Darryl Burling @ Work : .Net

Beginning .Net development?

dburling — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:19:16 GMT

In the deluge of email from the last week or two from corp around VS2008 (there was lots of excited emails with information about the new product in it), I missed one about the Express suite.

The Express team have taken the Visual Studio Express site and moved it to http://microsoft.com/express.

There is also a new site for beginners on MSDN that has a heap of learning resources depending on whether you are interested in learning to develop for Windows or for the Web.

If you are a beginner (or know someone who is), you should direct them to http://msdn.microsoft.com/beginner

MSDN Flash - Here comes the wave!

dburling — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:03:00 GMT

Last week Visual Studio 2008 was released to manufacturing. If you have a MSDN Subscription, you can download it now. Visual Studio 2008 will hit store shelves in late Jan/early Feb. In spite of the fact that Visual Studio has only just been released, a number of customers have already been using it.

Provoke, Datacom, Kiwibank and Intergen (among others) have been using it for a number of projects. Provoke used the Load test agents from Visual Studio 2008 Test Edition to load test the new Flybuys website (all built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). Datacom have been using it on a project for Paymark along with .Net 3.5 and Intergen are moving all their developers on to Visual Studio 2008 as soon as possible, having been using it for a variety of projects for a little while.

New products mean that we’ve got events coming up! Firstly there is the usual Microsoft tour of the main centres through March – more on these at a later date.

The .Net User Groups will be sending a tour throughout the country presenting on Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio 2008. This will be a very cool road trip starting on Feb 4 and going to Feb 22 throughout the country. Look for the website for this to be up in by the next MSDN Flash or stay tuned to my blog.

Speaking, albeit fleetingly, of Windows Server 2008 – Geekzone went live on Windows Server 2008 RC last week. After it was all over Maucirio from Geekzone said:

“My first impression is how responsive the UI is... The next thing I notice is that pages are actually faster now - to create and load.”

You can read more about the Geekzone story here.

Till next time – happy summer coding

Visual Studio 2008 RTMs - Get it now!

dburling — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:46:40 GMT

Yup. This morning (PST time) Visual Studio 2008 RTM'd. Its already on MSDN, so go get it..

Soma has the full announcement here. Scott has a list of top features on his blog (along with the announcement of course).

Oh - this also means that .Net 3.5 has also RTM'd

I should also mention that there was some sort of delay on VS Pro being put up to MSDN - so you may find it to be missing. This should be fixed soon.

If you dont have a subscription you can download Visual Studio 2008 trials from here..

I'm off to explore :-)

VS2008 Screen cast #4 - Client Application Services

dburling — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:41:35 GMT

If you are familiar with smart clients, you'll know that they allow you to use the full capabilities of the desktop including the screen real estate and connected devices as well as allowing a richer user experience.

We are continuing to build on our smart client story, and Client Application Services are part of this. Client Application Services allows you to use the authentication and role management of your web application (exposed via web services) inside your smart client application.

This saves considerable plumbing code that you'd have to write yourself and creates efficiencies for developers working to the Software + Services model.

In this screen cast I show the new extensions inside Visual Studio 2008 and walk through implementing it.

Enjoy!

Visual Studio 2008 screen cast #3 - WCF & WF

dburling — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:53:03 GMT

In my last screen cast I showed how easy it is to use WCF in Visual Studio 2008. During my user group tour, I was asked whether we had done any work to integrate Windows Workflow with WCF. The answer is yes.

In this screen cast you'll see how easy it now is to consume a WCF service from a Windows Workflow using Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5

Visual Studio 2008 screen cast #2 - WCF

dburling — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:24:36 GMT

This is the second in my series of screen casts of new features in Visual Studio 2008.

WCF has been out since we released .Net 3.0 in October 2006, however, with Visual Studio 2008 we introduce very good tool support for creating, configuring, debugging, testing and consuming WCF Services.

Of course it all starts with the new project templates, but there is lots more to it - in Visual Studio 2008, WCF comes of age and is easy to work with.

See for yourself - this screen casts covers most of the new features at a high level. Click the image to play the video.

C#3 features in .Net 2.0

dburling — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 01:01:29 GMT

In my presentation today at bootcamp I alluded to the fact that some of the C#3 features can be used in .Net 2.0.

Daniel Moth (a developer evangelist in the UK) has done a couple of blog posts that have more details.

Specifically he mentions that the following C#3 features work in .Net 2.0:

Local variable inference
object initializers
anonymous types
lambda expressions

He's got a sample and more detail in this blog post.

