On the 12th as planned, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010. As an update it’s pretty extensive where not all of it’s good but it’s the way of the future so progress we must.

With it, the latest .NET Framework, 4, was available. This also includes a ‘client profile’ release of .NET 4 which I personally feel is a complete and utter waste of time only serving to confuse the hell out of developers and users alike. For the sake of a few MB, install the full runtime and ignore the marketing spin. if Microsoft were serious about runtime size, they’d have scrapped the .NET Framework for UI/desktop and moved everyone to Silverlight…

This brings me neatly to another release – Silverlight 4 (although delayed until the 18th). Somewhat strangely the development tools are provided at an RC2 release version. RTM is expected ‘soon’.

It must be hard to release so many ‘seperate’ things at once!

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For those of you who love to code on the bleeding edge, check out the beta release of Silverlight 4. Please note that the development environment is limited to Visual Studio 2010 (see last post).

As has become the norm for Silverlight releases, there’s a slew of decent features to get to grips with. Microsoft will still receive a bunch of criticism over their RIA direction but .NET developers will be in their element.

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For those of you with MSDN subscriptions the download is now active!

Here’s the official notice from Brain Harry with additional information here.

For the past week I’ve been doing my bit towards a tool built to support Sparx Systems’ EA UML modelling product. The tool adds a URL protocol handler (Windows machines only!) that will open a design artifact in an EA repository.

Canonic Labs wrote the original code but for some reason didn’t complete/release it. Upon request they recently open sourced what they’d done and I jumped at the chance to finish it off. I can now have links to EA artificats from TFS, Fogbugz, e-mails, etc. without having to create an EA shortcut file each time.

Keep an eye on the project site for details of the upcoming beta.

It’s been sat on the drive for ages so I thought I may as well let it go live. Check out the original post for the download link. If you have any issues let me know.