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8/20/2009 4:57:20 AM
The Winforms ReportViewer in Visual Studio Pro will allow you define client reports with a variety of data sources. If you’re not familiar with creating client-side reports using the ReportViewer, take a look at these videos: How Do I: Create a report from a database? How Do I: Create a report from a business object? (The ReportViewer can also display server-based reports a la SQL Reporting Services and has a whole boatload of features that I’m not going to talk about her ... [ read more ]
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8/17/2009 5:05:21 PM
This month I have an article on DevProConnections: Taking Advantage of LINQ and XML in Microsoft Office 2007 In this article, I talk about how a lot of applications that need to take advantage of Microsoft Office can do so without going through COM. Many programs that need to process documents often require manipulation of the file formats directly and doing that through the Office component object model won’t scale very well. It also requires that Microsoft Office be installed to run ... [ read more ]
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8/14/2009 11:26:35 PM
I just finished a couple more How Do I videos on using EF with WPF using VS2008 SP1 (they’ll be published soon) and while I was translating my VB code to C# I stumbled upon an error in C# that does not happen in VB. This of course got me curious and so I thought I’d share what I found out. I have an EDM defined with a parent entity Order and child OrderDetails that I created with the designer – very basic – like I show in this video . In the example I was working on, I was putting the ... [ read more ]
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8/11/2009 12:31:51 AM
I was cleaning up my desk today and in the piles of mail and gobs of paper I found the SDN Magazine “Women in Technology” issue 101 that featured an article I wrote that was released in print back in May. Well, I just noticed today that near the end of June they made most of the articles available online, including mine. :-) Using Windows Presentation Foundation and Line-of-Business Data in Microsoft Office Clients In this article I talk about how to expose Line-of-Business data v ... [ read more ]
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8/6/2009 8:57:00 PM
Window 7 is available to MSDN subscribers today! My friend is so excited she pinged me in IM and told me she was refreshing her browser all morning on MSDN’s home page until the headline showed up. LOL!
Everyone is so excited maybe that’s why Twitter went down today and made the morning local news .
Anyways, I’m so ready to repave my main laptop with Windows 7. I’ll be doing a network install when it’s available on Microsoft’s corpnet this month. It’s so much easier that way, MSIT t ... [ read more ]
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8/5/2009 10:20:52 PM
This month’s MSDN Magazine has a particularly good article in there by Danny Simmons , Development Manager on the Entity Framework team, on N-Tier Application Patterns with Entity Framework that I recommend reading through. He explains the design considerations you need to take into account when building n-tier applications and also discusses some of the improvements that are coming in .NET Framework 4.0 that will make building n-tier applications with EF much much easier. I’m per ... [ read more ]
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8/3/2009 9:27:00 PM
Today Justin updated the Silverlight Toolkit on CodePlex with samples in Silverlight 3 that you can run live directly on the site. Check out all the live tutorials:
Part 1 – Controls
Part 2 – Charting
Part 3 – Theming
Part 4 - Navigation Controls
Part 5 - Data Controls
And best of all, the samples show a Visual Basic code view:
Support for Visual Basic in the toolkit itself was available in March, but now the live samples are also updated. Clicking th ... [ read more ]
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7/31/2009 7:58:00 PM
In this post and video I’ve shown folks how to work with a local database file (.mdf, .mdb, .sdf) that resides directly inside your project in order to see updates made while debugging your application. If it looks like everything saves fine while debugging, but you can’t see the updates if you look directly in the database, then there’s a simple fix. Today the VS Data Team wrote up a great blog post on this as well so check it out!
In general I prefer to develop against attached SQL S ... [ read more ]
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7/27/2009 4:56:38 PM
If you’re like me and used to having line & shape controls , PrintForm and a handy DataRepeater as part of your toolbox then you’ll be excited to know that these controls are also going to be installed with Visual Studio 2010. On Friday, Yunfeng Dong mentioned on the VS Data team blog that the VB Power Packs 3.0 release was installed by default with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 . In the comments of that post someone asks about VS2010 availability and it’s good to know that these con ... [ read more ]
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7/23/2009 8:25:00 PM
One of my favorite Visual Basic MVP’s, Billy Hollis, was caught at TechEd by the Patterns&Practices folks for a quick chat. In this short 2-minute interview Billy shares his opinions on WPF and Silverlight. Check it out:
Billy Hollis on WPF and Silverlight
By the way, anyone notice Channel 9 turned blue today in honor of Windows 7…
Enjoy!
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7/23/2009 12:02:53 AM
Since my last post on filtering child collections using Entity Framework , I have had more than a few emails about how to load filtered child DataTables that are part of a master-detail relationship and then get them to save properly through the TableAdapters. Many people are running into the problem where the designer won’t automatically generate the update/insert/delete commands for you when you are writing a select statement that uses multiple tables. Of course you could specify your own st ... [ read more ]
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7/22/2009 5:19:05 AM
Ever wonder what really happens when you write a simple LINQ query? Dim query = From row In db.Customers _
Where row.Country = "Canada" _
Select row
A lot of new language features went into the compilers in Visual Studio 2008 to make even this simple LINQ query work.
