Starting-up the Visual Studio Orcas March CTP VirtualPC Image (which obvoiusly runs on Windows Server 2k3).
Windows Server 2k3 Enterprise Edition, to be exact. Use the Right Alt Key + Del get to the login prompt (or use the menu Action > Ctl + Alt + Del)
When you login with the default Virtual PC image password (P2ssw0rd), you'll be prompted to change it to one of your own choosing.
Enter your new password to continue.
Once you've logged-in, you can find the Visual Studio 9.0 (or "Orcas") CTP in the start menu. Sorry, no shortcuts on the desktop by default.
Launch Orcas and you'll see the first of many rounded corners in the new Visual Studio. Just about anything that had square corners before has received the round treatment in Orcas.
The first time you open Orcas you need to specify which environment settings you want to use (just like previous versions of VS). I picked Web Development settings for this preview.
Visual Studio takes a few minutes to get everything setup on that first load. The sytem resource montior is open to show system resource levels as we open VS on the VirtualPC.
And we're there, Visual Studio "Orcas". Not much looks different at this point, so let's continue.
I opted to start by creating a new website. Notice the .NET Framework version for the new web site: 3.5.
Aside from some new coloration on the window tabs, not much looks different in the default Source View.
Ah! The new Split View. This view has been ported to VS from Microsoft's new Expression Studio. It allows you to see your Source and Design views at the same time, BUT changes made in the source view -do not- update the Design view in real time.
See. When you update the Source View you get a helpful message telling you that your Design view is out of sync. You must click that message or save the page to re-sync the two views.
The venerable Design View with the much improved layout features. Notice the new "Style Application" toolbar near the top of the screen. VS Orcas does a much better job of helping you work with CSS.
Using the Style Application toolbar, I can choose to build a new style rule to apply to my DIV. The Style Builder has been overhauled for VS Orcas and now includes the ability to give your style a name and specify if it should be defined on the page or in an external stylesheet.
Check out the new Box tab in the Style Builder. It now includes a helpful "CSS Box Model Reference" to help you properly create your style.
If you choose to add the style to a new stylesheet, it will automatically ask you if you want to attach the stylesheet to the page. Very nice.
The Style Builder also shows you the full CSS definition created by your style. Click Apply to see the style in the Design view.
You can set a number defaults for how VS handles CSS so that it knows when to use inline CSS and when to use classes.
The much anticipated JavaScript IntelliSense. This is about as much client code IntelliSense as I got, though. Effort to use external JS files with IntelliSense were met with errors.
A simple ASP.NET control in Split View. SmartTags works just like VS2005, but the Design View is much improved.
Let's get some r.a.d.controls in our project. The r.a.d.control installer doesn't add the controls to the Toolbox automatically, so we need to manually add the controls for now.
I've also tried to add the ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManger to my page. I had to install the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions to my VirtualPC Image manually as VS didn't seem to come preconfigured with ASP.NET AJAX. Notice the system resource spike when I tried to add the ScriptManager to the page. We find out why next.
The first of many TypeLibBuilder errors I encountered while trying to add client libraries to my page for use with JavaScript IntelliSense. This error appeared as soon as I added the ScriptManager to my page.
Debugging the TypeLibBuilder error reveals that the client code IntelliSense was having some problem with the assembly strong name validation.
Add a r.a.d.grid to the page works, though. Design View with SmartTag support appear in tact. Unlike the Source View, changes made in the Design View -do- update the Source View in real time.
Another effort to get the JScript IntelliSense to work. The new "///<refrence..." syntax allows you to reference external JS libraries in JS files to add IntelliSense support. As soon as you add your reference, you can see Visual Studio's message that it is trying to "generate client side script intellisense".
But no luck. You'll notice that the TypeLibBuilder error is occuring a lot. I had to remove these references to my RadGrid libraries to stop the errors.
Back to the r.a.d.controls. All of the r.a.d.controls seem to work fine in the Design/Split View. Here we see that the r.a.d.menu interactive configurator still works fine.
Here it appears that there is a problem with r.a.d.menu and r.a.d.treeview in the Design View. Later I discovered that it was a problem with tag prefixes being assigned to the controls when I dragged them from my toolbox and dropped them on the design view. We also see a r.a.d.gird, combobox, calendar (and thus input), upload, and panelbar working fine.
What happened? For some reason, Visual Studio replaced the tag prefix on some of my control to "radTS" (see the Source View). Changing the tag prefixes back to their correct state fixed all Design View errors. We also see r.a.d.tabstrip and chart working fine in this image.
Fixing the tag prefixes fixed all Design View problems. Now we can see that all of the controls (tested) render properly.
The r.a.d.chart wizard also seems to be in tact. While the wizard launches without error, making changes in the wizard does cause the WYSIWYG chart preview to disappear. There may be a GDI issue that needs to be addressed for chart to work 100% with Orcas.
