Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB : VS2010

Migrating an Outlook Client to .NET Framework 4 in Visual Studio 2010

Beth Massi — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:12:00 GMT

Early this year we built a business application for order management for Northwind Traders on the Office and SharePoint platform using Visual Studio 2008 and Office & SharePoint 2007. If you missed them:

The solution consists of an Outlook client that pulls up order history when a customer email arrives in the sales associate’s inbox. This way they don’t have to leave Outlook (the application that they live in all day) to see corresponding line-of-business (LOB) data, in this case order history, right in the email message. LOB data is exposed via a simple REST-based WCF data service (built in part 1) and is displayed in the reading pane in Outlook for each customer.

Today I want to take a look at how we can migrate the Outlook client we built in part 2 to Office 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile using Visual Studio 2010. The VSTO 4 Runtime has changed so there are some manual steps you may have to take when you migrate your solutions depending on what features you are using.

I set up a Windows 7 VHD with Visual Studio, SharePoint & Office Betas that I’ll be using for development, just like I explained in this post - Setting up Windows 7 for Office & SharePoint 2010 Beta Development. If you’d like to follow along you can download the Visual Studio 2008 version of the code here.

Required Changes for the New VSTO 4 Runtime

First I want to point out some excellent information on MSDN that you should familiarize yourself with if you are migrating Office solutions built with Visual Studio (VSTO). All the samples, walkthroughs and videos on the Visual Studio 2010 resources page on the VSTO Dev Center are valuable but if you are migrating you should pay close attention to this item -

Migrating Office Solutions to the .NET Framework 4

I also recommend familiarizing yourself with the new VSTO4 Runtime here -

Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime Overview

In particular, if your Outlook project uses Form Regions or the Ribbon designer then you will have some work to do if you target .NET Framework 4 because the VSTO 4 runtime has been updated to use Office object model interfaces and not directly inherit from classes like was done in the previous versions of the VSTO runtime. Moving forward this is a very good thing because it removes the dependency on specific versions of Office and enables Office solutions to use the new embedded interop types feature (sometimes referred to as “no-PIAs”) in the .NET Framework 4. This means solutions can run on end user computers without installing these primary interop assemblies (PIAs).

So you may have to reach into the designer generated files and tweak some code. Note that depending on how you structure your application it may be easier after you retarget to .NET 4 to just create a new Form Region and a new Ribbon and copy your user code into them. This is especially true if you are migrating solutions using Visual Studio Beta 2 to .NET 4 because of a bug which I’ll show you how to work around. Let’s take a look at what we need to do for our Northwind Outlook client.

Migrating the Outlook Solution to Visual Studio 2010

Before I jump into migrating this solution I should point out that building Office client solutions in Visual Studio became a lot easier starting in Visual Studio 2008 with all the designer support that was added directly into the Visual Studio box. You can create form regions, ribbons, and host WPF controls easily using these tools in VS2008 without having to install additional extensions. These tools have been updated in Visual Studio 2010 to allow you to build upon Office 2010 but they are just as easy to use.

So let’s start with opening the NorthwindOutlookClient solution in Visual Studio 2010. The migration wizard will open and you’ll be guided through conversion of the project to VS2010. Note that depending on what you have installed on your development machine will determine what Visual Studio does with the solution. If you have the .NET 3.5 framework installed then the target framework will not change, however if you only have .NET 4 then it will update to that automatically. (For more information see How to Upgrade Office Solutions and Configuring a Computer to Develop Office Solutions).

Since my development environment is a Windows 7 machine set up with Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 I get some warnings immediately about the version of Office being wrong. “This project requires Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, but this application is not installed.” However it will build and run just fine in Outlook 2010.

Updating the Target Framework to .NET 4

Now let’s change the target framework to .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. In Visual Basic you do this by selecting the project properties Compile tab, scroll down to “Advanced Compile Options…” and then select the new framework in the dropdown.

I should mention that the Client Profile is a subset of the full .NET 4 Framework meant for client applications like WPF, Windows Forms and Office solutions. This means it’s a smaller install if your users don’t have the .NET Framework installed at all. It doesn’t include any server pieces like ASP.NET. This is also now the default framework target for new Windows, WPF and Office projects.

