Darryl Burling @ Work : Developer

Launch - Building Connected Systems

dburling — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:01:12 GMT

As promised, I've uploaded the slides and code from my Connected Systems talk from the Launch events up to my skydrive, so if you are interested, you can grab them.

The sample code includes the code to extract data from Oulook, extend your ASP.Net Role and Membership provider to consume them in client applications along with a ReST based WCF project, and a slightly more fleshed out WCF project that includes sample code for implementing the RSS functionality of .Net 3.5 among other things.

Slides are here and the sample code is here.

Enjoy!

Slides - Overview of Visual Studio 2008

dburling — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:55:24 GMT

Since I've probably done this talk to exhaustion now, I thought I would post my slides for all to get at.

I've still got a few presentations left to do on this topic, once I've done them I'll try and post a screencast of the entire presentation and put it on silverlight streaming - it is mostly demos.

Actually because it's mostly demos, I don't know how useful the slides will be, but people have asked for them so here they are.

They are hosted on SkyDrive here.

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.

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

SQL Server for PHP driver CTP released

dburling — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:47:10 GMT

If you happen to be building sites in PHP and want to take advantage of SQL Server, we've just released a drive for SQL Server 2005 for use in PHP sites.

This is not final code, but it is scheduled for release in February. In the meantime you can download the CTP of the driver and try it out

And in good form the team that wrote the driver have a blog, meaning you can ask them questions and even send the team email :-).

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.

Whats new in Visual Studio 2008 - talk and demo

dburling — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:49:00 GMT

We are kicking off a series of events for anyone interested in getting an update on new tools, technology and platform advances. We are calling these "Microsoft Unplugged".

Nathan kicked these events off last week with an overview of Windows Server 2008.

This week its my turn. I'll be presenting at Microsoft in Auckland this Friday and Christchurch and Wellington next week on some of the new features in Visual Studio 2008. There are some cool features that I'll be showing and talking about including:

Multi targeting support
New WYSIWYG web designer
Great support for CSS and JavaScript
Full support for WPF applications in WPF
WPF Interop
Integrated support for ASP.Net Providers in WinForms
Integrated Office development support
New features in .Net Compact Framework 3.5
New Mobile emulator and security features
Support for LINQ and other language features in .Net 3.5
New ALM features in VS2008 TFS
and more...

The events are free and we will have some goodies to give away, so if you are doing work in Visual Studio 2005 or are looking at what is on offer in Visual Studio 2008, this session will benefit you - possibly in more ways than one.

The schedule is as follows:

October 5 - 10:00 am - Microsoft Auckland (Details/Register)

October 11 - 9:00 am - Christchurch Convention Centre (Details/Register)

October 12 - 2:00 pm - Microsoft Wellington (Details/Register)

Please register to attend (free registration) so that we can cater for you (Coffee/Tea and snacks provided during registration).

Collaboration - we all have something to share

dburling — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 10:58:19 GMT

Brenda was recently quoted in the Fryup on ComputerWorld with regards to the story behind SuperHappyDevHouse New Zealand.

“I wanted an event that would get people who don't currently work on open source, but want to, to come along and just do it.
After talking to Darryl I realised this goes the other way too. Those working on proprietary technologies (such as the various Microsoft platforms) can show us what they do too."

Yup. We all have something to share. Even at Microsoft we have Open Source projects under way.

In the New Zealand community, we want to help you reach your potential - such projects are a great way to get your head around a technology. Recent examples where New Zealanders have been contributing to Open Source solutions include BackgroundMotion and the Community Kit for Sharepoint (CKS) - hey look there is a user group edition too!

The first SHDH was a great event, so watch out for phase two where there should be more mixing and mingling of ideas...

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has been released

dburling — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:10:00 GMT

Hot off the press.

We just released Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008. Soma has all the details. Check the Channel9 Video too.

This is a very cool product - I've been learning about some of the new features this week. I'll be doing a user group tour in the next few months to help get the message out about why this is a very cool release that you'll want to move to from VS2005.

Download link.

If you are going to Tech Ed we will have DVD's of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 available to give out there, so dont break your download limit unless you really, really want to. (If you are an early adopter and do download it, post a comment to this entry :-))

Into WPF & Silverlight? Local community coming your way!

dburling — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 07:34:14 GMT

There is lots happening in the community and this is great to see.

The latest is that Nas Khan is setting up a XAML based user group in Wellington. She's put up a blog post outlining her current thinking. The long and short of it is that she has a few things she'd like feedback on.

