Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB : Community

Office Development with Visual Studio Tutorial Series – Part 2

Beth Massi — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:51:00 GMT

Last month Robert Green, VSTO MVP, started a series of tutorials on building on Office 2007. Today we published part 2 of his step-by-step tutorials. Thanks Robert!

In this second part of the series of tutorials on Office Business Applications, learn how to create a Word 2007 price quote generation solution using Visual Studio 2008. This tutorial shows you how to create a custom task pane to display data from a database and binding that data to content controls. This step-by-step tutorial also includes full source code in Visual Basic. Check out the tutorial on the VSTO Developer Center:

Building an Office Business Application Part 2 – Generating Automobile Quotes

And if you missed part 1:

Building an Office Business Application Part 1 - Scheduling Customer Appointments

If you’re just getting started with Office development in Visual Studio, this is a great place to start.

Enjoy!

New Learning Resources on the VSTO Developer Center

Beth Massi — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:43:20 GMT

Last week 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. We’ve changed the layout of these pages so that you can browse for a type of solution (right now we have Excel, Word, Outlook and Deployment) and then you can drill down into the specific topics to reveal articles and videos underneath. As you select a topic on the left, the content changes on the right so check it out.

We’ve gone through and picked key content in the Visual Studio and Office MSDN libraries, other Developer Centers and blogs to bring you a better integrated learning experience -- especially if you’re just getting started programming Office solutions with Visual Studio. Let me know what topics I’ve missed by making a comment to the end of this post or by contacting me directly and I’ll get them added. Also let me know how you like this layout, I’m planning on taking this approach to the Visual Basic Developer Center as well.

Enjoy!

SF Bay.NET UG Tonight: Create a Custom Outlook Add-In using VSTO

Beth Massi — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:23:22 GMT

If you’re in the Bay Area, come on out to downtown SF where Robin will be talking about Outlook Add-ins tonight.

Create a custom Outlook Add-In using VSTO

When: Wednesday, 11/18/2009 at 6:30 PM
Where: Microsoft San Francisco Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco

Visual Studio 2008 and Office 2007 made it easier than ever to create add-ins for Office. In this session, Robin Shahan will show how to program an add-in for Outlook that modifies the Quick Access Toolbar, adds your own section to the Office Ribbon, and adds a command bar to the main Outlook window. Then she will show you how to deploy the application via ClickOnce deployment.

Presenter's Bio

Robin Shahan has over 20 years of experience developing complex, business-critical applications. She is currently the Director of Engineering for GoldMail, a small company based in San Francisco whose product provides voice-over-visual messages. Robin is a moderator in the MSDN Forum for ClickOnce and Setup & Deployment projects, and vows to learn Windows Installer some day. She is also a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev; you can follow her blog at http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/, or on Twitter, @RobinDotNet.

Register for this talk tonight on the Bay.NET website.

See you there!

Channel 9 Interview: Overview of SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010

Beth Massi — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:53:00 GMT

In this interview I catch up with Mike Morton, a Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio team developing tools for SharePoint development. Mike gives us a great introduction and overview of these tools from the Visual Studio Developer perspective. Mike shows us how easy it is to build, package, deploy and debug SharePoint 2010 customizations by walking through a site workflow, event receiver, visual web part, the feature and package designers as well as other goodies. This is a great intro for Visual Studio developers looking to get into SharePoint development, but seasoned SharePoint developers will also appreciate the new tools presented here:

Channel 9 Interview: Overview of SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010

For more information on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 please check out:

SharePoint 2010 Development Resources

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Walkthroughs

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Samples

SharePoint Team Blog

Office Development in Visual Studio Team Blog

And give us your feedback in the SharePoint Development Forums!

Enjoy!

History of Visual Studio

Beth Massi — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:07:20 GMT

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!

SDC 2009 Recap & Surprise

Beth Massi — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:39:26 GMT

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:

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

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:

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

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!

I Made it to Holland for SDC 2009!

Beth Massi — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:31:09 GMT

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.

WPF In-Depth with Billy Hollis

Beth Massi — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:12:00 GMT

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.

Enjoy!

A New Look is Coming to MSDN – See a Preview on the VB Dev Center

Beth Massi — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:25:00 GMT

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.

Enjoy!

Great Article on Community

Beth Massi — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:08:10 GMT

I just read a great article on DevProConnections by Michael K. Campbell,

The SQL Server Community: A Welcoming Place for Newbies

It reminded me of when I started developing on the Microsoft platform back in the early 90s and how welcoming I found developers to be on the forums (CompuServ & Usenet back then). Looking back, the “no question is a stupid question” culture was probably the #1 reason why I stuck with Microsoft for so many years. Of course having great products is also key, but if you can’t quickly learn how to use them then there’s not much point to sticking with it.

I think because I grew up professionally in this community culture is why I have a strong passion and loyalty for the Microsoft tools I use today. That’s not to say I don’t criticize our own tools or use other platforms or tools, but I think people always have a favorite based on their past experiences with the people that repeatedly helped them the most.