In this interview I sit down with Jonathan Aneja , a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Compiler team, who dives deep into these features like Type Inference, Anonymous T ... [ read more ]
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7/17/2009 12:18:17 AM
Last post I talked about how to get WPF data binding to work with master-detail entity collections. I had a couple readers ask me how they could filter the child collection instead of bringing them all down so in this post I’d like to show how you could do that. It’s actually pretty easy. Customer (Master) –< Orders (Detail) I created a very simple Entity Data Model (EDM) that demonstrates a Master-Detail relationship. The Orders table is defined in the database with a non-nullabl ... [ read more ]
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7/14/2009 11:24:06 PM
Today I thought I would talk about a really common scenario in data applications, creating a master-details (one-to-many) data entry form. I’ve written about WPF data binding and Entity Framework a lot in the past:
Posts:
Master-Details with Entity Framework Explicit Load
Loading Data and Binding Controls in WPF with CollectionViewSource
Using the WPF ObservableCollection with EF Entities
Data Binding WPF Lookup Combobox Values to EF Entities
Notifying the UI when Entit ... [ read more ]
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7/10/2009 5:00:10 PM
On Wednesday I spoke at EastBay.NET User’s group at our new Livermore location and I have to say it was a TON of fun. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun speaking in a while. Deborah has an awesome recap of the event . We were afraid that we’d have low attendance because of the switch in venue but it was a great turnout! I did the same talk that I had done at DevTeach which I wrote about here . I guess the third time’s a charm because I had people laughing and learning at the same time ... [ read more ]
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7/8/2009 12:14:07 AM
I’ve blogged before about implementing validation on LINQ to SQL classes as well as how to customize the display of error messages in WPF . In this post I want to show how you can use these same techniques to validate entities coming from the Entity Framework (EF). Like LINQ to SQL classes, Entity Framework entities are implemented as partial classes so that you can extend them with your own code on top of the code that the designers generate for you. You can extend EF entities in a simila ... [ read more ]
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7/3/2009 1:09:24 AM
I guess Robin and I inspired her on Monday when we had dinner together. Yes folks, Deborah Kurata (VB MVP) is finally spilling her technical heart out on her new blog ! Time to update your RSS readers…. Deborah's Developer MindScape Neat-o title too. Enjoy!
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7/2/2009 12:28:50 AM
I just released 3 new videos onto the VB Dev Center starting a new series on how to do WPF data binding with Entity Framework using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 . This is a “no frills” WPF series that focuses on data so you won’t see any other tools used besides Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and no flashy animations. #1 | How Do I: Get Started with Entity Framework in WPF Applications? #2 | How Do I: Build a WPF Data Entry Form Using Entity Framework? #3 | How Do I: Create a WPF ... [ read more ]
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6/30/2009 7:44:59 PM
We just published another community article onto the Visual Basic Developer Center by Maurice de Beijer , Visual Basic MVP, on .NET RIA Services. Maurice explains what they are and how they help you build Silverlight line-of-business applications. Sample source code is included here . Read Getting Started with .NET RIA Services . Many thanks to Maurice for donating this article. I’m looking forward to part 2 myself ;-) Enjoy!
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6/27/2009 12:40:53 AM
At the MVP summit this year Kathleen and I asked MVPs using Visual Basic what kinds of applications they’re building, what other technologies they’re using, what their favorite features are, and more. Many thanks to all of you who humored me! The result? A great series of videos on Channel 9 . (I told you I’d get back at you Jim Duffy!) ;-) But Lisa decided to take this a step further to give more people, not just MVPs, a chance to tell their story. Check out www.imavb.net ( which ... [ read more ]
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6/25/2009 10:34:52 PM
If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve got a new article from Robert Green (VSTO MVP) up on the Visual Basic and VSTO Dev Centers . In this article, learn how you can use Visual Basic to build application-level add-ins that automate common Microsoft Office tasks. It’s a good introduction to Office development with Visual Studio so check it out! Create an Application-Level Add-In to Automate Common Office Tasks Enjoy!
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6/22/2009 11:51:30 PM
Joe Stagner’s second podcast is up and this time he’s interviewing the one and only Lisa Feigenbaum from the VB team . Joe pins her down on what the future of VB really is and discusses perceptions, parity and co-evolution. It’s a great interview so check it out: Misfit Geek Podcast - Episode #2 Does VB have a Future? I got a little nervous at about 31 minutes into it when Joe calls me the “Princess of Visual Basic” (better than an old queen I guess ;-)) and mentions that there ... [ read more ]
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6/20/2009 12:24:41 AM
Last week I spoke at DevTeach in Vancouver which was held at the beautiful Four Seasons in downtown. I love this Canadian conference because the attendees are great – super friendly and social, and ask a lot of great questions. I mostly interacted with folks building applications for the government or working as consultants and wanting to freshen up their .NET skills. It was also nice to see a good number of VB developers here. I gave three talks and ended up in the top 3 speakers overall whi ... [ read more ]
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6/17/2009 7:41:28 PM
One of the many samples released for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 that you should be aware of are examples of WPF data binding against Entity Data Models. You can find some easy to follow samples here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WPFDatabinding This sample demonstrates how to create a WPF Forms solution that checks user input with validation code, demonstrates common controls such as DataGrid and ComboBox, and shows typical data manipulation including create, read, update, and delete. ... [ read more ]
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6/16/2009 4:32:56 PM
Kathleen McGrath has started a series where she takes Visual Studio 2010 walkthroughs and demonstrates them with a screen-cast each week on Channel 9 . If you’re just digging into the VS2010 Beta you should definitely check these out to help get you started on all the new features. Don’t miss my favorites so far… Video: Deploying Multiple Office Solutions in a Single ClickOnce Installer Video: Auto-Implemented Properties in Visual Basic 2010 Enjoy!
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6/5/2009 10:55:00 PM
Visual Basic 10 (in Visual Studio 2010) is getting a new feature called Collection Initializers which contains the same functionality as the C# 3 feature but it takes it one step further. Let me show you what I mean.
Visual Basic 9 (in Visual Studio 2008) already has Object Initializers which come in handy when you want to quickly populate some public properties on an object. For instance, say I have a class called Student that has Name (string), Age (integer) and Score (integer) publi ... [ read more ]
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6/2/2009 6:09:00 PM
Joe Stagner , ASP.NET/Web community guru, has just launched a new podcast on MisfitGeek.com . In this first episode he talks with Scott Hunter, a Senior Program Manager Lead on the ASP.NET Team, about the future of Web Forms and how Web Forms compares with ASP.NET MVC. He also talks about web data controls and compares the web forms development experience to the ease of VB6 forms development which is interesting to me.
