Robert Green's Visual Basic Blog : Conferences

Watch VSLive Keynotes

rgreen_msft — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:51:00 GMT

The videos of the VSLive Keynotes are on the Fawcette web site.

Soma announced VS 2005 Standard in his keynote and has the latest dev tools roadmap. There is also a seperate link to the reg-free COM demo in his keynote. Reg-free COM is coming in Whidbey and is an important piece of ClickOnce. This lets you install (on a Windows XP machine) any COM components in your application without having to write to the Registry. Dave Templin of the VB team is working on an article explaining this in detail.

Dave Mendlen, who is now the Director of Web Services Technical Marketing, talks about Web services and SOA in his keynote. This is a good opportunity for you to get an understanding of what these are going to mean to VS developers today and over the next few years.

Greetings from Orlando

rgreen_msft — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 17:20:00 GMT

Good morning from Orlando. I am here for VSConnections. I flew down Sunday (7:20 AM flight through Dallas and then arriving in Orlando at 5:30 PM). Monday morning I was the demo guy (internally we use a different term but I'm not sharing that with you!) for Alan Griver's keynote. It went well. Alan did a very good job of laying out the vision for VS 2005. My first demo was of the Class Designer, which is a visual way of creating and managing classes in an application. You can drag a class out of the Toolbox onto the class diagram. This immediately creates a class file in your VS project. You can add the properties and methods in the Class Designer or in the code editor. And your code and the class diagram are continuously in synch. You can select a class in the designer and see not only its base classes but also its derived classes. Very nice!

I next showed the Consolidated Insurance demo that Jay Roxe debuted at VSLive in Bill Gates' keynote. It shows a WinForm with some nice UI (a gradiant background supplied by an image) plus the new Toolstrip control with image buttons. I dragged and dropped claim data that came from an object. I then showed a snippet that uses My to talk to the printer and also Edit and Continue. Here is the snippet code:
With My.Computer.Printers.DefaultPrinter
' Click for more: 'ms-help://MS.VSCC.v80/MS.MSDNQTR.80.en/commoner/redir/redirect.htm?keyword="a1520853-292b-4f38-b838-6a7fccc44a48"'

            .FontStyle = FontStyle.Bold + FontStyle.Italic
            .FontSize = 16
            .HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Center
            .WriteLine("Consolidated Insurance Claim " + curClaim.ClaimID)
            .WriteLine("Claim Date: " & curClaim.IncidentDate.ToShortDateString)
            .FontStyle = FontStyle.Regular
            .FontSize = 10
            .HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Left
            .WriteHorizontalLine(3)
            .WriteLine()
            .WriteLine("Customer " + curClaim.Customer)
            .WriteLine()
            .WriteImage(Me.PictureBox1.Image)
            .PrintPreview()

End With

Finally I showed the 2005 version of VS Tools for Office. I showed an Excel based expense report that gets expense data from a Web service. It also has 2 user controls, one that displays user info and one that displays the expense items. When you run the spreadsheet you see an Excel list and also the 2 user controls on the spreadsheet. How do you see user controls on the spreadsheet? Because they are added to the ActionsPane, which is similar to the Excel Task Pane except that it is a container for .NET controls. Here is the code that sits in the Workbook.vb file in this project:

Partial Class ThisWorkbook
    <Cached()> Private Expenses As ExpenseData
    Private UserInfo As New UserInfoControl
    Private Transactions As New TransactionsControl

    Protected Sub ThisWorkboox_InitializationComplete(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs) Handles Me.Initialize
        Me.Expenses = ExpenseService.GetExpenses()
        Me.Expenses.Expense.Clear()

        Me.UserInfo.DataSource = Me.Expenses.ExpenseReport
        Me.Transactions.Expenses = Me.Expenses
        Globals.Sheet1.List1.DataSource = Me.Expenses.Expense

        Me.ActionsPane.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.FromArgb(CType(101, Byte), CType(143, Byte), CType(224, Byte))
        Me.ActionsPane.Controls.Add(Me.UserInfo)
        Me.ActionsPane.Controls.Add(Me.Transactions)
    End Sub
End Class

The code retrieves expense info from the Web service, sends the expense report level data to the UserInfo control and then sends the expense items data to the Transactions control. List1 is an Excel 2003 list which we can now treat as a .NET object and the code sets the DataSource of the list. The last two lines add the two user controls to the ActionsPane and so they appear in the spreadsheet. The current version of VS Tools for Office is very cool and powerful and the next version is a tremendous leap forward over that.

After the keynote I gave a Building Windows Apps in VB talk while Dan Fernandez gave the C# version of that talk. Then I did a Data talk which drilled down into the drag and drop data capabilities in VS. Sean Draine showed ClickOnce in the next talk and in the final talk Joe Binder drilled into some of the advanced VB language features and My.

In addition to showing lots of exciting new features and capabilities, we tried to get across the following very important points

You get a lot of productivity from the data and My features. We write a bunch of code for you that you don't now have to learn and write yourself. However, behind the scenes we are writing a lot of the same code that you have to write today. So there is not going to be a signficant performance penalty from using drag and drop data or using My.
VB and C# are both very powerful languages and will both continue to get more powerful (generics etc). But VB is also very heavily focused on productivity. So with features like My and background compilation and compiler warnings etc we want VB to both extremely powerful and extremely productive.

VB Talks

rgreen_msft — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 23:27:00 GMT

Duncan and I are putting together a list of VB talks. The list will live on the VB Dev Center for all to see. We obviously know about the conferences and user groups that we will be speaking at, but we don't know about all the other VB happenings around the world.

This is where you come in. Got VB talks at your user group? Sponsoring a conference with VB talks? Know of VB events? Send them to me and I'll get it on the VB Events list on MSDN.

Upcoming events

rgreen_msft — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 04:02:00 GMT

Lots happening, both soon and in the near future.

Next week is VSLive! San Francisco (http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/vslive/2004/sf/). Bill Gates is doing the keynote on Wednesday. After that we have the .NET Architecture Day. The talks are:

Visual Studio 2005: Building and Deploying Windows Forms Applications and Deploying with ClickOnce - Jay Schmelzer
Visual Studio 2005: Building ASP.NET Web Applications - Rob Howard
Visual Studio 2005: Data Access and XML - Steve Lasker
Visual Studio 2005: Building Office Solutions with Managed Code - Eric Lippert
Visual Studio 2005: Advanced Language and IDE Features - Amanda Silver

Look for trip reports next week.

Apr 18-21 is VSConnections in Orlando (http://www.devconnections.com/vs/). ASPConnections and SQLConnections are at the same time. Alan Griver is doing the VS keynote. Scott Guthrie is doing the ASP keynote. Tom Rizzo is doing the SQL keynote. Quite the lineup, eh? The Microsoft talks after the VS keynote are:

Visual Studio 2005: Building ASP.NET Web Applications - (shared with the ASPConnections show and given by the ASP team)
Visual Studio 2005: Building Windows Forms Applications - me
Visual Studio 2005: Data Access and XML - me
Visual Studio 2005: Deploying Applications with ClickOnce - Sean Draine
Visual Studio 2005: Advanced Language and IDE Features - Joe Binder

Also coming soon is the VB User Group Tour. This will occur in various cities in April and on into June. Look for more details shortly on MSDN.

Looking a bit further out we see TechEd in San Diego, May 23-28. And .NET Advisor Live in Las Vegas June 6-10 (http://advisorevents.com/CMN0406p.nsf). I will be giving the keynote there.

Hope to see you at one or more of these events. Make sure you stop by and say hi. Maybe I'll have bits in hand to give out. Who knows?