That’s why I want to reiterate what I said yesterday to our MVPs as well as all the folks in the Microsoft developer community that selflessly help others and aren’t arrogant but instead are welcoming to newbies. It’s leaders like you that shape the culture and behaviors of the community and make it a fantastic place to be. And here is a plea to all the forum moderators, community leaders and participants alike, “Please be excellent to each other”. Don’t make newbies feel like idiots. If we do, we won’t have a fostering community left for our future developers.

And speaking of a fostering community of developers (on all platforms not just .NET) head to the Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend to see over 1600 of us geeking out and learning a ton. I can’t wait!

Enjoy, and have fun learning!

Congrats on your MVP Award!

Beth Massi — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:12:09 GMT

Today Robin (a.k.a Robindotnet) was awarded Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award in Client App Dev for her ClickOnce Deployment expertise and for all the valuable resources and support she provides to the .NET developer community.

Robin is a local (to me) here in the Bay Area and we help out with the EastBay.NET Users Group together with another awesome MVP, Deborah Kurata. If you’d like to meet Robin, show up at one of her October appearances. Robin also provides ClickOnce resources on her blog with written articles and videos and moderates the ClickOnce forum on MSDN.

It’s a much deserved award, Robin. Congratulations!

And congrats to all the MVPs that were newly awarded and re-awarded today. As a former MVP myself I know what an honor it is. And now as a Microsoft employee I don’t know what I would do without you all! You provide so much support for the community it’s hard to imagine the world without you.

THANK YOU!

Silicon Valley Code Camp Oct. 3-4 : Schedule is up!

Beth Massi — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:37:25 GMT

As I mentioned before, I’ll be speaking this weekend at Silicon Valley Code Camp (http://siliconvalley-codecamp.com/). This is a FREE event at at Foothill College and it’s not just Microsoft technologies. A lot of great speakers will be there too.

The schedule is up so check it out and mark the ones you plan on attending. I’ll be presenting two sessions on Saturday:

Also on Sunday there will be a Cloud Camp Unconference where early adopters of cloud computing technologies can exchange ideas and give insight on how to plan for and take advantage of cloud computing.

There are already over 1300 people registered so it’s sure to be a great event. Register today!

See you this weekend!

What is Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6 Support Strategy?

Beth Massi — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:47:00 GMT

I just posted an interview on Channel 9 with Paul Yuknewicz, Lead Program Manager on the Visual Studio team. Paul discusses Visual Basic 6 runtime and IDE support options as well as proven techniques, tools and best practices for interoperability and gradual, phased migration to .NET.

Channel 9 Interview: What is Microsoft's Visual Basic 6 Support Strategy?

Read the Official Support Statement on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

Today we also updated the the Visual Basic 6 Resource Center with better navigation, Visual Basic 6 samples and components, important downloads, as well as migration tools and training mentioned in the interview.

Please visit the Visual Basic 6 Migration page for information on how to plan and execute a gradual, phased migration to .NET.

Enjoy!

Speaking at the Central CA .NET Users Group Tommorrow Night!

Beth Massi — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:08:00 GMT

Tomorrow I'll be speaking at the Central California .NET Users Group located in Fresno, CA. I'll be tag teaming with Tim Huckaby, CEO of Interknowlogy showing off some new features of Visual Studio 2010. I'll talk about the managed language co-evolution strategy and demo all the new language features in VB10 and C#4 -- including those that make Office programming a lot easier. I'll also show off some of the new data tooling features like WPF/Silverlight drag-drop data binding as well. And I think Tim has a special surprise. :-)

I'll pretty much dig into any other tooling areas that people want to see as well, I'm playing with some of them today. I'm hoping that this will be a fun, interactive and educational talk. I've never spoken at this group before so I'm looking forward to meeting new .NET developers in my beautiful home state.

Meeting details are here.

See you tomorrow!

Rate and Ask Questions on How Do I Videos on the VB Dev Center

Beth Massi — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 03:50:00 GMT

“How Do I” Videos have been an incredibly popular free training for Visual Studio developers for a couple years now. Today MSDN launched a pilot on the Visual Basic Developer Center’s “How Do I” Videos that allows you to rate them and add comments. Sweet!

Click the 1 to 5 star rating above the video player to rate the video (1 is bad, 5 is excellent). You can also make comments about the video directly here instead of having to go to Code Gallery or contacting the authors directly. Comments are displayed at the bottom of the page for each video:

I know a lot of you email me directly on questions about the videos I’ve done and I try to respond to them all, but the sheer volume of questions (video related or otherwise) is way too much for just me to answer individually. The forums are much more responsive than me alone for general programming questions. I promise you that I absolutely do read them all though! And I use your common questions and suggestions to feed into topics I blog about here so please keep that coming. :-)

However, by adding comments on the video pages directly I’m hoping that others in the community will also help each other instead of just relying on me. It also helps focus the conversations better around a specific video topic. Of course, I’ll be monitoring all the comments on the Visual Basic How Do I videos and I’ll try to answer them quickly, but having a more open conversation will not only help me, it will help all of you too. It’s always more helpful to see how other developers find solutions to problems in an open forum like this.

So… let ‘er rip! I’m sure you’ll flood all the pages with a plethora of comments :-). Please note that I’ll be out of the office for the extended Labor Day weekend here in the states but I’ll respond when I get back to the office on Tuesday.

Enjoy!