Code/Tea/Etc... : TechEd

This blog has moved... notice #2...

Duncanma — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 05:17:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma

following the 3 leaf model when they moved, I thought I should post this notice a couple of times...

This blog has moved...

Duncanma — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:11:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net

The first post over there shows the app that I wrote last night and then used to copy all of my posts and categories over from this blog to the new location... I'll post the code for that app at some point, as boring as it is...

Andrew Troelsen's Refactoring Article is up...

Duncanma — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 07:03:00 GMT

Refactoring C# Code Using Visual Studio 2005
Andrew W. Troelsen
Intertech Training
Summary: This article examines the role of code refactoring, and the refactoring techniques supported by Visual Studio 2005. (23 printed pages)

Get a listing of all the upcoming VB Chats

Duncanma — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 09:07:00 GMT

Chats on Visual Basic 2005
For the past year, I've been organizing the Visual Basic chats that appear at http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/. For the most part, these chats focused on answering your questions about Visual Basic.
Naturally, now that the Beta 1 for Visual Basic 2005 is available, I wanted to schedule some chats to answer your Beta questions. But after discussing this with Robert Green, we decided to change the format somewhat; instead of just answering questions, the chat hosts will also be looking for feedback about what you like (or don't like) about the selected feature....

from the VB Team blog, click on the link to view the whole post... (and the schedule!!)

Generics in VB 2005 Article now live on MSDN...

Duncanma — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 04:40:00 GMT

Defining and Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005

Harish Kantamneni
Visual Basic Team
Microsoft Corporation
July 2004

Summary: Provides an overview of the generics feature in Visual Basic 2005, and explains the basic concepts involved in defining and using generics and their usefulness to the Visual Basic developer.

My new Coding 4 Fun Column is up on MSDN...

Duncanma — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 22:16:00 GMT

How Long Now?
Summary: Duncan Mackenzie describes how to calculate the difference between two dates in Visual Basic .NET, and builds an application that counts down to the release of Halo 2.

Another new article posted yesterday... "What's New In Help for VB 2005"

Duncanma — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:53:00 GMT

What's New in Help for Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1
Find out about the newest Help features in Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1, including distinguishing Visual Basic from other languages, more task-oriented topics, and an emphasis on code examples.

Operator Overloading in VB 2005

Duncanma — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:21:00 GMT

Matthew Gertz, Dev Lead for the VB Compiler, Editor & Debugger team has written an article on operator overloading in Visual Basic 2005...

Operator Overloading In Visual Basic 2005
Operator Overloading, new to Visual Basic 2005, simplifies the use and development of complex types by allowing you to specify your own implementation for standard operations such as addition and subtraction.

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 and the Express Edition Betas have launched...

Duncanma — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 07:38:00 GMT

Ah, launch day... what else would have most of my colleagues sitting in their offices at 12:30 am in the morning on a Monday... and there isn't a single Halo game running!!

So, if you haven't heard... the official site for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is now up, featuring a ton of new MSDN features including personalization and the release of our new feedback system that allows you to submit bugs directly into our bug tracking systems, view the status of existing bugs, vote on the importance of bugs submitted by other folks, etc... very cool stuff. Of course, there is also another big announcement; the Express Editions of Visual Basic, C#, C++, J#, and ASP.NET are all now available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/express !! The Express Editions are targetted directly at my favorite audience, the enthusiast/hobbyist/student... which happens to line up perfectly with my column on MSDN, Coding 4 Fun. Just think, even if you aren't a MSDN subscriber, you can go over to http://msdn.microsoft.com/express/vbasic right now, download the beta of the Express Edition of VB and you can build a fully functioning Windows Forms application using the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework... using a full-blown, high-quality IDE... wow. As you can imagine, internally we've known about these Express Editions for a bit now, and I've just been bursting at the seams to talk about it... I think it really makes it easier for folks who want to get into .NET development to get started!

Anyway, check it out... download it... work with it (definitely try the C# and VB Starter Kits, they are very cool...) and let me know what you think!!!