So once we change the framework, this will close and then reopen the project. Now we’ve got a bunch of stuff in our errors list. Ouch. There are 48 errors but only 25 of them are related to the VSTO 4 runtime changes. The minor problem is that the WPF control is referencing System.Xaml and when we switched the target this gets dropped (at least it does in Beta 2) so we need to just reference this 4.0 assembly. If you open up the OrderHistory.g.vb file, hover over the error, and drop down the error correction it will take care of this for you.

Much more important is the 25 errors around our Form Region. We have two options, we can either add a brand new Form Region to the project, add our controls, paste our custom code into it, and delete the old one, or we can modify the designer generated code. In this case, because there is only one user control on the Form Region, it’s much easier to just create a new one. But if you have very complicated layouts you may need to take the route of updating the designer code to use the new interfaces. For the sake of learning what we need to do in these trickier situations, I’ll opt to go that route too.

Update Outlook Projects that Contain Form Regions

Since we’ll be modifying the designer generated code you’ll need to make sure you click the Show All Files toolbar button on the Solution Explorer. Now we can open up the EmailForm.Designer.vb file in the editor.

This documentation contains the step-by-step code conversions that you need to perform to upgrade your form regions. First we need to modify the declaration of the form region class so that it derives from FormRegionBase instead of FormRegionControl:

<System.ComponentModel.ToolboxItemAttribute(False)> _
<Global.Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.DesignerGenerated()> _
Partial Class EmailForm
    Inherits Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionBase

The documentation also shows what the code looks like against a 3.5 target and what it should look like against a 4.0 target. For instance we have a problem with the constructor. In 3.5 we have:

    Public Sub New(ByVal formRegion As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.FormRegion)
        MyBase.New(formRegion)
        Me.InitializeComponent()
    End Sub

However in .NET 4 we need to change this to:

    Public Sub New(ByVal formRegion As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.FormRegion)
        MyBase.New(Globals.Factory, formRegion)
        Me.InitializeComponent()
    End Sub

Next we need update the signature of the InitializeManifest method (note that underscores are not necessary here in Visual Basic when targeting .NET Famework 4)

Private Shared Sub InitializeManifest(
     ByVal manifest As Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionManifest,
     ByVal factory As Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.Factory)

A Better Way to Upgrade (for now) – Working Around a Bug in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Steps 5-8 of the documentation tell us to create a new Form Region to get the new factory code that we need -- this is why it may just be easier for you to start this way. Unfortunately there’s a bug in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 when you attempt to add a new item to the project it will select the wrong language. If you have a C# project it will select VB templates and if you have a VB project it will select C# templates. Doh! (Now that’s taking language parity thing a bit too far ;-)) So the way you have to work around this is to create a new Outlook Add-in project based on .NET 4 already and then add a new form region there. This is a bug only with migrated projects and it will be fixed in the final release.

However, if you also want to keep building upon this solution in Beta 2, you should recreate the project, selecting a .NET 4 target, and add your existing files into it. This will ensure that things work smoothly going forward. You can actually name the project the same thing, you just need to put it into a different folder. Here’s how you do it.

First clean the solution to remove the registered Add-In. From the menu select Build –> Clean NorthwindOutlookClient.

Now since we have multiple projects in this solution you can right-click on the NorthwindOutlookClient in the Solution Explorer and then select Remove. Then close Visual Studio and open the folder where the NorthwindOutlookClient resides and rename that folder to NorthwindOutlookClient_OLD. Reopen the solution in Visual Studio.

Next go to the main menu and select File –> Add –> New Project then make sure you select .NET Framework 4 and then choose Outlook 2010 Add-in and name it NorthwindOutlookClient.

Next right-click on the project and select Set as StartUp Project. Then Add –> Existing Item and select all the code, app.config, .xaml and .gif files in the NorthwindOutlookClient_OLD directory:

When prompted, say YES to overwrite ThisAddIn but say NO to overwrite ThisAddIn.Designer file. (Even though we didn’t select the designer file, it is automatically brought in when we select ThisAddin.)

