Skip to main content

Visual Studio 2017 RC installation

A quick look at the Visual Studio 2017 RC installation and first impressions on the look and feel of the new IDE



My first impressions are really good. The web install genuinely took around 7 minutes and I was up and launching a new Asp.Net Core boilerplate application in a further 2 minutes, allowing for first time customisation and profile configure. That’s zero to hero in under ten minutes which is finally a wait time I can work with and will no doubt encourage non Microsoft Developers to just give it a try. I decided to go for the community edition for simplicity.


The new setup experience
The installer has been written from the ground up and it certainly feels nicer than the typical Microsoft Installer experience of not so long ago. I really like the select what you need approach and add later, which has always been possible but is a cleaner approach where you are selecting your intent rather than a host of individual features typical of a custom install.










It then picked up my profile settings and applied the ‘Dark’ theme that I mostly use.








My first observation from the out of the box experience is that the balance is pretty much right. Familiar enough to navigate without any problems but the new features are available when your interest takes you there. I like the fact that the configuration has added the common elements you would expect to see out of the box. For example, Static Files and IIS Integration. The initial beta release really went for fast start-up of .Net Core but was a pain to keep adding the common initialisation, especially as the namespaces and project configuration types were ever moving.

Out of the box, ‘Use Static Files’ is configured. I must admit, it is a better way round, rather than adding to almost every project as nine times out of ten we will require serving static html files etc.at some point. It also offers a quick and easy way to start developing from any other framework.


I also like that ‘UseIISIntegration’ is alo in by default as that is going to be the most familiar to seasoned Asp.Net web devs.

At Assemblysoft we specialise in Custom Software Development tailored to your requirements. We have experience creating Booking solutions, as we did for HappyCamperVan Hire. You can read more here.

We can onboard and add value to your business rapidly. We are an experienced Full-stack development team able to provide specific technical expertise or manage your project requirements end to end. We specialise in the Microsoft cloud and .NET Solutions and Services. Our developers are Microsoft Certified. We have real-world experience developing .NET applications and Azure Services for a large array of business domains. If you would like some assistance with Azure | Azure DevOps Services | Blazor Development  or in need of custom software development, from an experienced development team in the United Kingdom, then please get in touch, we would love to add immediate value to your business.

Assemblysoft - Your Safe Pair of Hands

https://assemblysoft.com/


It’s worth showing all files to see everything residing in the project


As you can see below, we are back to .proj files again and project.json is no longer the central configuration item


What is nice is that intellisense now kicks in for the project file. As you start typing the namespace, service calls are being made to show available packages


Ctrl-F5


A very quick look and I can say interest and confidence is high with the new offerings.
Definitely worth a keeping an eye on the Visual Studio Blog for frequent updates in this space at the moment.



If you would like some hands on expertise for your business feel free to reach via my company assemblysoft or checkout some other musings via my blazor.net and azure blog here carlrandall.net


References




Popular posts from this blog

Windows Azure Storage Emulator failed to install

CodeProject Windows Azure Storage Emulator failed to install When attempting to install a new version of the Azure Storage Emulator either as a separate installation package or automatically as part of an Azure SDK update, you may run into an error message which states the storage emulator has failed to install. This can occur using the Web Platform Installer (WebPI), NuGet Package Manager or when performing the install manually. Below is the message received using the WebPI.   Storage Emulator Background  (optional reading) The windows azure storage emulator executable lives under the Microsoft SDKs directory as shown below: Configuration If we take a quick look inside the WAStorageEmulator.exe.config file we can see each of the storage services pointing to local service endpoints. <StorageEmulatorConfig>     <services>       <service name=" Blob " url="http://127.0.0.1:10000/"/>       <service

Debugging Python and Iron Python using Visual Studio

Now Python is a first class citizen since the release of Visual Studio 2017 and can be configured directly from the Installation IDE, below are a few settings worth bookmarking for your next python integration project. Debugging Python One of the first things you are going to want to do is step through your code when using Visual Studio, particularly as the language is dynamic and inspection of local and global scope soon becomes necessary. One thing to note is that if you start from a native python project, this is all wired up for you but if you are using .Net to call python modules or want to support an older python version, such as 2.7, you will soon see that breakpoints are not being hit due to symbols not being loaded.   Enable Just My Code To distinguish user code from non-user code in .net, Just My Code looks at two things: PDB (Program Database) files, and Optimization Program Database A .pdb file, otherwise known as a symbol file, maps the identifiers

Azure DevOps Authorisation

Managing whether an identity has access to a given  service, feature, function, object, or method in Azure DevOps comes down to authorisation. Fortunately, by default, the DevOps permissions are set in such a way to enable you to focus on the job at hand, DevOps. Loosely translated this means 'don't get in my way'. My experience is that the Azure DevOps team have done a good job at this, enabling you to crack on developing, building, testing and releasing without much hindrance. Working with relaxed permissions is great when you are the owner and possibly either a one man band or small team but as soon as we need to consider larger teams, varying roles with approvals and degrees of access, authorisation becomes a real concern. I was recently involved in a project utilising offshore developers where trust was a concern and a number of specific teams handling specific roles needed to come together to approve a set of pipelines.  This article is a pick of findings a