Beth's Chinese blog
This week I have a couple interviews that released to the web. The first one is a short video with Eric Hagan from the DZone .NET community where I talk about some of my favorite features in Visual Studio 2010 and the languages:
Beth Massi on Visual Studio 2010; New Features in VB, C#
The second interview is a .NET Rocks Road Show podcast I did with Alan Griver and Tim Heuer where we chat about some of the cool features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight and Azure:
Alan Griver, Beth Massi, and Tim Heuer Live in Phoenix
If you haven’t head, Carl and Richard are the very famous .NET Rocks hosts that are travelling around the country in an RV doing community road shows promoting Visual Studio 2010. I was lucky to be at their Phoenix stop helping with the community launch event there (more on that later).
There are a ton of sponsors, one being PreEmptive Solutions, which makes the Dotfuscator Software Services which I’ve written about here before. Richard and Carl have a very cool Silverlight RIA application that lets you track their progress and it’s hooked up to their Twitter account so you can see where they are when they tweet. PreEmptive Solutions has implemented some application analytics into this as well so check it out here:
http://silverlight.onterrasys.com/dnr_roadtrip
Check out these resources from PreEmptive Solutions on MSDN (more videos coming soon)
Videos: Dotfuscator Software Services in Visual Studio 2010 Article: Using Visual Studio 2010 to Collect Usage, Performance and Stability Information to Improve Software.
Enjoy!
I just saw a tweet from Rob Windsor, VB MVP that he produced some How Do I videos on SharePoint and they were released on MSDN. Rob is an excellent trainer so I highly recommend them:
How Do I: Use the SharePoint 2010 Object Models?
How Do I: Build a SharePoint Feature with Visual Studio 2010?
We also have a bunch here as well that I would recommend if you’re getting started with SharePoint in Visual Studio 2010:
#1 | How Do I: Create Visual Web Parts for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010? #2 | How Do I: Create Sequential Workflows for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010? #3 | How Do I: Create State Machine Workflows for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010? #4 | How Do I: Create Event Receivers for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010? #5 | How Do I: Create Content Types for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010? #6 | How Do I: Create List Definitions for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010? #7 | How Do I: Create Site Definitions for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010? #8 | How Do I: Import a SharePoint Site Definition using Visual Studio 2010? #9 | How Do I: Create a Business Data Connectivity Model for SharePoint 2010 Using Visual Studio 2010?
You’ll find a lot more videos on the Visual Basic, Visual Studio, VSTO, and Office Developer Centers around Visual Studio, Office and SharePoint 2010 products.
Also take a look at these new Visual Studio 2010 resources, articles, samples, videos, + more!
Last post I talked about how you can create your own WCF data services (OData) and use PowerPivot to do some powerful analysis inside Excel 2010 as well as how to use the new sparklines feature. If you missed it:
Add Spark to Your OData: Consuming Data Services in Excel 2010 Part 1
In this post I want to show how you can create your own Excel client to consume and analyze data via an OData service exposed by SharePoint 2010. I’ll show you how to write code to call the service, perform a LINQ query, data bind the data to an Excel worksheet and generate charts. I’ll also show you how you can add these cool sparklines in code.
You can build your own document customizations and add-ins for a variety of Microsoft Office products using Visual Studio. You can provide data updating capabilities, integration with external systems or processes, write your own productivity tools, or extend Office applications with anything else that you can imagine with .NET. For more ideas and tutorials, check out the VSTO Developer Center and the VSTO Team blog.
Let’s create a customization to Excel that analyzes some data from SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 exposes its list data and content types via an OData service that you can consume from any client. You can also use the service to edit data in SharePoint as well (as long as you have rights to do so). If you have SharePoint 2010 installed, you can navigate to the data service for the site that contains the data you want to consume. To access the data service of the root site you would navigate to http://<servername>/_vti_bin/ListData.svc.
For this example, I created a sub-site called Contoso that has a custom list called Incidents for tracking the status of insurance claims. Items in the list just have a Title and a Status field. When I navigate my browser to the Contoso data service http://<servername>/Contoso/_vti_bin/ListData.svc, you can see the custom lists and content types get exposed as well.
