Charlie Calvert's Community Blog : Community

Microsoft SDK for Facebook Released

Charlie Calvert — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 06:03:00 GMT

Microsoft has created an SDK to make it easier for you to write Facebook applications.

Resources

Read the announcement.
Find out more about the .NET Facebook SDK

VSL at DevConnections

Charlie Calvert — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:38:02 GMT

The following talks will be given by Visual Studio Languages team members at the DevConnections Conference in Las Vegas.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009	Title	Speaker
10:00am - 11:00am	VMS01: The Future of C#	Charlie Calvert
11:15am - 12:15pm	VMS02: Future Directions for Visual Basic	Jared Parsons
1:45pm - 2:45pm	VMS03: Microsoft Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks	Charlie Calvert
3:15pm - 4:15pm	VMS04: Microsoft Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks	Jared Parsons

For additional Information see:

A Chance to Influence the MSDN Visual Studio Documentation (Help System)

Charlie Calvert — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:43:37 GMT

The docs team here at Microsoft has created a new survey to solicit your opinion on the help system found in the MSDN technical library. This the same information you see if you press F1 in Visual Studio to get help on the IDE or your development language. I know the people who create and process this survey, and I can assure that any feedback you give will be processed and carefully considered. The team is strongly driven by input from our users, and this is your chance to have your say. I’ve taken the survey myself, and found that it consists of about 10 pages with an average of 2 or 3 questions per page. I didn’t spend much time contemplating each question, and was therefore able to finish the survey in about 5 minutes.

Links

Thank you for your input!

.NET University is Live

Charlie Calvert — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:05:20 GMT

Doug Turnure and Mark Dunn just reopened the .NET University site. This resource includes approximately 40 developer-oriented presentation kits that include slides, speaker notes, demos, demo scripts and webcast videos. You can use these materials in your own presentations, or simply access the valuable information that they contain. You can also find free, sequenced online training at http://myrampup.com. Ramp Up is a free, online, community-based learning program, with a number of different tracks that will help you build your portfolio of professional development skills.

CodeRush Xpress 9.2 Ships

Charlie Calvert — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:47:57 GMT

The free CodeRush Xpress from DevExpress provides C# and VB developers with powerful extensions to Visual Studio. These features include editing and refactoring tools that make it easier for you to quickly produce well designed code. Version 9.2 of CodeRush Xpress, which shipped on August 25, 2009, has greatly improved memory and performance characteristics.

CodeRush Express comes with a set of selection, navigation and declaration features, as well as over 60 refactorings which are grouped into the following categories:

Changing Signatures
Conditionals
Declaration and Initialization
Expressions
Lambda Expressions and Anonymous methods
Loops and Blocks
Properties and Fields
Moving/Extracting Methods
Resource Files and Strings
Types and Visibility

Figure 1: Dustin Campbell and Mark Miller discuss the cool features in CodeRush Xpress.

The new features in CodeRush Xpress 9.2 include:

Faster Performance
Reduced Memory Consumption
Support for Preprocessor Directives
Background Processing Progress Bar

To learn more, watch the CodeRush Xpress 9.1 introductory video with Microsoft’s Dustin Campbell and CodeRush creator Mark Miller. You can also read an in-depth review of the new features in CodeRush Xpress 9.2 on Mark’s blog. A few months back, Dustin posted on some of the updated features in a May release of CodeRush Xpress, including

Duplicate Line,
Highlight All References
Increase or Reduce Selection
Smart Clipboard
Generate from Using
Quick Navigation Window
Quick File Navigation

Many of the features in CodeRush Xpress are also explained in depth on the DevExpress web site. For instance, you can click here for an explanation of the navigation features. In Figure 2 you can see a screen shot from the video which highlights some of the features of CodeRush Xpress.

Figure 2: A screen shot from the CodeRush Xpress introductory video shows the Refactor menu and New Field Active tip window. Click the picture to see a larger version.

CodeRush Xpress provides lots of tools designed to make coding inside Visual Studio easier. Take a look and see if it can help you get more work done in less time.

Tech Days Canada 2009 Call for Speakers

Charlie Calvert — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:05:36 GMT

Peter Ritchie has posted about the upcoming Tech Days Conference in Canada, stating that you can contact him or Justice Gray about speaking slots in the Developer Foundations tracks if you are interested in the Vancouver or Toronto sessions. Click these links to Tweet @PeterRichie or @JusticeGray. Of course, you might just want to attend the conference, which is very reasonably priced, so that you can learn more about various Microsoft technologies.

When and Where is Tech Days?

