Entries tagged with csharp - Channel 9

Creating a Web Part for SharePoint by Using a Designer

Kathleen McGrath — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:15:00 GMT

In this interview, programming writer Norm Estabrook demonstrates how to create a Web Part for SharePoint by using a designer in Visual Studio. You can follow along step-by-step in the corresponding Help topic.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen
Visual Studio and .NET Framework Content Survey

Embedding Type Information from Microsoft Office Assemblies

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:00:00 GMT

In this video, Mick Alberts shows you how to embed type information into an application that uses Automation objects from Microsoft Office. Embedding type information enables you to run the same build of an application with different versions of Microsoft Office on different computers, without needing to deploy a primary interop assembly (PIA) for each version of Office. For more information, see the Help topic:

Walkthrough: Embedding Type Information from Microsoft Office Assemblies (C# and Visual Basic)

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen
Visual Studio and .NET Framework Content Survey

Creating an External List in SharePoint by Using Business Data

Kathleen McGrath — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:19:00 GMT

In this interview, programming writer Norm Estabrook demonstrates how to create a model for the BDC service that returns information about contacts in a sample database, and displays the contacts in an external list. You can learn more in the corresponding Help topic.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen
Visual Studio and .NET Framework Content Survey

How to Use Named and Optional Arguments in Office Programming (C#)

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:57:00 GMT

This video demonstrates some of the tasks described in How to: Use Named and Optional Arguments in Office Programming. Using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and C#, I show you how to add text to a Word document and then convert the text to a table, without using all sixteen parameters that are possible with the ConvertToTable method.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen

Binding WPF Controls to an Entity Data Model

Kathleen McGrath — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:55:00 GMT

In this interview, programming writer, McLean Schofield, demonstrates how to bind WPF controls to an entity data model, using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. You can also learn more in the topic: Walkthrough: Binding WPF Controls to an Entity Data Model.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen

How to use a delegate

Jennifer Marsman — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:36:00 GMT

Jennifer Marsman demonstrates how to utilize a delegate in your code, using a real example where a delegate produced cleaner code.

Expert to Expert: Inside Bling - A C#-based library to simplify WPF programming

Charles — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:45:00 GMT

Bling is a C#-based library for easily programming images, animations, interactions, and visualizations on Microsoft's WPF/.NET. Bling is oriented towards design technologists, i.e., designers who sometimes program, to aid in the rapid prototyping of rich UI design ideas. Students, artists, researchers, and hobbyists will also find Bling useful as a tool for quickly expressing ideas or visualizations. Bling's APIs and constructs are optimized for the fast programming of throw away code as opposed to the careful programming of production code.

Some features of Bling:

Declarative constraints that maintain dynamic relationships in the UI without the need for complex event handling. For example, button.Width = 100 - slider.Value causes button to shrink as the slider thumb is moved to the right, or grow as it is moved to the left. Constraints have many benefits: they allow rich custom layouts to be expressed with very little code, they are easy animate, and they support UIs with lots of dynamic behavior.

Simplified animation with one line of code. For example, button.Left.Animate.Duration(500).To = label.Right will cause button to move to the right of label in 500 milliseconds.

Pixel shader effects without the need to write HLSL code or boilerplate code! For example, canvas.CustomEffect = (input, uv) => new ColorBl(new Point3DBl(1,1,1) - input[uv].ScRGB, input[uv].ScA); defines and installs a pixel shader on a canvas that inverts the canvas's colors. Pixel shading in Bling takes advantage of your graphics card to create rich, pixel-level effects.

Support for multi-pass bitmap effects such as diffuse lighting.

An experimental UI physics engine for integrating physics into user interfaces! The physics supported by Bling is flexible, controllable, and easy to program.

Support for 2.5D lighting.

A rich library of geometry routines; e.g., finding where two lines intersect, the base of a triangle, the area of triangle, or a point on Bezier curve. These routines are compatible with all of Bling's features; e.g., they can be used in express constraints, pixel shaders, or physical constraints. Bling also provides a rich API for manipulating angles in both degrees and radians.

And many smaller things; e.g., a frame-based background animation manager and slide presentation system.

As a lightweight wrapper around WPF, Bling code is completely compatible with conventional WPF code written in C#, XAML, or other .NET languages.

Sounds very interesting. Well, Erik and I wanted to find out more about Bling (Is it a library or a DSL? Is WPF programming really that hard? How is Bling designed and what makes it a simplified abstraction over a full featured platform technology like WPF?). It just so happened that Bling creator and software developer Sean McDirmid was in town recently (he works at Microsof's Advanced Technology Center located in Beijing, China). Tune in to see how the latest E2E unfolded (you must realize by now that we never really plan anything and E2Es just happen as you see them - it's just part of the game we play). Bling is an interesting idea with potential. Simplifying complexity is an important goal.

Enjoy.