However, there is a better way to explore the types that OData services expose using a Visual Studio 2010 extension called the Open Data Protocol Visualizer. You can install this extension directly from Visual Studio 2010. On the Tools menu select Extension Manager, then select the Online Gallery tab, choose the Tools node and from there you can install the visualizer. Once you restart Visual Studio you can add a service reference to the data service, right-click on it and select View in Diagram. Then you can select the types you want to explore:
We want to customize Excel with our own .NET code that calls this SharePoint OData service and does some data analysis on the Incident data stored in the Contoso SharePoint site. Starting in Visual Studio 2008 you could select from a variety of Office 2007 project templates, Excel Workbook being one of them. Visual Studio 2010 now adds support for Office 2010 projects as well as 64-bit support.
In Visual Studio 2010 create a new project and select the Office 2010 node and choose Excel 2010 Workbook. This will create a document-level customization for Excel 2010. The difference between selecting an Add-in versus a document customization is that an Add-in will run every time the user opens the application, regardless of the document being opened. Here I want to create a document-level solution so that only this document has the custom code. This also gives us the benefit of using the Excel designer to quickly lay out controls on our worksheet.
We want to bind to the list of data coming from our Incidents list to an Excel worksheet so first we need to add a reference to the SharePoint 2010 data service. Open the data sources window (from the Data menu select Show Data Sources) and click the link Add New Data Source to start the Data Source Configuration Wizard. New in Visual Studio 2010, you can select a SharePoint data source:
Selecting this and clicking Next will just open up the Add Service Reference dialog which is the same as adding it directly from the Solution Explorer, it’s just more convenient here since we’re going to do some data binding. Here you specify the address of the SharePoint 2010 data service, I named the service reference ContosoService in this example. Click Finish and now you will see the Data Sources window populated with the types exposed by the data service.
Now it’s time to do some data binding. Simply drag the Incidents list from the Data Sources window onto the design surface for Sheet1. This design surface is actually Excel 2010 being hosted inside Visual Studio. You can access all of the design features of Excel from here just like if you were working in Excel outside of Visual Studio.
This sets up a ListObject control named IncidentsListObject that is bound to a windows forms BindingSource that is created for you in the component tray. When you set the DataSource property of this BindingSource the data is displayed. But before we query the data from the data service, I want to hide some of the columns in the IncidentListObject to only show the Title and StatusValue columns. You do this by selecting the column range, right-click and choose Hide.
Next we want to add a PivotTable and pie chart to show a breakdown of incident claims by their status. If you are familiar with creating PivotTables and charts in Excel then this part is easy. Select the IncidentListObject on the sheet, then on the Excel Ribbon choose the Insert tab and drop down the PivotTable button on the far left and select PivotChart. The range will be set to the IncidentsListObject so just choose a location; for this example I placed it in the same sheet. In the Pivot Table Field List check the StatusValue field, drag it to the Values section, and then set the chart type to Pie Chart.
Now that we have our data and charts laid out how we want, we can write a LINQ query to get the SharePoint data.
When you add a data service reference to your project, a .NET assembly reference is added automatically for you to System.Data.Services.Client. This client assembly is needed in order to write LINQ queries against any data service. We could easily provide a UI to the user to call this service in the form of a custom Task Pane or Ribbon using those designers in Visual Studio, but for this example we’ll keep it simple and just add the code to the sheet directly. So open up the code-behind for Sheet 1 and in the Sheet1_StartUp event handler write the following code:
'Pull in sharepoint list data via OData service Dim ctx As New ContosoService.ContosoInsuranceDataContext( New Uri("http://<servername>/contoso/_vti_bin/listdata.svc")) ctx.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials 'Linq query to return incidents data from SharePoint Dim results = From i In ctx.Incidents Order By i.StatusValue 'Databind the list Me.IncidentsBindingSource.DataSource = results.ToList() 'Refresh pivot table Dim pvt As Excel.PivotTable = Me.PivotTables("PivotTable1") pvt.RefreshTable()
Hit F5 to start the debugger and Excel will display the data from our SharePoint data service and you will see the breakdown of status on the claims in the Incidents list.
