Lets look at the timeline.

Products and Milestones

1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a version of Basic for Altair 8080

1982 – IBM releases BASCOM 1.0 (developed by Microsoft)

1983 – Microsoft Basic Compiler System v5.35 for MS-DOS release

1984 – Microsoft Basic Compiler System v5.36 release

1985 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 1.0

1986 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 1.01, 1.02, 2.00

1987 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 2.01, 3.00, 4.00

1987 – Microsoft BASIC 6.0

1988 – Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.00, 4.00b, 4.50

1989 – Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System 7.0

1990 – Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System 7.1

1991 – Microsoft Visual Basic released May 20-Windows World Convention –Atlanta

1992 – Microsoft Visual Basic 2.0

1993 – Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 in Standard and Professional versions

1995 – Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 released, supported the new Windows 95

1997 – Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 – introduction of IntelliSense

1998 – Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 that included Visual Basic 6.0 released (first VS)

2002 – Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 7.0

2002 – Visual Studio .NET

2003 – Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 7.1

2003 – Microsoft Visual Studio w/Intellisense

2003 – Visual Studio .NET

2004 – Announce Visual Studios 2005 – Code name Whidbey

2005 – Visual Studio 2005 release w/Extensibility

2005 – Visual Studio Express released

2006 – Expression Tool Set released – devs and designers work together

2006 – Visual Studio Team release – November 30th

2007 – Visual Studio 2008 (code name Orcas) ships November = Video Studio Shell

2010 – Visual Studios (code name Rosario)

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Take advantage of all the new features in Visual Studio 2010! On this page, we’ve compiled some of the best content available for developers to help you get up-to-speed on what you can do with Visual Studio 2010, as well as what we’ve done to help you be much more productive and have a lot more fun writing code. From multi-monitor support, .NET Framework 4 integration, the debut of F#, full integration with Silverlight 4, and much more – we’re sure you’ll love Visual Studio 2010 as much as we do.

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Msdn says for SetThreadExecutionState:
Enables an application to inform the system that it is in use, thereby preventing the system from entering sleep or turning off the display while the application is running.
Return Value
If the function succeeds, the return value is the previous thread execution state.
If the function fails, the return value is NULL.

Cool. Ok lets see what pinvoke.net says about this.
SetThreadExecutionState is used to stop the machine timing out and entering standby/switching the display device off.

Ok. Thats exactly what we want!

Prepare the enum, then [DllImport] attribute and then Prevent and Allow Methods.

    public static class NativeCalls
    {
        [FlagsAttribute]
        public enum EXECUTION_STATE : uint
        {
            ES_SYSTEM_REQUIRED = 0x00000001,
            ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED = 0x00000002,
            ES_CONTINUOUS = 0x80000000,
        }

        //Do not forget to add the System.Runtime.InteropServices using directive
        [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)]
        public static extern EXECUTION_STATE SetThreadExecutionState(EXECUTION_STATE esFlags);

        public static void PreventMonitorPowerdown()
        {
            SetThreadExecutionState(EXECUTION_STATE.ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED |
                                EXECUTION_STATE.ES_CONTINUOUS);
        }

        public static void AllowMonitorPowerdown()
        {
            SetThreadExecutionState(EXECUTION_STATE.ES_CONTINUOUS);
        }
    }

And read carefully the pinvoke’s note:
There is no need to store the state you set, Windows remembers it for you. Just set it back to ES_CONTINUOUS when you don’t want it anymore. Also note that this setting is per thread/application not global, so if you go to ES_CONTINUOUS and another app/thread is still setting ES_DISPLAY the display will be kept on. Note that the return value is the EXECUTION_STATE that ”was” set.

After all don’t forget the compile with -unsafe option.

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Post tags: API, OS, prevent standby, standby, System, Unsafe code

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Julie Lerman takes you through using the Entity Framework 4.0 including creating models, reverse engineering, mapping, customizing and applying to a real application.

Watch or download this show here.

Also don’t miss out the previous shows. dnrTV rocks!

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TechNet Announcement:

Check out the Microsoft Desktop Player, now in beta, to find contextual content for IT professionals and developers based on your adoption lifecycle. The Desktop Player filters content by topic based on your role and where you are in your adoption lifecycle. It also surfaces local resources based on your zip code.

