Kathleen's Weblog

Video: Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio 2010

This week I'm featuring the topic Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio. In a video interview, Programming Writer, McLean Schofield, walks us through the topic, and demos how to drag items from the Data Sources window onto the WPF Designer. He also describes the XAML and code that is added behind the scenes.

See the Video: Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio.

--Kathleen

I'm a VB! Are you?

The Visual Basic team has posted a series of video interviews (as well as written interviews) with developers who use Visual Basic to build their applications. At this year's MVP summit, I followed Beth Massi, with my video camera in hand, as she interviewed several Visual Basic MVPs to learn about what types of applications they're building, what their favorite Visual Basic features are, and why they're a VB.

Are you a VB too?  Submit your story.

--Kathleen

Video: What's New in the Visual Studio 2010 Editor

The featured Visual Studio 2010 Help topic this week is What's New in the Visual Studio 2010 Editor. In a video interview, Leith McCombs walks us through some of the new features in the editor.

See the Video: Visual Studio 2010 Editor

--Kathleen

Video: Implicit Line Continuation

This week, I'm featuring implicit line continuation in the Help topic Statements in Visual Basic. This is the second part of the interview I did with Doug Rothaus. Implicit line continuation is a new (and frequently asked for) feature in Visual Basic 2010.

Check out the Video: implicit Line Continuation

--Kathleen

Video: Auto-Implemented Properties in Visual Basic 2010

This week, I'm featuring the topic Auto-Implemented Properties, which enables you to quickly specify a property of a class without having to write code to Get and Set the property.

I recently interviewed Doug Rothaus, the author of this topic, to learn more about this feature.

See the Video: Auto-Implement Properties.

--Kathleen

Video: Deploying Multiple Office Solutions in a Single ClickOnce Installer

This week, I’m featuring the topic: Walkthrough: Deploying Multiple Office Solutions in a Single ClickOnce Installer. This topic describes how you can deploy multiple Office solutions in a single package to simplify the installation and update process. For example, you can now publish both an Excel workbook project and an Outlook add-in project at the same time. Programming Writer, Mary Lee, wrote about this in her blog post Deploying Multiple Office Solutions In a Single Installer and the post is complete with graphics to help you visualize the process.

I recently interviewed Mary to learn more about this topic, and to have her give a demonstration of some of the tasks described in the walkthrough.

See video: Deploying Multiple Office Solutions in a Single ClickOnce Installer

-- Kathleen

Creating Your First F# Program with Visual Studio 2010

This week, I'm highlighting the Visual Studio help topic: Walkthrough: Creating Your First F# Program with Visual Studio.  This topic gives a great introduction to some of the features and syntax of F#.  I've also created a video that takes you through some of the basics. I show you how to declare simple variables, to write and test functions, to create tuples and lists. 

See video: Creating Your First F# Program in Visual Studio 2010 

-- Kathleen

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Documentation

If you've downloaded Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, or just want to learn about the new features, be sure to check out the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Documentation. 

Learn about What's New in Visual Studio 2010, or take a look at the Visual Studio 2010 Product Highlights.

Two Views

There are two views of the documentation available on MSDN. Classic view has the traditional hierarchical table of contents in the left pane, with rich content in right pane, with collapsible sections and code blocks.

Low bandwidth view has a flattened table of contents in the left pane, and content in the right pane. Because this is a script-free rendition of the help content, performance is greatly improved.

You can turn this view on by clicking switch on low bandwidth view in the upper left corner of the topic, and return back to classic view by clicking Switch off low bandwidth view in the upper right corner of the topic. Currently, there isn't search capability for the low bandwidth view, but hopefully that should be coming soon.

Feedback

To send us feedback on the documentation, use the classic view, and then rate the topic by clicking a star (1=Poor, 2=Fair, 3=Average, 4=Good, 5=Excellent), and then leave your feedback in the comment box, and click Send.

This feedback goes directly to the writing teams for review.  Although there's a feedback link in low bandwidth view, this is for comments on the view itself, and is not sent directly to the writing teams; feedback about the content should be sent using the Click to Rate and Give Feedback link in classic view.

I'll be featuring a new Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 topic each week on this blog, or you can follow me on twitter (kathleenmcgrath) to see a Visual Studio 2010 Topic of the Day.

--Kathleen

Featured Visual Studio Library Content

We now have a feed on several MSDN Developer Centers where we will feature Visual Studio Help content. This enables us to display links to Help topics that demonstrate the features of Visual Studio, such as taking a Quick Tour of the Integrated Development Environment, learning How to combine LINQ Queries with Regular Expressions, Designing an Outlook Form Region, Creating a New Ribbon Application By Using MFC, and more.

