Darryl Burling @ Work : Visual Studio

How to buy Visual Studio in New Zealand

dburling — Tue, 13 May 2008 06:36:30 GMT

We often get asked "how can I buy Visual Studio and MSDN?".

And since last time we posted on this was back in 2005 I thought we should update this guidance.

If you look at the bottom of the MSDN NZ Visual Studio page, you'll see a section called "How to Buy".

It lists there all the local LARs (Large Account Resellers) who are all well and good, but can seem a bit OTT if all I want is a copy of MSDN.

That is one reason why we have now got an agreement with Developers Inc - a specialist developer tools licensing company who also sell developer tools for many "other" companies :-)

You can contact Developers Inc by calling 0508 338 462 or email Richard Vowles.

You might be keen to know too that if all you want is a single license that if you purchase a single license of MSDN you qualify for Microsoft Open License - meaning nobody should be paying full retail for Visual Studio with MSDN.

If you are starting out building a product, you'll want to check out the Empower Program which provides an awesome starting point for companies looking to get their first products out in the next 12 -24 months.

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!

VS2008 blog on Geekzone

dburling — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:36:40 GMT

Given that March is a big month here at Microsoft New Zealand due to the launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008, Mauricio decided to get a bunch of developers together to blog about some of the cool new features in Visual Studio 2008.

The Visual Studio Blog is hosted on Geekzone's blog engine and the plan is to have a new post every couple of days from developers who are using Visual Studio 2008 today. These posts will be tips and tricks and things that the authors have learned along the way

The developers are mostly people from the NZ developer community, although there are a couple of Aussies in there as well.

If you want to pick up some new tips and tricks, this blog will be useful. Don't forget that we've still got tickets available for the Microsoft launch events on this month.

Microsoft Launch Events in March

dburling — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:15:40 GMT

I got asked yesterday when we are having our launch events for Visual Studio 2008, SQL 2008 and Windows Server 2008, so I thought I should put the current dates out so you can pencil them in.

We are going to be visiting Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch as follows:

Christchurch - March 11
Wellington - (two identical events) - March 18 & 19
Auckland - March 26

We are running two events in Wellington - both the same - to cater for smaller venues and larger audiences - so if you are in Wellington, hopefully the event will be more comfortable for you :-)

More details to come in the future.

In the meantime, watch this blog for details of the 2008 Summer Road Trip that the community is bringing to 11 centres throughout the country in February - more on this later today...

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

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.

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.

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.

Visual Studio 2008 Shell and VS2008 SDK

dburling — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:08:00 GMT

I've had a couple of customers ask about using the Visual Studio Shell and given I've just stumbled upon some info about it, I thought I'd share it.

Firstly the Shell will be a free component of the Visual Studio 2008 SDK when it ships. Initially it was (is?) available only to VSIP partners (register here), but I believe that the bits you need are generally available now.

To get started you'll want to grab the August CTP of the Visual Studio 2008 SDK (download link).

More information can be gleaned from this page. I also recommend you keep an eye on the VSX Team Blog.

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).