Beth's Chinese blog
This Saturday, Feb 27th I’ll be speaking at the Rocky Mountain Trifecta in Denver, CO. I’m really looking forward to it! This will be my third year and it’s a great excuse to get out to the Rockies in the snow. I also have many cousins that live here (they are like fractals, they multiply exponentially on that side of the family) so it’s always a great time with family and friends.
Why is it called a Trifecta? Because there are Developer, IT Pro and Database tracks. It’s not just a Code Camp, not just PASS Camp, not just an ITPro Camp, it’s all three in one place being held at the Metro State College in Denver. And best of all it’s FREE to attend.
I’ll be delivering two sessions, one on What’s New in the VB & C# Languages in Visual Studio 2010 and another on Building Office Productivity Solutions showing off some new RAD designers and tools for building Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 solutions. I have about 2 hours of material on this talk that I have to fit in 75 minutes so that should be quite interesting.
We also have some surprises in store for you at the keynote. ;-)
Register for this FREE event here!
Hope to see you there!
This week I’ve been learning about a free tool included with Visual Studio 2010 called Dotfuscator Software Services by PreEmptive Solutions. If you’re using the version included with Visual Studio 2008 then you are already familiar with it’s code obfuscation technology. You get a lot more with Visual Studio 2010. They’ve added a whole new class of features and services based on code injection like tamper defense and notification as well as performance and usage monitoring. If you’ve ever wanted to instrument your application to see how users really use your apps so you can improve them, this may be the solution for you.
I’ve been working with some folks to provide you with some How Do I videos on how to get up and running quickly. The videos will be released on the usual Dev Center locations so stay tuned.
Of what I’ve learned so far it’s super simple to set up your application in Visual Studio 2010 and compile it with these features. The application then communicates with a free cloud service called the Runtime Intelligence Services Portal that lets you analyze the data from your running applications. But what if you don’t want to use PreEmptive’s free cloud service and would rather host your own endpoint and collect your own data? You’re in luck because today PreEmptive announced an open source starter kit for creating and hosting your own endpoint. Check it out on CodePlex: http://riendpointkit.codeplex.com/ .
What’s the rub, how do these guys make money if it’s all free? The free version included in Visual Studio 2010 has some great features but the Pro versions have even more, of course! Take a look at the feature comparison here.
Enjoy!
A lot of times when I’m answering questions in the MSDN forums, I come across posts I know I’ve answered before. Usually I keep a doc of frequently asked questions, my answers, and links to resources that I can refer to in order to quickly craft the right response.
Wouldn’t it be great to search the forums for my own answers instead of having to keep a reference lying around? Right now you have the ability to see your recent activity under your profile, just log into the forums and click your name to get to your profile, then you can look at your activities which display all the forum threads that you contributed. Problem is you don’t have the ability to search within those activities.
This week I’m up at the MVP summit and I had the chance to meet up with the forums guys and one of them showed me a trick. You can use Bing or Google to narrow your search results to only threads which you contributed. The key is to supply some meta data in your search criteria and to narrow the site down to the forums. The meta data we supply in this case is the ThreadContributorUserName:
meta:Search.MSForums.ThreadContributorUserName(Beth Massi)
Then we want to narrow down to the MSDN forums site:
site:social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/
So if I want to query for posts that mention “Outlook Addin” then the full search string would be:
outlook addin meta:Search.MSForums.ThreadContributorUserName(Beth Massi) site:social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/
And the results:
There’s a bunch of other meta data that you can use as well when searching threads, for instance:
Search.MSForums.ForumName ex. meta:Search.MSForums.ForumName(vbgeneral)
Search.MSForums.IsAnswered ex. meta:Search.MSForums.IsAnswered(1)
Search.MSForums.HelpfulThread ex. meta:Search.MSForums.HelpfulThread(true) Search.MSForums.ThreadStarterUserName ex. meta:Search.MSForums.ThreadStarterUserName(Beth Massi)
Search.MSForums.ThreadContributorUserName ex. meta:Search.MSForums.ThreadContributorUserName(Beth Massi)
If you want to use more than one meta tag then just specify the “meta:” for each in your search string. For instance if I want just answered threads that I’ve contributed to then the search string would be:
outlook addin meta:Search.MSForums.IsAnswered(1) meta:Search.MSForums.ThreadContributorUserName(Beth Massi) site:social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/
Hopefully this makes it easier on moderators and answerers alike to quickly find their own related threads.
