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Tim Heuer has posted some videos that will help you undestand some of the new features coming with Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2.

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In the release of Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 one feature that might be interesting to Silverlight developers is the introduction of support for the coded UI test framework and Silverlight 4 applications, specifically:

  • Use Microsoft Test Manager to capture and playback action recordings for Silverlight 4 applications
  • Create coded UI tests for Silverlight 4 applications with Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Ultimate

Tim Heuer discusses NuPack - a new free open source package manager.

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It’s a pretty cool mechanism for getting .NET libraries. For other open source developers this concept isn’t something new (i.e., gems). But for .NET developers it might be because it is a difference from the way we typically have received dependent and 3rd party assemblies for our projects. It provides a PowerShell script mechanism for adding packages as well as the well-known “Add Reference” gesture for VS developers.

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Recently our team released a service release for Silverlight on 1-Sep-2010. We affectionately call these “GDR” releases (general distribution release).

In the GDR1 release (version 4.0.50826.0) we also released an update to the SDK. This is where it can start get confusing…allow me to attempt to explain. GDR1 released:

• Runtime
• SDK

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I found that no matter how I held the phone when I took the picture (portrait or landscape), the API always assumed landscape. I tried looking at some of the device orientation data, but it wasn’t providing the right information at the time I needed it. It turns out after some internal discussions that others were seeing this as well. On the device I have (Samsung) the picture snapshot button is in a natural place if you were to hold it landscape. However, in my current experience with my mobile devices (Android and iPhone) I actually take more pictures in portrait mode.

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On the heels of the Windows Phone Developer Tools and Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit releases I saw a lot of exhaling going on in the hallways today.  Apparently Jeff saved his largest one for an avalanche of knowledge on Twitter in the late afternoon.  Jeff Wilcox is a developer on the Silverlight team and has been working on the Silverlight for Windows Phone initiative as well as the toolkit released today.  He was headed out on vacation but decided to throw out some words of wisdom for Windows Phone developers working in Silverlight.  Here’s some of those nuggets – I wanted to capture them before he left because who knows how long they’ll stay in Twitter. 

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In introducing the concept of plugins, it was made clear that the Seesmic Desktop Platform (SDP) would be leveraging the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) that was to be included as a part of Silverlight. Seesmic would define MEF contracts that as long as developers adhered to them (and of course implemented any required interfaces for actual functionality) then the plugin would be able to extend the platform. The most grandiose idea can be simply stated as if you don’t like how Twitter is represented in Seesmic, fine…change it. Of course, I suspect most people will be just fine with their implementation and choose to extend in other areas as I’ve done.

After a little delay, Tim Heuer finally introduces JetPack – a new Silverlight 4 application theme.

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I’m really excited about this theme and the work that our team put together here. You may have see Tsitsi talk about theming in general and introduce this theme on Silverlight TV. The challenge behind this theme was to take some of the excitement around other Silverlight themes and create a great looking overall theme that could be used for line-of-business applications, but also extended as desired by any other application.

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You can find all the details in KB2164913. Here are the relevant highlights:

• SDK feature to enable Add New Row capabilities in DataGrid control
• Improving startup performance of Silverlight applications
• Adding mouse wheel support for out-of-browser applications on the Mac platform
• Various media-related fixes around DRM content
• Fixed memory leak when MouseCapture is used
• Fixed memory leak for DataTemplate usage

First, to make the scenario clear, say you are building a specific app for your brand’s media archives (audio and/or video).  You want to enable the user to selectively (or automatically) download the media to their device.  You want the user to be able to playback the downloaded media while offline later.  The media in this scenario is an MP3 file, a common audio format.