Darryl Burling @ Work : Visual Basic

User Group Meeting at Tech Ed Today!

dburling — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:36:00 GMT

Rodney Lake has organized a last minute User Group meeting for anyone interested at 4pm today at TechEd.

If you are around, come to the Milford Room on Level 4 (its down the corridor in behind the stairways where the "Sponsors Rooms" sign is).

The session is a round table open discussion with the head of the Visual Basic team at Microsoft - Paul Yuknewicz. This top Redmond man has put an hour aside especially for the .Net user group today. You wont get an opportunity like this again so don't miss out!!

Update: This was a great event!

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

Visual Studio Express Betas released

dburling — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 21:07:58 GMT

We released Beta 2 of the Express editions yesterday as well as the other Visual Studio 2008 SKU's.

You can go to the pretty download page here.

The express editions include some of the cool new features of the full version including the O/R Designer (for LINQ), RSS support via WCF and WPF integration with Windows Forms.

If you dont want to go through the full 3-4Gb download, or you are hanging out until Tech Ed to get the DVD, This is a good download to get into.

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 :-))

Scott Hanselman on Visual Studio 2008

dburling — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:13:33 GMT

I've just finished listening to Scott Hanselman's podcast on Visual Studio 2008. One of the nice things about this podcast is that its not just another LINQ love session, digging a bit more into some of the underlying changes to the compilers and the languages.

Carl Franklin also notes that he hasn't moved to C# yet (implying that he's still on VB.Net) which just goes to show that its not just Nick Randolph using VB. :-)

Carl and Scott also talk about how Visual Basic is "reasserting itself as a dynamic language" in the next release, taking it closer to its roots.

On the VB note, we have some good content at Tech Ed on VB. More will be shared in the near future, but we should have someone from the product team down for the event which will be very cool!

You can get the podcast here (MP3 direct link).

VB6 to .Net resources

dburling — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 03:33:31 GMT

I sent an email to a VB6 developer this morning to help point them to some of the resources we have available and thought I'd share it here.

If you are a VB6 developer and have not touched .Net you might like to look at some of these resources and use them to learn .Net. These resources are all on the web and generally cost nothing.

The following web pages have some great starting points. They may not all be applicable to you, so take a moment to look through the content and jump on board where you think you need to.
The beginner guides at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/ are designed to help you get started programming. The second teir (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/windows/tier2/) of this series introduces the basics of .Net programming and may be a good place to cover off the ground work – although feel free to skip to their 3 if its too basic.
The starter kits (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/windows/default.aspx) have some really good windows applications that you can take apart and play with. This is a great way of getting a pre-built application and figuring out how it works, and then customizing it. There are starter kits for Windows and Web this link is just for Windows starter kits.
For help migrating from VB6 to VB.Net there are some Power Packs (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa701257.aspx) which give .net some of the missing functionality of VB6 such as the Print Form control. There is also an interop toolkit that will allow you to call .Net forms and functionality from inside VB6. This will allow you to build new features in .Net while retaining the old application in VB6. It’s also a great way to migrate the application to .Net one part at a time.
At Microsoft we also have a patterns and practices team. Their job is to figure out the best way to do things and then write up guidance on how to do it. They’ve written a guide on how to upgrade from VB6 to .Net, which has a bunch of downloads including documentation and an upgrade assessment tool that provides you with loads of experience of upgrading that you can use to make sure you do it once and get it right the first time. You can read what they have and download the tools and documentation from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480541.aspx.
The last thing I’d point you to is the learning resources page we have built on the Microsoft New Zealand MSDN website. You can access the learning resources from http://www.microsoft.com/nz/msdn/resources.mspx. This page has dozens of additional links for kick starting your learning regardless of what stage you are at.

Hope this is helpful to someone out there!