Find videos, webcasts, podcasts, whitepapers and relevant links based on your specific criteria. And get a feed of the latest news for IT pros.

You can also download the player directly to your desktop.

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This can be downloaded for free from the speech-bubble at the head of the article.

He also describes the current weaknesses in WPF, and the most obvious differences between the two. Read the full article here.

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Stack Overflow is kind a new Microsoft MSDN. The site has over 500.000 questions and answers for any kind of technology issues. Ask your question and get reliable answer(s) immediately. We owe too much to stackoverflow.com creators Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) and Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software).

From the Microsoft Case Studies:

Developers See Faster Web Coding, Better Performance with Model-View-Controller

When a couple of renowned developers decide to create a Web site dedicated to helping the world of developers share technical information amongst themselves, they need to create a site that is efficient, scalable, and easy to use. That was the challenge facing Jeff Atwood, author of the Coding Horror blog, and Joel Spolsky, author of the blog Joel on Software. As they planned to create Stack Overflow, a question and answer site for developers, they wanted to find a tool that would enable them to use a Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach, which simplifies application programming and separates application logic from the view state. They built their site using the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework, part of the Microsoft Web Platform. The site supports some 1 million page views per day and hosts more than 500,000 questions, associated answers, and discussion

Organization Size: 7 employees

Software and Services

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
• Microsoft ASP.NET MVC
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

Vertical Industries
IT Services

Country/Region
United States

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A quarter century ago, Windows wasn’t everywhere. In fact, some were doubtful it would ever ship at all. And Tandy Trower was there.

Check out the cool story about Windows.

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Are you curious about the new programming language called F# which is supported by Visual Studio 2010?

You should check out this online book.

“Welcome to the F# Survival Guide by John Puopolo with Sandy Squires. We wrote this book to introduce mainstream developers to the world of functional programming through the lens of F#, Microsoft’s first fully-supported multi-paradigm language.

In the spirit of a survival guide, this book covers all of the essential elements of functional programming and the F# language. In this regard, the book is concept and keyword complete, covering the entirety of the core F# language and its pragmatic use.”

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Check out the tool here.

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Have you ever tried to sync your browser bookmarks across different computers?
At work I am using a desktop and a laptop, at home I have another desktop computer.
Sometimes, I have to find a website which I’ve bookmarked recently, but dont know on which computer I
have bookmarked it. I was looking for a perfect solution for this particular problem until today.

Xmarks a great addon for browsers. It syncs your bookmarks accross computers even different browsers
(including Firefox, IE, chrome and Safari) and stores them at their server.
Also, it has capability of storing “saved passwords”. It uses a pin to encrypt your saved passwords
and stores them in server.

Xmarks uses SSL encryption to ensure your special data stored privately.
Also if you want to use your server to store your private data it has that capability too.
If you are using several computers and looking for a solution for “Bookmark SYNC” this is the best
tool I can recommend to.

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Now with awesome mouse and multi-touch gestures!

Best Desktop tool written by VC++.

Check it out. Its really great fun!

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“The list is the result of collaboration between the SANS Institute, MITRE,

and many top software security experts in the US and Europe.”

You can get the list from here.

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Post tags: code security, secure code, Software security

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On tuesday VS 2010 RC was available for msdn subscribers, today microsoft has made this release public.

Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 will launch all over the world Arpil 12.

If you want to download RC iso you should take the this link.

.Net Framework 4.0 RC link is here.

Also Team Foundation Server RC is available too. You can download it here.

Team Explorer RC is available also. Download it here.

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Post tags: .Net 4.0, TFS, VS 2010

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A history about Photoshop.

Ä°f you want to read about designers best friend’s history look at the webdesignerdepot.com

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Some developers strongly feel that these new technologies are coming
along much faster than they can be absorbed. There have been many
heated debates on the extra aggressiveness with which Microsoft is
releasing new products. In many of the offline discussions we have had
upto now, most people feel that developers are not getting enough time
to absorb existing technologies and “keep pace with MS”.

Let’s keep reading.

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Microsoft released silverlight 3.0.

If you are experiencing “uninstallation problems”
of previous versions of silverlight, you need to take a look at “Windows Installer CleanUp Utility”.

You can find this nice utility here.

Very soon, we gonna talk about Adobe Flash vs Microsoft Silverlight and their futures.
I have a few very interesting thoughts about those two applications. Stay tuned!

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