New we want to add those cool sparklines. This time I want to add the column type of sparkline to give a visual queue of how many claims fall into the respective status. Same data as the pie chart in this case but just a different visualization. And since I don’t have a series of data in each row like in the previous example, I need the sparkines to scale across the group. Here’s the code to do that:
Private Sub AddSparkLines(ByVal pvt As Excel.PivotTable) 'Get the row where the actual data starts Dim row As Integer = pvt.DataBodyRange.Row 'Get the count of data rows but do not include the pivottable totals Dim count As Integer = pvt.DataBodyRange.Rows.Count + row - 2 'Get the data range in "A1:B2" format Dim dataRange = String.Format("{0}{1}:{0}{2}", Me.ConvertToLetter(pvt.RowRange.Column + 2), row, count) 'Get the location range in "A1:B2" format Dim locRange = String.Format("{0}{1}:{0}{2}", Me.ConvertToLetter(pvt.RowRange.Column + 1), row, count) 'Create the sparklines Dim range = Me.Range(dataRange) range.Select() range.SparklineGroups.Add(Excel.XlSparkType.xlSparkColumn, locRange) 'Set properties on the min and max scale to show across the group Dim sp = range.SparklineGroups.Item(1) sp.Axes.Horizontal.Axis.Visible = True sp.Axes.Vertical.MaxScaleType = Excel.XlSparkScale.xlSparkScaleGroup sp.Axes.Vertical.MinScaleType = Excel.XlSparkScale.xlSparkScaleGroup End Sub 'Converts column numbers to Excel column letters Function ConvertToLetter(ByVal col As Integer) As String Dim result As String = "" Dim alpha = Int(col / 27) Dim remainder = col - (alpha * 26) If alpha > 0 Then result = Chr(alpha + 64) End If If remainder > 0 Then result = result & Chr(remainder + 64) End If Return result End Function
Add a call to the AddSparkLines method after the call to RefreshTable and now when we hit F5 again we’ll see the column style sparklines next to the PivotTable.
As you can see there are a lot of the possibilities of what you can do with the Open Data Protocol and the types of analysis you can do with OData feeds in Excel 2010. You can easily build WCF data services in Visual Studio to expose your own OData feeds. You can use PowerPivot, a powerful Excel Add-in, to analyze data from a variety sources, including OData services, or you can use Visual Studio build your own Excel clients to consume and analyze OData sources from your Line-of-Business systems like SQL Server and SharePoint.
In this interview I caught up with a good friend, Boris Scholl, a Program Manager on my team building tools for SharePoint development. Boris shows off the new SharePoint 2010 tools in Visual Studio 2010 for web parts. He discusses the differences between "Visual Web Part" and "Web Part" item templates in Visual Studio, as well as best practices on when and why to use each of them. He also (patiently) teaches me the differences between sandbox and farm solutions:
Best Practices on Building SharePoint 2010 Web Parts with Visual Studio 2010
For more information on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 please see:
Also if you missed them, check out these interviews as well:
OData is an open REST-ful protocol for exposing and consuming data on the web. Also known as Astoria, ADO.NET Data Services, now called WCF Data Services in .NET. I’ve written about it in the context of .NET many times on this blog. However there are SDKs available for other platforms like JavaScript and PHP.
With the release of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, .NET developers could easily create and expose data models on the web via REST. The simplicity of the service, along with the ease of developing it, make it very attractive for CRUD-style data-based applications to use as a service layer to their data. Check out some of the articles I’ve written before on OData. If you’re just getting started, I’d suggest reading Using ADO.NET Data Services first.
Now with .NET Framework 4, there are some new enhancements to data services (like my favorite) and as the technology matures, more and more data providers are popping up all over the web. Codename “Dallas” was announced at MIX 2010 this year which is a service that allows you to subscribe to OData feeds from a variety of sources. Check out the catalog here. You can consume these feeds directly in your own applications or you can use the PowerPivot (a.k.a “Gemini”), an Excel Add-In, to analyze the data easily.