You'll (typically) find this featured Library content in the upper right corner of the Developer Center:

Featured content can be found on the following developer centers:

• Visual Basic Developer Center
• Visual C# Developer Center
• Visual C++ Developer Center
• Office Development with Visual Studio Developer Center
• Visual Studio Developer Center
• Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center

--Kathleen

Linking to Videos from Visual Studio Help Content

We've recently added links to the How Do I videos that you'll find on the MSDN Developer Centers in Help content related to the videos (and have added links to the Help content from the video landing page.

For example, in the Library topic Overview of LINQ to XML in Visual Basic,  You'll find links to two related How Do I videos about LINQ to XML.

We typically add this link at the end of the Introduction section, and add a Play button icon  to draw your attention to the fact that there's a related video.

On the video landing page, we add a link back to the related Help topics:

We also add links to "video versions of the topic" when a corresponding video exists. These are similar to general How Do I videos, but they directly follow the steps in the Help topic, rather than just being related to the topic. For an example, see Walkthrough: Binding Content Controls to Custom XML Parts.

I hope this makes it easier for you to find related topics and videos.

--Kathleen

How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks?

I finally got the chance to create another video! With the release of Visual Studio SP1, you can now add smart tags to Excel by using an Add-in project.  In this video, I show you how to add them to both types of projects.

How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks?

We've decided to start posting our videos as "How Do I" videos and post them to the various Developer Centers, rather than posting them to the Video How to node in the MSDN Library.  Enjoy!

--Kathleen

Change History in Visual Studio 2008 Documentation

We’ve added a new feature to the Visual Studio 2008 documentation to help you easily see when changes have been made in a topic. If a topic has been updated since its initial release (November 2007, in the case of Visual Studio 2008), you’ll see an updated date at the top of the topic. If you scroll to the bottom of the topic to the Change History section, you’ll see a table that lists the date of the change, a description of what change was made, and a reason for the update, such as SP1 feature change, Customer feedback, Content bug fix, or Information enhancement.

For example, if you look at the topic, How to: Target a Specific .NET Framework, you'll see the Updated date is July 2008 under the title:

. . . and you'll see a change table at the bottom that describes the change and reason for the change:

This is useful if you want to search the MSDN Library for a list of topics that have been updated in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (by searching for the string "SP1 feature change.").  Also, if we've changed a topic based on feedback that you've sent us, we'll add an entry to the Change History table, indicating that the reason is due to "Customer feedback."

--Kathleen

What's New in Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Here's a few pointers to articles that will get you started learning about some of the new features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

New Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Learn about some of the new features and enhancements in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, including tools to create occasionally connected smart device applications, Power Packs 3.0 controls and components, and .NET Framework Client Profile support.

Create Occasionally Connected Smart Device Applications  Learn how to configure data synchronization in an occasionally connected smart device application. You will learn how to configure your smart device application to add a customer to the local database cache and then synchronize the changes with a remote database.

Add Controls to Office Documents by Using an Application-Level Add-In Learn about a new feature in Visual Studio Tools for Office that enables you to add controls to Microsoft Office Word documents and Microsoft Office Excel workbooks at run time by using application add-ins.

Generate Unsigned ClickOnce Deployment Manifests Starting with Visual Studio SP1, signing ClickOnce manifests is optional. Learn how to generate unsigned ClickOnce manifests.

--Kathleen

Developer Documentation Survey

Just a reminder that I'll be at TechEd interviewing customers and handing out the developer documentation survey. You can opt to take the online survey instead:  Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey.

Thanks for participating!

-- Kathleen 

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beta) Documentation

If you’ve downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta, be sure to take a look at the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta documentation. This documentation has been updated to reflect product enhancements, and additional documentation enhancements based on customer feedback. You can find a detailed list of new product features in SP1 in What’s New in Visual Studio 2008.

We’ve also added a new feature to the documentation to help you easily see where changes have been made in a topic. If a topic has been updated since its initial release (November 2007, in the case of Visual Studio), you’ll see an updated date at the top of the topic. If you scroll to the bottom of the topic to the Change History section, you’ll see a table that lists the date of the change, a description of what change was made, and a reason for the update, such as SP1 feature change, customer feedback, or information enhancement.

Because this documentation is posted to a Beta site, it has limited functionality. For example, search and customer feedback links are not enabled, and topics have a slightly different appearance.

-- Kathleen