Episode #1 - Scott Hunter on the Future of Web Forms
This Jo ... [ read more ]
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6/2/2009 4:30:06 AM
Last week Alan and I headed up to Yosemite National Park with my sister and her boyfriend and Robert Green (VSTO MVP and log-time friend) and his wife, Colette. We had an absolutely fabulous time and I recommend that everyone in the world come visit. And believe me, Memorial Day weekend it seems like everyone in the world is doing just that! ;-) Luckily we stayed the whole week so after Sunday people left the valley and we were left with a peaceful vacation. The falls are full, the Merce ... [ read more ]
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5/22/2009 2:46:40 PM
Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end? Well I sure did and it's not just hitting F5 people ;-). In this interview I sit down with Matt Gertz, frequent VB blogger and also the guy in charge of the builds in Developer Division (he has a long title, but I forget what it is :-)). He explains how the build and test processes work on a team of two thousand people all on Team ... [ read more ]
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5/20/2009 5:50:00 PM
Here it is folks, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 has been released to the public today. Check out the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 site to download the Beta, submit product feedback on the Beta 1 Forums , report bugs on Connect , and find additional information. Also visit the Beta 1 walkthroughs page for information on how to use the new features and download the Visual Studio 2010 Samples . There’s also some good language-focused resources on the Visual Basic 2010 and ... [ read more ]
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5/18/2009 9:37:10 PM
I’m headed up to Vancouver June 8-12 for DevTeach . I love DevTeach because of it’s close, friendly atmosphere that you don’t get with the larger conferences. The caliber of speakers is excellent and they easily accessible and always floating around the session hallways, ballrooms and of course the bars ;-). Plus, the deal is great – buy 2 passes, get one free . Here’s some more reasons to go: Keynote: Visual Studio 2010 — Your Development Happy Place : Tim Huckaby is putt ... [ read more ]
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5/15/2009 12:48:01 AM
I’ve posted before about how to use TableAdapters to update parent-child (master-detail) relationships against SQL server. It’s pretty straightforward and Visual Studio generates all the code for you to properly insert, update and delete your data. However if you’re using MS Access then there’s one thing that Visual Studio doesn’t do because it’s not supported when using Access. How Parent-Child Inserts Work When Visual Studio generates the insert commands on a SQL-Server TableAdapter ... [ read more ]
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5/11/2009 7:15:09 PM
If you’re like me and couldn’t make it down to L.A. this year for TechEd, you can still check out some of the sessions and Keynotes at TechEd Online . If you want to really geek out, you can also watch the twitter feed , blog feed and more . Don’t forget to check out some of the recommended sessions from Lisa and Christin : TechEd North America, here we come! TechEd Sessions on Office Development Enjoy!
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5/8/2009 10:29:00 PM
The ObservableCollection is a special WPF collection that provides proper notifications to the UI when items are added, removed, or the list is refreshed because it implements INotifyCollectionChanged . It’s common to use this collection (or inherit from it) to contain your business objects you want to bind to in WPF. Class Window1 Private CustomerData As ObservableCollection( Of Customer)
You can then set up a CollectionViewSource and use it’s View property to get a r ... [ read more ]
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5/7/2009 3:50:28 PM
In the latest episode of CodeCast , Ken interviews me about my role on the Visual Studio Community Team. Ken caught me a couple weeks ago when I was in Redmond and we had a chat in the lobby of building 41. Ken and I are good friends and go way back so it was a fun interview. We chat about Open XML , OBA , and I plug one of my favorite features of VS2010 . I come on about 25 minutes into the show. And you know how sometimes you can’t stand hearing your own voice? Well I thought I sounded ... [ read more ]
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5/5/2009 2:51:20 AM
Last week I wrote about how to data bind WPF lookup comboboxes to entities returned from the Entity Framework. I described that the key to this type of binding is setting the SelectedItem to the object reference itself on the navigation property instead of setting SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath as in the case when you have foreign key scalar properties like LINQ to SQL classes or DataTables. However, depending on your UI, you may need a notification to fire when the entity reference c ... [ read more ]
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5/1/2009 3:41:27 PM
Nice! Now when you go any of the Visual Basic Forums on MSDN you’ll see the masthead and navigation bar from the Visual Basic Developer Center . And vice-versa, when you go to the Developer Center you’ll now see a Forums tab that brings you right into the VB Forums. So now you’ll never lose context with the Developer Center! So no matter what thread you’re on, you’ll see the same navigation at the top. This will make it much easier for folks to find our featured Learning c ... [ read more ]
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4/30/2009 2:57:00 PM
It’s extremely common to have to hook up lookup tables on your data entry forms in order to populate foreign keys in a database. I’ve talked about how to do this in Winforms and WPF with Datasets and LINQ to SQL before: How Do I: Create a Lookup Combobox in WPF? How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data Entry Form in WPF? How Do I: Create Lookup Lists? Creating Lookup Lists with LINQ to SQL Related Data Binding and ComboBoxes with LINQ to SQL Ti ... [ read more ]
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4/29/2009 3:39:39 PM
Codecast is a short (~25min) podcast by Ken Levy who runs around Microsoft grabbing interviews with folks. In this episode Lisa talks about what Visual Basic developers can expect from the Visual Studio 2010 editor and IDE and other cool new features in Visual Basic. She also talks about the developer community and even mentions me and the VB Developer Center :-) Check it out! CodeCast Episode 17: Visual Basic 2010 Preview with Lisa Feigenbaum Also here’s some links to chec ... [ read more ]
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4/28/2009 4:02:00 PM
Last post I was talking about DataSets and aggregating data with LINQ and the example I gave was around finding rows of data where the Status = “Unread”. This got me thinking about how we could do this by asking Outlook for my unread email count – one of the programs I spend a lot of time in ;-). This actually is a pretty easy thing to do if you use the Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) for Outlook – Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook. Add a reference to your project and then import the namespace ... [ read more ]
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4/28/2009 2:24:21 AM
Today I got a question that comes up often in data application programming about how to count rows in a DataSet that matched a condition. The DataSet may be bound to a DataGridView or other list control and it’s tempting to start looking at the control to see if you can coax it into returning what you need but usually there is a much better way. For instance, say we have a table in our database called “Inbox” that has varchar fields Subject, From, and Status and we’d like to tally all the ro ... [ read more ]
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4/27/2009 4:39:59 PM
I’ve had a couple questions lately on how to change the Visual Studio start page news feed so I thought I’d write a quick post on how to do it. When you open Visual Studio for the first time it will ask you what development environment setting it should use. You can pick Visual Basic, C#, General, Web, etc. Depending on what you pick you will see different news feed in your start page. If you pick Visual Basic, you will see the same news feed that is on the Visual Basic Developer Center which ... [ read more ]
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4/20/2009 7:33:24 PM
Yesterday Carl posted another dnrTV show with yours truly. This is a follow up from the last show where I went over the Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML in order to manipulate and query Office documents. Last show focused on CustomXML parts and Word content controls. In this show I demonstrate how to create Word and Excel docs from database data using XML Literals. dnrTV Show #137: Beth Massi on the Open XML SDK dnrTV Show #138: Beth Massi on Open XML and Office Here are some l ... [ read more ]
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4/7/2009 10:05:31 PM
Yesterday Carl posted another dnrTV show with yours truly . This time I’m talking about the Open XML SDK , something that I’ve written and spoken about many times . In this episode I show how to use Word 2007 content controls and map them to custom XML parts so that you can query structured data from unstructured documents using Visual Basic’s LINQ to XML. What’s really cool about the Open XML format is that you don’t need Office installed at all – no COM Interop needed. You’re working w ... [ read more ]
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4/6/2009 6:49:11 PM
In January I had the pleasure of attending Karl and Jamie's "WPF for line-of-business applications" training down in the Silicon Valley. Well I'm very excited to see that they are both heading on a training tour to hit some more major cities like NYC, L.A., even London. I see that they also lengthened it to two full days. When I attended the class it was delivered with both C# and VB.NET code samples which means you can focus on the WPF concepts and not worry about the ... [ read more ]
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3/30/2009 4:26:28 PM
Today Kathleen posted on her blog that the Visual Studio help topics in the library now contain links to related How Do I videos making it much easier for you to find related video content while reading the library articles. For instance, if you're reading the Overview of LINQ to XML in Visual Basic topic you'll see links to related How Do I videos that I did in the center of the page. Cool, thanks Kathleen! Enjoy!
