Beth's Chinese blog
“It’s the most, wonderful tiiiiime of the yyyyeaaaar”. Yes, I’ve been in love with Halloween ever since I was young. The neighborhood I grew up in L.A. was a great place to go trick-or-treating. Dead bodies in front yards, live action death scenes, and neighbors that actually made you perform a trick to get your treat. As a shy kid (yes, I was a shy kid!) I always loved to dress up and be something I wasn’t, especially something creepy or frightening. The last time I attempted dressing up and trick-or-treating I was about 17 (hey, I had a young face and I’m short!) and I didn’t do it for the candy, I just wanted to show off my costume.
Nowadays I have a costume party on Halloween at my haunted mansion. We have a garage full of decorations that we’ve collected over the years. Most recently added was an animatronic witch that drags itself across the floor. The house is done up in lots of black-lights, spider webs, gouls and goblins and there’s a theme to every room. We even have the head of a dead fortune-teller at the front door. And watch your step as you head into the bathroom (don’t look in the tub if your squeamish).
But the best part of these shenanigans is the costumes that everyone is required to wear. If you show up without one I have about 10 very embarrassing ones you can choose from (believe me you want to show up in your own costume, these are horrible and a bit smelly). We have voting and a prizes give-away for the Scariest, Funniest, Most Creative and Best Couple or Group costumes.
Alan and I always go for the scariest and it’s always a surprise what we’re going to be. This year I have to say is going to be the hardest costume I’ve ever attempted but if I get it right, it will be amazing. Maybe I’ll quit Microsoft and work for Universal Studios (which BTW, I highly recommend going there on Halloween if you’re near Universal City!)
Here’s some costumes from previous years, try and guess what we’re going the be this year. I’ll post back pictures of this year’s party on Monday.
Happy Halloween!!!!
I just started catching up on a cool series on Channel 9: The Visual Studio Documentary
The documentary kicks off by taking you back to the days of MS-DOS and Alan Cooper who originally sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates back in 1988. It has a lot of BASIC and Windows history and it’s pretty fun to watch. (How the heck did Huckaby get in that video?) ;-) It’s also cool to see the beginnings of how Microsoft fostered the developer community, realizing that it was super-important to create a developer ecosystem and support system. I’m sure glad they did :-). Dee Dee has some funny stories about some of the earliest “geek fests”.
Last time I was up in Redmond I bumped into Rico Mariani, Visual Studio Architect, and he mentioned to me that he had started a series of blog posts on his history building Visual Studio as a follow-up to the documentary that takes a different perspective based on his history working on C/C++. I finally read through all of his posts recounting his memories building developer products at Microsoft. If you’ve ever chatted with Rico, you know what an amazingly personable, excited and approachable person he is and it really shows in his writing. He keeps you laughing and interested the whole time, I highly recommend reading them. Thanks, Rico!
Rico Mariani: My History of Visual Studio
I came from a different background (dbase), and not a Microsoft product until 1990 (they bought FoxPro). Always a data-based programmer I didn’t have much experience with C++ back then, and only a tiny bit of Visual Basic. (Why would I, VFP had LINQ and OOP in 1995 ;-))
I learned a lot about the colorful history of how Visual Studio came to be so if you have some time to spare check it out. And don’t forget to download the latest piece of history -- Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. ;-)
Enjoy!
I’ve noticed that folks have been busy creating video content on the newly released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 while I’ve been gone! (I’ve got a couple up my sleeve that I’ll post soon as well ;-))
For instance, Kathleen’s continuing her series of Visual Studio 2010 interviews, this time she’s got Norm Estabrook talking us through how to create a SharePoint external list using the BDC designer in Visual Studio 2010 and Mick Alberts on the “no PIAs” feature, Embedding Type Information from Microsoft Office Assemblies. I’m told she’ll be releasing another one with Norm this week on building a SharePoint Web part with VS2010 so keep an eye out on her blog.
A lot of other folks are creating content on Channel 9 around Visual Studio 2010 so check out the feed. Some recent notables:
Stay tuned on this channel for more….
I finally made my way back home from Europe and I’m still digging through all my email, newsletters, feeds, etc. But one of the items that grabbed my attention is this week Karl Shifflett released updated XAML Power Tools for Visual Studio 2008 as well as a new set for Visual Studio 2010:
If you’re not familiar with these tools, XAML Power Toys are Visual Studio Add-Ins that makes WPF & Silverlight developers much more productive especially for Line of Business applications. They contain form generation tools, Grid tools, DataForm, DataGrid and ListView generation tools that really shorten the time it takes to lay out UI controls on a WPF form. Thanks Karl!
SDC09 has been a blast. I just finished my last session on Building Office Business Applications with Visual Studio 2010 and I think it went well. We created an OBA for good old Northwind Traders. I migrated the 2008 code which is here on code gallery into VS 2010 and showed the new features of VS2010 that makes Office development easier focusing on RAD data binding (including WPF) and designers, new multi-project deployment, and SharePoint 2010 tools.
My main goal was to provide a real-world scenario and architecture but keep the demo code manageable and simple while also introducing folks to all the RAD designers available. This way you can take apart the sample easily and reuse just the pieces you need. Check out the code and 5-part article series on how to build the Northwind OBA in Visual Studio 2008:
I migrated the solutions to use Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for my presentation so once those Betas are available I’ll update the links with that code. Beta 2 for Visual Studio released yesterday so I got to show everyone the latest and greatest tools including SharePoint 2010 tooling. Some of the features that make Office development and deployment easier are covered in these walkthroughs:
Yesterday my talks went really well too but I’ve done them many times before, last time being code camp. I did one on VB10 / C#4 language features which are covered in these walkthroughs on MSDN:
I also did a talk on using Open XML and LINQ to XML to manipulate Office 2007 document formats.