In this post I’ll show you how to create a data service with Visual Studio 2010, consume its OData feed in Excel using the PowerPivot client, and analyze the data using a new Excel 2010 feature called Sparklines. Next article I’ll show you how you can write your own Excel client code to consume and analyze OData sources from your Line-of-Business systems like SQL Server and SharePoint.
Let’s quickly create a data service using Visual Studio 2010 that exposes the AdventureWorksDW database (data warehouse). You can download the database here. Create a new Project and select the Web node and then choose ASP.NET Empty Web Application. If you don’t see it, make sure your target is set to .NET Framework 4. This is a new handy project template in to use in VS2010 especially if you’re creating data services.
Click OK and the project is created. It will only contain a web.config. Next add your data model. I’m going to use the Entity Framework so go to Project –> Add New Item, select the Data node and then choose ADO.NET Entity Data Model. Click Add and then you can create your data model, in my case I generated it from the AdventureWorksDW database.
Next we need to add the WCF Data Service (formerly known as ADO.NET Data Service in Visual Studio 2008). Project –> Add New Item, select the Web node and then scroll down and choose WCF Data Service. This item template is renamed for both .NET 3.5 and 4 Framework targets so keep that in mind when trying to find it:
Now you can set up your entity access. For this example I’ll allow read access to all my entities in the model:
Public Class AdventureWorksService Inherits DataService(Of AdventureWorksDWEntities) ' This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. Public Shared Sub InitializeService(ByVal config As DataServiceConfiguration) ' TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable,etc. config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead) config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2 End Sub End Class
We could add read/write access to implement different security on the data in our model or even add additional service operations depending on our scenario, but this is basically all there is to it on the development side of the data service. Depending on your environment this can be a great way to expose data to users because it is accessible anywhere on the web (i.e. your intranet) and doesn’t require separate database security setup. This is because users aren’t connecting directly to the database, they are connecting via the service. Using a data service also allows you to choose only the data you want to expose via your model and/or write additional operations and business rules.
We could deploy this to a web server to host for real or we can keep it here and test consuming it locally for now. Now let’s see how we can point PowerPivot to this service and analyze the data.
There are a lot of good video tutorials on the PowerPivot site that are aimed at power users so I suggest you have a look. I’m not a power user of Excel per se but I am a developer and I can tell you after I installed PowerPivot I was consuming feeds in about 2 minutes, so it’s really easy to get started. PowerPivot isn’t just about OData feeds but rather a consumer of many kinds of BI data sources, many more than what you get out of the box with Excel. For instance, we could have just as easily connected directly to SQL Server or Access data or loaded data from Reporting Services, a text file, or other spreadsheet.
To start consuming our data service, first make sure the service is running. If you just built it in VS then you can just start the debugger to test it by hitting F5. This will open the browser and you can drill into your data service from there. The URL to the data service will look something like http://localhost:1234/AdventureWorks.svc/ when in development.
Now open Excel and select the PowerPivot tab and click the PowerPivot Window button to open it. This will open a second Workbook that can you use to collect the data from multiple sources and set up relationships between them. On the Home tab select From Data Feeds and then choose From Other Feeds. This will open the Table Import Wizard where you specify the URL to your data service.
Click Next and now we can pull in a couple tables and do some analysis. Let’s pull in the DimEmployees and FactSalesQuotas tables. Click Finish. Now we need to set up a relationship between them on EmployeeKey. You do this by selecting the Table tab and then clicking the Create Relationship button on the Ribbon. Set Table equal to FactSalesQuotas and Related Lookup Table to DimEmployees and then both columns to EmployeeKey and click the Create button.
