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En février, lors de Microsoft TechDays à Paris, je n’ai pas assisté à une seule conférence (ce n’est pas grave, il y a toujours les webcasts) mais j’ai quand même pu arpenter le salon pendant trois jours pour rencontrer du monde entre autres pour la WebTV de SUPINFO.

J’ai fait, avec d’autres, plein d’interviews pour aborder à peu près tous les sujets : les communications unifiées, les femmes dans l’IT, les communautés, etc. L’épisode TechDays 2009 avait été mis en ligne il y a un moment, mais ma préférée reste quand même celle que j’ai fait d’Eric Mittelette (a.k.a. ericmitt), responsable du groupe pour les les relations techniques avec les développeurs chez Microsoft France. C’est normal, puisqu’on parle développement. C’est pour ça que j’ai récupéré les rushes et je l’ai reprise en entier pour la partager ici.

Je déteste ma voix sur la vidéo, mais j’adore la discussion avec Eric, que je remercie une fois de plus pour les minutes qu’il m’a accordées, même si je sais qu’il était extrêmement occupé pendant la conférence. Je vous laisse regarder :

Enfin, si le “développement vert” ou la “Green Dev Attitude” vous intéresse, voici la conférence Développement d’applications vertes dont parle Eric.

Et comme je sais que la plupart ne voudront pas aller chercher trop loin, voici aussi l’épisode complet de la Web TV:

As funny and cute as this little girl talking about Visual Studio 2008 might be, I’d be really, really scared if my kids turned out like this :P (that is, assuming anyone would actually dare have kids with me in the first place).

Oh, and did she actually test the WPF designer and XAML Intellisense? All the rest, I pretty much agree, but I’m really looking forward to better WPF and XAML support in VS 2010 ;)

Disclaimer: this is a fake job opening, please do not even think of applying. I'm just making fun of big corporations that cannot seem to fit a couple of pixels into their budgets.

Do you want your work to have global impact? See your creations in applications downloaded by thousands?

All you need is minimal graphic aptitude (we'll subjectively judge you on that based on the file you'll send us), but most importantly, pixel transparency skills!

To better understand what we're looking for, take a look at some of our current work:

If you know the voodoo that will help us correct the atrocities above, you're the person we're looking for! Apply now!

Wow, it's been a while... Hopefully, now that I'm putting the finishing touches on the project that's been taking up all of my time, I'll be able to write more around here.

I'm starting with good news! At least for those lucky enough to have access to a MSDN subscription. As it was announced on Friday, the final version of Visual Studio 2008 is available for download as of this morning!

Slightly under 4GB, the ISO for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite (32 and 64-bit version) DVD is just waiting to be downloaded. Go get it quick before people actually start waking up and download speeds are affected ;)

What am I talking about? Well, haven't you heard? Microsoft is releasing the source code for the .NET framework libraries!

I didn't say it, Scott Guthrie did.

Actually, this has been in planning for a couple of years now, and it has finally happened.

The code is being released under Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL), which is basically the equivalent of a "Do not touch!" sign in front of a painting in a museum. But, hey, that's fine with me. I just want to look at it, appreciate it, learn from it: it will be just like visiting the Louvre of source code... At first we'll get the Base Class Library (BCL), ASP.NET, Threading, Windows Forms, WPF, ADO.NET and XML. Other libraries, such as WCF, WF and LINQ will get there later.

Finally, as if getting the source code (comments included, by the way) wasn't enough, integrated debugging with Visual Studio 2008 will also be supported, which means that VS will be able to automatically download the code as needed when you debug your code. For more details on this, visit Scott's blog.

For more info in general, you might want to listen to this interview recorded by Scott Hanselman last week (working at MS has its perks).

Of course Intellisense is still there in Visual Studio 2008. If anything, it's undergone several nice improvements.

For example, it has happened to me thousands of times and I bet it has happened to you too: you are writing code, the Intellisense window pops up. You appreciate that it's there because you like how it helps you write code faster, but at that precise moment you'd really wish it would get out of the way so you could see the code that's underneath.

Well, as of Visual Studio 2008, happiness is just one keystroke away. Just press  and the window will become semi-transparent.

But well, this is not what this post is about. It's about how Intellisense was not working properly on my installation of Visual Studio 2008 "Orcas" Beta 2 running on Vista and what I did to fix it.

What was happening was that, although the little Intellisense window that you see above was appearing, I couldn't see the description of the method as shown below.

I didn't really know how to fix it, but while reading around about Visual Studio 2008 I stumbled upon a post by ScottGu where I found the following command:

Notice how I executed the command in Administrator mode. Why? Because so did Scott, but I don't really know if it's necessary. All I know is that Visual Studio had its configuration reset, launched and Intellisense worked. I restarted in "normal user" mode and Intellisense still works. So there you have it. I'm off to enjoy VS 2008 now.