DevTeach 2010 Recap

DevTeach is finally winding down and my sessions are all done. It’s been a great conference, as always. I have been speaking at DevTeach since the second year and it’s always a great time chatting with Canadians about software development. This year I had the pleasure of kicking off the conference on Tuesday morning with the Keynote. I did a Lap around Visual Studio 2010 and I showed fun IDE features and extensibility, showed off a couple of my favorite language enhancements, new Entity Framework 4 & WCF Data Services, new WPF designer and data binding, and Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 tools. It was fun and I think people were pumped.

Here’s some good links to check out for VS2010:

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate
• Visual Studio 2010 Walkthroughs
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit
• Visual Studio 2010 Samples
• Visual Studio 2010 Product Information

Right after the Keynote I had a session that I’ve spoken about many times before (always a crowd pleaser) on VB10 / C#4 language features which are covered in these walkthroughs, articles and videos, on MSDN:

• Creating and Using Dynamic Objects (C# and Visual Basic)
• Embedding Types from Managed Assemblies (C# and Visual Basic)
• Use Named and Optional Arguments in Office Programming (C# Programming Guide)
• Create a Collection Used by a Collection Initializer
• Create an Add Extension Method Used by a Collection Initializer
• Generic Co- and Contravariance in Visual Basic 2010
• VS 2010 VB Language Features Video Series
• C# 4.0 Video Series

I also did an off-the-cuff talk yesterday with Jon Aneja at lunch on using Open XML and XML Literals in VB to manipulate Office document formats.

• Article: Taking Advantage of LINQ and XML in Microsoft Office 2007
• Article: Mail Merging Into a Single Word Document Using XML Literals
• Article: Merging Text & Photos into a Word Document using Open XML SDK
• Screencast: Showing off the Open XML SDK and LINQ
• Screencast: More Fun with Office and XML Literals
• Code: Working with Open XML in Visual Basic

My last session was today on Building Office Productivity Solutions with Visual Studio 2010 and according to the evals it went well just like my language talk. We created an OBA for good old Northwind Traders, bringing them into the 21st century. ;-)  I showed the new features of VS2010 that makes Office development easier focusing on RAD data binding (including WPF) and designers, ribbon and the other available designers, as well as SharePoint 2010 tools around workflow and visual web parts.

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 all the articles here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/OBANorthwind and check out the VSTO Developer Center for more awesome resources: http://msdn.com/vsto

Some of the new features that make Office development and deployment easier are covered in these walkthroughs:

• Office Programming (C# and Visual Basic)
• Embedding Type Information from Microsoft Office Assemblies (C# and Visual Basic)
• Deploying Multiple Office Solutions in a Single ClickOnce Installer
• Copying a Document to the End User Computer after a ClickOnce Installation
• SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010

Here are some pictures from the conference which was held at a really nice Microsoft facility in Mississauga.

Now it’s time to get some dinner and good beer. ;-) Goodbye, Canada. Thanks for the awesome hospitality. See you next time!