I list the locations below. For those who, like me, need a little Canadian geography refresher course, the conference locations are shown on the map, appearing from left to right, that is, from Vancouver on the west coast to Halifax on the east coast. Click the map to get more details on the locations.

Vancouver is September 14-15
Calgary Nov 17-18
Winnipeg Dec 15-16
Toronto is September 29-30
Ottawa Dec 9-10
Montreal Dec 2-3
Halifax Nov 2-3

Figure 1: Learn more about the locations by clicking the picture.

Tracks and Sessions

The tracks at the conferences include

Developing for the Microsoft Based Platform
Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices
Windows Client
Servers, Security and Management
Communication and Collaboration

Learn more about the tracks and sessions.

MSDN Event: Fundamentals of WPF & WPF in the Real World

Charlie Calvert — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:26:14 GMT

MSDN Events will host Paul Sheriff in two free half day events in Southern California. He first talk is on the Fundamentals of WPF. It covers basic WPF concepts and working with data. Technologies discussed in the talk include working with combo boxes, list boxes, and list views. His second talk, WPF in the Real World, is designed to help people move from Windows Forms to WPF. Topics covered included toolbars, status bars and other features commonly found in Windows Forms applications. Business developers looking for best practices for developing applications will find this talk helpful.

Details

ORANGE COUNTY (IRVINE)

Fundamentals of WPF
August 24, 2009
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Click here to register
Event ID: 1032421370
WPF in the Real World
August 25, 2009
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Click here to register
Event ID: 1032421372

San Diego

Fundamentals of WPF
August 24, 2009
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Click here to register
Event ID: 1032421585
WPF in the Real World
August 25, 2009
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Click here to register
Event ID: 1032421584

To Register by Phone call 1.877.MSEVENT (1.877.673.8368).

Community Convergence LIII

Charlie Calvert — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:15:22 GMT

Welcome to the fifty-third edition of Community Convergence. Here at Microsoft the C# team is still busy polishing C# 4.0 so that is shines and glistens. Below I provide some links to recent articles of interest by C# team developers, other Microsoft employees, and community members. Included is a fun video by Kirill Osenkov on his Live Geometry library, and a Jason Zander link to the new Windows XP to Windows 7 Reference application.

From the C# Team

Eric Lippert

Kirill Osenkov

Matt Warren

Building a LINQ IQueryable provider - Part XV (IQToolkit v0.15)

Charlie Calvert

Windows 7 Code Pack V. 1.0 Released

From other Microsoft Teams

Jason Zander

Announcing the XP2Win7 Reference Application

Vijay Upadya

Unit Testing Business Logic in .NET RIA Services

Scott Hanselman

Scott Guthrie

ASP.NET MVC V2 Preview 1 Released

Brad Abrams

Wriju Ghosh

C# 4.0 : Co-variance and Contra-variance

From the Community

Written by Various Authors

Abel Avram: SQLite Ported to .NET
Nate: Painless REST via ASP.NET MVC
Malcolm Sheridan: Two New Features of C# 4.0 You Will Love
Troy Goode: ASP.NET MVC Membership Kit
DotNetCube: Using the Adapter Pattern in C#

Social Bookmarking on MSDN

Charlie Calvert — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:55:52 GMT

Social bookmarking plays a big role in my online life. Sites like Delicious, DotNetKicks and Digg are places I often turn to for information or entertainment. These sites are important to me because I believe the community has a wisdom of its own that sometimes matches or exceeds the wisdom of the various experts we have been taught to rely on when we need to exercise taste or judgment. Certainly it is fascinating and frequently instructive to watch clusters of connections being drawn by people interacting in the virtual world we call the Internet. And sometimes its just interesting to see the crazy things that people find significant enough to bookmark.

Here are few posts recommended by the social bookmarking team that can help introduce you to the Microsoft vision for this technology:

The Social v1 launch post.
Custom feed queries (devs might be interested in using our feeds in mashups)
FeedFlare (have you thought about putting your blog on FeedBurner?)
Live Writer Plugin (I'd love it if all MSFT bloggers were using this on every post)
IE8 Accelerators for bookmarking

They also point out that you can easily add bookmarking icons to your blogs, as shown at the end of this post:

Stick this in your News section:
- <script type="text/javascript" src="http://Services.social.microsoft.com/widgets/bookmark.jss?type=1&brand=Msdn&locale=1033"></script>
And/or use the Live Writer plug-in. (See the set of "Share this post" links shown below.)

