Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1 Beta Download

Monday, May 12 2008 - , , , , , - 1 comments

Soma announced this morning that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1 is now ready and can be downloaded. This includes several updates, includes support for SQL Server 2008, and has a few new products including the Entity Framework, LINQ to Entities and ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria). ScottGu posted some notes regarding what's included in the service pack, as well.

Of course all of this is released 2 days before I have a demonstration on the Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities on Wednesday to the Sarasota .NET and SQL Server User groups. So I have a few modifications to make for my presentations.

I received an error when I first tried to install it. The problem was that the service pack was in conflict with Silverlight Tools Beta for Visual Studio 2008 which I was using to create/edit Silverlight 2 applications. Once uninstalling this i was able to get the service pack to install properly. Scott Gu's post discusses this issue as well as the importance of making sure you install Vista SP 1 first.

Check out ScottGu's post for full details.

JohnPapa.NET is Open for BusinRSS

Saturday, April 19 2008 - , , , , , , - 0 comments

No that's not a typo in the title ... it's my poor attempt at dry humor :)

I have had several questions from people over the past few months regarding my noticeable sparseness in blogging at www.codebetter.com, my blogging home for the past 3 years. The truth is that it took me a while to get back to setting up my new blogging home at www.johnpapa.net . I used the various beta versions of Graffiti CMS to get it started and then I recently migrated the site over to the release version of Graffiti. I must say that Graffiti is perfect for my needs. I can consolidate my posts, organize my events, articles, and add some ASP.NET and SilverLight aspects, too.

So what will you find on www.johnpapa.net ? You will find my usual technical posts as well as a listing of all of the articles I have published (the books listing is not there yet) and all of the events I will be speaking at as they get scheduled and confirmed.

Will I still post to www.CodeBetter.com ? Yes, I will still cross post some content to www.CodeBetter.com but the superset of the posts will be on www.johnpapa.net including technical content, reviews, and opinions.

So please add my new site www.johnpapa.net to your aggregated feed  list http://feeds.feedburner.com/JohnPapa.

I'll be at DevConnections this coming week in Orlando, so if you are going to be around please stop by one of my sessions on windows mobile development, LINQ, the Entity Framework or SQL Server Reporting Services and say hi!