Don't worry. Not everyone knows it...

Finally Installer Projects templates are back with Visual Studio. Hope most of you are aware that few years back, Microsoft removed the templates for installer projects from Visual Studio and we all were obliged to use InstallShield.  Till Visual Studio 2010, these templates were shipped along with VS but post releases were not having these templates. But user voice and vocal feedbacks made this possible and now these templates are again part of Visual Studio 2013 and will continue to be the part in all the Visual studio’s future versions. This Extension can be downloaded either from Visual StudioGallery or by using ‘Extensions and Updates’ dialog’s online section with a search string as ‘Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension’. Important point to mention here is, Visual Studio will still provide the in-box solution for InstallShield limited edition. As of now, this update is part of preview release version;)

Overload resolution has always been an area of frequent attention for compiler team. So, once again there are some major changes done to make the compiler more intelligent. Let's have a look at the below snippet(picked from MSDN) first and try to predict the output: Output in Visual Studio 2010: ExampleMethod: p2 is object Output in Visual Studio 2012/13: ExampleMethod: p2 is string Explanation of code: In above code, there are two overloads with a difference of 3rd parameter params and bit a different ordering of parameters. Visual Studio 2010 picks the overload without params parameter whereas Visual Studio 2012 compiler is smarter and picks the overload which has more specific type. If all your overloads do precisely the same thing, then this change will not be a problem. But in other cases, it may lead to crashes or exceptions. So, going forward, be careful while offering method overloads.

As most of you are aware that there are lot of language and compiler changes has happened with recent release of .Net, but all the issues will not arise until and unless you are recompiling your code. Once you recompile your code, these changes will be introduced regardless of which framework you target. Today I am writing about one of these breaking changes happened in .Net 4.5.  With earlier framework, named and optional parameter concept was introduced and unfortunately it was implemented incorrectly. In essence, there was a issue with the evaluation order of named parameter and will occur only when you are using methods as an argument.  Let's have a look at this snippet taken from MSDN: Expected output: A C B Output in Visual Studio 2010: C B A Output in Visual Studio 2012/2013: A C B Hope by this time, you are convinced about this incorrectness.  Please note, here issue is with named parameters and has nothing to do with optional parameters...

It has been great movement, great work done by VS team for making easy to use Visual Studio. There has been lot of new features in Visual Studio 2013 preview, which has some very cool features in XAML, intellisence, goto definition and many more. But in RC, most of these features are extended. Today I'll try to cover as much as possible about all these new features. So, let's start by taking them one-by-one. 1)  Intellisence in XAML - Earlier versions of VS were pretty cool but I hope, whoever working in WPF would have surely miss intellisence feature. But in RC, that is no more a limitation. So, if we let editor know where the data is, it will help us out like a friend and will make our work easier. VS2013 rc supports intellisence for DataBinding and Resources . Let's have a look of this feature in below screen shot: I ntellisence for DataBinding    I ntellisence for Resources 2) Go To Definition in XAML - This new feature in available in VS2013 R...

Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate is available for download now. This release includes new tools for line of business applications, Web applications, games, mobile devices, services and of course applications targeting our latest platform Windows 8.1.   With the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate (RC) and Windows 8.1 RTM for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, developers now have everything they need to start building and testing  the next generation applications for the Windows Platform. More.. .