Entries tagged with vb.net - Channel 9

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) in Visual Studio 2008 SP1

funkyonex — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:07:00 GMT

In this interview Saaid Kahn, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team, shows us how to create an n-tier application against a database using ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) and an Entity Data Model, both now available in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.

ADO.NET Data Services use WCF REST-ful services and provides all the plumbing so you can focus on the program logic by programming against a service proxy. ADO.NET Data Services allow you to easily create data services exposed on the web using URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data.

Saaid shows us how to create a simple service and then consume it using a Windows client via the "Add Service Reference" dialog in Visual Studio. He also walks through the client proxy methods that work with the data service.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

New Editor Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1

funkyonex — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:57:00 GMT

In this short interview, Yang Xiao, a tester on the VB IDE team is back demonstrating new improvements to the "Go To Definition", "Find All References" and Rename capabilities in the editor when flipping between code and XAML in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1

funkyonex — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:03:00 GMT

In this interview, Yang Xiao, a tester on the Visual Basic IDE shows us the new XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. This new window is invoked when you right-click on an XML literal element or namespace and select "Show in XML Schema Explorer" in Visual Basic programs. It's a nice way to visually display the structure of your schema sets which makes you even more productive when working with XML in Visual Basic.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

SQL 2008 & Occasionally Connected Client Support in Visual Studio SP1

funkyonex — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:07:00 GMT

In this interview, Milind Lele, a PM on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team shows us the improvements made to the tooling in Visual Studio SP1 for occasionally connected clients as well as the new data type support for SQL Server 2008. Using SQL 2008 built-in change tracking, you don't need to make modifications to your table schemas like you have to do with SQL 2005. Additionally he shows off a "smarter" DataSet designer where you can have tables coming from server and client data stores all contained within one model.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

The P-Invoke Interop Assistant

funkyonex — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:14:00 GMT

In this interview, Jared Parsons, a Developer on the Visual Basic IDE, shows us the P/Invoke Interop Assistant available on CodePlex. The tool helps with converting unmanaged C code to managed P/Invoke signatures and vice versa. Say goodbye to digging through random header files or MSDN documentation to find the right constants, structures and signatures. The P/Invoke Interop Assistant does a smarter translation for you using SAL (Source Code Annotation Language).

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Visual Basic Language Design Meeting

funkyonex — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:21:00 GMT

I sat down with the VB Language design team and asked them about their design process, favorite features, their thoughts on other languages, as well as what the Visual Basic language strategy really is. It was a fun and enlightening interview with a group of really smart people lead by Paul Vick. You can find most of the team members on the Visual Basic Team Blog.

And as for the "grey shirt joke" that's mentioned in the interview, see this post on the VB Team Blog.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Tips and Tricks with the Interop Forms Toolkit

funkyonex — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:39 GMT

In this interview, Todd Apley, Senior Test Lead on the VB Team, shows us a variety of tips and tricks with using the Interop Forms Toolkit on Visual Studio 2008. He also shows us how to deploy a hybrid application built with VB 6 and VB.NET using XCopy deployment and RegFree-COM.

The Interop Forms Toolkit, available from the Visual Basic Developer Center, enables you to take a phased migration approach to upgrading your VB 6 applications. Instead of having to do a complete rewrite, you can instead create .NET user controls and forms that can be run from within your current VB 6 applications.

Todd will also be posting follow-up information on the VB Team blog.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Code To Live: Dave Donaldson on CodeKeep

joshholmes — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:47:18 GMT

Josh Holmes caught up with Dave Donaldson to talk about the cool project that he started back in 2005 called CodeKeep. This is a fantastic example of a passionate guy putting up a project that everyone can benefit from with no financial motivation.

This is one of the longer episodes so far (close to 30 minutes) but there's a lot of great content here.

The New DataRepeater Control in the Latest Power Packs Release

funkyonex — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:41:46 GMT

In this interview John Hart, QA Lead on the Visual Basic Team, shows us the new DataRepeater control that has just been added to the latest Power Packs release on the Visual Basic Developer Center. Power Packs are free Add-Ins, Controls, Components, and Tools for you to use with Visual Basic to make developing applications even easier.

The new DataRepeater control allows you use standard Windows Forms controls to display rows of your data in a scrollable container giving you more flexibility and customization than standard grid controls.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

XML Properties and Enabling IntelliSense

funkyonex — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:36:02 GMT

Join me and Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as he shows us how to enable XML IntelliSense in Visual Basic using the XML to Schema Wizard. Avner shows the differences between how IntelliSense works with axis properties on XDocument and XElement objects and speaks to how the wizard can infer multiple schemas from multiple sources as well as the affect XML namespaces have on IntelliSense.

Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. And here are some good articles too.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

Happy Holidays Niners

jeffsand — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:00:11 GMT

In keeping with what has become a holiday tradition here on Channel 9 he have Chris Anderson, Don Box and now Amanda Silver singing you a special holiday song.