Luca Bolognese: C# and VB.NET Co-Evolution - The Twain Shall Meet

Charles — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:45:00 GMT

For most of their lifetimes, C# and VB.NET have evolved at their own pace and in their own ways (C# added iterators, VB.NET didn't. VB.NET added XML Literals, C# didn't. etc, etc...). Today, Luca Bolognese and team have embarked on a new approach to how .NET's premiere languages will evolve going forward: Co-Evolution. Essentially, new language/compiler features will be developed for each language concurrenly. No longer will C# get new language construct X while VB.NET adds Y. They will both get X (and they will both get Y). Anders Hejlsberg, the father of C#, now oversees both languages and will make sure that language innovations are developed for C# and VB.NET at the same time.

I visited Luca recently to get a sense of the rationale behind this new co-evolutionary approach to two very different languages. Why is co-evolution important? Why not just have the languages, which target different demographics (do they?), evolve in ways that match the needs their users? What's the story here? What's next?

Anders Hejlsberg and Gilad Bracha: Perspectives on Programming Language Design

Charles — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:33:00 GMT

Lang.NET Symposium 2009 was held on Microsoft's campus (make sure you watch the talks, which are available for your viewing pleasure). We were of course there and conducted several interviews with some of programming language design's brightest thinkers. Here, the great Anders Hejlsberg, father of C#, and one of my favorite language designers and personalities Gilad Bracha (you'll see more Gilad in the next few days discussing his Newspeak programming language) are interviewed by C# Program Manager Mads Torgersen (he works with Anders and others on the design of C#). Mads should consider a career in interviewing! Awesome job, man. This is a great conversation with two of the premiere programming language designers in the world. Enjoy!

See all the C9 Lang.NET conversations here. Their numbers will grow over the coming week so check back.

10-4 Episode 12: Simplifying Your Code With C# 4.0

Jason Olson — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:04:00 GMT

In this episode of 10-4, we take a look at some features coming with C# 4.0 that will help you simplify your existing code (as well as making new code you write more simple). There's already a plethora of C# 4.0 content you can find out there (including here on Channel 9 itself), so we will dive in specifically to how the combination of named and optional parameters will help you simplify your code.

While we aren't specifically using the CTP, most (if not all) of the code shown in this video should work in the CTP as well.

For more 10-4 episodes, be sure to visit:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4

C# Dev Center:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/default.aspx

Community Convergence Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/default.aspx

Managed World Blog:
http://www.managed-world.com/

Visual Studio Topic Area on Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio

10-4! Over and out!

This Week: Martin Woodward, MVP Summit, Web Perf, Show Off, and a VSTS Pep Talk

Dan Fernandez — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:45:00 GMT

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian are joined by MVP Martin Woodward to discuss this week's news, including:

- Martin talks about the MVP Summit and how hewon the Team System MVP of the year. The prize, a pimp belt
- Phil Haack: ASP.NET MVC RC 2
- Tutorial: How to enable Gzip compression on IIS 6.0 to get ~70% smaller file size
- Viktar Karpach - Getting an "A" Grade with ASP.NET using YSlow and Firebug
- Erik Meijer and Charles Torre interview Anders Hejlsberg on the future of C#
- Michael Kennedy - ubbuzz.com A custom Twitter watcher for .NET developers
- Jamie and Long start the Channel 9 Task Force for bugs and suggestions
- 1 week left for Show Off Contest
- Vincent Rithner - Sobees, A free WPF Social Desktop Aggregator, Beta now available
- Rob Relyea - XAML State of the Union
- Caliburn Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight(via Alvin Ashcraft)
- Tess Ferrandez - 5-part series on building a Silverlight Game
- Live FrameIt SDK - Picasa and Photobucket integration
- Martin's pick of the week: Send a VSTS Pep Talk to your teammates
- Brian's pick of the week: Scott Hanselman's analysis of Quake Live, it isn't a Web game
- Dan's pick of the week: Brian Peek's tip on how to force a 64-bit exe that uses a 32-bit dependencies to load the 32-bit CLR.

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Charles — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:16:00 GMT

It's always a pleasure to get a chance to sit down and geek out with Anders Hejlsberg. Anders is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (a Technical Fellow is the highest ranking technical position at Microsoft) and programming language design master. He's the creator of C# and one of the founders of .NET. Anders is an expert language design craftsman. C# is one of the most popular languages Microsoft has created and certainly the most widely used language by developers who target the .NET platform.

Erik Meijer, Expert to Expert host, programming language designer and occasionally-radical category theoritician, has spent many years working with Anders and the C# team. As you may know, Erik has been a key contributor to the addition of functional constructs to C#.

Here, Erik and Anders wax on topics ranging from the design of C# 4.0's dynamic keyword (what's the thinking behind the thinking) to the potential near and far future of the C# language (and general purpose imperative programming, generally). Anders also spends some time at the whiteboard explaining C# 4.0's support for covariance and contravariance. Of course, we can't forget about concurrency and parallelism, so we don't.

