MSVS 2015 - Cordova 4.0, EF7 and C++17 Lookahead

The Big Picture

Visual Studio 2015 RTM (Release to Manufacturing) was released on 20 July 2015.  The first thing to note is the new .NET Framework 4.6.

Update 2 CTP (Community Technology Preview) was released on 20 February 2016 (it is an unsupported pre-release version of Visual Studio not recommended for production usage).

.NET 4.6; EF7 Preview

.NET 4.6 includes better WPF support for touch (removing a delay in processing touch events) and HDPI (high dots per inch). There are also improvements to garbage collection and cryptography (i.e. ECSDA X509 certificates), more details here.

There is also a preview of Entity Framework 7 (which allows Windows phone applications to use Entity Framework) and an update of Entity Framework 6.

Welcome Cordova 4.0

RTM also introduced Apache Cordova (4.0) support in Visual Studio. Apache Cordova is an open-source mobile development framework (which is free and open source under the Apache License Version 2.0).  Update 1 also introduced new samples, updates and bug fixes.

C++14 and C++17 Look-ahead (Resumables for x64)

But is there anything new in the C++ space? Indeed, there is enhanced support for C++ 11 and initial support for some C++ 14 features. For one thing, return type deduction has been implemented. Resumable functions, expected in C++ 17, has also been implemented for x64 targets. For interest, Stroustrop's thoughts on C++ 17 are here.

Query Active Directory in Excel

Excel 2016 comes with something called "Get and Transform" which allows you to query Active Directory stores. This is known as "Power Query" in other versions of Excel. Data discovery - made simple (or fairly simple).

Get-WmiObject

This is a cmdlet that makes calls into Windows Management Instrumentation, or WMI, objects. The alias gwmi can also be used.

What version of PowerShell am I running?

The simple cmdlet

Get-Host

will get you the version information.

Hiding a Page at the End of a Document in Microsoft Word

Display pilcrows as described in a previous post (Control-Shift-8). Select the pilcrow and change the Font properties to Hidden. The page will disappear. Hit Control-Shift-8 again to make the pilcrows disappear.

Where is the Pilcrow in Microsoft Word?

The pilcrow is also known as the "strange paragraph symbol". It can be found in the Paragraph section of the Home tab. Read more about it on Shady Characters.  The keyboard shortcut to display and make pilcrows disappear is Control-Shift-8.

Mozilla's XUL - the XAML of the Firefox world

XUL stands for XML User Interface Language and is a markup language similar to XAML that is (developed by Mozilla) and used in Firefox. The Gecko layout engine (written in C++) interprets and displays XUL and can be range of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, OS X and OpenVMS. The original technology for Gecko came from a company in San Diego called DigitalStyle and is released under the MPL.