Visual Studio 2008 - Multi-targeting

dburling — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:00:04 GMT

As promised, here is the first of my screen casts on Visual Studio 2008. This one focuses on Multi-targeting which allows you to target one of three versions of the .Net Framework in Visual Studio 2008.

These screencasts will generally weigh in at around 5 mins long. The video is 1024x768, so you can read the text, but this means that the stream is larger and will take some time to stream down to your machine.

Enjoy

Opening up the source of the .Net Base Class Libraries

dburling — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 04:27:38 GMT

Today we've announced (through ScottGu) that we are opening up the source code (complete with comments) for some of the .Net Base Class Libraries.

The purpose of this is to enable richer debugging support inside Visual Studio 2008 which will be released later this year.

When you hit a breakpoint in Visual Studio 2008 on a call to a method in a Base Class Library, you'll be able to drill into the implementation of that method to find where in the method the call is breaking.

This will take away much of the guess work associated with why a particular call is failing.

For more complete information, head over to ScottGu's blog and take a gander.

If you want to see what else is in Visual Studio 2008, come along to one of my user group sessions on my tour or to one of the Unplugged events this week and next week.

BootCamp 07 - November 3-4

dburling — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:00:50 GMT

You may have already noticed the murmurings of another code camp - just weeks after the last one.

This Code Camp is being organized by the Christchurch crowd (Peter is the front man for it) and will therefore be the first Code Camp ever in the South Island.

The other interesting thing about this code camp (apart from the cool theme) is that it will be focused on getting back to basics in the new wave of technology coming from Microsoft - namely Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.

Pre-registration is now open, and if you are interested in presenting (and there are some who should put their names down) head over to the Boot Camp home page and register!

Whats with all those non-Wellingtonians not having blogs I can link to?

Day of Code will rock!

dburling — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:51:42 GMT

Kirk and the guys have done a great job of promoting the Day of Code and with the fantastic speakers they have, why not?!

One of the sessions I'm looking forward to is Tony Goodhew talking about how we build Visual Studio - that will be something different and should be interesting.

Mahesh is also doing a session that combines his two Tech Ed sessions on Dynamic Languages - I know Ivan is looking forward to that session.

Over 230 people are signed up to attend - this will be a very cool event - sign up if you haven't already!

Open XML Sample coming your way

dburling — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 03:09:55 GMT

Last year I was speaking on the Open XML file formats in Office 2007. Initially I wasn't thrilled to be speaking on the subject, however the more you dig into this area, the more compelling this file format is. The developer story around Open XML is particularly interesting and quite compelling.

Part of .Net 3.0 included the System.IO.Packaging class that allows you to quickly and easily read and write Open XML files using fairly standard code. This led Nigel and I to toss around building a simple converter application to help convert files from the old version to the new version. Nigel found the time one evening to build the app - you can download the application from his blog here. Converting documents to the new format could save you more than 60% of your existing disk space allocated to Office documents.

There have also been good support from third parties who are including OpenXML formats in their products including Corel WordPerfect suite, KOffice, Gnumeric (open source spreadsheet for Linux), Apples TextEdit as well as a number of others who have announced support for it (check out Brian's timeline here for more details). Even the iPhone supports OpenXML!

My favorite Open XML based application is MindJet's MindManager which now supports using OpenXML to support its own data structures

One of the other very cool things about the Open XML file format is that the container is simply a zip container. You can just rename the docx (or xlsx, pptx, etc) file to .zip and open it up to take a look at the contents. This is a great feature and makes it really easy to open the files up regardless of the platform or development environment you are using.

At Microsoft we think that the new Office file formats are pretty cool and will allow developers to build some funky new products that take advantage of the Open XML file format allowing them to do things like generate documents on a server without having to install Office on the server, move documents between formats and extract document information programmatically.

A local example is Xero - Rod Drury has posted about the reports that Xero has been able to enable using OpenXML - including the actual formulas rather than just raw data - very cool.

Get started - IIS Log analyzer sample

To help you get into this we've been working with Intergen to build out a sample application to allow you to take your IIS Logs and pull them into excel, do some analysis and build some reports using System.IO.Packaging.

Chris has just announced that he's looking for testers - so if you are interested in using the app or just pulling it apart - Chris has all the details.

If you are working with Open XML as a developer today, we'd love to hear from you! You can email me or leave a comment below.

VB6 Migration Training with the VB Program Manager

dburling — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:43:20 GMT

If you've got a VB6 application that you've been considering upgrading to .Net, we've got help for you!

On Thursday August 16 at Microsoft House we will be hosting a VB6 to .Net Migration workshop. The workshop will help you understand how moving to .Net will help, what is involved in migrating to .Net as well as give you opportunities for Questions and Answers. Bring your laptop and code if you have particular areas of concern.