As you might expect, the conversation takes some interesting jaunts into various programming language design rabbit holes. For example, Anders discusses the notion of creating a new language to support new problem domains versus extending current languages to meet the needs of developers who need to express solutions to complex problems (so, how do you make a language like C# more dynamic in the sense that it can readily help developers solve problems that the language was not initially designed to solve?). We talk about the work being done on a service-oriented C# compiler (compiler as a service), C# as an ESDL container (or as an EDSL itself to be hosted in other environments...) and much more. This is a fantastic conversation with some of Microsoft's true visionaries. Enjoy.

deCast - Dynamic Xml with C# 4.0

Rob Bagby — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:32:00 GMT

The Dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0 provide the ability to communicate with dynamic languages such as IronRuby and IronPython, but C# developers can build dynamic objects, as well. In this screencast, we will illustrate how you can take advantage of the dynamic functionality enabled in C# 4.0 to access Xml data in a more natural way. We will illustrate how you can go from writing code like: ele.Attribute["lastName"].Value to just ele.lastName.

Inside C# 4.0: dynamic typing, optional parameters, covariance and contravariance

Charles — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:28:00 GMT

C# Program Manager Mads Torgersen and C# compiler developers Eric Lippert, Chris Burrows, Samuel Ng discuss (and whiteboard) the details inside C# 4.0's dynamic type, optional parameters and default parameter values, and new support for COM interop (should make Office developers giddy). Samuel, Chris and Eric were very busy solving some really hard problems to pull these new features off. It's great to learn about these new features from the people who actually implemented them. Classic Channel 9!

So, how does C# 4.0's dynamic type work, exactly? What does "more COM friendly" really mean? Covariance and Contravariance? Optional parameters with default values and parameter re-ordering? Why? How? Tune in.

Enjoy!

(my apologizes for the slight glitch at the middle of the interview. My camera bluescreened! Fortunately, data captured before the system failure was stored successfuly, but a little tiny piece of the conversation was lost)

PDC2008 ShowOff Entry: Silverlight 2 Spectrum Emulator

Brian Keller — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:00:00 GMT

This video is a sample of one of the entries from Microsoft PDC 2008 ShowOff.

Title of the video
Silverlight 2 Spectrum Emulator.

Short 2-3 sentence description of your video
A quick demonstration of my Silverlight 2 Spectrum Emulator, playing a game, writing some Spectrum BASIC, looking at the code quickly.

Silverlight 2 Version Developed By: Chris Hay (me)
Original XNA version By: Jan Jones (http://www.codeplex.com/zx360)
Original Z80 ported from Jasper by Adam Davidson and Andrew Pollard.
PNG Encoder: Joe Stegman

Chris Hay
http://silverlightuk.blogspot.com/

The developer and designer tools you used (both Microsoft and non-Microsoft)
Visual Studio 2008, Silverlight 2, C#

Back To Basics - Race Conditions, Part 1

Jason Olson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Welcome to the "Back To Basics" Screencast Series. In this series of screencasts, we will be taking a look at specific .NET language features, as well as features of the .NET Framework itself. We'll be playing particular attention to how these various features work and why you, as a developer, need to understand how they work.

In the first several screencasts, we'll take a look at several common pitfalls when writing multi-threaded code. In this screencast, we'll dive into race conditions, how they can show up in your code, and what you can do to fix them.

Meet the Visual Studio Managed Languages Development Experience Team

Beth Massi — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:45:00 GMT

In this interview I meet with the team that brings us the "experience" of coding in Visual Studio, also sometimes referred to as the VS IDE Team. I ask them how their design process works, what the top requested features are for the code editors, how they work with the language teams as well as what their favorite and hardest features are to build and test.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:36:00 GMT

What's the C# team up to these days? Who's on the C# 4.0 design team, anyway? With the looming problem of manycore facing developers now and certainly in the near future (to a much greater extent - programming for 80 core (asymmetric to boot) processors, anyone?). I thought it was time to find out what Anders et al are working on to get a clear sense of C#'s near (and not-so-near) future so I asked if I could come to one of their design meetings to have an informal chat (are we ever formal on C9?) and meet the people behind the next iteration of the most popular .NET programming language.

There are some new faces (and some old ones (not in terms of age, mind you :)). As expected, merging functional constructs into imperative C# are still top of mind for the C# design team. Here, you'll meet some new programming language gurus and some old time Niners (you'll recall the great Eric Lippert. He was in fact the very first developer we interviewed for C9 back in 2004 - even though his was not the first interview posted, it was the first one shot and the one where Lenn, Jeff, Scoble, Bryn and myself looked at each other and said "wow, we are on to something here!".).