Now we can party on this data. Let’s create a PivotTable and a couple charts to look at the sales quotas for employees. From PowerPivot’s Home tab, select the PivotTable button and select Chart and Table (horizontal). This will flip you over to your workbook where you can choose a worksheet to put it. A task pane will open but depending on what version you have installed it may still say “Gemini Task Pane”. This should look relatively familiar though if you have ever created a pivot table and chart in Excel. Select the appropriate fields to report on and viola, you have your data analysis against an OData service. (click image to enlarge)
One of my favorite features of Excel 2010 is sparklines. Sparklines are little graphics in a cell that give a visual indication to what’s happening with the data in that row. For instance, we could add trend lines for each of the rows in the pivot table to quickly see the yearly performance for each individual employee. Instead of creating a filtered chart that you have to flip through, you can immediately see the visualization inline.
To add sparklines, select the Insert tab on the Ribbon, then choose the type of sparkline you want to create. Next select the data range and the location. In this example I chose the Line sparklines and am displaying the high and low points. Note that by default each sparkline is independent of each other, meaning you’re just seeing the trend of data in that row only. If you want to see how data compares across rows you can play with the Axis min and max properties.
For more information on sparklines see the Excel Team blog.
In the next article-size post I’ll show you how you can create your own Excel client code to consume and analyze data via an OData service exposed by SharePoint 2010. I’ll show you how to write code to call the service, perform a LINQ query, data bind the data to an Excel list object and generate charts. I’ll also show you how you can add these cool sparklines in code. Until next time…
UPDATE 4/21: Read part 2 - Add Spark to Your OData: Consuming Data Services in Excel 2010 Part 2
“Back to the future” as Todd put it. That’s right, the Interop Forms Toolkit has been updated to support Visual Studio 2010.
This was just a minor release in which the setup authoring was updated so that the toolkit now supports both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. The toolkit features remain unchanged from v2.0. It still supports adding controls, methods, properties, and events to Visual Basic 6 applications using Visual Basic.NET.
So if you’re working on VB6 interop or migration projects and are using the toolkit, have no fear, you can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and install the latest version of the Interop Forms Toolkit. Please uninstall any prior toolkit before installing this one.
For more information and download details please see:
For more information on phased migration and interop please see:
And if you have questions or feedback please visit the Visual Basic Interop and Upgrade Forum.
Tonight I’m going to give a preview of my Visual Studio 2010 launch demo on the new SharePoint development tools in Visual Studio 2010 including some Office client tools. This is basically the talk I did at TechDays in Belgium but much more focused on the Visual Studio developer who is just starting to learn about SharePoint development. After I show off the tools for about an hour Peter is going to get up and demonstrate some real world examples of SharePoint customizations that you can build with VS2010. It should be a great show!
Here’s the 411…
April meeting – SharePoint 2010 Tools and Business Solutions When: TONIGHT Wednesday, 4/14/2010 at 6:45 PM Where: University of Phoenix Learning Center in Livermore, 2481 Constitution Drive, Room 105
Event Description:
Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools Overview (Beth Massi) The Visual Studio team has made significant investments in building tools for SharePoint 2010 development. This session will provide you with an overview of SharePoint development with Visual Studio 2010 from the team that built these tools. Specific topics covered will include an overview of the project and item templates, a walkthrough of the designers included, areas of extensibility within Visual Studio 2010 that can enhance SharePoint development, and of course lots of demos!
SharePoint 2010 is great – now what do I do? (Peter Tweed) So you have the power of SharePoint 2010 as a platform. What are you going to do now? How about build upon the power of the SharePoint product and implement solutions to business problems that are intuitive, easy to use, integrated, have a rich user experience and delivered over the web? Sounds good doesn’t it! Come listen to Peter show you how easy it is to build Silverlight applications on top of SharePoint 2010 that can be quickly developed, delivered and wow your stakeholders.
Agenda:
6:00 - 6:30 .NET FUNdamentals 6:30 - 6:45 check-in and registration 6:45 - 7:00 tech talk; announcements and open discussion 7:00 - 9:00 main presentation and give aways
Click here for more information, maps and registration!
Hope to see you there tonight!
