New productivity features in Visual Studio 2017

Visual Studio 2017 is turning out to be a game-changer when it comes to new features and of course, as with all Visual Studio releases, productivity enhancements are key to developer adoption.

With Visual Studio 2017, the developer productivity features and enhancements are numerous: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/11/28/productivity-in-visual-studio-2017-rc/

Live Unit Testing with Visual Studio 2017

One of the very new and exciting features in Visual Studio 2017 is the ability to perform "Live Unit Testing".

What this basically means is that as you write and refactor your code, Visual Studio will let you know if the code you are changing will break any of your existing Unit Tests!

How cool is that?

You can read more about Live Unit Testing with Visual Studio 2017 here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/11/18/live-unit-testing-visual-studio-2017-rc/

Visual Studio for Mac now available for download!

Most Macintosh users probably never thought they would see this day arrive, but here it is folks!!

You can now download a Visual Studio for Mac Preview from here that provides much of the same look, feel and functionality that is found in Visual Studio for Windows:  https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/

You can read more about the details of this release here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/11/16/visual-studio-for-mac/

Microsoft is truly committing to bringing Visual Studio development as a cross-platform development tool and IDE much like the Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans or Eclipse.

Only time will tell how quickly developers begin adopting Visual Studio across platforms!!

SQL Server 2016 SP1 Released!

SQL Server 2016 SP1 was recently released!

You can read more about the changes in SP1 here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlreleaseservices/sql-server-2016-service-pack-1-sp1-released/

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2016/11/16/sql-server-2016-service-pack-1-generally-available/

The biggest set of changes in SQL Server 2016 SP1 revolve around many of the features that were previously only available in SQL Server Enterprise Edition (such as Change Data Capture), now also being offered in SQL Server Standard and SQL Server Web Editions as well!!

You can download SQL Server 2016 SP1 from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54276

Changes to ADFS in Windows Server 2016

With the release of Windows Server 2016, as with earlier releases of ADFS, Microsoft has made significant updates to the functionality and capabilities available with ADFS.

Previously, with the release of Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft released support for OAuth as well as several other features in ADFS 3.0.  Now, with the release of Windows Server 2016, the list of new features continues to grow.

One of the major updates to this release of ADFS has to deal with customizing the sign-in/authentication process.  ADFS 3.0 allowed some basic customization of the login/sign-in screen, but with ADFS in Windows Server 2016, the administrators are given nearly full-control of customizing this screen.

You can read about the changes and new features of ADFS in Windows Server 2016 here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/identity/ad-fs/overview/whats-new-active-directory-federation-services-windows-server-2016

Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate - First Look

Visual Studio 2017 takes a dramatic departure from previous releases of Visual Studio with a completely re-designed installation process which is unlike anything we have ever seen from Microsoft before in terms of the decomposition of the individual installation components.

Here you can see the completely revised installation process:

Abstract, sealed and various other C# related interview questions

Whenever I go into a technical interview, invariably I get asked one or more technical questions about the C# language itself so I thought I would share some of these with all of my readers in the event they also encounter these questions on their own interviews:

• What is an abstract class?  - Quite simply an abstract class is different from a base class in that it cannot be directly instantiated.  It is basically a combination of an interface and a base class in that you can have some implementation details while also leaving other implementation details out so that it can be implemented in the subclass.  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173150.aspx
• What is a sealed class?  A sealed class is a class which simply CANNOT be inherited.  It basically locks down the class for main usages in OOP scenarios.  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173150.aspx
• What are the access modifiers for C#?  public, private, protected and internal.  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173121.aspx
• What is a virtual method/property in C#?  A virtual method/property is a method or property which can be overridden in a derived class.  This is frequently used in applications that leverage Entity Framework so that property values can be overridden in a separate class from the originally generated Entity Framework POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) classes.  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9fkccyh4.aspx
• Does C# support multiple inheritance?  No, just like Java, C# can only inherit from a single class.  Also, just like Java, you can implement as many interfaces as you like. To get features similar to multiple inheritance, you can subclass as many times as you want though. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/64hstbtx.aspx
• What is the difference between passing parameters by reference vs by value in C#?  In the case of passing by reference, you are passing a pointer to the original object, while passing by value passes a copy of the object and therefore changes the copy rather than the original object. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0f66670z.aspx
• Passing Value-Type Parameters: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9t0za5es.aspx
• Passing Reference-Type Parameters: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s6938f28.aspx 
• What is the difference between using IEnumerable vs IList?  IEnumerable is a read-only collection meant for iteration while IList allows modifying the original collection as well.  
• IEnumerable - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.ienumerable(v=vs.110).aspx
• IList - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.ilist(v=vs.110).aspx
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