Next we need to re-add our Service Reference to our data service by right clicking and select Add –> Service Reference, click Discover button and then name the service the same thing, NorthwindService.

Next make sure the .gif file is set to a Resource in the file properties. Select the file in the Solution Explorer and in the properties window set the Build Action to Resource.

Finally, because we are using WPF controls in this solution, right-click and select Add Reference to add the .NET assembly references for System.Xaml, PresentationCore, PresentationFramework, WindowsBase and WindowsFormsIntegration.

Back to Migrating the Form Region

Now you can get back to upgrading your Form Region as explained in steps 5-8 . Add a new Form Region by selecting Project –> Add New Item and then selecting Form Region (now you’ll see the right templates). Walk through the wizard and then Show All Files again to open the designer generated file and grab the code for the two partial classes (note that the factory is an embedded class):

It’s not too painful to change your original code once you get the right template for it. You just need to make sure that after you paste in these two partial classes, you update all instances of the class name with yours. In our case the name of the Form Region is EmailForm so the updated code back in the NorthwindOutlookClient project will look like this (I know it’s ugly that’s why it’s designer generated ;-). As an aside, look at where underscores are still necessary to resolve ambiguity if there is a line break):

Partial Public Class EmailFormFactory
    Implements Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.IFormRegionFactory

    Public Event FormRegionInitializing As  _
        Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionInitializingEventHandler

    Private _Manifest As Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionManifest

    <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()> _
    Public Sub New()
        Me._Manifest = Globals.Factory.CreateFormRegionManifest()
        EmailForm.InitializeManifest(Me._Manifest, Globals.Factory)
    End Sub

    <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()> _
    ReadOnly Property Manifest() As Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionManifest _
             Implements Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.IFormRegionFactory.Manifest
        Get
            Return Me._Manifest
        End Get
    End Property

    <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()> _
   Function CreateFormRegion(ByVal formRegion As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.FormRegion) As _
             Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.IFormRegion _
             Implements Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.IFormRegionFactory.CreateFormRegion

        Dim form As EmailForm = New EmailForm(formRegion)
        form.Factory = Me
        Return form
    End Function

    <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()> _
    Function GetFormRegionStorage(ByVal outlookItem As Object,
                  ByVal formRegionMode As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlFormRegionMode,
                  ByVal formRegionSize As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlFormRegionSize) _
             As Byte() _
             Implements Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.IFormRegionFactory.GetFormRegionStorage

        Throw New System.NotSupportedException()
    End Function

    <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()> _
    Function IsDisplayedForItem(ByVal outlookItem As Object,
                ByVal formRegionMode As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlFormRegionMode,
                ByVal formRegionSize As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlFormRegionSize) _
            As Boolean _
            Implements Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.IFormRegionFactory.IsDisplayedForItem

        Dim cancelArgs As Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionInitializingEventArgs =
            Globals.Factory.CreateFormRegionInitializingEventArgs(outlookItem,
                                                                  formRegionMode,
                                                                  formRegionSize,
                                                                  False)
        cancelArgs.Cancel = False
        RaiseEvent FormRegionInitializing(Me, cancelArgs)
        Return Not cancelArgs.Cancel
    End Function

    <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()> _
    ReadOnly Property Kind() As Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionKindConstants _
             Implements Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.IFormRegionFactory.Kind
        Get
            Return Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionKindConstants.WindowsForms
        End Get
    End Property
End Class
End Class

Partial Class WindowFormRegionCollection

    Friend ReadOnly Property EmailForm() As EmailForm
        Get
            For Each Item As Object In Me
                If (TypeOf (Item) Is EmailForm) Then
                    Return CType(Item, NorthwindOutlookClient.EmailForm)
                End If
            Next
            Return Nothing
        End Get
    End Property
End Class

Now it looks like all our project errors have disappeared (thanks to Visual Basic’s background compiler). However if you didn’t create a brand new project like I explained above in order to work around that migration bug, then when you rebuild the solution you’ll see the build still fails. In this case we have one more thing to do.

