May 2007 Entries
Microsoft has cancelled its autumn Professional Developers Conference, citing bad timing in light of the launch of important infrastructure and platform products.
We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones.
This has happened before, but not with so many highly anticipated releases on the horizon. It is certainly understandable, we are already seeing Go Live licenses for just about everything on the development horizon.
I am especially glad now that I committed to go to TechED, this will be a very important event for Silverlight, Orcas, Katmai and Windows Server 2008.
For others going to TechED please feel free drop me a Contact message so we can meetup.
The first 8 videos of the Visual Basic Forms over Data "How-to" video series are now available on MSDN.
Some of us are using Code Generation to do this and hopefully we will see how this compares to the "standard" approach described in these videos. So much of this can be automated, this will get you going on how to provide the operational requirements, then you can make some templates to rip through an entire database in a few seconds.
This is still really good beginner information for doing data-centric work in Visual Studio.
Silverlight
Last Monday I delivered one of the keynotes at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, and discussed a new project that I've been spending most of my time working on over the last year: Silverlight.
Scott's insights and thoughts about what his teams are working on are always enlightening. I really look forward to getting my hands on a few of these Starter Kits. Silverlight certainly has the potential to change the way programs for the Net are written.
The "Top Banana" application was built with C# and runs cross platform on any system where Silverlight is installed. The total download size of the application (meaning the size of all of the XAML + compiled code when a user types in the URL of the site) is only ~50kb. We'll be shipping a source-code version of the application as a sample later this summer.
Awesome, hopefully we will see a bunch of these for VB as well. VB As a Dynamic Language is also an interesting idea. This is VB10 though, don't expect this for VB9 (Orcas).
Once again I will be attending TechED, if anyone wants to meet up while we are there, feel free to email me or leave a comment.
Additionally, I will be blogging about all the sessions I attend as I always have in the past.
Topics of interest this year will be:
- Visual Basic
- Silverlight
- ASP/AJAX
- LINQ
- Orcas
- Media Center
- Media Server
The VB Team is starting to let it rip with the exciting new capabilities we are going to have with VB in the near future:
some partner teams started asking what it would take to write VB.NET code-behind for a browser plug-in that could run cross-browse and cross-platform, my interest was definitely peaked. “Let me get this straight… You want to write a web plug-in VB.NET… that doesn’t require the full .NET framework to be installed… and runs on the Mac… and Firefox … but supports the full VB.NET language? Uh… Okay, let’s chat.”
VB on a Mac. VB.NET In the Browser, this is NOT VBScript, this is pretty much anything you can do in VB.NET: Collections, String, Math, Date and Information Utilities, Linq, Conversions, Late Binding and All Core VB Language Constructs...
Exciting times are here again for VB.
THIS IS AWESOME!!! VB FINALLY hits the MAC!
VB on Silverlight – In short, this means that you can now use Visual Basic as the code-behind for whiz-bang rich interactive applications that run on Windows or the Mac and can run in IE, Firefox, and Safari. You can download the alpha .NET-enabled release but to develop you will need the Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight for “Orcas” Beta1.
Read on for more announcements here.
Paul Vick is writing about some preliminary information talked about at Mix07 and being released soon as a CTP.
Whatever they decide to name it, I hope they pick something I can spot in a Search Engine. VBx will not be so great a choice... why not iVB, that is just as bad. VB10 or "VB 10" should show up when you are looknig for specific info, but maybe VBTEN would be even more distinctive.
Don't be fooled by some of the discussion floating around the blogosphere, we are NOT talking about VBScript here, nor is it PCode, the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) is going to give us a heck of a lot more power than the immediate window or scripting. This is going to be great to start playing with soon.
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