Some of you may be thinking that AJAX and Silverlight were just fine. Well, WPF control has some advantages that you would do well to take advantage of. The main advantage being that developers can now “build interactive tools for visualizing geographical data on the desktop.”

James McCaffrey, writing for Visual Studio Magazine, lays out a good argument as to why he thinks WPF control is the best way to develop for Bing Maps.

“The two main alternatives to Bing Maps with WPF are Bing Maps AJAX in a Web application and Bing Maps Silverlight. I’ve used — and like — all three approaches, but I really like Bing Maps with WPF. It gives you the combined power of Bing Maps and the WPF programming model, with the convenience of the C# language.

I’ve found Bing Maps with WPF especially useful when I have to deal with very large data sets. In those scenarios, Bing Maps with WPF was much faster than Web-based alternatives, and it allowed me to effectively handle SQL databases with millions of records, and to display thousands of data points in real time.”

McCaffrey then goes on to detail some of the ways people can use WPF control for Bing Maps. He details how developers can change map properties, place marker data, draw straight lines and curved lines, handle double-click events, display multiple data points, and work with large data sets.

All of the examples contain huge amounts of code for you to sift through. It should give you an idea of how to start developing for Bing Maps with the new WPF control system.

It should be noted that you’re going to need a version of Visual Studio that contains Microsoft’s .NET Framework 4 and the Windows SDK. You can get this by downloading the free edition of Visual Studio 2010 Express. You will also obviously need the WPF SDK as well which is available here.

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The Visual Studio team announced in a blog post today that they are making some changes to the Find and Replace options within VS11. They had already introduced a new Find control when they launched the beta last year. While they have fixed various bugs with the new Find controls, they are now addressing some of the suggestions users have submitted.

The first is that search options can now be navigated with the arrow keys. What’s more is that you can open the MRU list by just pressing the down key. This should make search options easier to find as pressing a key is much simpler than looking all over a UI for a specific list.

They are now adding back in more keyboard shortcuts from Visual Studio 2010 after customer feedback. You can now use Alt+C to toggle Match case or Alt+E to toggle regular expressions. This is still the beta so Microsoft will be adding in more keyboard shortcuts over time. You can get a list of all the currently available keyboard shortcuts for VS11 here.

The Find control is now resizable. This was apparently a “top customer request” and I can see why. Some terms are too long for the default size of the search box. This is especially true for searches involving regular expressions.

There have been some updates to the regular expression builder. It now supports .NET regular expressions as well some of the missing regular expressions from VS 2010. You can access these by clicking on the builder menu flyout.

A small change also came to the tab order. It’s now consistent with the dialog, which came after the Developer Preview provided this feedback.

There are a few bugs left, however, with one of them being fixed by a small extension. The first bug is that the shared scope and search options for Quick Find and Find in Files were common across the new Find control and the Find dialog. Microsoft claims its too risky to fix in the beta, so they have released this extension to fix it for the time being.

The other bug causes a COM exception every time a document is closed with an active incremental search. Like the last bug, this will be fixed after the beta ends. As a workaround now, you should close any incremental searches by pressing the Esc key before closing documents. If you do encounter the COM exception, just hit Ctrl+F and perform a Find Next.

This latest release should fix a lot of the complaints users have had with VS11. Microsoft says they are prioritizing bug fixes based on feedback so keep on sending them suggestions.

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Ted Kummert, corporate vice president at Microsoft, pointed out that “[d]ata is being generated faster than ever before, and organizations need a way to process and analyze all that date.” SQL Server 2012, he said, “delivers the platform and familiar tools to manage data, generate actionable insights and help drive business impact.” David Mariani, vice president of engineering for Klout, one of the businesses that has implemented the software already, said that the SQL Server 2012 allows his Klout to deal with “massive volumes of data queries in near-real time.”

In addition to the basic software, Microsoft will also release several new data warehousing solutions. SQL Server 2012 has already been deployed by a selection of business customers, including Volvo, Revlon, HSN, Klout and others. SQL Server 2012 is scheduled for general release on April 1st.

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On the Visual Studio blog yesterday, Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience in the Microsoft Developer Tools Division, laid out the changes the team is making to Visual Studio 11. The changes are focused on increasing efficiency of the developers working on new code. Microsoft has found that with the current set of tools, developers are only spending 15 percent of their time writing code.

To increase efficiency and fix what they perceive as problems with the program, Microsoft has outlined three problem areas:

Coping with tool overload. Visual Studio provides a large amount of information and capabilities that relate to your code. The sheer breadth and depth of capabilities that Visual Studio provides, at times, makes it challenging to find and make effective use of desired commands, options, or pieces of information.

Comprehending and navigating complex codebases and related artifacts (bugs, work items, tests etc.). Most code has a large number of dependencies and relationships with other code and content such as bugs, specs, etc. Chaining these dependencies together to make sense of code is more difficult and time-consuming than it needs to be due to the need to establish and re-establish the same context across multiple tools or tool windows.