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3/27/2009 4:11:20 PM
I just posted a new Channel 9 interview on a nifty little feature which isn't so little when you look at it from the compiler. In this interview, Tyler Whitney , a developer on the Visual Basic compiler team demonstrates how line termination has changed in the Visual Basic 10 compiler making underscores unnecessary as line continuation indicators. Woot! This makes your code more readable especially when writing multi-line LINQ queries. It's also really handy not to have to worry ab ... [ read more ]
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3/25/2009 6:05:00 PM
I just popped a headline onto the Visual Basic Developer Center (which also appears on the VS start page for all of us that have selected the VB development settings :-)) about the release of Visual Basic QuickStarts and How-to Topics for the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (formerly known as " Prism "). Cool, more things to play with!
Here's an excerpt from the download page :
The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight is designed to help you m ... [ read more ]
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3/20/2009 4:31:12 PM
I just posted a new interview on Channel 9 on using the Touchless SDK. The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. "Touch without touching." It's actually pretty cool! In this interview I meet up with Touchless SDK creator, Mike Wasserman and Visual Basic Spec Lead, Lucian Wischik. They explain the project and show off a game they developed using Visual Basic 9 in Visual Studio 2008. I almost got my block knocked ... [ read more ]
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3/8/2009 10:45:21 PM
In my last few app building posts we've been building a simple Office Business Application (OBA) for the new Northwind Traders. If you missed them: OBA Part 1 - Exposing Line-of-Business Data OBA Part 2 - Building and Outlook Client against LOB Data OBA Part 3 - Storing and Reading Data in Word Documents (In the last post on OBA I mentioned we would build out the SharePoint Workflow next but I realized that it's important to see how the Excel client works befo ... [ read more ]
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2/19/2009 3:40:48 AM
I'll be speaking in my own home town of San Francisco next week for VSLive ! so if you're in the area you should register and come on out! There's an amazing line up of speakers and sessions . Also when you register you get free access to the MSDN Developer Conference on Monday. I'll be showing off some super-cool new Visual Studio 2010 features as well as some tips and tricks of LINQ in Visual Basic 2008 -- including a whole talk devoted to working with LINQ to XML (my personal favo ... [ read more ]
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2/18/2009 2:11:16 AM
Julie Lerman's Programming Entity Framework book just arrived today! I've been skimming around it all day and so far Chapter 8 is my favorite but I'm sure once I get to Chapter 14 that will take the cake :-) Thanks Julie! (especially for all the great VB code!) How Do I videos here we come..... Enjoy!
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2/13/2009 1:55:33 AM
In my last few posts we've been building a simple Office Business Application (OBA) for the new Northwind Traders. If you missed them: OBA Part 1 - Exposing Line-of-Business Data OBA Part 2 - Building and Outlook Client against LOB Data In this post I'm going to talk about how we can create a purchase order in Word 2007 that contains data about the items being purchased and how we can query that data and place it into our database. We'll use this code as a basis for our S ... [ read more ]
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2/7/2009 10:36:00 PM
In the last couple posts we've been talking about an Office Business Application (OBA) architecture for the new Northwind Traders and how to expose line-of-business (LOB) data , in our case the Northwind SQL database, using ADO.NET Data Services .