A couple months ago Robert Green, VSTO MVP, started a series of tutorials on building on Office 2007. Yesterday we published part 3 of his step-by-step tutorials. Thanks Robert!
In this third part of the series of tutorials on Office Business Applications, learn how to create an Excel 2007 solution using Visual Studio 2008 that generates financing information. This tutorial shows you how to create a custom task pane to display data from a database, bind that data to Excel using ListObjects and NamedRanges, and perform calculations on that data. It also shows you how to easily print the data as a PDF. This step-by-step tutorial also includes full source code in Visual Basic & C#. Check out the tutorial on the VSTO Developer Center:
Building an Office Business Application Part 3 – Generating Financing Information
And if you missed the previous tutorials:
These tutorials are becoming very popular so if you’re just getting started with Office development in Visual Studio, this is a great place to start.
If you haven’t seen these yet, various members of the languages team have released some How Do I videos on Visual Studio 2010 including new language features in Visual Basic 10 and C# 4.
We also just released a good video from Rob Windsor, Visual Basic MVP who demonstrates many of the new language features of Visual Basic 2010 including: array and collection initializers, statement and multi-line lambdas, automatic properties, and much more! Check out What’s New in Visual Basic 2010?
And don't forget to check out the VS 2010 code samples and walkthroughs.
If you haven’t heard, Jason Zander announced today that the Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 is now available for MSDN Subscribers here. The RC will be made available to the public on Wednesday the 10th.
We also just refreshed all the WPF & Silverlight Data binding, VSTO and SharePoint Dev samples on Code Gallery to match the RC bits so check them out once you’ve downloaded and installed the RC:
Here’s some more additional resources to look through:
Office Development with VS:
SharePoint Development with VS:
WPF & Silverlight Data Apps:
Recently I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how to work with and connect to SQL Express data. (SQL Express edition is the free version of SQL Server that comes with Visual Studio). Well if you haven’t seen these videos on getting started with SQL Express you should check them out:
SQL Server 2008 Express How-To-Guide Series
I recommend this one in particular, SQL Server Express Troubleshooting which shows how to add logins to SQL server and troubleshoot connectivity problems.
We just published another community article onto the Visual Basic and VSTO Developer Centers by Robin Shahan (Client App Dev MVP) on how to handle certificate expiration on ClickOnce deployments. She explains in her own entertaining way how to handle a variety of cases depending on the version of the .NET framework and what OS is installed. She even has a flowchart to help you navigate all the options… here’s a teaser:
Sample source code is included here which includes a PDF version of the full flowchart.
Read the article Certificate Expiration in ClickOnce Deployment.
A couple months ago we revamped the Learn pages on the VSTO Developer Center with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks under each type of Office solution. And as a result, we’ve had a lot more people finding the content they need.
Today we’ve started doing the same type of organization on the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax pages. To get there, head to http://msdn.com/vbasic and then click the Learn tab. There you will see a set of general topic areas to explore.
If you select Introductory Topics or Language Syntax you will be taken to a new set of pages that lets you browse on more topics and tasks. Select a topic from the list on the left and the content will change on the right. I’ve collected a good set of content from a variety of sources like the MSDN library, blogs, How Do I videos, and other learning sites. Hopefully this organization makes it easier for you to find what you need related to language syntax whether that be a video, article, blog, webcast, etc.
However, if you still like to see, say, all the videos or articles related to VB Language, you can select the icons on the right-rail. I’ll be working on this type of structure for the rest of these pages and will release them as I finish each one. It takes a while to categorize all the content I want so I rather release section by section. Next section I’m working on will be Data Access.
Am I missing a topic or some good content you want to see? Please send me feedback by making a comment to this post or send me an email.
Happy Learning!