Current state of Visual Studio releases [March 2015]

Hi, my blog readers!

This is the second installment of Visual Studio releases update information on March 2015.

For complete series of Visual Studio releases update of my blog, go to: http://fsharpmonologue.blogspot.com/search/label/Visual%20Studio%20release%20state%20update

For March 2015, we have exciting news about Visual Studio! There are:

1. Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 (February 2015)
2. Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP (February 2015)
3. Tooling SDK of Windows 10 (official name: Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10 Technical Preview2015

This update is a little bit late (it should be on 19th or 20th March), as I was keeping up with the streaming broadcast of dotnetconf 2015.

The dotnetconf 2015 is an online conference for all of .NET update including .NET Core, WPF, ASP.NET, Roslyn, F# and many more!

Didn’t have time to watch? Watch or download offline at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/dotnetConf/2015

ENJOY!

Now, here are the updates…

Overview of the updates on March 2015

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Now let’s dive into those three above!

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6

Visual Studio 2015 is at CTP 6. The CTP marks that this release is not for “go live” or for production environment. I will keep stating (or reminding) this as many of you, blog readers, including my friends are confusing the CTP for production environment.

This CTP 6 contains these notable features and improvements:

• UI debugging tool for XAML
• Single sign in (with integration to other cloud based authentication)
• Code Lens improvement for Git and also with support for C++, Javascript, and SQL script
• Code Maps improvements such as filtering, faster display (faster diagram rendering) performance
• Visual Studio tools for Cordova now supports Android 4.4 and 5.0 (Lollipop)
• Javascript editor improvement: support for // TODO comments, object literal intellisense
• and many more!

For complete list of CTP 6 release notes, visit: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2015-vs

The official blog that described this release is available at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/02/23/visual-studio-2015-ctp-6-and-team-foundation-server-2015-ctp-released.aspx

With the release of CTP 6, it’s expected that Visual Studio 2015 is nearing the release of Release Candidate. This assumption is safe unless there is a notable bug needs to be fixed.

Special notes:

• The UI debugging tool for XAML in CTP 6 only supports WPF. Support for Windows Store app will be available in the final release.

The UI debugging is surely a very useful feature:

Please check up the original blog post of Visual Studio for more detailed explanation: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/02/23/visual-studio-2015-ctp-6-and-team-foundation-server-2015-ctp-released.aspx

Well.. I suggest you should download the ISO instead of using web installer to minimize error while installing this CTP, since the download is more than 4GB.

Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP

Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP is the next release after the preview release (the same time at Visual Studio 2015 Preview public release).

There are not so may improvements, but the improvements are mostly worthy to be considered:

• REST API support for TFS (previously only available for online TFS, Visual Studio Online)
• Team build improvements, including preview on MSBuild activity on TFS web portal (when accessing TFS via web) and cross platform builds (YESSS!! not just on Windows, now on Linux, XCode, and Android)
• Assign and invite testers
• and more (although it’s not so numerous)

The assign and invite testers is very helpful. Now you can invite testers, attached with the test suite number to test.

This is the screenshot from VisualStudio.com website (link below):

Those  screenshots are taken from the notable release notes of Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP. The official link is:

https://www.visualstudio.com/news/tfs2015-vs

Personal note on TFS:

Compared to other ALM product such as SVN or even commercial one such as StarTeam, TFS has widen the competitive edge. But compared specifically to IBM Rational UrbanCode coupled with IBM Rational Team Concert, TFS is quite on a par to IBM’s.

Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10 Preview (a.k.a. Tool for Windows 10 Preview)

Before you proceed, please read and notice my friendly reminder below.

If you want to try develop apps in Windows 10 Preview, this tooling is the one that you must install after you install Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6.

Why, because Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 is the prerequisite of this tool.

Yes, the latest Windows 10 Preview on March 2015 is also available to be downloaded! But it is available after you join/register first for the Windows Insider program. Don’t worry, it’s totally free! Just go to this official site: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-faq

If you are done installing, there will be a new template for Windows 10 UAP (Universal App Platform) projects, not just the usual Windows 8/Windows 8.1/Windows 8.1 (phone) Universal Apps.

To bring you quick peek, I copy picture from Microsoft’s Somasegar’s blog on Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10:

Here is the original location of Somasegar’s blog entry: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2015/03/23/visual-studio-tools-for-windows-10-technical-preview.aspx

Now what are you waiting for? Code right now, guys! :)

Current state of Visual Studio releases [January 2015]

Hi my blog readers!

Begin with this date, I will post Visual Studio updates every 2 months: January, March, May, July, and so the next 2 months.

The update from me will always be released on every 19th or 20th bimonthly.