Today we're going to talk about how to build an Outlook Add-In that pulls the order history from the database through our data service when a customer email arrives in the inbox of our sales reps. This allows the sales reps to easily communica ... [ read more ]
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2/3/2009 3:09:36 AM
The last week I've been working with a couple teammates on an Office Business Application (OBA) demonstration we wanted to put together for TechReady 8. TechReady is an internal conference we deliver to the field employees. It's my first one and so far it's been pretty fun. This morning Scott Hanselman hosted an "UnKeynote" that showcased a lot of the new stuff coming in Visual Studio 2010 that I can't talk about yet but believe me it was cool. ;-) The application I helped build wi ... [ read more ]
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1/27/2009 8:54:46 PM
Bay.NET is organizing an Education Day in Cupertino this Saturday the 31st which you should check out if you live in the SF Bay Area. This is an awesome opportunity to learn WPF and the M-V-VM pattern from the experts Karl Shifflett and Jamie Rodriguez . Jamie is a Technical Evangelist who helps companies with the move to WPF. Karl is one of our featured Visual Basic bloggers on the Visual Basic Developer Center and is working on the WPF Designer team. He also is the creator of the Visu ... [ read more ]
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1/23/2009 6:46:21 AM
Last few posts I've been building a WPF client against ADO.NET Data Services, if you missed them: Using ADO.NET Data Services ADO.NET Data Services - Building a WPF Client ADO.NET Data Services - Enforcing FK Associations and a Fix for Deleting Entities ADO.NET Data Services - Intercepting Queries and Adding Validation Today I want to show a simple Excel client that queries our service and allows us to edit the customers in Northwind. I'm going to use Visu ... [ read more ]
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1/22/2009 4:53:10 AM
Last few posts I've been building a WPF client against ADO.NET Data Services, if you missed them: Using ADO.NET Data Services ADO.NET Data Services - Building a WPF Client ADO.NET Data Services - Enforcing FK Associations and a Fix for Deleting Entities Today I want to show you how we can add validation or any other extra processing when data is queried from the data service as well as when we attempt to make changes to the data. Ways of Querying a ADO.NET Da ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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1/16/2009 4:30:00 AM
In my last post I introduced ADO.NET Data Services and how you can easily expose your data model via RESTful services that support the basic CRUD (Create,Retrieve,Update,Delete) operations. Basic CRUD database operations map well to the familiar HTTP verbs POST, GET, MERGE, DELETE and the framework takes care of the plumbing for us. In this post I'm going to build a simple WPF client that shows how to work with the client piece of the framework which resides in the System.Data.Service.Client ... [ read more ]
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1/10/2009 3:52:20 AM
This week I worked through a good article on getting started with ADO.NET Data Services (a.k.a Astoria) called Using ADO.NET Data Services . If you're not familiar with the technology it's basically a framework for exposing your data models via RESTful web services. So if you are building a remote CRUD data access layer then this is a technology that you'll probably want to look into. It should save you some time especially if you're trying to expose your data over REST. (Note: We're in ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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1/7/2009 11:03:34 PM
I'm still catching up from holiday vacation so I just watched my dnrTV episode today that I filmed with Carl when I saw him at DevTeach in Montreal last month. I always enjoy interviewing with Carl. He has a way of making you feel comfortable and making you look maaaavelous in an interview. In this episode I show a new feature of Visual Studio 2010 related to drag-drop data binding for WPF. I start by building a teeny WPF form from scratch in Visual Studio 2008 and hooking up the ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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1/5/2009 10:18:47 PM
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a great holiday like I did. My family went on a cruise down the west coast of Mexico and it was awesome. I'm still wading through all my email ;-) It was so much fun to be on a ship for New Year's Eve celebrations but I think I ate my body weight in food and drink. My New Year's resolution will definitely be to get more exercise this year. MSDN Magazine also made a New Year's resolution as stated in Howard Dierking's January 2009 Editor's Note . Y ... [ read more ]
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12/17/2008 8:43:52 PM
We just released a new community article onto the Visual Basic Developer Center by one of our MVPs, Jeff Certain , called Scaling ADO.NET DataTables . In this article Jeff shows shows us how to query and aggregate data using the built in DataTable methods as well as LINQ to DataSets. He compares the performance on indexed and non indexed DataTables in a variety of scenarios. See for yourself what Jeff recommends on large sets of data. Enjoy!
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12/13/2008 12:32:38 AM
One of the basic things that we need to do as business application developers is to make sure that data being displayed to a user makes sense to them and that they know what type of data something is when they are making edits. In every business application I've written the data entry forms needed to format data in different ways. Let's take a look at how we do this in Windows Presentation Foundation. IValueConverter In WPF there is an interface called IValueConverter that you can imp ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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12/12/2008 7:11:00 AM
The VB Team just anounced the VB Key Bindings poster for VS 2008 . Sweet!! I didn't even know about some of these keyboard short-cuts. Thanks to Lisa on the VB Team for providing these.
Enjoy!
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Beth Massi
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12/11/2008 12:45:08 AM
Unlike LINQ to SQL, explicit loading is the default behavior in LINQ to Entities and the Entity Framework. When a query is executed within the Entity Framework, the entities returned by the query are fully accessible, but any associated entities are not immediately loaded. This means that if we have a Master-Detail relationship in our model, say Customer related to many Orders, and we query for a Customer then only the Customer entity will be returned, not the related Orders.
Now LINQ to SQL ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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12/9/2008 1:01:32 AM
Today, December 8th, is the 10 year anniversary of the Italian Visual Basic Tips and Tricks community site . HAPPY BIRTHDAY to you all and thank you for fostering the Italian Visual Basic community all these years! Some members of the VB Team created a video , baked a cake, and sang Happy Birthday in Italian in the community's honor. Unfortunately I was speaking in Montreal last week so I couldn't make the video, my apologies! But I want to personally thank the all the people involve ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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11/17/2008 11:06:07 PM
I'll be speaking at DevTeach in Montreal December 1st - 5th this year.... brrrrr!!!! I guess I need a winter coat! Seriously though, this Canadian .NET/SQL conference is always jam-packed with high caliber speakers, take a look . I'll be speaking on Visual Basic 6 to .NET Migration ( similar to this webcast I did with Rob ) and I'm doing a fun session on manipulating Office Documents using the Open XML SDK and LINQ. Check out all the sessions here . Plus, they have some awesome goods to ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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11/13/2008 12:30:15 AM
Alessandro Del Sole , Visual Basic MVP, has been busy on CodePlex writing a neat WPF learning application that aggregates RSS feeds. In his words: It's developed in Visual Basic 2008 and uses LINQ-to-Xml and XML Literals to read feeds and persist XML data. You'll learn a lot of things like: WPF Styles and control templates ; WPF Data-binding ; WPF color animations ; Creating a Grid to show data in WPF; LINQ-to-Xml query expressions an ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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11/7/2008 5:47:39 PM
When designing WPF Windows with data (or as I usually refer to them WPF "Forms") we have many options on how we want to load the data and bind our controls. Depending on where the data is coming from and how it's being used there are a lot of possibilities. DataContext "Direct" Suppose we have the following simple window defined and we've set up data binding on our text boxes to the corresponding properties on a Customer object. < Window x : Class =&quo ... [ read more ]
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11/5/2008 8:33:48 PM
There are over 1100 people registered for the Silicon Valley code camp this year! Wow! That's a couple hundred more than last year. This is a free event people, so there's no excuse not to come out to Foothill college this year. And it's not all Microsoft technologies (of course not --we're in Silicon Valley for heaven's sake!) so there's a lot of variety of talks and a diverse crowd of developers to network with. And people are coming from all over. The home page has an interactive Virt ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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11/3/2008 6:50:05 PM
I posted two more WPF "Forms over Data" videos onto the Developer Center that you should check out. How Do I: Edit Tabular Data in WPF? - learn how to create a simple data grid in WPF for editing tabular data using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data Entry Form in WPF? - learn how to create a master-detail (or one-to-many) data entry form in WPF using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. Subscribe to the How Do I video ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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10/29/2008 5:33:49 PM
What a busy week! Every time I sat down to write this blog post, someone would sit down and want to chat with me about architecture, languages or data. PDC is so big and there's so much to talk about with people and there are so many experts here. I've had a lot of folks come up to me and tell me they read this blog, so I thank them! I hadn't planned on going to PDC but I decided to drive the 5 hours down to L.A. from the Bay Area so I could spend some time with Alan. Our schedules for the ... [ read more ]
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10/22/2008 4:12:15 PM
If you missed it, yesterday we released a new community submitted article onto the Visual Basic Developer Center and the Office Development with Visual Studio Portal by MVP Alessandro Del Sole . In this article learn how to control the Vista operating system's speech recognition engine in .NET from a custom task pane in Microsoft Word 2007. This article compliments Alessandro's previous article on a text-to-speech add-in for Word 2007. Enjoy!