The group she is considering starting would be XAML oriented - which means Silverlight and WPF specifically. She is also interested in getting designers coming along, so this is not the usual user group.

If you are interested in this sort of group, head over to Nas's blog post and give her some feedback on the points she's made.

Good work Nas!

Sharepoint User Group - Wellington

dburling — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:28:01 GMT

Chandima has posted the details of the Sharepoint user group that is on in Wellington on Wednesday night.

The Sharepoint user group is one of - if not the biggest Microsoft oriented user group in New Zealand that I'm aware of. If you are interested in a great networking and educational event around MOSS and WSS, this group is a regular and well run group that is worth checking out.

Details of Wednesday nights meeting is available on Chandimas blog here.

MSDN Flash: What Multi-targeting means to customers

dburling — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 02:15:00 GMT

One of the new features of Visual Studio 2008 is the ability to target multiple versions of the .Net framework with your application. I briefly mentioned this my last editorial, but I thought I'd expand on it here and help you understand why this is a very good thing for developers.

One of the problems many people faced with Visual Studio 2005 was that it only allowed you to develop .Net 2.0 applications. The benefits of moving to .Net 2.0 from 1.1 are pretty obvious (check out the guided tour for details), but the issue people had was that they still had to develop and support their old applications which meant that the new IDE would have to wait until they either upgraded or they started a new project.

With Visual Studio 2008, we've included the ability for the product to target multiple versions of the .Net framework. This means that if you have a .Net 2.0 application you can install Visual Studio 2008 and continue to work with the old application while at the same time taking advantage of some of the new features of Visual Studio 2008. Features such as vastly improved CSS design support, rich JavaScript debugging and intellisense, built in AJAX and design time support for nested master pages or improved click-once support to name a few.

This will also mean that if you want to upgrade your p roject from .Net 2.0 to .Net 3.0 or 3.5 you can do this simply by changing the target framework version in the project properties. This doesn't mean that there wont be upgrade issues to think about, but at least you don't have to change tools and upgrade your projects to see what happens when you upgrade to the latest framework - which should make the upgrade process significantly easier.

Unfortunately if you are on .Net 1.1 or 1.0 you'll still need to move to .Net 2.0 (which you could do on Visual Studio 2005 today) before you can take advantage of Visual Studio 2008, but we are working hard to make it easier for you to get the latest tools and move your applications through the upgrade process.

For more details about what is coming up in Orcas, check out my previous MSDN Flash editorial, have a look at the "Orcas" overview whitepaper, check out the feature specifications or read Scott Guthrie's blog post on Multi-targeting for web developers.

Background Motion - now live!

dburling — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:35:00 GMT

Over the last few months the guys at Mindscape have been dotting i's and crossing t's in order to get BackgroundMotion up and running. This has meant getting a solid hosting solution up (thanks to ZeroOne for pitching in!) as well as ensuring things like the terms of use and such things are in place.

The great news is that this is all now done and http://BackgroundMotion.com is now up (Mauricio got the scoop on this yesterday).

What is it?

Backgroundmotion.com is two things.

Firstly it is a community website to allow you to share backgrounds and background video for the DreamScene features of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Secondly it is a great example of a modern web application built on .Net 2.0. When I say example, I also mean sample - the source code for the site is available on codeplex for you to download and pull it apart.

There is also a "Code" tab on the site to help you get up and running with the source code. The developer section of the site includes sample code, short introduction videos and resources to lower the bar to use these technologies.

Technologies used

One of the things that the guys did was to build in all the latest technologies and making the code available means that you can go and see how they did it. Specifically, the technologies and tools they used include:

.Net Framework 2.0
.Net Framework 3.0
ASP.Net 2.0
ASP.Net AJAX 1.0
Silverlight
NUnit
LINQ (May CTP)
Web Client Software Factory (Composite Web Block)
Lucene.Net
RSS Toolkit (which was extended for the solution)
Virtual Earth
Sidebar Gadgets

The guys also made sure that it is XHTML 1.0 compliant.

If you went along to the Technical Briefings we did back in March you'll remember that JB and JD presented at those sessions on BackgroundMotion. The code tab on BackgroundMotion also has links to the videos of their sessions from the events, all nicely polished with demos and decks integrated into the video (dont forget you can get the decks here).

Nigel tells me he's planning to do a screen cast on getting started with BackgroundMotion, so watch his blog for that too.

Go check out the site, click the code tab and take a hunt around. We are keen to know what you think - so click the feedback link on the site or post a comment on one of the blog posts that you'll see today.