Robert Green's Visual Basic Blog : User groups

Visual Basic World Tour is under way

rgreen_msft — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 03:37:00 GMT

The VB World Tour is well under way. We have already visited user groups in Portland OR and Pleasanton CA. The rest of the schedule right now is (note, edited on 4/23 for accuracy)

Waltham 4/14 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver)
New York 4/15 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver)
Louisville 4/20 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick)
Chicago 4/21 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick)
Philadelphia 4/21 (Sean Draine and Joe Binder)
Denver 4/26 (Paul Yuknewicz and Jay Roxe)
Long Beach 4/27 (Sean Draine and Jay Roxe)
Dallas 5/13 (Steve Lasker and Eric Gruber)
Oklahoma City 5/14 (Steve Lasker and Eric Gruber)
Northern NJ 6/8 (Joe Binder and tbd)
Albany 6/9 (Joe Binder and tbd)

The first part of the evening is based on VB 2003 with a preview of some cool user controls we will be shipping soon and also cool Tablet PC and Visual Studio Tools for Office demos. The second part of the evening is all VB 2005.

We hope to see you there!!

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.

NETDA monthly VB Meeting

rgreen_msft — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 02:56:00 GMT

The .NET Developer Association meets on campus 3 Mondays a month. There is a monthly General meeting, a monthly Web meeting and an alternating Beginner/Database meeting. The group used to be a VB user group but changed to a .NET user group awhile back.

Starting March 22 there will now be a VB meeting on the 4th Monday of each month, with yours truly as the leader. This gives us an opportunity to focus on VB topics each month and should be a lot of fun. Our first meeting features Elizabeth Newman, a Software Developer in Test on the VB team, showing us ClickOnce deployment and also Amanda Silver, a Program Manager on the VB team, diving into advanced IDE and language features in Whidbey.

I haven't quite figured out the April and beyond meetings but that should be done this week.

For those of you in the Seattle area, come on and join us for the VB meeting (and the other ones too of course). Monday's General Meeting is Bill Vaughn on using CLR assemblies in stored procedures and UDTs in Yukon.

NETDA is at http://www.netda.net

Whidbey at the .NETDA Part 2

rgreen_msft — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 02:37:00 GMT

Previously on my blog I wrote about showing VB Whidbey to the .NET Developers Association General Meeting in Redmond. I covered IDE enhancements aimed at increasing productivity. Here I'll cover Data.

I showed the Data Sources Window. You can use it to connect to data from a database, a Web service, an object and a database local file. (You can still connect to data using the Server Explorer, but the Data Sources Window provides additional capabilities.) I dragged the Employees table onto a form and got a databound grid and a navigation toolbar. Hit F5 and the form shows up with data in the grid. No code required!

In the Data Sources Window the Employee table has a dropdown next to it which lets me specify whether I want a grid or individual controls when I drag onto the form. Also, each field in the table has a dropdown that lets me specify which control to use. I showed how to specify a user control for the phone field.

I talked about the navigator, a new WinForm control. It understands the data binding and has buttons for next, previous, add, delete, save, etc. Of course, you don't have to use it. I deleted it and showed that although it understands the data bindings, it doesn't contain the data bindings. I added a next button to the form and wrote the following code:
Me.EmployeesDataConnector.MoveNext()

The DataConnector is a non-visual control that surfaces the form's BindingManager. This is more intuitive for folks new to .NET. I've seen several times on newsgroups somebody asking how to bind to data and scroll. They are used to typing Recordset.MoveNext but in VS 2002 and 2003 they have to find the BindingManager and set its Position property. That will of course still work in Whidbey, but those used to scrolling through the data by calling a method of the data/recordset will find the DataConnector easy to use.

I closed by showing binding to an object. I was asked if the object needs to expose an interface and the answer is no. Just public properties is all that is needed. And you have to write the code to load the data since we won't assume we know how you want your data loaded. So in my example, I added this to the form's Load:
Me.CustomerDataConnector.DataSource = ObjectBinding.Business.CustomerFactory.GetAllCustomers
where ObjectBinding.Business is the namespace and the CustomerFactory class has a GetAllCustomers method.

My part of the user group lasted an hour and I covered all of 2 things! Whidbey is a major release folks!

Whidbey at the .NETDA Part 1

rgreen_msft — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 05:14:00 GMT

Last night I presented VB Whidbey at the .NET Developer Association General Meeting here in Redmond. I was on after Dave Winer and Robert Scoble spoke on blogs and RSS, etc. It is no coincidence that my blog debuts the very next day. Thanks to Dave and Robert for inspiring me.

My hour was all demos. I showed several IDE enhancements, including
- Faster startup
- Not having to be prompted for project location when you start
- Snap lines to help you line up controls
- Editing control Names and Text on the form all at once rather than having to individually edit them in the Properties Window
- Error correction options. Let's say you type Dim iVar as integr. You'll get a blue squiggly and a smart tag. Click the smart tag and we offer suggestions as to what you may have meant. Select Dim iVar as integer from the list and we'll change your code to that. Or you create a property and then make it ReadOnly. You can't have a Set in a ReadOnly property. We'll prompt you and offer to either remove the ReadOnly or remove the Set.
- If you rename form1.vb to GroovyForm.vb we'll change the class name from form1 to GroovyForm. (Actually, this was in my notes to show, but I don't remember if I did it.)

I showed debugging enhancements, including
- Edit and Continue, including how we grey out code that you can't edit if you then want to continue
- You have a class VBGuy and you Dim oBoy as VBGuy. Set a breakpoint and when you hover over oBoy you will see a dropdown that lists the properties of oBoy and their values. You don't have to dive into the debug windows to see that. You can also change the values right there in your code. This is nice because you don't have to stop looking at your code.
- I showed snippets, collections of precanned code we will ship in the box. I was not able to show how you create your own because that doesn't work in the build I was using.
- And I showed the My namespace and code like My.Computer.Name or My.Forms.Form1.Text. The My namespace is really just wrappers around existing Framework classes. So you can do things like print with less code. My.Computer.Printers.DefaultPrinter.WriteLine(“Wicked cool“)
My.Computer.Printers.Print(True)
And here is code to copy a file
My.Computer.FileIO.CopyFile("C:\BigFile.zip", "C:\Backup", False, True)
This is going to be a very popular feature! You can use the My shortcuts and of course you can use the .NET Framework classes. Your call.

Tomorrow I will talk about the Data features I showed.