Goto 100 - Development with Visual Basic : UX

Visual Basic books in the UK were top sellers in the lead into Christmas

Eric Nelson — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:16:17 GMT

I was looking at some statistics on developer book sales in the months leading up to Christmas 2008. Overall C# outsold VB (there are a lot of C# books to choose from!) BUT VB 2008 had three of the top five slots including the number one slot. Unfortunately I can’t share the data but I felt it was worth sharing the good news :-) Well done VB!

WPF Performance issues? Then maybe this tool can help…

Eric Nelson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:13:49 GMT

I am seeing more interest in building richer UX in WPF of late which is great. Since WPF is very powerful and very flexible, we are beginning to see developers hit UX performance issues as they build increasingly rich and exciting UI. The good news is we have a new release of our Performance Profiling tool for WPF with a better UI, new tools and increased capability. I have not myself had a need to use it in anger (My WPF UI is still pretty much grey screen stuff) but this tool is looking great.

VB links on Entity Framework, Data Services and WPF

Eric Nelson — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:42:35 GMT

The following are all well worth a look:

N-Tier Development with Data Services and Entity Framework (16mins)

A PM on the team builds a simple ADO.NET Data Services application in VB.

Dynamic Data Entry with XML Literals

Dynamic creation of WPF maintenance screens using VB XML Literals.

12 new videos on ASP.NET Dynamic Data in VB

Bill does a great job at introducing ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

My low tech polls: show of hands at the UK MSDN events

Eric Nelson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:29:45 GMT

I have been asking a few “raise your hand” questions at the MSDN events we are currently delivering in various parts of the UK. I thought they would be worth sharing.

What language do you code in?
- C# – around 60%
- VB – around 40% Good stuff!
- Something else (normally C++) – one or two folks
Do you subscribe to the MSDN Flash?
- Yes – around 60% Good stuff – but 100% should be about right :-)
Do you listen to podcasts?
- Yes – around 40% Wow. We all commute too much!
Do you use an ORM currently in your project
- Yes – around 5% This is low. This is very low. This will change significantly over the coming years….

Do you have Silverlight Beta 2 code? Then you really need to test with RC0.

Eric Nelson — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:20:05 GMT

Tim has done a great job of explaining in lots of detail what you should be doing as a developer with RC0 in preparation for the final RTW.

However I feel a simplification may help - then you can read what Tim has to say :-)

If you have any users of your Silverlight Beta 2 code then there is a high chance that you Beta 2 code will stop working on their machines when we do our final release of Silverlight.

Hence… you need to test on RC0 now and be ready for the final release. Thanks all.

The Silverlight team have made all code downloads available in VB and C#

Eric Nelson — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:19:03 GMT

All the code downloads are now available in VB and C# which is great news http://silverlight.net/learn/videocat.aspx?cat=2.

See you all in a weeks time

Eric Nelson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:20:05 GMT

I need to crack on with some other work today before my holiday. I should be back on the blogosphere (!) on the 18th. In the meantime – have fun, cut great code and always make up before bed time…

C# and Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll

Eric Nelson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:48:58 GMT

As I dig into Visual Basic a bit further I to realise what I have been missing as a (lapsed) C# developer. A great example is some of the goodness wrapped up in Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll. It is a standard part of the .NET Framework and… is absolutely available to C# developers. Scott calls out one great example – creating a single instance Windows Forms application which makes use of Microsoft.VisualBasic.ApplicationServices.WindowsFormsApplicationBase.

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

Great WPF application written in Visual Basic

Eric Nelson — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:18:00 GMT

Today I set aside sometime to watch some “random podcasts”. Ok, not that random in that I decided they either had to be about Entity Framework or WPF.

The WPF episode I chose turned out to be a great choice – a real world line of business application which tries to use many of the capabilities of WPF to great effect. I need to watch it once more to really decide how good it is – but certainly it is not another “Windows Forms application implemented in WPF”. Well worth a watch.

Couple of comments:

This is a real app – hence no source code to share. Sorry.
A sticky sample is mentioned – available at http://dotnetmasters.com/downloads/TechEd2008DemoCode.zip
Oh – did I mention it was all written in Visual Basic :-)

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.

My first MSDN Flash is live - July 9th 2008

Eric Nelson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:02:37 GMT

Yesterday was my first MSDN Flash. It was fun to put together working with Mandy in Marketing. I think I roughly now understand the flow back and forth and next time it should be much easier.

As promised - I managed to get a couple of Visual Basic links in there :-)

Video Visual Basic 2008 and the future of Visual Basic.
Amanda Silver discusses new 2008 features & shares her thoughts on the future of Visual Basic.
KB Article FIX: Vbc.exe may use 100 percent of the CPU.
Fix for Visual Basic compiler when you build a Visual Basic 2008 application.

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...