Removing the SecurityTransparent Attribute

The next section of the documentation on upgrading Office solutions has information on how to Remove the SecurityTransparent attribute from Office Projects that you upgrade from Visual Studio 2008. Under My Project node in the Solution Explorer, open up the AssemblyInfo file and you’ll see at the bottom the SecurityTransparent attribute. Remove that line of code. If you created a new project based on .NET 4 from the get-go this file will already be correct.

Run it!

Now you should be able to rebuild the project and it will succeed. Hit F5 and now we have the Outlook client working and looking as before, but now we are targeting the .NET framework 4 and we have all the new features at our disposal.

As you can see there are some manual steps to migrating Office solutions to the .NET Framework 4, but once you are familiar with the changes, it’s pretty straightforward. Keep in mind that if you are migrating your own solutions and you have code that loads form regions and/or ribbons dynamically at runtime you will also have to update that code as well to use the factory methods and interfaces instead of classes, take a look at the documentation for details. Hopefully dealing with a little migration pain now will pay off in the long run to you and your users.

Resources

For more information on building Office solutions with Visual Studio please check out:

Office Development with Visual Studio Developer Center on MSDN = http://msdn.com/vsto
Visual Studio Tools for Office Team Blog = http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto
Visual Studio 2010 Resources

For more information on underscores in Visual Basic 10 in Visual Studio 2010 see:

Enjoy!

Setting up Windows 7 for Office & SharePoint 2010 Beta Development

Beth Massi — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:16:00 GMT

So I decided to get my Windows 7 laptop installed with all the latest public Betas this week which includes Visual Studio Beta 2, SharePoint 2010 Beta and Office 2010 Beta. I had been using internal builds and thought it would be better to get in sync with everyone else in the community. I have to say there were a couple bumps that I experienced along the way that had me scratching my head and searching the web so I thought I’d consolidate all the resources I found and document the steps I did which resulted in a successful install. There is a lot of information out there depending on how you want to configure your system and I’m definitely not going to cover all the possibilities, I’m just going to focus on setting up a Windows 7 development environment and what worked for me in hopes of saving some time for other folks out there. As always, your mileage may vary.

NOTE: If you don’t plan on doing any SharePoint development then the install of Visual Studio and Office 2010 should be very smooth. I only experienced issues installing SharePoint 2010 Beta on my Windows 7 development machine. Also be aware that SharePoint 2010 Beta is supported on Windows 7 (and Vista) only for development purposes. So you will still need to have a testing environment built on Windows 2008 Server (or R2). For more information please see, Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server , SharePoint Deployment, Determine hardware and software requirements and SharePoint 2010 Beta Release Known Issues.

OS Requirements & Boot From VHD

Before you attempt to set up a Windows 7 development environment, I highly recommend booting from VHD. Do yourself a favor and create a Windows 7 bootable VHD so that if you mess up any part of an install you can simply delete it/roll back and start over. There’s a lot of information out there on how to do this but I used these instructions to create a Win7 64-bit VHD via Hyper-V, sysprep-ed it, copied it to my local hard drive, and then used BCDEdit to add the VHD to my boot menu.

Make sure you create a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional or higher edition with at least 4GB RAM if you’re going to do SharePoint development. You'll need Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate to boot from VHD.

What to Install - SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server?

There are two versions of SharePoint that you can choose to install. It’s recommend that you install SharePoint Foundation (formerly known as WSS) if you only have 4 GB of RAM on your machine because there’s a lot less services running than the Server version (formerly known as MOSS). But if you need all the functionality of SharePoint Server then make sure you have enough of RAM. Just for fun I installed the Server version on my machine with only 4GB and it’s maxed out at 95% so I went with Foundation in the end. :-)

Download Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta here.

Download Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta here.

Note that you do not need to register or obtain a product key for installing SharePoint Foundation but you do for Server. The Product Key for Server is located at the bottom of the download page after you register (I missed it the first time so make sure you grab that before installing).

Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta on Windows 7

Read these instructions carefully: Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server. These are the instructions you’ll need to follow with a few additions I’ve added below as you go. Now that you’ve got your 64-bit Windows 7 VHD (are logged in as an administrator account) and downloaded SharePoint 2010 Beta you’re ready to proceed to Step 2 in the instructions.

