Mike Vincent's Blog : VB .NET

LA Code Camp, November 21 and 22

mikev — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:14:00 GMT

The LA Code will be November 21 and 22, the weekend right after PDC 09 at the USC campus. Several teams from Microsoft including Team System, Languages (C# and VB.NET) and ASP.NET plan to be presenting sessions. I’m to entice some from the Windows Azure team to join in as well. This will be a great opportunity to catch some of the latest info on just released and soon to be released development tools. You can get more information at http://www.SoCalCodeCamp.com and http://www.lacodecamp.com. Sign up and if you also want to present a session, sign up for that as well. Hope to see you there.

Microsoft Product Team Meetings

mikev — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:54:00 GMT

In mid September I, along with other INETA NorAm board members, had the pleasure of meeting with several product teams at Microsoft while in Redmond for an INETA board of directors meeting.

In our product team meetings, we shared our overall plan INETA Programs for MSFT FY 09 including speakers bureau, regional speakers, virtual presentations and INETA Live as well as regular communications through our newsletter. We will be adding product focus to our newsletters. Also, a common thread for INETA and the product teams is one of measurement.

C#, VB .NET

We have some recent experience working with Charlie Calvert and Lisa Feigenbaum and their user group road show a few months back. The feedback was good and we want to build on that experience. We’re exploring several other ways to work together including leveraging more content produced by the team for INETA presentation.

VSX

The VSX team covers Visual Studio extensibility, ecosystem and the SDK. They are opening up to a much broader audience, and doing it big as evidenced by the recent VSX Developer Conference in Redmond. We can effectively work together by helping them get their message and content out to community influencials to leverage evangelism.

Visual Studio Team System

Visual Studio Team System is growing rapidly in the Application Lifecycle Management space and has a lot of new material coming in the not too distant future. We are discussing some ways to work together to more effectively reach both developers and key decision makers.

ASP.NET

Other INETA board members met with the ASP.NET team. Again our programs were well received. The team has several areas they will explore to work closely with INETA on.

Iron Python, DLR

IronPython 2.0 is getting close to release so they will soon have a lot to talk about. Where INETA can help the most is evangelizing through community influentials in the .NET community. Harry Pierson is very open to setting up monthly Live Meeting discussions with key influencers.

Iron Ruby, Dynamic Languages & Silverlight

The dynamic languages team is small and resources limited so they have to work in innovative ways for product evangelism. Iron Ruby has two distinct marketing objectives – moving Ruby developers to .NET and moving .NET developers to Iron Ruby. INETA can help with the later by reaching to our user groups. The dynamic language teams have a lot to say, we can help them get it out.

Virtual Earth

Mark Brown has some exciting new releases with Virtual Earth where INETA can play an important role. Just released is Virtual Earth Web Service. Mark has a VE Deep Dive web cast on Oct 3^rd so we’re jumping in to help with a special newsletter focused on VE.

Patterns and Practices

I didn’t personally have the opportunity to meet with this group but others did and they were well received. The group has an objective of extending awareness and reach among architects and developers. INETA can help by getting content and information out to influential user group members for presentation and demonstration.

LA Code Camp

mikev — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:23:00 GMT

Coming up October 25 and 26 is the first LA Code Camp. It’ll be held at the USC campus. This is the weekend just before PDC so we may see some of the Microsoft product teams attending. I’m again doing my continuous evolving dynamic languages presentation. Currently there are 47 sessions registered. Plan on joining us for a great weekend of content and community.

New PDC Sessions Added

mikev — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:29:00 GMT

On July 1, a bunch of new sessions were added to the PDC. You can see the full list of sessions that have been published (so far) at the PDC site.

Here are some interesting sessions:

An Introduction to F#
Learn about Microsoft's new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the .NET Framework. F# combines functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, tools, and object model of .Net. Understand how F# asynchronous workflows help tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming and how to use F# in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET.

Architecture Without Big Design Up Front

Visual Studio Team System, code-name "Rosario" Architecture Edition, introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams that can visualize existing code, layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. See how VSTS extends UML logical views into physical views of your code. Learn how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, how to extend these designers, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.

Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in .NET
The CLR has great support for dynamic languages like IronPython. Learn how the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a shared dynamic type system, a standard hosting model, and support for generating fast dynamic code. Hear how these features enable languages that use the DLR to share code with other dynamic and static languages like VB.NET and C#.

Future Directions for Visual Basic
Come learn about the new capabilities in the next version of the language, including: extensions to LINQ, syntax simplifications, and improvements to the IDE. We'll provide insight into the direction of the language, including dynamic binding, meta-programming, and scripting.

The Future of C#
In this talk Microsoft Technical fellow and C# Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg outlines the future of C#. He will describe the many forces that influence and shape the future of programming languages and explain how they fit into C#.

