Visual Studio 2008 Setup Project and .Net 3.5 prerequisite issue

By default, every MSI package built using Visual Studio 2008 requires .Net 3.5 even though the application is actually targeting .Net 2.0 or .Net 3.0.

My computer has .Net 3.5 installed so I never notice this problem until I try to install the application on other PC. I changed the prerequisites in the project properties, but it didn't solve the problem. After spending almost half an hour inspecting every single properties in the setup project, I finally discovered the problem is caused by the launch conditions......

In VS 2008, go to View \ Editor \ Launch Conditions. Select '.Net Framework' under 'Launch Conditions' folder, then go to the Properties window. Change the 'version' to desired .Net framework version. Rebuild the project and the problem is solved.

LINQPad: A better way to practice using LINQ

Imagine that you can use C# to query against your database. Now there is a free tool available to let you do that. Best of all, LINQPad is preloaded with 200 examples. I have read some articles on LINQ, but haven't started to get serious on it. It seems LINQPad is a great tool to help me get myself started to learn more about LINQ.

Open source .Net operating system: Cosmos

Cosmos is an operating system that is done entirely in C#.

Microsoft has a similar research project called Singularity, Singularity is not made publicly available (I thought the project was dead but the project website states version 1 is completed and is available for a small number of universities).

Although an OS written in pure C# is cool, I am awaiting to see the real word examples to solve real world situations.

.Net overtakes Java

To me, with the release of WCF and WF, it is just a matter of time for .Net overtaking Java - .Net is getting easier to use and more features, while Java is getting more and more complicated. The result of the survey over here shows .Net is gaining market share. I think even if Sun changes its ID on NASDAQ from SUNW to JAVA won't help much because it cannot change the fact that the .Net is more productive by now - that is why .Net is winning.

Free LINQ eBook

You can download a free copy of Introducing LINQ from Microsoft Press at here.

GC.Collect()

One thing I don't like about .Net application is that it takes up very large chunk, and the memory usage grows very quickly in a data intensive application. I regularly need to call GC.Collect() to force the application to free up memory otherwise it is just getting slower and slower. This observation here is very interesting. It seems GC is smarter in .Net SP1 and even more in .Net 3.5 runtime.

Software Development in the Future

Brad Abrams made his software development predictions for 2008. However, the content isn't sound too realistic according to my experience. Maybe, I should call it predictions for the future, some times beyond 2008. Here is a response to the Brad's predictions which I believe is more practical in many ways.

The .net Suffix

A recent blog post from Keyvan Nayyeri kindly reminds us the .Net suffix is dropped out from most of the product names, so we shouldn’t refer Visual Studio 2008 as Visual Studio .Net 2008. I did notice that the suffix was removed when I installed VS 2005 on my PC and when I read articles where VB.Net is simply referred as VB 2005. I found this product renaming and versioning thing often very confusing: WinFX suddenly became .Net 3.0, Silverlight 1.1 becomes Silverlight 2.0, SQL Server Everywhere renamed as SQL Server Compact, we use C# 3.0 with .Net 3.5 LINQ..etc…..The most recent confusion is the ADO.net Entity Framework. The Entity Framework itself has different versioning from the Entity Designer. So, which Entity Designer should I use? Users have to figure out all these version names before working productively.

LINQ Cheat Sheet

A great way to learn a programming language is to look at the code snippets. Keith Rull has published a LINQ Cheat Sheet which is quite nice. Most of the LINQ coding are one-line and lengthy statement which make it very hard to code in VB. I think it is hard to read with so many underscores in a code file. In other word, if I want to use LINQ extensively in my projects, it is better to convert my existing data validation coding, etc to C# first, and that would be lots of work. Also,I rather stick to my current ORM vendor as LINQ is not much more superior as an ORM tool. However, LINQ will be an excellent query language if it is well integrated into my favourite ORM tool.