Earlier this week the Visual Studio team released updated VS 2010 Keyboard Shortcut Posters.  These posters are print-ready documents (that now support standard paper sizes), and provide nice “cheat sheet” tables that can help you quickly lookup (and eventually memorize) common keystroke commands within Visual Studio.

This morning we posted the “Preview 1” release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download it here.

We’ve used an iterative development approach from the very beginning of the ASP.NET MVC project, and deliver regular preview drops throughout the development cycle.  Our goal with early preview releases like the one today is to get feedback – both on what you like/dislike, and what you find missing/incomplete.  This feedback is super valuable – and ultimately makes the final product much, much better.

Last week I blogged about the new Entity Framework 4 “code first” development option.  The EF “code-first” option enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to:

Last week I blogged about the new Entity Framework 4 “code first” development option.  The EF “code-first” option enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to:

Last month I blogged about the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Extensions – a free set of Visual Studio 2010 extensions that provide some really nice additional functionality.

.NET 4 ships with a much improved version of Entity Framework (EF) – a data access library that lives in the System.Data.Entity namespace.

When Entity Framework was first introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1, developers provided a lot of feedback on things they thought were incomplete with that first release.  The SQL team did a good job of listening to this feedback, and really focused the EF that ships with .NET 4 on addressing it. 

Some of the big improvements in EF4 include:

Earlier today we shipped the beta of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools.  You can download them here.

What is included in the Windows Phone Developer Tools

The Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta includes:

Last week I published several blog posts that covered some new web development technologies we are releasing:

• IIS Developer Express: A lightweight web-server that is simple to setup, free, works with all versions of Windows, and is compatible with the full IIS 7.5.

One of the things my team has been working on has been a new view engine option for ASP.NET.

ASP.NET MVC has always supported the concept of “view engines” – which are the pluggable modules that implement different template syntax options.  The “default” view engine for ASP.NET MVC today uses the same .aspx/.ascx/.master file templates as ASP.NET Web Forms.  Other popular ASP.NET MVC view engines used today include Spark and NHaml.

Earlier this week I blogged about IIS Express, and discussed some of the work we are doing to make ASP.NET development easier from a Web Server perspective.