Visual C++: 10 is the New 6
Get more done. The next version of Visual C++ is all about improving developer productivity for large-scale applications. Learn about the IntelliSense and browsing experiences, changes to the project and build system, project-less browsing, collaboration through remote symbol indexing, and custom visualization of symbolic information.

Microsoft Silverlight: Building Business Applications

What if you could develop your solutions with the ease pioneered by Microsoft Office Access, deploy them like an Internet application, and take advantage of the power of Microsoft .NET? Learn about an exciting new technology that is all about making business applications for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) much easier to build. In this session, hear how we've made n-tier application development as simple as traditional 2-tier, provided application level solutions to developers, and how we're doing all of this with the same .NET platform and tools on both the client and server.

Microsoft Silverlight: Developing for Mobile Devices

Silverlight provides on mobile devices the same great capabilities you are familiar with on the desktop, but there are some differences you should understand when targeting mobile devices. This session shows you how to make your Silverlight applications device agnostic as well as how to optimize your designs for multiple targets.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft

Take a detailed look at the present and future of Team Foundation Server (TFS). With close to 14,000 users, 2,000 projects, 33 million files, and over 2 million work items, Microsoft runs one of the largest known installations of TFS. In this session we share our internal best practices for version control, branching and merging, work item tracking, metrics, reporting, testing, and integrations with TFS.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services

In this session we present processes and tools from the upcoming Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" release and Microsoft Research and show how we deliver on quality, scalability, and experience goals for the new class of applications that demand rich UI, service consumption, and frequent release.

Plus, a whole lot on architecting and developing cloud services including Mesh Services and Virtual Earth v next.

New VB 2008 Book from Bill Sheldon, et al

mikev — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:52:00 GMT

And, another local author, Bill Sheldon, has a new book out - "Professional Visual Basic 2008" co authored with Bill Evjen, Billy Hollis and Kent Sharkey. If you are a VB developer, this is the book for 2008. I'm planning on having Bill speak at one of our local OC user groups later this year.

SoCal Code Camp June 28 & 29, University of California San Diego Extension

mikev — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:58:00 GMT

The next SoCal Rock & Roll Code Camp is set for June 28 & 29 at UCSD Extension

Code Camp is a place for developers to come and learn from their peers. This community driven event has become an international trend where peer groups of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines band together to bring content to the community. Here in southern California we add a little spice to our Code Camp by inviting great independent bands to entertain us!

As of today, there about 60 presentations registered. Hope you can join us. And hope to see you at my Dynamic Languages and the DLR session.

Microsoft Program Managers Lisa Feigenbaum and Charlie Calvert at OC .Net

mikev — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:10:00 GMT

May 7, 2008 Meeting

Best Practices with the Microsoft Visual C# 3.0 and LINQ
and
Visual Basic 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks

Details:

This month we have visitors from Redmond for two great presentations on the latest and greatest technologies.

Our monthly meeting date and location have been changed to accommodate our presenters. We will be meeting at the Microsoft offices in Irvine and have a joined meeting with SoCal .NET user group. Here is the address:

Microsoft
Three Park Plaza, Suite 1600
Irvine, CA 92614

Presentations Abstracts:

C# 3.0...:
This presentation introduces a number of new language features such as query expressions, lambda expressions, extension methods, automatically implemented properties, local type inference and more. These are all features that can really improve the quality of your code. They also provide new opportunities for making mistakes. This talk focuses on both the good and the bad: how to use and how not to use the new features of C#. Each feature will be introduced with a small example, and you should be able to follow the talk even if you are not already familiar with the new language constructs. The talk will also explore the theoretical underpinnings of LINQ.

Tips & Tricks...:

In this talk, Lisa will show how to turn yourself into a Visual Studio 2008 guru with the new language and IDE features. Tips and tricks will include how to maximize your VB IntelliSense experience, leverage Refactoring features, and improve the performance of your query and XML code. She will explore integrated XML, and show how to navigate XML gotchas and express what you wish in fewer lines of code.

Presenters Bio:

Charlie Calvert is the Community Program Manager for the Microsoft C# team. While working on outreach and bridge building to both external and internal teams through the web and live events, Charlie focuses his technical energies on LINQ and core C# language scenarios such as generics. He has a degree in Journalism and Computer Science from the Evergreen State College. The author of ten technical books which have sold well over 100,000 copies, Charlie currently lives in the Seattle area where he enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking, sailing and skiing in the mountains.

Lisa Feigenbaum is the program manager for the Visual Basic Editor and Debugger. She has been a member of the Visual Basic team since 2004. Her team is responsible for features such as intelliSense, error correction, edit-and-continue, and code snippets. You can find Lisa at various US & international conferences and user groups, watch her Channel9 webcasts, or read her posts on the VB team blog. Before joining Microsoft, she earned an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.