As you can read on Scott Guthrie's Blog the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta can be downloaded now. It has a amazing set of features and improvements and I highly recommend it, especially if you live on the bleeding edge :) I like the VS IDE and ASP.NET Routing Engine (previously part of the new ASP.NET MVC framework) the most.

David Hayden has summarized the list of changes (Scott's Blog posts are usually very long ^^):

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data -  The wonderful ASP.NET RAD Data Scaffolding Support similar to what you get from Ruby on Rails.
• ASP.NET Routing Engine - The routing engine we have been enjoying in the ASP.NET MVC Framework and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
• ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support - What you know and love from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions
• ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support - Haven't seen this one before. It allows you to declaratively define multiple script references within a new custom tag.
• Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor - Always good to see :)
• Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences
• Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks - This will help with jQuery, cool!
• Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects
• Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging - Need this for ASP.NET MVC Framework Views.
• Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects
• SQL Server 2008 Support
• ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities - We expected this. Awesome!
• ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria") - This is awesome, too!
• C# - The C# code editor now identifies and displays red squiggle errors for many semantic code issues that previously required an explicit compilation to identify. Every little bit helps.

Read all this in more detail on Scott's blog or just download VS2008 SP1 Beta.

As you can read on the XNA Team Blog the first CTP (kinda early beta/alpha) for XNA Game Studio 3.0 is available for download now.
The major new features beside full VS 2008 (Express, Standard, Pro, etc., but not longer VS 2005) support you can now write and deploy games for the Zune. Luckily for me I own one (not many non-US people do since the Zune is ONLY available in the US). Please note that while the Zune is a powerful device it obviously will NOT support any advanced rendering techniques at all, but all the other parts of the XNA Framework are supported very well. This means 3D games or shader based games will be possible on the Zune and the display is just 320x240 pixel and there are other things you have to think about (controls and playing music), but other than that it should be pretty easy to start developing Zune games right away :)

While the new features are really cool and I definitely will check out the Zune development options (XNA MVPs already saw some cool samples and stuff at the MVP Summit about this ^^), the show stopper for me is the "no 64 bit support" issue. All my PCs (work, home, laptop and even the servers) run on 64 bit vista/win2003/win2008, it will not be easy to play around with XNA 3.0 ("Hey, go away from that PC, I wanna test something").

Anyway, check out XNA Game Studio 3.0, especially if you own a Zune and find this Zune-targeted game development cool. Other features worth checking out are better sound APIs in the new Media namespace, namely the SoundEffect and MediaPlayer APIs. They allow you to play sounds and music much easier and in more formats (yeah, mp3s).

I worked on the CR_Commenter v1.8 Update all weekend and tested it a little bit today at work. If you do not know about the CR_Commenter plugin for CodeRush yet (I originally wrote it back in 2004 and still use it every single day), please read this article of version 1.7 from 2006 or check out the original Commenter - A CodeRush plugin which helps you to comment your code article on CodeProject.net from 2004

Here are the coolest new features in v1.8:

• New and updated hotkeys, also made sure all of them work as advertised! You can also now switch on and off much more features and hotkeys if you like (e.g. disable Ctrl+1, Ctrl+3 or Ctrl+.). Normally the commenter will do his work every time you press '}' while coding and automatically add comments, xml blocks and the header (no need for any hotkeys during normal coding). But you can also press the following hotkeys to perform special actions:
  
  
  • Ctrl+1: Does perform the same action as closing a block with '}', but can be used anywhere inside a method or class.
    
    
  • Ctrl+2 or Ctrl+.: Adds a namespace for the current word at the cursor. Used to support automatically adding a namespace in C# 3.0 (back in v1.7), but now works the same way as VS 2008 plus saving you from pressing Enter to accept a namespace suggestion. If you like the VS2008 way better (allowing different namespaces), just disable Ctrl+. and VS will work as before.
    
    
  • Ctrl+3 or Ctrl+R: Auto generate region around the current block (method, property, constructor, etc.), for selections use Ctrl+R. You can also press Shift+Ctrl+3 to process the whole file! This feature was originally added in CodeRush v1.5, but abandoned in v1.6 and v1.7 after CodeRush supported it internally. Now the feature is back with lots of improvements, auto generating regions all over the place and producing region names for you. Can of course be disabled if you like the CodeRush way better (having to type the region name yourself).
    
    
  • Ctrl+4: Toggle collapsing and expanding current selection. This feature often caused trouble in v1.7 because it collapsed sometimes regions you were working in (e.g. method blocks with sub regions), now it will not longer disrupt your work and never close any region you are working on (except you want to with this hotkey).
    