Whooo hooooo! It’s been ~2 years in the making but Visual Studio 2010 has been released! This is my first full product cycle since I started Microsoft and oh what a ride! I’ve been watching live interviews from the Vegas launch event all day on Channel 9.
I’m really pumped about all the awesome resources that we’ve put together for you for launch and I’m looking forward to continuing to share my knowledge on how to build awesome business applications with Visual Studio 2010. It’s going to be a really fun year! Here are some of the plentiful resources to check out…
We’ve updated MSDN with a variety of resources to help you get started learning all the new stuff that VS2010 has to offer. First off, we’ve been integrating Visual Studio 2010 content into the Developer Centers. Here you’ll find the most up-to-date samples, videos, articles and news:
Visual Studio
Visual Basic
Visual C#
Office Development with Visual Studio (VSTO)
SharePoint
.. more developer centers
For instance check out the new downloads and samples pages on Visual Basic and VSTO Dev Centers, and the new How Do I videos on Visual Basic, Visual Studio, and VSTO. The Dev Centers are your one-stop shop for all content like….
Check out these links to download the FREE Visual Studio 2010 Express editions or Visual Studio 2010 Pro/Ultimate trial editions:
Visual Basic 2010 Express
Visual C# 2010 Express
Visual C++ 2010 Express
Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
Visual Studio 2010 Pro & Ultimate Trial Downloads
We’ve updated all these samples online for Visual Studio 2010’s release and have added a bunch more like:
Visual Basic 2010 Samples
Visual C# 2010 Samples
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit
Parallel Processing: C# and Visual Basic
SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010
Office Development in Visual Studio 2010
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
WPF & Silverlight Data Binding in Visual Studio 2010
… more samples
We also have a few MSDN Library technical articles published to get you started on some language, IDE and build features in VS as well as some notable MSDN Magazine articles on new features you can sink your teeth into.
Better Coding: Better Coding with Visual Studio 2010
IntelliTrace: Debugging Applications with IntelliTrace
What's New in Visual Basic 2010
Generic Co- and Contravariance in Visual Basic 2010
How to Build Visual Studio 2010 Office Development Projects with TFS Team Build 2010
How to Build SharePoint Projects with TFS Team Build
Using Visual Studio 2010 to Collect Usage, Performance and Stability Information to Improve Software
… more MSDN articles
“How Do I” Videos Check out the new quick training videos on Visual Studio, VB, C#, Office and SharePoint:
Visual Basic 2010 Language Features Series
Visual C# 2010 Language Feature Series
Visual Studio 2010 IDE Series
SharePoint Development with Visual Studio 2010
Office Development with Visual Studio 2010 (VSTO)
Dotfuscator Software Services in Visual Studio 2010
Channel 9 Videos Watch these interviews and demos on Visual Studio and new features:
Launch Demo: Paul Yuknewicz: Windows Development with Visual Studio 2010
Launch Demo: Doug Seven: Code Understanding and Systems Design with Visual Studio 2010
Launch Demo: Sam Gazitt: SharePoint and Office Development with Visual Studio 2010
How We Do It: Building the Visual Studio Product Line
No More Underscores in Visual Basic 10
Overview of SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010
…more VS2010 on Channel 9, more of my interviews on Channel 9 (more coming soon!)
Here are some of my favorite blogs that contain essential resources on Visual Studio 2010:
Visual Studio Platform Team Blog
Visual Basic Team Blog
Office Development with Visual Studio Team Blog
Visual Studio Data Team Blog
SharePoint Team Blog
WPF & Silverlight Designer Team Blog
Jason Zander
Check the Blogs, Dev Centers and Channel 9 for more content in the weeks to come, we’re still making updates and producing new content. Now that Visual Studio is launched, we’re just getting started here on MSDN! Have feedback and questions? Discuss Visual Studio and related technologies on the MSDN Forums.
I want to thank everyone in Visual Studio and DevDiv here at Microsoft and especially the BizApps team for a wonderful and exciting product! Visual Studio just keeps getting better and better.