You can compile along with them by grabbing the Very Beautiful holiday season! For even more holiday cheer, please check out episodes I, II,III and )
            With i
                Console.Write(.Value)
            End With REM a language so true
            If i IsNot Nothing Then
               Console.WriteLine()
            End If REM
            Console.Write(<some>xml</some>)
        Next
    End Sub
End Module

'Lyrical-indenting

Module VB : Dim myvar As _
Integer?() = {3 * 3}
Sub Main() : For Each i In myvar
Console.Write("Hello VB")
With i : Console.Write(.Value)
End With REM a language so true

If i IsNot Nothing Then
Console.WriteLine() : End If REM
Console.Write(<some>xml</some>)
Next : End Sub : End Module

Brian Beckman Does Higher Algebra with Visual Basic

funkyonex — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:19:29 GMT

In this interview, Brian Beckman, Principal Developer (currently working with Erik Meijer), attempts to teach me higher algebra using Visual Basic, generics, and operator overloading. Brian is a wonderful person and brilliant physicist and we have a lot of fun with vectors and matrices and VB. I actually think I understood some of what Brian showed me ;).

Visual Basic is a great language for mathematics as well as all kinds of other applications. Brian makes the point that he has fun coding in VB because of its intuitive style and how easy it is to be immediately productive. Check out Brian's blog post on the VB Team blog! And for all you abstract algebra aficionados, here's the code to play with.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

XML Literals Performance and Namespaces Explained

funkyonex — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:54:40 GMT

Join me and Avner Aharoni, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as he dives into LINQ to XML and XML Literals in Visual Basic 9 and explains namespace bubbling and the performance gains you may see using XML Literals. This is a good interview to pay attention to if you are struggling with how XML namespaces work in Visual Basic.

One funny note here about the interview -- I was having a hard time pronouncing Avner's last name so when I introduced him I was so focused on getting his name pronounced correctly (which I did) that I messed up and said "feature related to SQL to XML" instead of "feature related to LINQ to XML" Doh!

Get started with LINQ to XML in Visual Basic with these How-to Videos. And here are some good articles too.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, VS Community

Refactoring in Visual Basic with Refactor!

funkyonex — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:39:45 GMT

Join me and Lisa Feigenbaum, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, as she shows us how to use Refactor!, the free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that provides over 30 refactorings for Visual Basic. Lisa walks us through all the new refactorings that were added for the latest version of Visual Basic 2008. You can download Refactor! here. You can get the demo code she used here.

Enjoy!
-Beth Massi, VS Community

VS2008 Training Kit: What's new in Visual Basic 9.0?

DavidAiken — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:56:12 GMT

Hi and welcome to another Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit screencast.

This session was presented by Amanda Silver and is the from the Visual Studio 2008 training kit available from http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397.

Do you remember your first Basic program? Visual Basic has come a long way from a simple event handling language to a fully capable Object-Oriented language with the power of the .NET frameworks behind it. Visual Basic 9 will bring unparalleled productivity for line of business applications in the form of SQL-style query expressions and XML as a first class data type. But LINQ isn't the only important feature for the VB developer. We’ll continue to deliver on the productivity promise for VB devs with a vastly improved Intellisense experience in VS 2008 that should jazz those not ready to move to .NET 3.5. Off-cycle releases will ease migration from VB6 to .NET and address some missing features like line and shape, repeater, and PrintForm controls. Did you know that refactoring support is available for VB developers for free for VS 2003 – 2008?
In this brief session, you will learn about some of the key new language enhancements that are provided as part of Visual Basic 9, which is included with Visual Studio 2008.

Recorded September 2007.

Type Inference in Visual Basic with Bill Horst

funkyonex — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:20:43 GMT

In this interview Bill Horst, a member of the Visual Basic QA team, shows us the ins and outs type inference in the newest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. He shows us how the new Option Infer works and how various types are inferred by the compiler without having to explicitly declare them. Type inference is one of the new features in Visual Basic to support LINQ.

Also make sure to check out these LINQ How-Do-I videos on the VB Dev Center.

Enjoy!
-Beth Massi, VS Community

Chris Gray: Windows Home Server Extensibility Model - Building Add-Ins

Charles — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:27:58 GMT

We recently announced the availability of Windows Home Server. I caught up with Lead Developer Chris Gray to get the scoop on Home Server's extensibility model (fully .NET managed APIs, by the way) and talk about some of the innovative add-ins customers have created. Chris demos a few simple add-ins to show how easy it is to extend the Windows Home Server admin console using Visual Studio.

Matt Gertz Plays Cards with Visual Basic

funkyonex — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:05:31 GMT

Matt Gertz, Development Manager on the Visual Basic team (well former Dev Manager, I'll let him explain ;)) shows off a Euchre game he's developed in Visual Basic that includes speech and sound. Matt is one of our best bloggers on the VB Team and he loves game programming as well as the VB Community. Matt talks about his experiences at Microsoft and the Visual Basic team, and what he'll be doing going forward.