    
  • Ctrl+5: Toggle collapsing and expanding everything at top level. Very cool to quickly check out what this file is about, use it in conjunction with first generating all region blocks (Shift+Ctrl+3).
    
    
  • Ctrl+6: Update all comments and xml blocks for the whole file. Was Ctrl+9 before and Ctrl+F9 even before that, this method is not required very often because Ctrl+1 handles most of this already. Please also note that Ctrl+7 was abondoned for now (resort language blocks and regions) because this feature is very complex and not implemented yet (see above for v2.0).
    
    
  • Ctrl+9 or Ctrl+F9: Generate all unit tests automatically for us (I use F9 to test, Ctrl+F9 makes sense to generate tests)! This will add a sub class called Tests, which contains all public methods as tests, which will all fail by default. Then all unit tests will have to be written and tested until everything is implemented correctly. Existing test methods will not be overwritten! This features is the major improvement in v1.8 for me, it will add unit tests automatically for us at the bottom of file to provide 100% code coverage (all unit tests should fail initially, add and change code to make them work).
    
    
• Thought about auto sorting and removing namespaces for all files, but that works just fine with the new VS2008 Powertools.
  
  
• Fixed '}' inside string or comment, even if CodeRush has not processed the whole file yet (double checking now). E.g. the following string will not longer produce any comments:
  SQL = String.Format("UPDATE GC SET Status = {0} WHERE ID = {1}", Msg, ID);
  
  
• Added option to not update comments on } (or Ctrl+1)
  
  
• Supporting to generate regions again, but split up function names, also suppress CodeRush region generation with Ctrl+3, Ctrl+R (also suppressing VS hotkeys now) Better support for auto generated region blocks for big methods, just press Ctrl+3 to generate region (let CR_Commenter choose the name automatically, allow editing after pressing Ctrl+3).
  
  
• Press Shift+Ctrl+3 to generate all regions at once for the whole file! The commenter will also not longer produce regions were you already have some (even if they are different), especially if you press Ctrl+3 multiple times you will see what I mean ^^.
  
  
• Fixed #if DEBUG in Using directives (caused trouble, was removed)
  
  
• Also added code to always remove #if DEBUG and #endif, especially at the beginning and end of the Using directives region
  
  
• Fixed double line #using Using directives issue when using directives got mixed up.
  
  
• Fixed long line commenter generation, will now still work, but not longer cut of any of your code. If you have long code lines (>100 letters), you can still generate comments for them and the Commenter will not longer cut anything off (you are responsible for formating the code).
  
  
• Fixed auto-collapsing of regions, especially when closing blocks in methods, the method should not auto-collapse!
  
  
• Checked support with other languages (which are at least similar to C#) like Lua, Python, etc.
  
  
• In Python/Lua, etc. we had to disable } comment generation and also use other comments (# for python, -- for lua) when using Ctrl+1 for header generation.
  
  
• Test all other hotkeys and make sure they do not affect the code badly in CodeRush unsupported languages (note: VB is still not supported since it is very different from c# code).
  
  
• Supports now any unit test framework, actually does not care anymore what you use, only the unit test generation code will add Xunit, but you can easily change that code if you want to.
  
  
• Options are now available directly into Editor tree of the CodeRush options!
  
  
• Refactored all classes, added about 4 new classes and removed 1 unused class. The source code is now much easier to read, to follow and to change.
  
  
• Remove commented out code, cleaned up the source code a lot.
  
  
• And finally applied the commenter to the commenter source code :)

Some cool and highly complex ideas (like the auto refactoring and resorting of all code elements in a file) did not make it into v1.8 and will probably lay on ice for a while until I start developing CR_Commenter v2.0. But other than that I'm pretty happy with the new version and both the new region generation code and the new unit test generation code is really helpful, plus the many fixes and improvements of existing features make it more enjoyable to use CR_Commenter.

Download CR_Commenter v1.8 here (free as usual, you will need DXCore, which you can download here freely):

• Click here to download the installer: CR_Commenter.exe v1.8 (95 kB)
  
  
• And here is the sourcecode for: CR_Commenter_src.zip v1.8 (90 kB)
  
  

This is the final post of my picture set (7 Days of posting pictures, uff). Nothing much happened on Friday. I just woke up in the hotel, posted the Thursday post, watched some more GOM TV StarCraft Videos and finally left to the Seattle Airport. My camera batteries were depleted and most of the pictures were not recorded because of that. From time to time I was able to shake the batteries enough to make one or two pictures ^^