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10/21/2008 8:17:00 PM
In this interview Saaid Kahn, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team (and former member of the VB 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 yo ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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10/16/2008 1:31:00 AM
I've had a lot of questions lately on how to display data from two separate tables in the database into a single DataGridView for editing. It sure would be nice if all our data was in a single table, but in reality most of the time it's not. Basically the problem is that we want one single table (entity) representation on the client even though we have two physical tables in the database holding the information... thus we need to "split" the data in our entity on the client side into two or mor ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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10/8/2008 10:04:00 AM
Today I woke up at the crack of dawn because I had an 8:30 AM session. Okay maybe not quite the crack, but for me it was early . Especially after a night of socializing. That's a really cool thing about conferences here, the attendees love to go out with you after dinner and uh.. socialize. ;-) There were a lot of great conversations about technology flying everywhere it was hard to keep up. I crashed about 1 AM (which everyone told me was early!) and woke up about an hour and a half ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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10/7/2008 10:28:00 AM
I'm here in the Netherlands in a town called Noordwijkerhout near Amsterdam at the SDN Conference with a lot of great speakers and sessions .
I took these shots while the attendees were in session. There's good food, great vendors and lots of entertainment -- XBoxes, bowling, pin-pong, and lots of bars ;-) We also had a really funny English comedian perform at the end of the night. The Dutch really know how to put on a great event.
I have a total of three sessions a ... [ read more ]
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10/2/2008 1:49:38 AM
Check out the latest news on the VB Dev Center . I'm finally headlining myself ;-) I'm in the October issue of MSDN Magazine . I've been managing the content for the Basic Instincts column for a little over a year now where we rotate writers from the VB Team. This month is my birthday month so I decided to take this one on personally. :-) Enjoy!
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9/30/2008 8:41:04 PM
Bill Burrows has released more video tutorials! This time he focuses on the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature that is available in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 . If you need to build a quick web site against a database then you should definitely check this framework out. Also check out the Web Development section of the Visual Basic Learning page for more VB ASP.NET videos. Enjoy!
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9/24/2008 4:35:00 PM
On Monday night I spoke at my first .NET users group here on the Microsoft Campus. It was the Visual Basic .NET Developers Association meeting that's here in Building 40/41 Steptoe room behind the cafeteria. It's held every last Monday of the month so if you are in the Seattle area then you should check it out, they've got a great lineup of Microsoft speakers from the VB team presenting.
I have to say I was slightly more nervous than the usual user group meeting because the audience was ab ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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9/22/2008 3:26:49 PM
If you're interested in learning about Silverlight, check out the How Do I videos on Silverlight 2 , which include managed code examples in both Visual Basic and C#. All you need to get started building Silverlight applications is here on the Get Started page of www.silverlight.net . There are also a lot of great articles, tutorials and samples so check them out. Also check out Tim Heuer's blog for excellent information on Silverlight. If you like what you see, bookmark it . ;-) ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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9/16/2008 2:12:48 AM
In my last post on WPF I showed how you could use a Winforms DataGridView on a WPF form in order to edit data in a tabular style. Today I'll show you how you can customize the WPF ListView in order to edit data without having to use any Winforms controls at all. WPF gives us the ultimate flexibility when it comes to designing our UI, it just takes learning what XAML we need to get the job done. The WPF ListView control is easily customizable using templates in a GridView mode where we ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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9/13/2008 1:27:26 AM
Chris posted this week about the new version of our social bookmarking platform and he's got a couple cool videos on his blog on how to use the features. He uses me as one of his examples so I thought it was pretty cool ;-). I better get back to bookmarking things! You can look at my bookmarks here . We also have a social feed on the VB Dev Center Community page so try it out, tag things "visual basic" and you'll see them show up on the Dev Center. Enjoy!
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Beth Massi
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9/11/2008 7:51:00 PM
Last night I spoke at East Bay.NET UG on some of the new features in Visual Studio Service Pack 1 focusing on client and data. I did a whirlwind tour of new SQL 2008 data types and Sync Services enhancements , ADO.NET Entity Framework , ADO.NET Data Services , WPF performance and data enhancements , Client Profile Deployment , VSTO Add-In Host Controls and Smart Tags , and VSTO deployment and end-user install troubleshooting improvements. There is just so much packed into SP ... [ read more ]
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9/10/2008 7:30:15 PM
Maurice is on fire with his latest series of Workflow articles on the Visual Basic Developer center . In this second of two articles on WCF and Workflow , Maurice de Beijer shows us how to use the ReceiveActivity, which allows you to publish a workflow as a WCF service -- very handy. If you missed them, here's the rest: Workflow Foundation 101 The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 1) The Power of Custom Workflow Activities (Part 2) Using Windows Communicat ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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9/5/2008 5:10:45 PM
In the past month or so we've been working hard to redesign some parts of the Visual Basic Developer Center . First you'll notice the new look with icons next to news items and a cleaned up Getting Started section. If you head to the Learn Tab you'll see a redesign that's based on topic and content type pivots. Click on a topic and you will see that the list of results are sorted by type and you can subscribe to them as feeds as well . If you click on the type then you can see the full ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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9/4/2008 11:09:00 PM
A pretty common requirement of any business application is to be able to edit data in a "spreadsheet" or tabular style. Usually we use some sort of data grid to do this. When building WPF applications in Visual Studio 2008 you'll notice right away that there is no such control available in the toolbox. Using WPF puts you in complete control of your UI, which is awesome, but in most cases you just need an "out-of-the-box" control for handling data editing like a grid. The WPF team is working on ... [ read more ]
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9/3/2008 4:58:02 PM
Lisa Feigenbaum , Visual Basic Community PM here at Microsoft, was traveling around the world this last month spreading the VB love and yesterday posted materials for her sessions at TechEd South Africa on the VB Team blog . She's had quite the adventure including going to the Olympics! Very cool! Welcome back, Lisa!