Share this post :

Charlie to Speak on LINQ at DevLink

Charlie Calvert — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:12:50 GMT

I will be speaking this Friday and Saturday, August 22nd and 23rd, at devLink near Nashville, TN. I will give two talks, both on LINQ, both for intermediate and advanced developers. The first covers querying in LINQ, and the second talk explains the features of C# 3.0 that make LINQ possible.

Essence of LINQ Part I

Query expressions are the primary tool for writing LINQ queries. This talk will explore the syntax for writing query expressions. It will also explore a number of the most important LINQ operators. The 7 different types of LINQ clauses will be covered, as well as the 4 different ways to introduce range variables, the different means of creating a LINQ join, and the role of composition in LINQ. Some of the operators that will get special attention include Join, SelectMany, GroupBy, OrderBy and the Aggregate and Set operators. This talk digs into some intermediate and advanced issues, and I assume that most attendees know at least a little about LINQ.

Essence of LINQ Part II

To enable LINQ, C# 3.0 introduces a number of new language features such as query expressions, lambda expressions, extension methods, automatically implemented properties, local type inference, expression trees and more. These are all features that can improve the quality of your code. They also provide new opportunities for making mistakes This talk will explore these features and outline best practices for using them.. Each feature will be introduced with an example illustrating how it contributes to the overall LINQ architecture.

The materials for my talk are on the LINQ Farm on Code Gallery. To download them directly, click here.

Give Us Your Feedback: Take the Visual Studio Survey

Charlie Calvert — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:08:04 GMT

A new Visual Studio survey has been created and we would like your feedback. This survey focuses on learning more about the types of applications you are creating, which tools and technologies you are using, and how we can improve our content and code examples to better meet your needs. There are also questions about how you access online help, and some questions about the .NET Framework docs.

The survey is located here: Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey

If you have time to take the survey and give us feedback, we will appreciate it.

Charlie Speaking in Southern California

Charlie Calvert — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:36:07 GMT

I will be presenting on C# and LINQ three times in Southern California next week at a series of user group meetings. The events will be held in the San Diego and the Los Angeles area. Lisa Feigenbaum will be flying down from Redmond with me, and she will do VB presentations at the same set of meetings.

The schedule is as follows:

May 6, 6:00 PM: San Diego, http://sddotnetdg.org/
May 7, 6:30 PM: Irvine, http://www.ocdotnet.org/
May 8: 6:30 PM: Torrence, http://www.southbaynet.org/southbaynet.org/default.html

I will be talking on C# 3.0 Best Practices and LINQ:

C# 3.0 introduces a number of new language features such as query expressions, lambda expressions, extension methods, automatically implemented properties, local type inference and more. These are all features that can improve the quality of your code. They also provide new opportunities for making mistakes This talk focuses on both the good and the bad: how to use and how not to use the new features of C#. Each feature will be introduced with a small example, and you should be able to follow the talk even if you are not already familiar with the new language constructs. The talk will also explore the theoretical underpinnings of LINQ.

Lisa will be speaking on Visual Basic 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks:

In this talk, we’ll show how to turn yourself into a Visual Studio 2008 guru with the new language and IDE features. Tips and tricks will include how to maximize your VB IntelliSense experience, leverage Refactoring features, and improve the performance of your query and XML code. We’ll explore integrated XML, and show how to navigate XML gotchas and express what you wish in fewer lines of code. With respect to LINQ we’ll go deep into best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and answers to most frequently asked questions

Tuesday Night:

AMN Health Care
12400 High Bluff Drive
San Diego, CA 92130

Wednesday Night

Microsoft
Three Park Plaza, Suite 1800
Irvine, CA 92614

Thursday Night

American Honda Motors
Bldg 100, # 100-1E-13
1919 Torrance Blvd
Torrance, CA 90501

Source and deck from the talk.

Understanding the Technical Book Market

Charlie Calvert — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:35:16 GMT

Mike Hendrickson from O'Reilly has published a survey of the technical book market. As when viewing the TIOBE site, I think it is wrong to extrapolate any broad conclusions about the development languages market from the data you see here. For instance, lots of developers are still writing batch files, it just so happens that the book-market for that syntax is small. Changes in the C/C++ market are slow, which means that developers stick with tried and true books for those very popular languages rather than rushing out to buy new texts. Nevertheless, it is instructive to at least view this data, especially if you happen to be interested in technical books or trends in the broader developer landscape.

It should come as no surprise that C# and Java are the biggest sellers with a respective 13 and 14 percent of the publishing market. Note, however, that over the last year Java books have decreased in sales by about 13%, while C# has increased by the same amount. JavaScript, PHP and C/C++ are the next largest sellers, with about 10% of the market each. All three of these latter languages have been losing their share of the publishing market over the last year. JavaScript is down 10%, while PHP and C/C++ are down 5%.