On 19th January 2015, these are the updates of Visual Studio (from the latest in January 2015 goes back to December 2014):

• Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5
• Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 CTP 1

Overview of the updates

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Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5

This is the 5th CTP release of Visual Studio 2015. Reference:

The updates on this release are new features and bug fixes. These are the new features:

1. XAML Language Service
2. Timeline tool (for WPF and Windows Store 8.1 application)
3. Diagnostic tool
4. ASP.NET

There are bug fixes (for bugs reported in earlier version of Visual Studio 2015 CTP/Preview): http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/2967191

For more information about VS 2015 CTP 5, visit this page: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2015-vs

Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 CTP 1

Yes, there will be another update for Visual Studio 2013! Personally, I thought Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 was the last update and I was wrong.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 CTP 1 brings only two updates:

1. Technological improvements on debugging for DirectX 9 PS 3 depth support (DirectX 9.0c) on Windows Phones
2. Bug fix on notification hubs

For #2, the bug (and also the fix) is described as:

FIX: You cannot dismiss developer license notifications in Visual Studio 2013 Update 4

Let me elaborate more on this bug. This bug is available since Visual Studio 2013 Update 4. After you successfully install Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 (either standalone update or as included installation of fresh installation of Visual Studio), a notification about acquiring developer license would always appear, even after you dismiss it and open another project.

For full explanation about this bug, here is the original MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3018885

For more information about Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 CTP 1, visit this MS KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3021976

See you again in two months

Loop construct of C#/VB mapped into F#

Hi there, my blog readers!
The F# adventure series is almost complete, and F# adventure series is focusing on F# 3.0 in Visual Studio 2012. Meanwhile, there were questions addressed to me about the basic common feature of programming languages: loop.
For those of you comes from C#/VB world, F# actually has the same semantic loop constructs.
F# has these loop supports:

1. for loops with n times (incremental for in C#,For Next in VB)
2. for loops that iterate the elements of a collection/set/array (for each in C#, For Each in VB since VB 8.0 in Visual Studio 2005)
3. do..while that perform loop with test condition (same as do..while in C#, While..Wend in VB)

To simplify giving you the samples, I’ll take samples of F# directly from MSDN Library, paste them, and add the same samples with C# and VB.
Starts from Visual F# MSDN Library: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233249.aspx
Let’s visit the three loop above with samples:

F# loop	C#	VB
// for loop with n times for i = 1 to 10 do   printf "%d " i	// incremental for for (var i=1;i++;i<=10)    Console.Write("{0:d}",i);	‘ For Next For I = 1 to 10     Console.Write("{0:d}",i) Next
// Looping over a list. let list1 = [ 1; 5; 100; 450; 788 ] for i in list1 do    printfn "%d" i	// for each var list1 = new Int32 { 1, 5, 100, 450, 788 } for each i in list1    Console.WriteLine("{0:d}",i);	‘ For Each Dim list1 As Int32() = [ 1, 5, 100, 450, 788 ] For Each i In list1    Console.WriteLine("{0:d}",i) End For
// while..do let lookForValue value maxValue =   let mutable continueLooping = true   let randomNumberGenerator = new Random()   while continueLooping do     // Generate a random number between 1 and maxValue.     let rand = randomNumberGenerator.Next(maxValue)     printf "%d " rand     if rand = value then        printfn "\nFound a %d!" value        continueLooping <- false	// do void lookForValue(Int32 value, Int32 maxValue) {     var continueLooping= true;     var randomNumberGenerator = Rendom();     do     {         var rand = randomNumberGenerator.Next(maxValue)         Console.Write(rand);         if (rand == value)         {              Console.WriteLine(rand);              continueLooping = false;         }     } while (continueLooping) }	‘ While..Wend Sub lookForValue(value As Int32, maxValue As Int32)     Dim continueLooping= True     Dim randomNumberGenerator = Rendom()     While continueLooping         Dim rand = randomNumberGenerator.Next(maxValue)         Console.Write(rand)         If (rand == value)              Console.WriteLine(rand)              continueLooping = false         End If     End While End Sub

There you have it now! All of those samples mapped from F# codes are semantically the same, although the low level IL implementation might be different.

In For Next, VB will hoist the variable of the loop limit first. But this will change after Roslyn compiler is shipped with Visual Studio 2015, as C# and VB now have the same compiler infrastructure.

Great question my blog reader, and I will include this in my completed F# adventure series!

Speaking on Lambda Jakarta: delivering intro to concurrency and asynchrony

Now it’s Lambda Jakarta meetup time! This meetup is on 4th October, 2014. Again, thanks to Traveloka for preparing the place for us to meet!

This time, Abdullah was presenting about the problem of concurrency titled: “Promise of Better Concurrency in Functional Programming: Big Win or BS?”. Yes, concurrency is everywhere now, and it’s becoming more and more relevant because of the fact that nowadays CPU is not getting speedier, but the CPU is keep getting denser with more core CPUs.

Even on my laptop, the HP Envy beefed with intel CORE i7, it has 4 core and each core has 2 logical hyperthreading:

This makes the logical overall CPU to be 8 logical CPUs! As we see, the clock speed is only at 2.39Ghz.