C# 4.0 will contain many new features that will help developers be, yeah, you've heard it before, more productive. There's also some very interesting work going on with adding dynamic constructs to the language, which is of course very interesting given the static nature of the C# language.

In this video you will not get any specific details since the C# team wants to reveal exactly what they've done at PDC 2008. That said, you'll still get a very clear sense of what they've been up to and where they're taking the language.

It's always a pleasure to chat with Anders and team. I think you'll enjoy this one. On a personal note, I was coming down with a cold during this interview so please excuse the asking of the same question more than once (though in a different context). Oh, the joys of cold medicine. You know, the same stuff Lenn was on when he conceived the idea of Channel 9 several years ago.

C9 Bytes: Alex Turner showing the evolution of C#

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:50:00 GMT

In this C9 Byte, Alex Turner walks through how the C# language has evolved between version 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 for working with data structures. If you don't know Alex, he's the guy that got Anders Hejlsberg to pay him $202 when he was an intern.

Whirlwind 8: LINQ

bruceky — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:17:16 GMT

Bruce Kyle of Microsoft and Stuart Celarier of CheckFree explore the new languages features in C#. It's a whirlwind tour of the important language features since C# 1. Stuart describes the feature and why it is useful. But doesn't get into best practices nor suggested usages. Just the facts about the feature.

Whirlwinds are bite-sized webcasts, usally each is shorter than 15 minutes. You can start anywhere in the series to learn about the parts you're most interested in.

In the final episode, Stuart's fingers get itchy. And instead of slides, he open up Visual Studio and shows code. This time, he shows how LINQ takes advantage of the new language features that are explained in the other Whirlwind episodes.

He uses a code example in Visual Studio to show to use the C# language features to write a query using LINQ to Objects. He compares the same query using LINQ and extension methods that each contain a lambda expression. Next he describes the use of LINQ providers.

These features are part of C# 3 in .NET 3.5.

This screencast is also a great way to get started in with lanugage integrated queries (LINQ) or to explore the various ways you can use LINQ.

Duration: 16:53

Other Whirlwind episodes: What's new in C# 2

Other Whirlwind episodes: What's new in C# 3

Whirlwind 6: Anonymous types, Extension method
Getting Started with Windows Workflow
Stuart's Visual Stuart blog.
For more information of interest to software developers, see the US ISV blog

Whirlwind 7: What's New in C# 3 - Lambda Expressions

bruceky — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:10:55 GMT

Bruce Kyle of Microsoft and Stuart Celarier of Whirlwind 1 - Generics

Whirlwind 3 - Partial types, Anonymous methods

Whirlwind 5 - Automatically Implemented Properties, Type Inference, Initializer

Getting Started with Windows Workflow

Stuart's Visual Stuart blog.

For more information of interest to software developers, see the US ISV blog

Whirlwind 6: What's New in C# 3 -- Anonymous types, Extension methods

bruceky — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:33:21 GMT

Bruce Kyle of Microsoft and Stuart Celarier of Whirlwind 1 - Generics

Whirlwind 3 - Partial types, Anonymous methods

Whirlwind 5 - Automatically Implemented Properties, Type Inference, Initializer

Other videos of interest

Getting started with ASP.NET AJAX

More information

For more information about this topic, see Stuart's Visual Stuart blog.

For more information of interest to software developers, see the US ISV blog

Whirlwind 5: What's new in C# 3 - Automatically Implemented Properties, Type Inference, Initializer

bruceky — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:13:49 GMT

Bruce Kyle of Microsoft and Stuart Celarier of Whirlwind 1 - Generics

Whirlwind 3 - Partial types, Anonymous methods

CheckFree explore the new languages features in C#. It's a whirlwind tour of the important language features since C# 1. Stuart describes the feature and why it is useful. But doesn't get into best practices nor suggested usages. Just the facts about the feature.

Whirlwinds are bite-sized webcasts, each is shorter than 15 minutes. You can start anywhere in the series to learn about the parts you're most interested in.

Part 4 is about accessors, static classes, and nullable types. Stuart shows how the features are similar to features in C# 1. Stuart explains how to write diferent accessors on properties. He explains the syntax of the ? that can be added to a type and the ?? operators. He shows how to determine if a value is null.

These features are part of C# 2 in .NET 2.0.

Duration: 9:40

Other Whirlwind episodes: what's new in C# 2

Whirlwind 2 - Iterators

Whirlwinds are bite-sized webcasts, each is shorter than 15 minutes. You can start anywhere in the series to learn about the parts you're most interested in.

In Part 3, Stuart describes partial classes and anonymous methods. He describes why you'd use them and the syntax of each language feature. This features is part of C# 2 in .NET 2.0.

For more information about the language features of C# 2, see Stuart's blog at VisualStuart.NET

For up-to-date information for developers, see the Whirlwind 1 - Generics