Goto 100 - Development with Visual Basic : .NET Framework 3.5

Another reason for using LINQ to Relational – avoiding SQL Injection attacks

Eric Nelson — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:28:15 GMT

There are lots of great reasons to use LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities – but I forgot this one. I just came across this nicely written article which explores this area in some detail and makes a good case for why LINQ can help. All in glorious Visual Basic. Enjoy.

Visual Basic and .NET Framework Versions

Eric Nelson — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:23:25 GMT

Hi all, apologies for the pause in blogging. This is holiday season and I am … having plenty of holiday :-) (Which makes a nice change)

A couple of folks have asked me recently about Visual Basic versions and .NET Framework versions and how they tie up. I thought I would have a stab at a concept map to demonstrate the relationship.

Note that things got very different with the release of VB9. VB9 targets three versions of the framework and really brings to the fore the separation between the language/compiler and the runtime .NET Framework. What that means is new VB9 features (such as extension methods) will work just fine on a machine with only .NET Framework 2.0 (or 3.0) installed. Very clever stuff and one of the reasons VB9 (and VS2008) is the right choice even if your world is about .NET Framework 2.0.

NB: VB9 = Visual Basic 2008, VB8 = Visual Basic 2005, VB7 = Visual Basic.NET, VB6 = “the good old days” :-)

UK MSDN events now scheduled

Eric Nelson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:21:24 GMT

Topics have been chosen, venues confirmed and details posted on our events site. We will be showing up at 6 cities through Sept and October with a lot of the content focused on Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. Me – I will be delivering the “data bit” – in Visual Basic :-) I liked the tag line we went for:

“Service Pack? We’re calling it a Service Pack? Are you kidding??!?!”

P.S. We do also hope to get up to Scotland in October.

MSDN Event - Rich Internet Applications with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
- Location: Reading
- Date: 2 September 2008
MSDN Event: Rich Internet Applications with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
- Location: London
- Date: 4 September 2008
MSDN Event: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
- Location: Reading
- Date: 2 October 2008
MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
- Location: Manchester
- Date: 7 October 2008
MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
- Location: Birmingham
- Date: 14 October 2008
MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
- Location: Bristol
- Date: 22 October 2008
MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
- Location: Exeter
- Date: 23 October
MSDN Roadshow Re-Run

Location: London
Date: 24 October 2008

Visual Basic samples for WPF book - Applications = Code + Markup

Eric Nelson — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:34:53 GMT

Once again, Ged Meads work on WPF catches my eye. A big thanks to Ged, Young Joo and Evan Lim for converting the C# samples over to Visual Basic for Petzolds book on WPF (Only 3 left in stock at Amazon UK - lets get those sold as well - but be warned, the style/approach of this book may not appeal to everyone).

You can find the samples for all 31 chapters on the MSDN Code Gallery at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/petzoldsamplevb. This was a great initiative - I would love to know of any more examples.

P.S. Lets see if we can drive the downloads up - 1320 as of 17th July 2008 :-)

Ged Mead on Windows Presentation Foundation

Eric Nelson — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:18:02 GMT

UK Visual Basic MVP Ged has been taking a look at WPF this year. I spotted his post on WPF Basics: How To Play Sounds and Music in Windows Presentation Foundation a couple of weeks back and found it a clean, easy to follow example - that really tried to help others avoid some of those frustrations you typically run into when trying something new (Which I am running into lots at the moment as well!). He has several other WPF posts all worth a read if you are new to WPF development and his most recent post takes you to a shiny new article on Windows Forms and WPF Interop in which he creates a rich WPF list control. All good stuff.

Intellisense - VB 2005 vs VB2008 + a great example of mixing VB with XML

Eric Nelson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:45:43 GMT

I had not appreciated just how much intellisense had improved between releases of Visual Basic until I spent 6mins watching this (which isn't a huge surprise as I have never coded in VB 2005).

Lisa also does a great job of showing the real power of XML Literals in VB - mixing VB code inside the XML, even LINQ code. Very, very cool.

P.S. Video quality is not great - but good enough to see what is going on.

C9 Bytes: Lisa Feigenbaum on Visual Basic 2008 IDE Enhancements

Building a "brand new application" - WPF, ADO.NET Data Services, LINQ to Entities with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Eric Nelson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:19:00 GMT

At the end of June I run workshops with 2 ISVs both looking to completely re-develop their applications. One is entirely VB6, the other a combination of VB6 with C++.

The beauty of "starting from scratch" with a one to two year development plan is you can take a hard look at the latest technologies from Microsoft - and there are a lot of them! As a result, both application architectures at a high level ended up looking pretty similar.

The following links should help those teams drill in further - and maybe you?

In both cases we went with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as our base level technology (NB: SP1 is really a feature pack)

Presentation Tier

Rich Client for power/frequent users, typically inside the firewall with the need to be occasionally connected
- Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5
  - In June we released the Composite Application Block for WPF
- ADO.NET Synchronisation Services to a local database cache
- Workflow Foundation for ....errr...workflow :-)
- Communication to middle tier via HTTP/REST
Browser Client for occasional users, typically outside the firewall
- Silverlight 2.0
- ASP.NET AJAX
- Workflow Foundation

Middle Tier

Serving both types of clients. Ability to scale out.
- ADO.NET Data Services - exposing entities and operations
  - SP1 Documentation for Data Services
- ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities - delivering object relational mapping
  - SP1 Documentation for Entity Framework
- Workflow Foundation
- Windows Communication Foundation to drive and respond to external systems
Note: We ruled out LINQ to SQL in favour of LINQ to Entities - however worth saying that in both cases we only needed to support SQL Server and therefore LINQ to SQL would be a valid alternative
- LINQ to SQL has shipped and N-tier development with it is nicely covered in the documentation and in Beths posts

Data Tier

Where we store all the data :-)
- SQL Server 2008
  - Extended via SPs, Triggers and Types using TSQL or CLR integration as appropriate

Blogs (sample of the best):

ADO.NET Team on Entity Framework http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/tags/Entity+Framework/default.aspx
ADO.NET Data Services Team http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/
Sync Framework team http://blogs.msdn.com/sync/default.aspx
UK based Mike Taulty with some great content on ADO.NET Data Services, Entity Framework and Silverlight
Tim Sneath (ex UK) on all things WPF/Silverlight http://blogs.msdn.com/tims
Product group WPF site http://windowsclient.net/
Related - SQL Server Data Services http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/default.aspx

P.S. Both teams will be using Visual Basic 2008 :-) I thought you would like that one...