The workshop will be run by Paul Yuknewicz who is a Senior Lead Program Manager for the Visual Basic team at Microsoft in the US. Paul currently leads the business, community, and SKU strategy areas of the Visual Basic product group. He and his team are primarily focused strategies to help VB developers succeed upgrading to VB.NET and ensuring high satisfaction. They have participated in numerous large scale migrations.

*This is a rare opportunity to get help from the best in the business*

Agenda:

8:30am - 9:30am - Reasons to move to Visual Basic 2005
9:45am - 11:15am - Understanding practical upgrade strategies: From planning, to migration and interop approaches to post upgrade
11:15am - 12:15pm - Open Q&A

Registration is free. Register online at http://www.vs.net.nz/vb

MSDN & TechNet Flash: Get Ready for Tech Ed!

dburling — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 04:46:00 GMT

Tech Ed is almost upon us. In less than two weeks, Tech Ed New Zealand is underway. This year’s event will be awesome - not just because we've worked hard to make sure that the best speakers are at Tech Ed, but also because the content and events that happen at Tech Ed will be available online during the event. More on that in a moment...

Women in Technology – network with your peers

One of the new things we are doing at Tech Ed this year is an evening (dinner actually) specifically designed for women. The goal of the Women in Technology evening is to bring women in the Technology industry together for an evening of dinner, discussion and networking. The evening will be hosted by Helen Robinson the General Manager of Microsoft New Zealand and our keynote Speaker will be Eileen Brown who has conducted research around Women in Technology which has been presented at Tech Ed in Orlando. After the keynote there will be a panel discussion which offers attendees the opportunity to ask questions and interact with the panel. This will be followed by discussion and networking for the remainder of the evening.

This evening is free for Tech Ed attendees and incurs a small cost for those not attending Tech Ed who would like to come along. If you are not going to Tech Ed, we’d love to see you there!

Full details of the Women in Technology evening including the agenda, panelists and how to register can be found in my blog entry.

Day of Code

There is also a day of code being held by the .Net User Groups on Sunday the 12^th of August. This is a free event that features some of the speakers from Tech Ed. Generally the sessions by Tech Ed speakers will be informal discussions or presentations that differ from Tech Ed content. To register for this – head to http://codecamp.net.nz and fill in the form. More details are available on the registration site and on my blog.

Session Editor in ComNet

If you’ve been getting into ComNet and scheduling sessions, please note that there have been some minor changes so you might need to check that your schedule still looks OK The good news is that we will be sending the agenda off for printing at the end of this week, meaning we don’t expect any changes after that

Tech Ed Live

Like last year we have Tech Ed Live going live in the next week or so which will be the source of all news and information flowing from the event.

If you are not going to Tech Ed, this is your chance to keep up with what is going on. We will be hosting photos, videos and blog entries from Tech Ed up there. The site will be updated several times a day. I’m getting them to add a RSS feed to the site so you should be able to subscribe to it when it goes live.

If you are a blogger and will be blogging about Tech Ed, please tag your entry with TechEdNZ07 or email me a link to the entry so we can put it up on Tech Ed Live for all to see (and get you some hits too!)

VB6 Upgrade Migration workshop

We have Paul Yuknewicz from the VB team down for Tech Ed and thought it would be useful to have him run a VB Upgrade workshop while he is here. More details here.

Happy Developing!

Darryl

Day of Code

dburling — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:30:00 GMT

I've been bad to my good community peoples and haven't posted about this (sorry guys), although Nigel did (thanks Nigel!).

The .Net User Groups are having a day of Code the day before Tech Ed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Auckland.

This is a free event (registration required) where you can hear speakers talking about a range of topics from language to architecture and a host of things in between.

Given that this event is the day before Tech Ed I've been working with Kirk to try and get some of the Tech Ed speakers along to speak.

So - as I dont see announcements anywhere else, I'm pleased to announce that speaking at the Day of Code will be:

Mahesh Prakriya (Program Manager Dynamic Language Runtime)
Tony Goodhew (Microsoft Corp based Visual Studio 2008 Guru)
Tom Hollander (Architect and ex Patterns and Practices guru from Microsoft Corp)
Adam Cogan (Aussie RD and Tech Ed TFS speaker)

Actually there will be others as well so the day should be pretty cool, and all this for no cost. So get along if you can.

To register - head over to http://codecamp.net.nz and fill in the form - there are still spaces left - so do it now.

UPDATE - added link for Adam :-)