Updated features and known issues with C# Express Edition October community tech preview

I wanted to highlight some of the updated features and known issues in the C# Express Edition community tech preview that was released earlier this week. All of this information is in the online readme (along with some additional information about all of the other express edition October 2004 tech preview versions), but that kind of information tends to get buried so I wanted to bring it to everyone's attention as an FYI.

Updated and new features:

Project Templates

Project Templates for Visual C# Express Edition Community Tech Preview October 2004 are now available at https://download.microsoft.com/download/6/e/9/6e9a1e2e-417b-494e-89d3-2bc03b751bd1/OctCTPTemplates.msi for download.

"Edit and Continue" is now available in C#

However, there are currently the following known issues:

  • Making an edit that results in no change (i.e. inside a #ifdef'd out region) can cause the IDE to crash
  • The Instruction Pointer (yellow arrow) can in some cases be placed incorrectly after stepping when an exception has been thrown.

If you are working with code built from the Windows Forms Template (and a few others), you may not be able to do EnC at all. To work around this, remove the "= null" initializer of the components field in the .designer.cs file as follows:

private System.ComponentModel.IContainer components = null;

should become

private System.ComponentModel.IContainer components;

New Start Page

There is a new Start Page, but it is not enabled by default in this tech preview release. To see the new start page choose Tools -> Options, then "Show All Settings", then Environment -> Startup. From there, set "At startup: " to "Show Start Page".

Other Changes:

  • New Community Menu: A few new features around community interaction.
  • New Local Data Wizards: Try connecting to your SQL Server Express database files using the new wizard.
  • Fewer Refactorings: To simplify the C# Express user experience, a few of the refactorings have been removed.

Known issues:

  • ClickOnce is added to the Express SKUs, but it does not work in this tech preview release
  • ScreenSaver Starter Kit will not load