed add-ins inside of apps like Explorer or Outlook. Again, new and existing apps in the same process, chillin'.
  • For more details on Application Compatibilty, check out the AppCompat Walkthrough for .NET 4 on MSDN.
• Dynamic Language Support - The DLR (Dynamic language runtime) ships built-in with .NET 4 so you can mix-and-match your solutions and pick the best language (or languages) amongst C# and VB.NET as well as F#, IronPython and IronRuby. This includes better support for COM (yes, COM! People do use COM and it's even easier with the new dynamic keyword in C# these days.)
• More Web Standards Support - Better support for WS-* and REST making interop easier. (I love ADO.NET Data Services, but you know that already, Dear Reader. I'm a bit of a RESTafarian, these days.)
• Plugins Galore - Visual Studio 2010 uses MEF and WPF to enable a whole new world of clean managed extensions as well as an Online Gallery (there's an extension for that!)
• Multi-Framework Multi-targeting - You can't really overestimate how useful this is, but a picture is worth a thousand words. You can code all your apps in all your organization's frameworks with the same IDE:
  

Keep an eye on the blogs this week as the various teams talk about their favorite features.

On the ASP.NET 4 side:

• I'll be posting video interviews with the actual ASP.NET 4 developers all week on Hanselminutes on 9 up on MSDN's Channel9 so watch for those.
• Joe and I will also start populating the Learn section of ASP.NET with new ASP.NET 4 videos between now and Christmas as well.
• And of course, @ScottGu is continuing his series of ASP.NET 4 Tutorials, so watch his constantly updated rollup post. He's currently on #8!

Oh, yes, one other thing…

Fresh Look

You may notice a few things in the new Splash Screen above. There's a new Visual Studio logo that goes nicely as well as a new logo for MSDN. You probably heard that we launched a new MSDN this weekend and today we add the new logo and background. This new MSDN is the beginning of a more agile, community focused MSDN and you should expect to see and hear of cool stuff coming from the team, often, in the months to come. Of note will be the new MSDN Lightweight view, soon to be the default view for the library. 

In the coming weeks I'll dig into more details on the these new things and how they work together:

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
• Windows 7
• Microsoft Developer Network

Enjoy! Also, be sure to check out Soma's blog post and go get Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 as soon as you can!

The team I work at Microsoft for is called Server and Tools Online, and one of the things we work on is the Microsoft Developer Network or "MSDN." If you go way, way up, our boss is Soma (Yes, this Soma), but down here in the trenches there's the folks that make content and systems to help you after you "File | New Project."

Our goals this year are to get back to basics and make sure that our online user experience meets these goals in as few clicks as possible.

PREVIEW: Check out the Live Preview of the new VB Dev Center. Other centers will follow.

INTERNATIONAL UPDATE: Our international team members are writing blog posts of their own:

• Germany:  Vorschau auf das neue MSDN Online
• Brazil: Preview do novo visual do MSDN

A few months ago I snuck a few "comps" out of a meeting with the designers on MSDN. A few months before that we talked about the a upcoming "loband" option for MSDN and performance improvements to the MSDN library that are bringing page-load times for the MSDN library to the 1- and 2-second level.

There was a lot of great comments and feedback from you in the comments of both of those posts and I took it all straight to the teams.

There's a bunch of big stuff going on in the next few months. We've got a new Operating System (Windows 7 is launching on Oct 22, in case you've been living in a cave, or a small home office like me) coming, there's also Microsoft's PDC November 17-19, and you know how we like to announce fun stuff at PDC. :)

I've got a bunch of comps (these are not final) from a recent meeting I wanted to share with you about what's new at MSDN to support all this newness and fix some old problems.

New MSDN - Why?

To be clear, this is more than a "visual refresh." Sure, there's a new design and it's pretty, but this is more about UX (User Experience) than it is about swapping out icons. We've got 5 main goals as a team to enable you, Dear Reader:

1. HELP ME - I've got a problem. What's the answer, quickly and accurately.
2. CONNECT ME TO PEOPLE - There's other people like me, connect me to them, and to the product group.
3. GET ME THE DOWNLOAD I NEED - Get out of my way, I just want a download. Bits, Scripts, Utils, Code, etc.
4. CONNECT ME TO THE PRODUCT - What's new with Product X? I've got feedback and I want to be heard.
5. KEEP ME SMART - I'm looking to sharpen the saw.

Our goals are to be transparent and authentic. I think you've seen that on this blog since day 0, and hopefully in the last two years after I joined Microsoft. The web continues to evolve and we want an MSDN that better reflects a focus on community, on fresh content, and on making things easier to find.

What's Coming

We'll be launching an entirely new MSDN very soon and I'll have all the details for you, Dear Reader, here on my blog. You'll be able to see a live pilot of the new design in the VB Dev Center this week. This will be part of an ongoing reinvention that will span the next year. We'll be listening to you and making sure you're getting what you need. For now it's at /vbpreview, and soon you'll see it the new layout at /vbasic and all of MSDN will change.