Happy Birthday!
Yes it’s my birthday today. Not really an important one in my opinion, I’m just getting old I guess ;-). But when I showed up in my session this morning the room had been decorated with rainbow streamers. It was very cute and I thought that was the end of it. But afterwards during lunch I was lead onto the stage in the main hall and properly embarrassed by the event organizers. They brought out a cake with a gigantic fire-cracker on it! Then all the attendees sang happy birthday to me in Dutch. It was totally embarrassing but also incredible to feel loved by the Dutch developer community :-).
THANKS TO ALL OF YOU!
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has been released! Check out the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 site to download the Beta, submit product feedback on the Beta Forums, report bugs on Connect, and watch videos about Visual Studio 2010 on Channel 9. Also visit the Beta 2 walkthroughs page for information on how to use the new features and download the Visual Studio 2010 Samples.
There’s also some good language-focused resources on the Visual Basic 2010 and C# 2010 as well as resources for Office Development with Visual Studio 2010 that are hanging off the Developer Centers. Take a look through the Visual Studio 2010 Product Highlights and What's New in Visual Studio 2010 .
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 resources:
Looks like content is still propagating across the net so some headlines still still need to update but the download is ready for MSDN Subscribers today and the content is here! Everyone else can download it on the 21st. I can’t wait to mention it to all the attendees at the SDC conference :)
Enjoy, and let us know what you think of Beta 2!
Yesterday I flew into Amsterdam and today I walked all over the city taking pictures for a mini-tourist day before the conference tomorrow. It’s a bit chilly (for me) but so far hardly any rain at all. It’s a little after 6pm in Holland as I write this and it’s almost time for the speaker dinner but I thought I’d post a few pictures I took earlier.
Robert Green and I met for breakfast (bumped into Shawn Wildermuth) and then took off or a walking tour around town. Robert loves to take pictures and has a fancy-smancy camera. I just have a point-and-shoot but I thought it took pretty decent photos nonetheless. (Click to enlarge)
It’s my 4th time in Holland and I love it. Maybe someday Alan and I will come here for vacation :-). I’ve got an early session tomorrow so I probably won’t stay out too late. Now that we’re at the Papendal conference center and not in Amsterdam I’ll be less tempted to stay up tonight. ;-)
I’ll report back tomorrow and let you know how day 1 turns out. I’m sure it will be a great conference. I’m definitely anxious for it to begin.
If you’re up in Redmond, the .NET Developers Association has a very special guest for their meeting tonight.
Billy Hollis will be speaking on WPF showing off a real business application he developed. Billy has a very “practical programmer” style that I always enjoy. He’s also an expert on WPF so this meeting is bound to be informative and fun. Hope you can make it out to campus tonight. The meeting starts at 7pm in the Building 40 cafe. Check out the .NETDA site for directions.
Meeting details….
Topic: WPF In-Depth: Walkthrough a Real World WPF App The StaffLynx application, developed by a team led by Billy Hollis, has been acclaimed for using WPF technologies in a business-oriented software system. In this session, Billy will cover the basic architecture of this application, highlighting architectural differences from previous generations: layered client design, service-based data access, and advanced UI capabilities. He will show how critical pieces are constructed, including novel coding concepts in WPF and XAML. Then he’ll discuss the design and prototyping process, show various prototypes with analysis of their strengths and weaknesses, and cover lessons learned from that process.
Speaker: Billy Hollis Billy Hollis is an author and software developer from Nashville, Tennessee. Billy is co-author of the first book ever published on Visual Basic .NET, VB .NET Programming on the Public Beta. He has written many articles, and is a frequent speaker at conferences. He is the Regional Director of Developer Relations in Nashville for Microsoft, and runs a consulting company focusing on Microsoft .NET.
I’ve written before about the new array and collection initializer support in Visual Basic 2010. In this month’s MSDN Magazine, Spotty shows us how this new syntax in Visual Basic will make you more productive when writing code.
Collection and Array Initializers in Visual Basic 2010
Visual Basic provides the same support as C# using the new “From” syntax which automatically calls Add for you on any collection that has an Add method. VB also allows you to take it a step further by supporting Extension Methods. If you provide an Add extension method of your own, VB will use that instead making your code even cleaner.
Check out my post and the article.
There’s also a lot of other great articles this month, in particular:
Today MSDN released a preview of what’s to come later this month on the Visual Basic Developer Center. You should notice an URL at the top that directs you to check out the preview:
Besides the cool colors you’ll see a better layout on the home page for easier navigation. Essential resources are centered right in the middle with a rotator of sorts that allows you to pick a tab on the left to hone in on the content you want on the right. You’ll see featured articles and library content, VB team and MVP blog posts, our Channel 9 videos, and VB samples & projects on Code Gallery and Codeplex all right there in the middle of the page.
Of course, content is king, and you’ll still be seeing great Visual Basic content rolling out here on the Dev Center. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff in our pipeline! Stay tuned for more awesome “How Do I” Videos!
I mentioned that we added ratings and comments on the videos a while back (and I’ve been keeping up with them ;-)), but now we also have a video scroller that lets you browse the most popular videos with ease. You’ll see this control on the home page (at the bottom) as well as the learn page and soon we’ll also be able to see the ratings and views right here as well.
There’s a lot more coming on MSDN but take a look at the site and give us your feedback in the MSDN feedback forum where folks from MSDN will be participating. Of course, you can always tell me your thoughts here as well and I’ll get them back to the right folks.