And this has becoming trend, not just from Intel. AMD has begun releasing microprocessor using this scheme/model.

Abdullah in his presentation was quoting this nice article from Herb Sutter (the Visual C++ lead dev of Microsoft) about “Free lunch is over.” published in 2005.

He said that developer should not depend on CPU speed, instead they should begin to think on how to maximize the existing CPU cores. Otherwise the developed application will always run on one core and the rest of CPU core will be wasted. This of course will have negative impact not just on performance, but it will make the application to lose competitive factor of being efficient and support multi core.

Herb also added an undeniable fact of concurrency, it’s not just becoming relevant but it’s already relevant at the time of his writing!

The known concept of these maximizing cores to run at many cores, hence running multiple processes at a time is called parallel programming or on more abstract, parallelism.

This is the original link of the article: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

But concurrency doesn’t stop at just parallelism. Concurrency is also dealing with states, dealing with race conditions, and also traditional concept of operating system such as locks, semaphores, mutexes, and execution contexts.

Now execution contexts are becoming more relevant as the advances in hardware are allowing us to free us from having to wait for blocking operations such as I/O (including networks, printers). But then the software has to leverage this feature as much as possible by freeing current thread to be available for other execution context. The thread doesn’t have to be multithread, as you can still use the same thread but with different execution context.

This concept is known for asynchronous programming, or simply just asynchrony. Most programming languages handles this by providing state continuations such as “Futures” and “Promises”, or using complex callback with support for function as parameter (delegate in .NET, functional interface in Java 8, function in Haskell, Scala, and other functional programming languages).

I was also helping Abdullah to further explain asynchrony in the pragmatic perspective.

The easiest way to explain asynchrony is if we are ordering food at a restaurant:

1. We order the food/beverages and we are served by a waiter
2. Waiter deliver the order list to the cook
3. Waiter serves other customer without waiting the cook to complete our order
4. Our order is complete, and the cook is telling the waiter by putting our finished order at the waiter tray (this is the callback)
5. Waiter checks the tray, grabs the finished order, and delivers the order to us

I also promised the audience that the next meetup, I will deliver small presentation about asynchrony sample in detail

The gory detail of concurrency is also nicely explained by this guy (formerly Oracle’s Java developer, now one of NodeJS founder) Bryan Cantrill in his excellent article: https://blogs.oracle.com/bmc/entry/concurrency_s_shysters

That’s all, folks!

This is the official landing page of this session’s Lambda Jakarta: http://www.meetup.com/Lambda-Jakarta/events/206904832/

If you live in nearby Jakarta, I encourage you to participate on this meetup, guys!

Presenting at MVP Community Camp for September 2014

Hi my blog audiences!

Why I have silent month of August? Don’t worry! Because I was preparing for participating at MVP Community Camp!

Previously, I was asked by Katherine Chen, my MVP Lead, whether I have some experiences with Xamarin tools at the end of July. I told her that I had some about 8-10 months of experiences, and the tool is strong!

This is the original official promotional ad:

After it’s decided by Katherine, I got my own sessions:

Although there were some glitches when we’re rehearsing the presentations (with the assistance of Katherine), at the time of the Lync conference, the session is fine! Unfortunately the Android emulator were unexpectedly sluggish when I was having demo of running Xamarin code.

I also gave demo of The Multi Device Hybrid for Visual Studio 2013 CTP 2, fortunately the demo went well.

Speaking on Lambda Jakarta meetup delivering F#

Hi all! Time for speaking

The talk is on July 26, at Traveloka headquarter. Many thanks to Traveloka!

Before that, I have to tell you now in Indonesia we have special meetup for functional programming called Lambda Jakarta! This special interest meetup is not just functional programming as general, but for more specific interest such as F#, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, OCAML, R, LISP, RUST, Erlang as well!

Just look at their logo:

Found in 2011, now has more than 8 active participants!

It was an initiative proposal at Ruby Indonesia meetup, initiated by Asep. Now mentored by Abdullah (a Haskell specialist, yes he’s a damn good Haskellian!).

In this meetup I deliver mostly intro to F# but with geeky introduction specific to functional programming: “Putting the functional and fun in F#”.

Here’s the starting presentation:

And some of the audiences:

And as of this meetup, I pledge myself to be active participant of this meetup as well!

SPEAKING and TRAINING: Giving Functional Programming awareness in Allianz

Hi all!

I got appointed to give awareness of functional programming as now Functional Programming is everywhere! Previously this is also a part of Allianz IT application development biweekly meeting, now they wanted to have sharing sessions as well!

In this presentation, I have given 50 minutes of quick intro of Functional Programming with sample in F#. The audiences was quite many, we got 25 developers, testers and one MUGI member (he’s also Allianz employee)

This presentation was held on 3rd July, 2014. Here are the pictures:

Thanks to this guy sitting in front of me, Joerg Sauer, or giving me time and place to present Visual F#:

 

Happy coding with Functional! Go Visual F#!