JAOO 2007: Erik Meijer and Dave Thomas - Objects, Functions, Virtual Machines, IDEs and Other Fun St

Charles — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:05:38 GMT

I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besids learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life. What a great conference! For one thing, JAOO not about specifc products. It's not about one company's view of the world. It's not about one class of technologies or developer. It's not just about Java and LAMP or .NET and Windows.

Dave Thomas is well known for his work in object oriented programming language design, dynamic language development (SmallTalk), virtual machines and in the development of the Eclipse IDE.

I was lucky enough to grab Dave and Channel 9 celebrity, co-creator of LINQ and programming language scientist Erik Meijer to about objects, OO, functional programming, the future of programming languages in the age of parallelism and concurrency (multi/many-core hardware "revolution"). We also talk about virtual machines in the context of language runtimes. Dave provides some feedback on Microsoft's approach to "managed" runtimes (aka CLR). He has an "interesting" perspectives in this area, though I don't agree with him fully :)

This is a fantastic conversation with two of the computing industry's best and brightest. It was a real honor to meet Dave Thomas. He's incredibly nice and really humble given his myriad of technical accomplishments.

Enjoy!

geekSpeak Generics (and more) in VB with Jim Duffy

llangit — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:46:14 GMT

Listen in to this geekSpeak to hear about the finer points of using Generics in VB as explained and demoed by expert Jim Duffy.

In this segment, Jim answers common developer questions about not only use of Generics, but also some language-specific features of VB.NET.

Jim's real-world experience shows as he tackles tough questions from the audience. The show consists mostly on Jim showing code samples. Tune in and enjoy!

Offline Data Synchronization Services in Visual Studio 2008

funkyonex — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:35:38 GMT

In this interview Milind Lele, Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, shows us his favorite features - the new Data Synchronization designer in Visual Studio 2008 and how the sync services for ADO.NET work to support occasionally connected scenarios. He shows us how to set up a local database cache using SQL Compact Edition and how to use it to store read-only data caches as well as how to add the code to support two-way synchronization.

If anyone's ever tried to implement an occasionally connected smart client, they'll very much appreciate this new tooling and framework in Visual Studio 2008. For more information on sync services catch up on The Synchronizer blog.

Partial Methods in C# v3 and VB9

Daniel Moth — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:07:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :-)

Introduction: Partial Methods is a new language feature of both C#3 and VB9, available via Visual Studio 2008 for projects targeting .NET Framework v2.0/3.0/3.5. Watch the 15' video for more.

Video download: Click on the image to play the video (from a streaming file). If you'd prefer to download the wmv packaged in a zip file, you may do so here.

Building N-Tier Applications in Visual Studio 2008

funkyonex — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:39:42 GMT

In this in interview John Stallo, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, talks about WCF and simple N-Tier applications. He talks about a specific architecture scenario and some of the pain points we have building n-tier applications today. He then walks us through the improvements made in the DataSet Designer that physically separates the data access from the structure and validation code and then quickly creates a WCF service and a client that demonstrates this architecture.

Here's the step-by-step walkthrough of what John demonstrates.

0:00 – 1:33	Intro
1:33	Architecture discussion
6:30	N-tier project layout
7:15	Separating data access code (TableAdapters) from the structure (DataSet)
10:36	Adding validation code
12:55	Creating the WCF service
15:31	Adding the service reference on the client and reusing types
19:17	Databinding to the client form and calling the service

LINQ to SQL and the O/R Designer in VS 2008

funkyonex — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:53:56 GMT

In this in interview Young Joo, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, talks about LINQ to SQL and the new O/R Designer in Visual Studio 2008. He demos a typical business client-server scenario and shows how LINQ to SQL classes make it much easier to work with relational data in SQL Server 2005. Young also talks about architectures where he sees using LINQ to SQL having the most benefits.

Learn more about the O\R Designer and LINQ to SQL by viewing our "How Do I" video LINQ series on the Visual Basic Developer Center.

0:00 – 2:48	Intro
2:48	Demo Starts
3:22	Create LINQ to SQL classes
7:50	Adding Stored Procs on DataContext
9:06	Setting namespaces on the entity classes and browsing the generated code
12:20	Partial Methods
15:55	Databinding to LINQ to SQL objects
18:40	Loading customer classes and lazy loading related orders
21:02	Submitting changes
24:15	Using Stored Procs when submitting changes
27:45	Writing a LINQ to SQL queries
31:55	Calling stored procs through the Datacontext
36:06	Architecture usage discussion

Amanda Silver on Visual Basic LINQ Syntax in Visual Studio 2008

funkyonex — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 19:12:35 GMT

In this interview, Amanda Silver, a Lead Program Manager on the Visual Basic Team, demonstrates new LINQ syntax around Joins and Aggregates that is now available in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. Amanda is a guru of LINQ in Visual Basic and gives insightful explanations of how to use this new syntax. Also check out new How Do I videos on LINQ to help get you started with LINQ in Visual Basic. More are added weekly!!

The interview starts out a little funny because the first 20 seconds of my video tape got chewed up so we had to reshoot the intro later in the day. Amanda thought of a funny way to make the transition as you'll see. See if you can pinpoint the movie that inspired her!