We're adding guidance for new developers on every Dev Center Home Page. There's also a renewed focus on consistency across the whole network. You'll find Related Content in the right margin throughout the network and primary content top center of every page.

There's a number of new active controls with dynamic community content. More content than ever will be driven by feeds and tagged so the freshest and most relevant content is easy to find.

Learning

Another focus is learning, particularly around educational videos and screencasts. There's a pile of them, but historically it's been hard to find the ones that apply to you, and no way to add comments and questions. This release adds video sharing, comments and ratings. There's also plans for a new video scroller - this is an artist's rendering I found in a design PPT.

Community Activity

More areas of the home page will be active content driven by feeds and bring people with interesting content, comments, code and perspectives to the front. It'll be easy to find what's new and what's popular in Forums, Galleries, Video and Code.

Downloads

Another point of focus for this first upcoming release is downloads. I've been beating the downloads drum since I got here and this release changes puts Downloads right up front. The downloads are better organized and all consistent. The Top downloads and samples are more visible and updated more often, putting them often within two clicks.

Even More To Come

I hope you'll agree when you see the new site that it's got better discoverability, readability, consistency and most importantly, more relevant content. You'll see more fewer, more focused Dev Centers, more task-oriented content, and more community content.

This is all the start of a leaner meaner MSDN and it's just the first "wave." I'll post about some other cool changes that we've got coming down the pipe soon.

Be Heard

A lot of people are working hard to make MSDN fresher, more relevant, faster and easier to navigate. Everyone is actively monitoring the MSDN Feedback Forum so if you've got questions, concerns, feedback, ideas or compliments, that's the spot. You can also post here in the comments and I'll make sure the right people hear what you've got to say!

You, Dear Reader, very likely don't need this information. I assume you're probably not a beginner. BUT, you likely KNOW a beginner. Share this information with them!

A bunch of people on Twitter discovered the MSDN Beginner Developer Center today. I tweeted it, figured it was a throw-away tweet and it was "re-tweeted" several dozen times. Apparently there's a hunger for Beginner content out there! Who knew? ;)

It's at http://www.msdn.com/beginner and here's some of the cool stuff. Tell your 12 year old and your great-aunt, Dear Reader. There may be a programmer inside one of them.

There's several tracks to go down, first the obvious Web Track and Windows Track, but also Aspiring Pro and Kid's Corner.

Web Track

The Beginner Web Developer center has three tiers, so you can start at various levels of "beginner." You can even start at the VERY beginning with no understanding of how the web works and go from there. The "Introduction to the Web" Video is very good! I'm going to send it to my Mom.

As you move through the three tiers you move up to VB and C# then start building a real application. Along the way you'll learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript and ASP.NET. There's also downloadable lessons, podcasts, videos and code.

Windows Track

This section has another nice video (in the absolute beginner part) in the style of "How Stuff Works" with an explanation of what an OS is, how a computer runs instructions, etc. It's a fun video. This section has lessons like "Life Before Mice" and "Problem Solving in Life and Technology."

Aspiring Professional

Taking it from amateur to "professional" is the real trick. I personally like to say that we're ALL amateurs. I mean, if you can get a gold medal in the Olympics as an amateur, then who am I to call myself a professional?

Regardless, there's more than just programming skills involved, there's also working in groups, as a team, in an office and how the software lifecycle works. There's also sections on moving to ASP.NET from PHP and moving to ASP.NET from Classic ASP.

Kids Corner

Do kids always get a korner because kids love alliteration? I assume so. They also get MS Comic Sans and other bright graphics to keep their tiny attention spans. Seriously, though, the videos are pretty cool and worth watching because it's fun to watch an 8 year old explain Object Oriented Programming.

• Video: What is the Internet - presented by kids
• Video: What are Objects and how does OOP work - presented by kids

As an aside, there's some really cool changes happening at MSDN...I've seen some artist comps and snuck stuff out before and used your feedback. I'm hoping to get a hold of some new screenshots and some insider stuff on the new low-bandwidth (and other) views for MSDN that will be launching soon. MSDN Libraries are getting faster, as fast as <2 second page load times worldwide is what I hear, so I'll try to dig up details on that also. More to come, soon.

My one-hundred-and-sixty-third podcast is up. Scott sits down with Patrick Smacchia, lead developer of NDepend, and talks about Software Metrics. What metrics lie beyond Lines of Code?

• Metrics Definitions
• NDepend "Placemat" PDF
• NDepend Features

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show #163
• Play in your browser

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

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As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

It's time to remind people about Fusion. Mostly because I don't see as many people using it as should. I mentioned it as long as six (!) years ago and it's still useful. I used it just this week with .NET 4.

Sometimes when an assembly doesn't load, there's still a sense/feeling that "something in the black box has broken." For some folks, the black box is larger and obscures more, than for others. My point is, if you know where to look, there is no box at all.

