Earlier this week, Microsoft has released RC 1 (release candidate) version of Visual Studio 2010. This version is freely available to everybody. If you want to download it and start playing with it, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx.

Along with this release, some training ad tutorials appeared on MSDN. If you want to watch a couple of “how do I?” videos, check Beth Massi’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2010/02/09/how-do-i-videos-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx. The same link also provides another link for samples and walkthroughs.

Also available is the Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 training kit. If you want to download this 200MB kit which contains something like 17 presentations, 22 demos, and 32 hands-on labs, visit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en.

Red Gate just released their first released of their new SQL Search SSMS add-on.What is it all about?

Freely availble for download from http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Search/index.htm

I just published a new article about a real problem I faced in January. One junior member of the team modified the definition of a database table without checking the dependencies. All of sudden, many stored procedures started to crash!

The full article is available from http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2010/02/Validating-database-objects.aspx.

The Montréal .Net Community is proud to organize a full day of training on Entity Framework Saturday, March 13th, 2010. This workshop will be presented by Matthieu Mezil from France. The workshop will be in French.

To register to this workshop, goto http://atelierentityframework.eventbrite.com/?ref=ecount. The title says that the workshop is almost free because you need to be a paid-member of the Montréal .Net Community (25$ a year) and pay 26.77$ for the workshop itself.

Act quickly because places are limited.

I was testing the Telerik components demos and suddenly got this execption: "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 Provider is not registered on the local machine".

I found that this error can occurs when your Windows is a 64-bits version and Visual Studio is targetting 64-bits (or any CPU which prefer the 64-bits version).

To fix the error, simply change your targeted processor to x86 and everything will work fine!

The solution is simple but the error message is very misleading!

I just published a new article on 2 Windows Forms controls introduced with Visual Studio 2005 that most of you don't know. Those controls are the TableLayoutPanel and the FlowLayoutPanel.

The article is available from http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2010/01/The-Table-and-Flow-Layout-container-controls.aspx

God Mode!

Yes, God mode. It is just (or yet) another way of seeing your control panel but in a very useful way for geeks. Simply add a new folder to your desktop and name it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. You can rename "GodMode" to whatever fits you. 

I found this little hack on http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2010/01/03/enable-godmode-on-windows-7.aspx.

I just published an article following a session I did at TechDays Canada in Montréal earlier this month. This session was titled “Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio”. I received many good comments on the content of this session (presented first at TechEd by Scott Cate).

Because so many of these tips and tricks are very little known, I have decided to recycle 10 of those “obscure” tips and to introduce them to you. In fact, you will find more than 10 because I grouped some under a single section. Those tips are made of keyboard shortcuts, registry hacks, and macros.

All those tips and tricks have one thing in common: to provide you ways to become more efficient with Visual Studio.

The article is avalaible from http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2009/12/Top-10-Visual-Studio-Tips-and-Tricks.aspx

Some attendees who were at my “Visual Studio Tips and Tricks” last Wednesday at the TechDays conference in Montréal told me that they were unable to run the increase/decrease font size macro (tips # 242 – original Sara’s post: http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2008/06/20/did-you-know-you-can-bind-macros-to-keyboard-shortcuts-or-how-to-quickly-increase-decrease-your-text-editor-font-size-242.aspx). In fact, the real problem is that the macros are not loaded.

I have seen the problem on 2 computers so far. Each time the problem was the same and was easy to fix. First, open Visual Studio. Then open Tools->Macros->Macro Explorer (or press ALT-F8). In there, the samples folder should appear empty. Right-click Macros and select “Load macro project”. Navigate to the “C:\Users\{your account name goes here}\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\VSMacros80\Samples” folder and select the Samples.vsmacros file. Finally, click the Add button. You should now be good.