I hope this is not the plane that will take me all the way back to Europe :)	After basically just walking over to the gate the plane was not there yet. I expected one or two hours of security checks and waiting like in the past, but it took maybe five or ten minutes to walk through that. Strange .. maybe it was early or just luck.	Ah, there is my plane. My laptop batteries are almost dead by now and I will read the book I brought along (Digital Fortress). Sleeping in the plane is not an option, way too uncomfortable and too noisy.
Bad weather in Frankfurt - Germany. We slided quite a bit on the water on the runway. By now it is actually Saturday because of the 10 hour flight plus the 9 hours time difference.	Cool secret underground tunnel. The airport was so packed, it took over an hour to get to the security and finally reach my gate just in time. And all that stress just to find out that my plane to Hamburg has not arrived yet and will be 30 minutes late.	Finally reaching Hamburg Airport (looks much smaller, doesn't it?). It is about 1:00 PM here now and I'm awake for 18 hours now.
Not only is Hamburg Airport much smaller, there are no train connections. You have to take a bus first and then drive all around the city. Next time I will probably take the Airport Express Bus, which drives directly to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (main train station). It is quicker to get back home from there for me.

I hope you enjoyed my pictures. Sorry for any misspellings I might have made, just contact me to fix links or names. Most of the time I wrote the text in a bus ride or while listening to a session. Next I will probably blog a little bit about ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and/or IronPython.

Thursday was the last day of the MVP Summit and the closing keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Balmer were in the Seattle Convention Center again. Additional sessions were hold in the hotels later that day.

After eating some breakfast it was time for the final keynotes.	Ray Ozzie told us how great we are and told some not so exciting development and technology stories. Maybe it was still too early to listen to anything but jokes.	A short break and preparing the mind for the upcoming Steve Balmer speech.
The weather outside is as usual. I guess I was really lucky last Saturday, which was the nicest day wheaterwise I had all year.	Say hello to Steve Balmer.	Steve is moving so fast and always so excited about everything, it is hard to take a still picture of him.
Mr. Balmer is wondering about Microsoft's Strategy? Not really, he is just straching his head :)	Looks like he is giving up on the Online Business ^^ He was actually talking about the fact that Microsoft is only number 3 in Online Search. But as much as he wishes to change that I predict Google will be on the top for a long time to come.	Now that is a lot of products!
Time for some questions.	Poor Steve did not only have to answer 3 Sharepoint/Groove questions in a row, but then the Canadians went crazy once again and demanded that he will wear a stupid shirt like the rest of the Canadians.	Which Steve Balmer actually went along with ^^ Some questions were really stupid now, but Steve stayed cool and always had funny remarks.
More gifts for Balmer!	And this is what he looked like at the end. Well, it was a nice MVP Summit and most sessions and keynotes were exciting and fun to watch.	Time to get up and eat some lunch. But it is only 11:30, why eat lunch already .. crazy.
Still about 1700 MVPs around.	The Canadians couldn't stop making noise and drawing attention. Time for a final group photo. Other MVPs told me that this is not the first time they acted that strange and it was not funny anymore. Just stay normal guys, this is not a sporting event.	At lunch all the XNA/DirectX MVPs meet for a last time. We put 2 tables together and relaxed for a while until it was time to eat lunch.
Someone is taking a picture of us. I guess Andy Dunn will upload his pictures somewhere too, I will check out his blog later.	A lot of Asian guys were also taking pictures of themselfs :)	Saying bye to Pat and Andy Dunn and Andys Camera :)
Leaving the Conference area for the last time. Still only XNA/DirectX MVPs on this photo.	Nick Gravelyn is telling us about his next 100 game ideas.	And George Clingerman, Catalin Zima and me are listening.
And one optinoal session I attended to in the afternoon at the hotel. It was about the VS Debugger and VS 2008 SP1 and was very informative and exciting. Especially through the fact that the audience was quite loud about known bugs and issues we have every day.

Good. I made it, time for me to leave to the airport now. It will be a long trip back. It was a nice time here in Seattle, but I will be glad to be home again and not having to type on my laptop keyboard anymore :)

Wednesday Sessions were on the Microsoft Campus again. I was most of the time this day in Building 85 (same as yesterday) and listening and participating to XNA discussions. In the evening the fun MVP Attendee Party at the Experience Music Project at the Seattle Center, which was a lot of fun.