When it comes to assemblies there's three "times" to know about:

• Binding before it happens - What do you want?
  • ILDASM or Reflector will tell you what your assembly wants (what it was compiled against)
• Binding as it happens - Where does it look?
  • Fusion (the Assembly Binding Log Viewer) will show you all assembly binds if you set the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\ForceLog registry value to 1
• Binding after it happens - What did you get?
  • Process Explorer will tell you what DLL (assembly) is loaded in memory and from where it came.

Here's an example of how a tiny bit of digging saved me hours of confusion recently when I hit an unusual edge case. I was doing a build of sample that was showing C# interop-ing with IronPython, but I was using a daily build of .NET 4 and a random build of IronPython.

I made a mistake and had some really old DLLs floating around that I shouldn't have had. My symptom was a FileNotFoundException for the file "System.Dynamic.dll." I KNEW it was in the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) and I could SEE it as a reference DLL in my directory. Can't find the file? Dude, it's right there!

Turning on Fusion Logging

You probably have a tool to help on your development system already. Type "Fusion" in the Start Menu. The Assembly Binding Log Viewer, or "Fusion Log Viewer" will tell the CLR to load assembling binding/loading activities to a folder, then let you see them.

Be sure to run it as Administrator if you want to change the Settings, otherwise they'll be grayed out.

Alternatively, just set the Registry keys your self. (I just memorized them, as I set them all the time.) Set HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\ForceLog registry value to 1 and HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\LogPath registry value to C:\FusionLogs or some path that exists.

Personally, I leave this on all the time on my dev machines (there's a small speed hit) and just clean the folder out every once in a while.

Solving My Binding Problem

Once I turned on Fusion Logging I could immediately see a failure in my folder:

The operation failed.
Bind result: hr = 0x80070002. The system cannot find the file specified. 

Assembly manager loaded from:  C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.xxxxx\clr.dll
Running under executable  C:\Users\Scott\Desktop\TechEd09\FX4\Demo 5 - DLR\Two.IronPythonInterop\bin\Debug\Two.IronPythonInterop.exe
--- A detailed error log follows. 

=== Pre-bind state information ===
LOG: User = HANSELMAN-DEV10\Scott
LOG: DisplayName = System.Dynamic, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089
LOG: Appbase = file:///C:/Users/Scott/Desktop/TechEd09/FX4/Demo 5 - DLR/Two.IronPythonInterop/bin/Debug/
LOG: Initial PrivatePath = NULL
LOG: Dynamic Base = NULL
LOG: Cache Base = NULL
LOG: AppName = Two.IronPythonInterop.exe
Calling assembly : IronPython, Version=2.6.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35.
===
LOG: This bind starts in default load context.
LOG: No application configuration file found.
LOG: Using host configuration file: 
LOG: Using machine configuration file from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.xxxxx\config\machine.config.
LOG: Post-policy reference: System.Dynamic, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089
LOG: GAC Lookup was unsuccessful.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Users/Scott/Desktop/TechEd09/FX4/Demo 5 - DLR/Two.IronPythonInterop/bin/Debug/System.Dynamic.DLL.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Users/Scott/Desktop/TechEd09/FX4/Demo 5 - DLR/Two.IronPythonInterop/bin/Debug/System.Dynamic/System.Dynamic.DLL.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Users/Scott/Desktop/TechEd09/FX4/Demo 5 - DLR/Two.IronPythonInterop/bin/Debug/System.Dynamic.EXE.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Users/Scott/Desktop/TechEd09/FX4/Demo 5 - DLR/Two.IronPythonInterop/bin/Debug/System.Dynamic/System.Dynamic.EXE.
LOG: All probing URLs attempted and failed. 

You can see that it's looking all over for the file, first in the GAC< then all over the local folders before it gives up. Hm. Why isn't this working? I can see the file sitting right there.

Well, what's the public key token for this signed assembly? I can run "sn -T" on the file:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0>
sn -T System.Dynamic.dll 

Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Strong Name Utility  Version 4.0.xxxxx.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved. 

Public key token is b03f5f7f11d50a3a

Wha? What's b03whatever? That's not b77whatever like the one my app is looking for! Looks like my sample app had reference not only an old version of System.Dynamic, but one with a completely different public key. That's what I get for not cleaning out my obj directories between daily builds.

This could have been just by setting the registry keys and watching the c:\fusionlogs folder, but the Fusion Log Viewer makes the process more user-friendly.

If you're debugging version number mismatches or strong-name mismatches, Fusion will ALWAYS tell you what's really going on. There is no Black Box.

Related Links

• Detailing Failed Assembly Loads with the Assembly Binding Log Viewer ("The Fusion Logger")
• More on Assembly Binding, Strong Naming, the GAC, Publisher Policy and Dynamically Loaded Assemblies
• Gotcha in .NET Framework handling of Versions and Publisher Policies
• Be aware of your DLLs and who's loading them - know about assembly binding redirects
• Richard Grimes' most excellent .NET Fusion Workshop