Well known languages that have been growing quickly include ActionScript, which is up 53%, Python, up 31%, and PowerShell which has come out of nowhere to claim 1% of the market. Some well known languages that have been losing market share are Visual Basic, which is off by 34%, vbscript, which is off by 30%, and perl, which is off by 23%. Ruby has 5% of the market, and has grown at a rate of 10%. SQL is up by 5%, VBA is off by 11%. Some of these numbers may simply reflect fluctuations due to release cycles, but others may represent trends in the publishing market.

There are some interesting details in the figures found in this article. My old favorite language, Delphi, sold a grand total of 126 units in 2007. F# sold 698 units, but I bet we will see that number grow quite a bit in 2008. The overall market is dominated by languages that run on some kind of virtual machine, with C/C++ being the only native language that is still selling broadly in the book market. Oh yes, I should also add that sales in the technical book market as a whole are off by about 1%. The web is a huge, and very hungry, machine.

Mike Hendrickson says that the information in his article is drawn "from Bookscan's weekly top 3,000 titles sold. Bookscan measures actual cash register sales in bookstores. In other words, if you buy a book it gets recorded in this data."

Remember, you should not draw too many conclusions based on this data. For book authors and publishers, this information has obvious value. For the rest of us, it is just a tantalizing peak into a market that is very difficult to understand. Only one thing is certain: the actual usage numbers for these languages is probably quite different from what you see in this article.

Key Links:

Read the article

Get an overview with the Treemap

View the Marketshare Graph

Code Gallery goes Live: New Site for Samples

Charlie Calvert — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:33:34 GMT

Code Gallery, a new site for sharing samples from Microsoft and the Community is now live: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/. Soma has posted about this site, and the C# Developer Center is tracking a list of popular releases on its front page in the section called Visual C# Code Gallery Samples.

If you have sample C# projects that you want to share, then you should upload them to Code Gallery. This site is intended for use by both Microsoft and the developer community. If you have projects that you want to share, please upload them to Code Gallery.

Microsoft has several sites where code and other downloads are shared. These definitions might help clear up any confusion that might exist:

Code Gallery: Use this tool to share sample projects that demonstrate key features of the C# language, or that you find interesting or exciting. Anything that you or your team created that you want to share with the community will be a valuable contribution to this site. You can also use Code Gallery to share other resources that might be of value to the community.
CodePlex: If you have ongoing projects that you want to develop with the community in a collaboration, then you should use the already existing CodePlex site. It allows you to collaboratively work with a set of developers who can check code in and out of a source repository. Code Gallery, on the other hand, is meant for completed samples that will not be developed collaboratively. You can update the projects and resources on Code Gallery, but only CodePlex gives you the ability to work collaboratively with other developers through a source repository.
MSDN Downloads: Some Microsoft projects will remain on MSDN. For instance, the trial versions of Visual Studio 2008, or a VS service pack, would still be available on the MSDN downloads side. The MSDN downloads site is generally not a place for the community to share code or other resources. It is usually reserved only for Microsoft employees or teams.

If you have projects that were shared on the GotDotNet site, you should move them over to Code Gallery as quickly as possible. GotDotNet is being phased out, and will be replaced with either CodePlex or Code Gallery, depending on your needs.

Microsoft employees who have questions about sharing code on the Code Gallery site should feel free to contact me or the members of the Code Gallery team.

The Code Gallery URL: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/
Alternative Code Gallery URL: http://code.msdn.com/

Happy code sharing!

Seattle Code Camp this Weekend

Charlie Calvert — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:28:14 GMT

Just a reminder to community members in the Seattle area that there will be a free Code Camp here this weekend put on by members of the local community. This is a great chance for you to learn about the latest technologies in Visual Studio 2008 and other aspects of .NET technology.

One of the highlights will be the LINQ track occurring on Sunday:

9:15 AM: LINQ Overview (Charlie Calvert, Microsoft)
10:45 AM: LINQ to XML (Erick Thompson, Microsoft)
1:30 PM: LINQ to DataSet (Erick Thompson, Microsoft)
3:00 PM: Parallel LINQ (Igor Ostrovsky, Microsoft)

There will also be an LINQ Entity Framework (Jonathan Carter, Microsoft) session at 9:45 am Saturday.

Other important topics covered at the conference include Castle, Reflector, Windows Live Development, F#, Workflow, MVC, Ajax, etc.

Web site: https://seattle.codecamp.us/
Schedule: https://seattle.codecamp.us/schedule.aspx
Registration: https://seattle.codecamp.us/register.aspx