The day started again with taking the bus to the Microsoft Campus again. Since I woke up a little bit later today I ate half of my breakfast in the bus :)	The XNA Sessions are starting and everyone is checking emails and stuff. Took like 4 years to download 1 kb of data.	After the lunch break someone suggested that we go over to Building 84 and check out the "Wall of graphic cards", which was pretty cool, but we were not allowed to take photos for some strange reason.
This is Mateusz Kierepka from Poland, another XNA MVP, who thinks like me that Silverlight and XNA should merge sooner than later :) Sadly the XNA Team is not thinking the same way yet.	Leaving Building 85 after the final session ..	And heading back to the hotels.
Once there after preparing the post from the day before I headed out for the Party at the Seattle Center park.	And I was taking the Monorail once again, which is quite a bit faster than my feet.	The Seattle Space Needle at night (or at evening). Still people driving up and down ..
At the party we were again not allowed to take any pics of the Science Fiction Museum or the History of Music exhibition. And my camera batteries being low didn't help either.	Most other pictures of today were either blurry or boring. Sorry for not much more. Hopefully the Camera will be at good enough health tomorrow. I do not have anymore replacement batteries :(

And tomorrow some pictures of the final keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Balmer and some final goodbye pictures.

Tuesday's Sessions were happening on the Microsoft Campus. Since the XNA MVP Party yesterday and waking up this morning (which is actually Wednesday) I had no time to prepare and publish this blog post. On the Microsoft Campus, especially in Building 85 (XNA Guys) there was no way I could upload this because Internet was just way too slow. So this post had to wait until I got back to the Hotel after the Attendee party.

This morning we could eat breakfast at the Hotel in this huge ballroom.	Walking out of the hotel to the bus, which will take us to the 15km distant Microsoft's Campus.	The weather is pretty much the same as on Monday or Sunday. Driving up north here until we reach the bridge over to Kirkland and Redmond.
After about a 40 minute drive we arrived at the Microsoft Conference Center (Building 33). Traffic is not going very fast over here ^^	This is how it looks inside the Microsoft Conference Center (short MSCC) at 9:00 in the morning when a conference is going on.	Instead of attending the first XNA session I decided to take a look at the Silverlight 2.0 talk by the master himself: Scott Guthrie
Until someone decided to throw down this wall, which causes quite a bit of noise and amusement.	And this was me uploading the post for Monday yesterday while listening to the sessions.	After eating some lunch and then some cake (see picture) I watched some StarCraft vods from GOM TV with the good old Nick 'Tasteless' commenting in English. This was the game with Tossgirl, which was very exciting to watch.
Shortly after that another session about ASP.NET MVC started with Scott Hanselman.	The MVC talk was very enjoyable to watch because of the many remarks Scott made.	As you can see, the MVC framework is still very much a work in progress.
Okay, let me take a look at that. Hmm, that should test the MVC routing engine. While Scott was talking about that I tried to write some MVC tests with Xunit, which worked just great (as advertised).	Setup-Code for some routes, looks complicated, but I'm not sure how to make them much easier.	I went to Building 85 now for more XNA sessions over there. It was raining quite a bit.
One of the buses traveling from building to building at the Microsoft Campus.	A few native DirectX MVPs, which probably make fun of us managed DirectX/XNA MVPs. But it is all in good fun, we all like DirectX somehow :)	Heading back to Seattle through all the traffic.
Instead of heading back to the Hotels all XNA/DirectX MVPs had a nice little dinner at Jillian's, which obviously did not have enough power to light up both parts of their logo.	Andy Dunn (The ZMan), Sean ?, Michael Klucher (from the XNA Team) and George Clingerman (Mr. www.XnaDevelopment.com) standing around and discussing the physics of billiard :)	Michael Klucher, Nick Gravelyn and Niko Sumi? sitting down and discussing more XNA.
And finally heading back to the Hotel after we were thrown out from Jillian's ^^

More pictures today from the second and last day at the Microsoft Campus. Cya!

Today (Monday, but it will be yesterday at the time I post this) was the first day of the MVP Summit 2008. BTW: I uploaded this post from the Microsoft Campus and it took around 2 hours to upload all the photos (2.5 MB ^^). Tomorrow I will do it from the Hotel again, no fun to do anything but a little surfing here.