Dealing with large numbers of documents. It is very common for developers to end up opening a large number of documents. Whether they are documents containing code, or documents containing information such as bugs or specs, these documents need to be managed by the developer. In some cases, the information contained in these documents is only needed for a short period of time. In other cases documents that are opened during common workflows such as exploring project files, looking through search results, or stepping through code while debugging are not relevant at all to the task the developer is working on. The obligation to explicitly close or manage these irrelevant or fleetingly relevant documents is an ongoing issue that detracts from your productivity.

Dealing with the first problem of tool overload, the Visual Studio team is changing four areas of the UI to make to reduce visual clutter. The four areas are command placements, colorized chrome, line work and iconography.

For command placements, the team has reduced toolbar command placements throughout the entire program by 35 percent. As an example, they have removed the cut, copy and paste commands from the toolbar because most developers use the keyboard shortcuts.

In previous versions of Visual Studio, many of the tools were colorized with bright colors and bold images. They have moved to a monochromatic color scheme in Visual Studio 11 so that users can focus on the tools instead of the colors.

To give users a choice, the Visual Studio 11 UI can be changed from light gray to a darker gray color. This allows users to choose which color compliments their work best.

Light UI:

Dark UI:

Line work has always been important to the UI for Visual Studio. The team at Microsoft, however, found that using boxes and gradients “drew attention away from developer content.” They are now using more typography and whitespace to create structure and emphasis.

The team has also changed the iconography to be more simplistic thus making it easier to understand each tool’s intended function. They do understand the change may confuse some users, but found through their own studies that users could still identify the tools based on the new glyph style.

Finally, the team is making it easier to find what they need to do their job. To this end, the team has made it possible to search for commands and configuration options through quick launch. Users can also search within tool windows and open files.

Microsoft hopes that the changes will make Visual Studio 11 feel lighter and less complex. It should also allow more room for developers to see their content.

As developers, what do you think of the changes coming to Visual Studio 11? Do they make the tools easier to use? Let us know in the comments.

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Though the vulnerability affects other web platforms, on ASP.Net it is described as giving “a specially crafted ~100kb HTTP request [the ablility to] consume 100 percent of one CPU core for between 90 and 110 seconds” by Suha Can and Jonathan Ness from Microsoft Security Responce Center. By repeating these requests a user could mount a DoS attack on even a cluster of multi-core servers.

HybrisDisaster, alluding to be a member of Anonymous released the code, telling the public to “use it your own way.” It was expected, of course as Can and Ness stated in December, “We anticipate the imminent public release of exploit code.” Anyone who maintains an ASP.Net application should deploy the patches in Microsoft’s MS11-100 security bulletin.

ComputerWorld reported how an exploit was discussed by Klink and Walde during the Chaos Communication Conference a few weeks prior. Based on research from a 2003 paper, Klink and Walde demonstrated how a low-bandwidth attack could be initiated without the use of bots to take down entire websites – an attack equivalent to that of a full fledged denial of service attack. This attack utilizes the high CPU load needed to handle various hashing techniques to create a unbearable load on the server with minimal requests. Although the exploit requires a web application to utilize hash tables to even be vulnerable, it was found that various parts of auto-generated forms and its data in ASP .NET utilize these hashes, and thus was easily exploited.

Other languages, such as Ruby and PHP, were also vulnerable to this exploit. Ruby immediately released a patch to help combat the issue, while PHP made modifications to a future release. However, these releases were not critical as hashing is not as frequently used nor utilized by default in these languages.

Bravo, Microsoft. Bravo.

The Silverlight team released a press release a few days ago announcing the upgrade and describing all of the new goodies that have been included. Some of these include:

• Improved support for various media formats such (as well as some nifty variable speed playback support.
• Improved text support.
• Improved graphics.
• Generally improved performance.
• Lots of nice extensions and such for “Building next-generation business applications.”

Apparently this release of Silverlight allows developers to use the trusted application format. According to their report, that means that “when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks.” For more information on the new release (such as what what it does, where to get it, and how to use it) check out this blog post that is linked from the ASP.net website.

So far, well over a million websites have been affected in some way by this. These are mainly sites that are associated with schools, universities, small businesses, and hospitals i.e. the types of organizations that probably wouldn’t spend thousands of dollars a year on advanced Internet security measures. Most of these were sites built using ASP.NET, and they were compromised by code being inserted by the bug. The code inserts an invisible link on the page that takes users to unsafe sites, which apparently divert to other sites as well. Apparently, all of the rogue sites are registered under the name “James Northone,” which is the same false name that was used during the aforementioned Liza Moon attack.

Surprisingly, only six out of forty three big web-security firms have actually been able to identify the virus, which is not good for the people that regularly visit the types of websites that would get infected. Experts have suggested that users keep all of the anti-virus and web related (Javascript, Flash, etc.) completely up to date because hackers often exploit weaknesses in previous under-supported versions of software.

Most of the features from the old site have stayed constant, such as the two navigation bars at the top of the page, and the community spotlight feed. The redesign includes some features such as more tutorials and the integration of social networking functionality (facebook, twitter, etc.). They have also added what they call an “Improved onboarding experience”, which means that they intend to make it easier to get new developers started. It seems that the most important aspect here is to make sure that the site is much easier to use than the previous one. Go ahead and check it out at http://beta.asp.net, and for more information on the new additions to and some of the plans for the site, go to this link to read an official rundown of what is going on.