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Beth Massi
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8/27/2008 4:18:39 PM
Bill Burrows has released a new set of videos on the ASP .NET MVC Framework - Preview 4 Update which provides an overview of the MVC pattern as well as shows you how to perform adds and updates against a database. If you missed them, you should first check out his Intro to MVC videos and LINQ to SQL tutorials . Bill is a professor and Visual Basic MVP who is providing these completely free of charge to the community. Thanks Bill! Enjoy!
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Beth Massi
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8/20/2008 3:09:00 AM
One of the things I was really missing from WPF when I started to dig into data binding was feature consistency between the BindingListCollectionView and the Winforms BindingSource I had grown to love. The BindingListCollectionView provides the navigation, currency, filtering and sorting on the bound collection of data (or DataTable) just like the BindingSource in Winforms.
However transacted adding and removing of items to the collections was not supported. You'll notice in my WPF Fo ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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7/31/2008 2:30:00 AM
About a month ago the Open XML SDK 1.0 (June 08 update) was released . The SDK provides strongly typed document part access to Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 documents. The SDK has been a CTP for a while, but last month version 1.0 was finally released. So I installed this baby last week and started playing around with it and found it really easy to use after briefly looking at the documentation . The How Do I section is a great place to start.
Upgrading the Letter Generator ... [ read more ]
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7/25/2008 1:39:00 AM
I couldn't wait for the content pages to prop onto MSDN to tell you that I just uploaded two more WPF Forms over Data videos and code samples onto Code Gallery: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wpfdatavideos , videos 3 and 4.
Video #3 shows how to create a dropdown combobox (pick-list) that pulls data from a lookup table in a database. #4 shows a technique for customizing the display of validation messages on controls (for more details on that you can read this post too .)
Enjoy!
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7/24/2008 1:02:00 AM
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 writing on the Visual Basic Team Blog .
Stay tuned for more interviews like these ...
Enjoy!
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7/17/2008 9:16:47 PM
This week on the VB Dev Center we're featuring another community submitted article by Maurice de Beijer (VB MVP) on Using Windows Communication Foundation with Windows Workflow Foundation . Maurice has a great wiki as well that you should check out if you're doing Windows Workflow development. In this article he shows you how to use SendActivity which enables you to call WCF as well as standard web services in your workflows. Stay tuned for the next article which will show you ho ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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7/3/2008 5:00:00 PM
This week TechEd Online posted the TechEd panel I was on with Erick Thompson and Shyam Pather of the SQL Data team. I thought it was a pretty funny panel description they came up with, ala Dr. Strangelove :
VB XML Literals for C# developers or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Dim You dream in curly braces and end your sentences with semicolons. With Visual Studio 2008, you've seen the power that LINQ brings to your relational data. However, not all of your data is relational; ... [ read more ]
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6/30/2008 9:12:00 PM
In the July/August issue of CoDe Magazine there's an article I wrote with Avner Aharoni (the Program Manager on XML literals) called Sharpening Your Axis with Visual Basic 9 . (They just opened up online access to even non-subscribers today!) I highly recommend this article which shows you from the beginning how XML literals, embedded expressions and axis properties work in Visual Basic.
I start with the basic syntax and definitions and then walk through the XML to Schema t ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi
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6/27/2008 10:57:00 PM
As you can probably tell from my last couple posts I've been working with WPF in different data scenarios. Yesterday I was playing with data validation in WPF and .NET 3.5 which is pretty slick. In this article I'll walk through how to hook up validation in your data objects using the IDataErrorInfo interface and then I'll go through a couple Validation ErrorTemplates you can use to display the validation error messages and cues to the user.
Performing Validation on Data Objects
If you'r ... [ read more ]
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6/24/2008 10:29:22 PM
In my last post on this subject I explored creating WPF UI's dynamically using XML literals. The one part that bugged me a bit was that even though the UI was dynamic, we were using a fixed object model of our customer (using LINQ to SQL classes). I wanted to augment this code a bit more so that we could not only dynamically generate the WPF UI but also dynamically edit any maintenance table in our database -- not just customer. What I really wanted to enable is if we modify the database sc ... [ read more ]
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6/12/2008 11:51:02 PM
Lately I've been getting my hands deep into WPF with my line-of-business (LOB)/data-based application mind set. I'm taking a different approach to the technology resisting the urge to put on my amateur-designer hat and instead purely focus on data, data-binding, formatting controls, and some basic layout. (Yes before you ask, I have started producing the WPF forms over data videos!)
Today I wanted to play with dynamically creating XAML and loading it at runtime. This was really easy using XM ... [ read more ]
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6/9/2008 11:20:00 PM
I feel like I need a T-shirt that says "I survived TechEd". It was my first time at TechEd and no one can really prepare you for how much work and play takes place at a huge conference like that. I had a BLAST. Our VB6 to .NET migration talks went well but I think by far the most fun was working the Visual Studio booths (so much so that I stayed longer there than I signed up for). I also did a .Net Rocks! show on VB XML Literals (I'll let you know when it goes live) and hung out at the MSDN ... [ read more ]
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5/30/2008 11:06:00 PM
John mentioned that they just released a social bookmarking preview so that we can pop social feeds (feeds generated by content bookmarked by you) to enable all members of the community to publish useful resources directly to MSDN and TechNet. Check it out, the visual basic feed is on the VB Dev Center Community page displaying links by popularity.