After posting the blog post for Sunday (Day 2) from my hotel, the first thing I had to do was to move from my first Hotel (Renaissance) to the Seattle Conference Center and then later in the day to the Sheriton Hotel right beside it. The weather was similar to Sunday.	Several signs and banners were greeting the over 1700 MVPs and RDs that came to this event.	But before the opening welcome keynotes started it was time to eat some lunch first. The room was quite big and the food was good as usual :)
The keynotes were a little bit boring at first, but when Sean O'Driscoll came out and talked about MVPs and the evolution of Social Networking, it was very enjoyable because he is such a good speaker. You can see him on the picture above talking about Web 2.0.	After the welcome speaches the Open Space sessions started, which basically means you get together with a couple of other MVPs and everyone discusses around a given topic.	I attended the MVC and Unit Testing sessions and both were interessting, but the Testing discussion was more fruitful IMO.
This is one of the slides that were developed in the beginning of the Unit Testing session. I guess the discussion will continue somewhere on a blog or wiki somewhat soon.	The wheater outside was rainy again. I had to wait a bit until my hotel room was ready, so I walked around a bit trying to find any shopping stores that interested me. Let's just say I was not very interested at all the cloathing stores and restaurants here.	There is always construction of new sky scrappers going on here.
Still cold and raining ...	I ended up in "Little Italy" for a while, but again notthing of interest here for me.	This reminded me of a picture I took at my first trip to the US (Los Angeles in 2005).
Outside the Seattle Art Museum there was a big metal guy standing and waving his arm (or hamering something, I'm not that good at Art ^^).	Okay, and other wishes can also be satisfied here. Strange location for such a place, right next to the Seattle Art Museum.	The highway to the west and the Seattle Habour behind it.
Again the Public Libary of Seattle. This time it is open, but I'm back on my way to the hotel, my room should be ready now.	After finally checking in I had to go back to the Convention Center because the Welcome Dinner began right now and I had the chance once again to meet with the other MVPs from Germany, Switzerland and Austria.	Some other guys from Germany at the Welcome Dinner. As you can clearly see they are "Men" as it states right above their heads :)
The camera war has begun!	This is Peter Bucher in the middle, we talked quite a bit this evening. He is an ASP.NET MVP.	Some more German MVPs.
This guy had constantly problems with his camera, which was obviously better than all our other cameras combined :) He also took aprox. 10 times more pictures than everyone else at the MVP Summit combined ^^	And thats it for today. All other pictures were as blurry as my vision this evening after drinking all kinds of beer they had to offer here (I think it was Heiniken, Red Hook, MSC something, and something else, can't remember).

Tomorrow all the sessions will take place at the Microsoft Campus. Until then ..

Well, most of the pictures today are still from Saturday because I made so many that day. At Sunday the weather here was like in Germany, rainy and cold. I went a little shopping and went to a movie theatre, which was very enjoyable. In the evening I went to a MVP Germany meeting, but my Camera batteries died. But many other people made photos, I will post a link as soon as I know where all the photos are going to be uploaded.

The Space Needle I visited yesterday.	Well, it is not cheap to get up there. And due the good weather a lot of people had the same thought I had.	After waiting about 30 minutes in line I finally was driving up.
The buildings on the ground are getting smaller and smaller.	Great view at the top. You can walk on the inside and the outside and view in any direction you like.	The habour south of the Space Needle.
A big ship in the south west. It probably is too big to move any closer.	The waterfountain I posted yesterday from above. Its surreal how small the people are. It was a lot of fun zooming in at people and stuff going on down there.	A lot of buildings. Reminded me a bit of Ghost Recon. The jpg compression is also not working well on this image, it is more twice the size than the other images here ^^
Lake Union in the south east. My hotel was located there last time. The good weather also has its effects on the people down there :)	And to the east there is Lake Washington (hardly visible on this image) and behind that are Kirkland, Redmond, Bellevue and so on.	And finally Seattle Downtown south of the Space Needle. The MVP Summit will be on the very lower left side ^^
Mount Rainer, the highest mountain here, was also visible this day.	The water shader effects are certainly nice to look at. After spending about an hour on top of the Space Needle I decided to go back down to where all the action is.	And this is how Seattle looks at night at the daytime if you look at some monitors displaying night time in the middle of the day. Hopefully this sounded confusing enough.
A look up the Space Needle from below again.	A big red thingy.	In the Pacific Science Center you can watch movies in 3D, but all the movies were pretty boring (only kids stuff).
More stuff for kids in the Seattle Center Center Hall (what a stupid name). I ate some icecream and went back outside for the rest of the day exploring Seattle.	Even at bright daylight, if you take a picture directly of the sun, the surrounding area looks kinda dark. Confusing again ..	At sunday the weather was bad as I said above. I did not take many pictures. Here you can see my in the elevator playing around with my camera.
At the movies .. I saw Street Kings. It was an good movie with a lot of action and twists.	The public libary looks pretty cool. It is also quite big, but it was closed at Sunday.	And finally the Bank of America Towers, the biggest building here in Seattle. The weather was getting worse and it began to rain. I went back to my hotel and went to the MVP Germany meeting a few hours later (but no pictures because of my empty camera batteries).

And today (Monday) the MVP Summit will start. I'm pretty excited about this.