The Visual Basic Team : SMB

Petzold Chapter 3 (Young Joo)

VBTeam — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:55:00 GMT

I am Young Joo, PM @ VB team. I will be helping out Patrick on converting samples in Charles Petzold's WPF book (Applications = Code + Markup) to Visual Basic. This is an exciting project and I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Another exciting news is that we have an extra help for this project. Evan Lim who currently teaches WPF & Blend courses at Foothill Community College in Los Altos, CA, has decided to help us with this. He already has a lot of chapters converted. So we will be able to release them much more quickly.

Attached is VB sample for chapter 3.

Enjoy!

Continued search for Small Business Developers and Chapter 2 of Petzold's book (finally!)

VBTeam — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:28:00 GMT

I've attached the chapter 2 Visual Basic.NET code for the ongoing project of converting Peztold's Applications = Code + Markup book on WPF proramming. I am happy to say that Young from my team is going to help with this effort so you will see these chapters coming out more frequently.

Also, we are about to close the doors on our intial sweep of bringing in our fellow small business developers to help us shape Visual Basic. As a note, I should mention that if you or someone you know is still using VB6 or has switched to another technology, we are very intersted in talking with you. A few links are included here.

If you are a consultant/small business developer (and that is really anyone out there who writes software for small businesses) please use the following sign up sheet: https://www.microsoft.com/usability/enrollment.htm

If you are an IT developer who builds departmental level applications, please sign up here:

https://www.microsoft.com/usability/enrollment_ITPros.htm.

And most importantly, if you are in the puget sound area, after signing up, please email uccoord@microsoft.com and cc' myself patd@microsoft.com.

Why you should learn WPF (and how I can help)

VBTeam — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was working on a side project. Well, then the soccer, tennis, and school season hit and..well I won't tell you the rest. What I had started to do was take all of the samples in Charles Petzold's book Applications = Code + Markup and rewrite them in VB for publication to the VB community. I had invited anyone else to do the same as it was a great way to learn WPF, and for the customers I will be focussing on over the next few years (the small business developers and IT pros) there was method behind my madness; especially for those still using VB6.

One of my fellow Program Managers, Paul Yuknewicz, put me in contact with Charles and he agreed to allow me to publish all of the samples in his book in Visal Basic. At home I had gotten to rewriting these through chapter 10, but in order to get the quality I need for publication, I need to re-do them. So today I offer you chapter 1 (attached). Oh yea, and I created these project files in Visual Studio 8 beta 2 to encourage your downloading of our latest work.

I invite you along with me on this journey of learning WPF for several reasons. First, I've always believed that Visual Basic was about creating stunning applications rapidly. WPF is a very powerful technology and I am looking to build a community around developers who are sharing ideas about creating great end user experiences - getting out of the grey form white textbox. The second reason is our big investment in Silverlight. Over time, as Silverlight evolves, I predict that a lot of the lessons learned in creating great desktop applications with WPF, will translate over to Silverlight with little effort.

Yesterday, a group of us spent a day locked in a room figuring out how to improve Visual Basic for the small business developer and IT departments. I mentioned before that we were looking for people in the area to help us learn more about their pain points with using Visual Basic to develop applications rapidly. We are now prepared to cast that net further. If you are anywhere and are willing to contribute a little time and help us shape our products, please contact me (patd@microsoft.com).

Lastly, before I go off and do my day of soccer with my boys, I want to remind folks that we have set up a Small Business Developer's forum. I encourage you to visit there and share your experiences or ask any questions.

Patrick Dengler