Step 2: Install the Prerequisites for SharePoint 2010

There are a lot of prerequisites that you’ll need to install before you get to actually installing the SharePoint Beta. Follow all the instructions in Step 2 exactly as it says for Windows 7 to install all the prereqs and Windows features. But note that figure 3 in bullet #9 is incorrect. WCF Non-HTTP Activation should appear as checked. The script in bullet #8 is correct, it’s just a problem with the screenshot so don’t get confused.

Next reboot.

BEFORE going to Step 3, you will need to install a WCF hotfix as described in this post which fixes an "Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'" error. The WCF hotfix for Windows 7 is available here. After installing this hotfix, reboot.

Now you’re at Step 3 and ready to install SharePoint.

Step 3: Install SharePoint 2010

Follow the instructions listed in this step to install SharePoint until you get to bullet #5. When you get here, you need to download and install the SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 hotfix SQL_Server_2008_SP1_Cumulative_Update_2 build
10.00.2714.00 which you get to by clicking the View and request hotfix downloads link at the top of the KB article.

When installing this though I got the error "Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created." To resolve it, I closed the all open windows including the SharePoint Configuration wizard (which is sitting open after SharePoint is installed) and then I reran the hotfix. Not sure what is going on here but it looks like it’s a known issue on Win 7 64 according to this post.

After that successfully installed I rebooted again.

Now you need to run the SharePoint Configuration wizard, Start –> Programs –> Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products –> SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration.

Note to domain users: If you are installing as an administrator but your account is part of a domain, you will need to make sure you have online access to the domain controller! Otherwise configuration will fail on Step 2 with “Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: User cannot be found.” This happens even though you select to install the standalone version. This bit me because I was installing on a laptop at home and was not on the corporate domain. I had to start my VPN and then I was good to go, until step 5 that is. ;-)

On Step 5 I ran into another error “Failed to register SharePoint services. An exception of type System.ServiceProcess.TimeoutException was thrown.” This happened when I was installing the Server version and not Foundation. However I found a thread that told me this is related to low memory so I closed some other programs I had running and tried it again and it ran fine. This is why you should make sure you have enough memory before starting. ;-)

You made it! SharePoint 2010 Beta should now be installed. To verify, open your browser to http://<MachineName> and you should be able to start playing with your new SharePoint site.

Installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Everything should be super easy to install now but just in case you may want to save your VHD after you get SharePoint successfully installed ;-).

You’ll need Visual Studio 2010 Beta Professional edition or higher to work with Office & SharePoint. I just picked the whole she-bang, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. I used the web installer but you can also choose the ISO package if you want to bring it all down once.

Download Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (web bootstrapper) (See this page for more download options).

There was no hitch to install all the components of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. It took me about 35 minutes to wait for it to complete with one reboot in the middle. For more information, see the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Readme, Visual Studio 2010 Product Information and Featured Overviews and Walkthroughs.

Installing Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

This one is probably the easiest to install.

Download Office 2010 Beta here.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to get started. You’ll need to register and then you’ll get a product key page with a download button at the bottom. Save your product key and then select the language to download. Note that it says “Download the 32-bit (x86) version:” but the download will include both 32-bit and 64-bit so don’t worry.

Once you click the download button you’ll actually have to install a little download manager to get the setup package. Once you download the package, click on the ProfessionalPlus.exe to start the install. You’ll see a big button “Install Now”. Click that and in about 15 minutes you’ll have Office installed. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Let ‘er Rip!

Okay so you want to be able to test these things are all installed and playing happily. In order to develop against SharePoint you’ll need to open Visual Studio as run as Administrator. Next, open the Server Explorer and you should see a SharePoint Connections node. Expand that node and you should be able to browse your SharePoint site.

You should also explore some of the awesome new project templates under the Office > 2010 and SharePoint > 2010 nodes in the File > New Project dialog.

What’s Next?

Now it’s time for us to learn how to use these Office and SharePoint tools in Visual Studio! Check out some of my favorite resources:

Office 2010 Development Resources

SharePoint 2010 Development Resources

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Walkthroughs

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Videos

SharePoint Development Forums

SharePoint 2010 Development Resources

SharePoint Team Blog

Enjoy!