Jet lag, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. That’s been my week so far preparing all the awesome content we have in store for you for Monday’s Visual Studio 2010 launch! Unfortunately this week has also taken me away from blogging and I have some fun stories from DevDays Netherlands and TechDays Belgium where I spoke last week. Alan and I then took a couple days over the weekend to tour Belgium so I got some cool pictures (and drank some good beer) too.
DEVDAYS 2010
I’ve been to the Netherlands many times, this trip was my 5th time flying into Amsterdam. This time I got to travel to a city that I had never been to, The Hauge (Den Haag), which I think is the third largest city in the Netherlands. I didn’t get to see too much of the city itself though because I was at the conference the whole time. And what a show! There was probably close to 2000 developers there. The venue was at the World Forum and it was a big venue with some big theater-style seating. I must admit that even though I’ve been speaking at conferences for over 10 years it made me nervous when I saw how big the main theater was. Luckily the rooms where I had my 2 talks were much smaller!
I was invited to deliver some talks on Visual Basic and the VBCentral community was represented well in the community area of the exhibit hall. The talks I did were not on shiny new Visual Studio 2010 features but rather LINQ to XML and Open XML in Office 2010. I’ve done these talks many times before but it was fun dusting them off and upgrading the demos to work with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.
Conquering XML with LINQ in Visual Basic 9
This topic is an oldie but goodie, at least for me. I've written a lot on this topic. I have been doing this one for a few years now and what’s great about it is that it never gets old. It surprised me how many folks are still not aware of all the things you can do with XML Literals in VB. Only about 25% of attendees had used them before (one person had never heard of LINQ before) so I started with the basics and worked my way up into the demos. Here are some good resources to check out:
Taking Advantage of LINQ and Open XML in Office 2007 & 2010
This session I did was a lot of fun and I have done it before here in the Netherlands at SDN last year. I showed how to manipulate Open XML document formats in Office 2010 Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents using the Open XML SDK version 2.0 and LINQ to XML. I think it sparked a lot of people's curiosity and creativity because there are a lot of possibilities. I showed how you can create, query and transform documents without having to have Office installed at all. A couple people in the audience had not realized that these Office documents were just zip files full of XML files that describe the document. Since the SDK 2.0 had just released a week before, it was relevant to do this talk again. Here are some good resources on this topic:
There are a lot of Office developers in the Netherlands and I had a great time chatting with a fellow afterwards showing him some of the new VSTO and SharePoint tools in Visual Studio 2010 as well. ;-)
Off to Antwerp, Belgium for TechDays…
TECHDAYS 2010
Here I did one session on our new SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 so it doesn’t get much more shiny and new than that. The venue was equally impressive here in Antwerp, held at huge IMAX movie theaters called Metropolis. There were also close to 2000 people here both developers and IT Pros. This time my session was in a huge theater with bright spot lights on me, loud music, and a camera in the third row filming and projecting me onto the screen behind. Wow I thought my hair was big, but seeing it on an IMAX screen is a bit scary. ;-)
SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 2010 Overview
This talk was a variation of Mike Morton’s talk at SharePoint Developer Conference last October except I had some different demos that I think were kinda fun. I showed off the all the awesomeness around building, debugging and deploying SharePoint 2010 customizations with Visual Studio 2010. I showed the Visual Web Part designer, mapped folders, LINQ to SharePoint, Workflow designer with an Initiation form, we created an Event Receiver, walked through the Packaging and Feature designers, Imported a Site Definition (WSP), and deployed a Silverlight Web Part that uses the SharePoint client object model to work with tasks. I even briefly opened up the BDC designer although there was a session on that later in the day so I didn’t really get into it much. It was exciting to show off the tools that my teammates built. I hope I did them justice.
Check out these resources to learn more (and stay tuned for more content Monday!):
Last but not least, here are some pictures from the trip (click to enlarge):
I had a wonderful time meeting new people and seeing new places in Europe. Thanks to the DevDays & TechDays conference organizers and local developer evangelists, Arie Leeuwesteijn in the Netherlands and Katrien De Graeve in Belgium, for taking great care of us.
See you next time!