Links of the moment:

C# Express
VB Express
The New VS 2005 Developer Center
The Channel 9 "Summer of Express" contest (for all you 'enthusiasts' out there)

Oh, and one other thing... some folks have complained in the past that MSDN is providing too much coverage of 'future' topics like Whidbey and Longhorn, and we certainly understand that concern... personally I've been watching the content on my two sites (/vbasic and /vcsharp) and we've been floating around 90% shipping products, 10% future... which is where I'd like to keep it... but this launch will throw all of MSDN ratios out of whack for a bit as we headline the ton of content that has been written targeting the Beta 1 bits and is all being released at the same time.... my apologies in advance if you are sick of hearing about Whidbey, but rest assured that at least VB and C# will be returning to a more reasonable balance of material in the near future.

A sneak preview of Visual Basic 2005 (article) is up on MSDN...

Duncanma — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 22:13:00 GMT

This new article from Ken Getz provides an overview of many of the new features in Visual Basic 2005, including "My", "Edit and Continue", "AutoCorrect", "Just My Code" and more...

Check it out here

Cyrus ruminates on the revelations of TechEd 2004...

Duncanma — Fri, 28 May 2004 01:34:00 GMT

Cyrus, recent addition to the C# bloggers list and poster of many posts, has been blogging extensively from TechEd...

OMGTHXURGR8!!!!
That's basically the message we got today concerning the work we're doing in the C# IDE for VS 2005. I ended up not being able to show people the new stuff on a person by person basis because we ended up getting too much of a backlog of people while that was happening. I ended up doing demos 10 people at a time instead. At first I thought it was because I had some awesome C# hats to give away, but then when people were staying even after I gave them out, I realized they were pretty psyched about the new features.

The 'Chalk Talk' went well....

Duncanma — Fri, 28 May 2004 00:49:00 GMT

You can expect to see a MSDN TV version of this session at some point soon... should be pretty good quality, Anders was wearing a microphone... although it did fall off him for a bit :)

Anders Chalk Talk today at 2pm to 3:15pm (at TechEd 2004)

Duncanma — Wed, 26 May 2004 19:05:00 GMT

Swing by Cabana 5 today (May 26) at 2pm if you want to chat with Anders.... Erica Weichers is here and is going to try and record it, but if you are at TechEd you should come on by.

(Just in case you don't know the name: Anders Hejlsberg is the designer of the C# language... so if you are into C#, you'd probably enjoy listening to his talk)

Contents of a programmer's backpack

Duncanma — Wed, 26 May 2004 11:04:00 GMT

Returning to the room tonight I was greeted by an amazing spread of technology across the bed in my hotel room. Early in the day I had returned to my room only to realize that my cell phone was not in my pocket as expected, so I had proceeded to pull everything out of my backpack, one item at a time, and place it on the bed. Turns out it wasn't in there, it was back in the Cabana... but that isn't really the point of this post. Now, because it is very late and I wish to use my bed, I'm forced to take all of these items and carefully move them to another location or put them back into my bag. Looking over the pile of items, I'm stunned by the amount of gadgetry I've brought with me... and it reminded me a lot of that scene from the first Austin Power movie where he was being given back his personal possessions after being awoken from hibernation.

Yep, that really is all my stuff... I had just never taken out more than one item at a time before, so it had seemed quite normal before now. The pile contained:

a digital camera,
a digital video camera,
a laptop of course,
a power cord for said laptop,
studio headphones (yep, the big kind),
a USB web cam,
a full-size mouse,
a RIO Nitrus music player,
small headphones for the Rio,
a USB memory stick reader (for the memory sticks out of the digital camera) and
a second hard drive for my laptop...

wow. And to think, I've been carrying all of that around on my back during the day... I suspect this isn't an unusual amount of stuff, especially for those of us in 'the business' (saying 'in the business' makes it seem so much cooler than saying 'geeks'), but it was more than I realized I had with me. I have a few other pieces with me as well (a 4 port hub, cell-phone, assorted power supplies) but that pile of technology was all from my backpack...

Paul Vick is in the house....

Duncanma — Tue, 25 May 2004 19:04:00 GMT

Paul Vick, language guy for Visual Basic and unofficial spokesman for Krispy Kreme (look at the picture to understand that comment), arrived yesterday at TechEd.... Look for him around the Developer Division Cabanas (5 and 6), the Visual Studio 2005 booth and at the "Meet the VB Team" session (Thursday 3:15-4:30).

(click to see the whole picture)

Bonus points if you can pick out the MSDN staffer in the background behind Paul...