Channel 9 Interview: Implementing a Silverlight SharePoint WebPart with Visual Studio 2010

Beth Massi — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:37:35 GMT

Mike Morton is back at it again, this time showing how easy it is to develop, package and deploy a Silverlight WebPart to SharePoint 2010. He also walks us through the solution, package and file properties available to you in Visual Studio 2010. You'll see me giggling in this one because I can't believe how easy it is.

Channel 9 Interview: Implementing a Silverlight SharePoint WebPart 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:

And please give us your feedback in the SharePoint Development Forums!

Enjoy!

Channel 9 Interview: Using the SharePoint Business Data Connectivity Designer in VS 2010

Beth Massi — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:33:45 GMT

This time I interview a good friend of mine, Boris Scholl, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team building tools for SharePoint development. Boris shows off the new Business Data Connectivity designer in Visual Studio 2010 and how it allows you to describe data coming from multiple data sources and how to work with them in SharePoint. He builds a master/detail association across entities coming from separate data sources (a database and a service) and demonstrates how the entities can be displayed and edited.

Channel 9 Interview: Using the SharePoint Business Data Connectivity Designer in 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:

And please give us your feedback in the SharePoint Development Forums!

Enjoy!

Channel 9 Interview: SharePoint Feature and Package Designers in Visual Studio 2010

Beth Massi — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:21:30 GMT

In this interview I sit down with Lily Ma, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team building tools for SharePoint development. Lily shows off the new SharePoint feature and package designers in Visual Studio 2010 and how they make packaging up and deploying your SharePoint customizations easy. As she dives deeper into the tools, she also demonstrates the flexibility and control you have in specifying what features go in what packages across projects in your solution as well as how to modify the manifests to meet a variety of developer needs.

Channel 9 Interview: SharePoint Feature and Package Designers in Visual Studio 2010

Also if you missed it, check out these interviews as well:

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

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Walkthroughs

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Samples

SharePoint 2010 Development Resources

SharePoint Team Blog

Office Development in Visual Studio Team Blog

And please give us your feedback in the SharePoint Development Forums!

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: Importing SharePoint Solution Packages (WSP) into Visual Studio 2010

Beth Massi — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:47:10 GMT

In this interview I sit down with Saaid Khan, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio team developing tools for SharePoint development. Saaid shows us the WSP Import Wizard in Visual Studio 2010 that allows developers to take SharePoint Solution packages developed with SharePoint Designer and bring them into Visual Studio 2010 to further customize them there.

Channel 9 Interview: Importing SharePoint Solution Packages (WSP) into Visual Studio 2010

Also if you missed it, check out Overview of SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 which I posted on Monday.

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

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 please give us your feedback in the SharePoint Development Forums!

Enjoy!

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!

Check out New Features in the MSDN Library Documentation

Beth Massi — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:28:08 GMT

There’s some changes coming to the MSDN library and documentation. Kathleen posted about the new views available on the MSDN library which include a Lightweight view, ScriptFree view and a Classic view. She’s also got a short Channel 9 interview with the senior development lead on the library team who demonstrates them so check it out!

We’ve also got a webcast scheduled at 10AM PST today -- Lap around the Visual Studio 2010 documentation – hope you can join us and ask questions.

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!

New Channel 9 Videos on Visual Studio 2010

Beth Massi — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:29:19 GMT

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….

Enjoy!

XAML Power Toys Released for Visual Studio 2010

Beth Massi — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:25:58 GMT

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:

Updated: XAML Power Toys for Visual Studio 2008 v5.0.0001
New: XAML Power Toys for Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 v5.1.0001 - same features as the 2008 version above for Beta2.
New: XAML Power Toys for Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 for Cider v1.0 - new product for the WPF Designer

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!

Enjoy!

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is Here!

Beth Massi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:58:15 GMT

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!

Basic Instincts MSDN Magazine Article: Collection and Array Initializers in Visual Basic 2010

Beth Massi — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:33:09 GMT

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:

Enjoy!

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!