YA.NB - Yet Another .Net Blog

For information on the preview of forthcoming VS / TFS features, there's a nice little channel 9 video episode . Visual Studio follows Windows 8's example and offers users with a live id to sign in and have their settings synced in the cloud. Furthermore there's minor UI changes (Icons, dockability added to Team Explorer,...). VS2013 also comes with version 4.5.1 of the .Net Framework. One of the news in TFS is Rooms, a Facebook-Timeline-like history with chat functionality - roughly what I proposed earlier this year . Right now, I wonder who will pay extra money to buy such minor updates, which could easily pass as Update X.

VSIX files have version numbers and can be maintained via the menu Tools->Extensions and Updates  Sometimes you encounter VSIX files Download VSIX installer rename VSIX to ZIP Extract extension.vsixmanifest from the ZIP and open in any editor. Change the SupportedProducts section to match the snippet below Update the file (drag into the zip and confirm overwrite) rename back to VSIX <SupportedProducts>    <VisualStudio Version="10.0">     <Edition>Ultimate</Edition>     <Edition>Premium</Edition>     <Edition>Pro</Edition>   </VisualStudio>   <VisualStudio Version="11.0">     <Edition>Ultimate</Edition>     <Edition>Premium</Edition>     <Edition>Pro</Edition>   </VisualStudio> </SupportedProducts>           This basically works for any VSIX extension, but the extension's functionality might be either restricted or broken.

What a day! Just found out that as of Update 2, Blend for Visual Studio 2012 now supports WPF applications. That means, Blend now comes free of charge with Visual Studio 2012. This late addition of WPF support (to a product that had supported the framework before) comes more than expected, after the slight turmoil around Microsoft's Blend pricing policy. Of course, WinRT Blend was the first freebie - Are there better ways to establish a technology than giving away the best development tools?

HLSL is mature language that enables developers to address the graphics hardware in a familiar, C-like way. Next to vertex shaders, you can use it to write pixel shaders, which is what - with .Net version 3.5 SP1 - Microsoft introduced into WPF. What sounds like no big deal at first sight is a major leap towards serius WPF / Silverlight game development and - more generally - graphically intensive UI. That goes hand in hand with the DirectX-powered concepts of WPF, finally giving .net developers a good deal of acceleration without the need for unsafe code. Since we're not doing heavy calculus on our GPU, even decent hardware is sufficient to display manipulated images. Since the death sentence of XNA , hopes were shallow that .Net developers get in touch with this cool technology, but we've always loved the walking dead, haven't we? Quite a few WPF Pixel Shader libraries and tutorials have popped up (Some are linked below), and I really recommend getting in touch with the