You can also take a look at my bookmarks , not an exhaustive list of course, I just stated bookmarking 2 days ago ;- ... [ read more ]
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5/16/2008 3:19:12 PM
Thursday: Okay I know it's Friday but I was the last session of the day yesterday and I didn't have time to post afterwards (I'll tell you why in a minute). My duet session with Rob Windsor was on VB6 to .NET Migration. We're going to take this one to TechEd this year as well. We've also done a webcast on this too that you can watch here . There weren't too many people in this one but it's always hard when you are the last session of the last day of a conference. Even though I was slightly ... [ read more ]
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5/13/2008 4:32:52 PM
Monday: I wake up at 3:15am CA time and get to SFO to make a 6am flight to Toronto. (Note: Air Canada flights do NOT leave from the international terminal, they leave from domestic terminal 3, go figure.) But the flight was pretty nice, TVs on the back of the seats and all that. Of course I spent most of the flight writing code.
I land in Toronto and get through customs about 3pm and arrive at the hotel around 4pm, quickly unpack my wrinkled dress shirts and get down to the lobby to meet Rob ... [ read more ]
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5/10/2008 1:33:00 AM
I've had many questions lately on how you can query for a specific node in an XML document (or fragment) and change it's value using LINQ. (This must mean that people are really starting to use this stuff so I'm pretty excited.) This is really easy to do because you can modify the values of the selected XElements from your queries and that will change the source XML.
Here's an example: Imports < xmlns = " urn:mycompany:examples:plants " >
Module Module1
Sub Main()
... [ read more ]
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5/8/2008 11:54:00 PM
The Learn tab of the Visual Basic Developer Center is being updated with a bunch of new content and VS 2008 topics. If you look at the center of the page you'll see the list of topics and when you click one, you should now see some fresh stuff. Currently there's over 200 items presented on the topic pages and we're adding more every week. Right now each of the topics are displayed in a fixed order by content type (i.e. Webcast, Video, Article, Blog, etc.) but we plan on ... [ read more ]
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5/1/2008 12:44:00 AM
The session I did last November at QCon in San Fransisco is online so check it out . In this talk I introduced VB 9's LINQ to XML syntax and XML literals, axis properties, and embedded expressions.
It's so weird watching myself but I think it was a pretty good presentation even though I was fighting a cough. I use my hands a lot (so unlike me <g>) but I think that helps express my points. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. ;-) I'll probably do even more ... [ read more ]
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4/25/2008 11:00:28 PM
Often times we need to parse HTML for data. Sure in a perfect world everything would have a nice service or API wrapped around it but as we all know this is not always the case. Many times we're left with parsing files or "screen scraping" to get the data we need from other applications. Sure this is brittle, but sometimes it's the best we can do. And sometimes you're just trying to get the data once so "good enough" is really good enough. I was faced with that challenge myself this week. Yes ... [ read more ]
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4/16/2008 7:03:41 PM
In my previous posts this week I showed how to build a simple distributed application with a Windows client, a WCF hosted middle-tier and a data access layer that used LINQ to SQL: LINQ to SQL N-Tier Smart Client - Part 1 Building the Middle-Tier LINQ to SQL N-Tier Smart Client - Part 2 Building the Client After sleeping on the design I realized that there's a scenario that we may want to handle. When we built the connected client-server version of the application (using the connect ... [ read more ]
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4/14/2008 6:03:00 PM
In my last post we built the service and data access layer for our LINQ to SQL N-Tier application. In this post we'll walk through building a very simple Windows client form that works with our middle-tier.
Adding the Service Reference
Now that we have our middle-tier built it's time to add the service reference to the client project. Sine we have both .NET on the server and the client I'm going to use type sharing so that we can reuse the business objects (LINQ to SQL classes) on both ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
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4/12/2008 4:01:00 PM
In my previous posts on LINQ to SQL I showed how to build LINQ to SQL classes and set up the data binding in your Windows applications. If you missed them:
Related Data Binding and ComboBoxes with LINQ to SQL
Creating Lookup Lists with LINQ to SQL
One-To-Many (Master-Detail) Forms with LINQ to SQL
Simple Validation with LINQ to SQL Classes
These articles focus on the binding and validation and use a connected model; meaning that the DataContext is alive and available tracking ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
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4/9/2008 4:05:00 PM
I've been getting a lot of mails lately from people trying to build n-tier applications with Visual Studio 2008. Luckily, VS now makes it much easier to build these kinds of applications which have pretty much become the "norm" these days. Here's a feed of items I'm building that should help you get started.
I've been really busy this week tagging items like this in an effort to revamp the Visual Basic Learn area of the Dev Center . The content there is still very popular but ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
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4/4/2008 11:20:00 PM
I was just informed that all the Hands On Labs from the Visual Studio/Windows Server/SQL Server 2008 launch events are available online here .
I took a brief look at the " Visual Basic 9 Language Enhancements " lab and in general it looks good although it completely omits XML Literals and XML properties, I'm assuming because this lab was created before the RTM release. I'd take a look here for a good starting point on XML in VB . I also will plug my XML in VB webcast I did this morning t ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
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4/3/2008 7:55:00 PM
If you missed my March 21st webcast on LINQ to XML in VB then you get another chance to join me live tomorrow at 9AM Pacific. These webcasts have been loads of fun for me. Although I prefer speaking in front of live people (I like to see your faces) I think I'm getting used to the webcast as a great teaching medium.
Live From Red Bethmond: VB9 - Working with XML in Visual Basic 4/4/2008 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) | Duration:60 Minutes
Hope you can join me. Enjoy!
&n ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
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4/1/2008 11:00:00 PM
Bill Burrows , Visual Basic MVP, has done it again and is creating another series of video tutorials on the ASP.NET MVC Framework . Based on ScottGu's blog posts , Bill teaches us how to use this pattern of web development using Visual Basic. Check back often, right now Bill explains the basics and more will be added in the coming weeks.
Enjoy!
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Beth Massi via
Beth Massi
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3/28/2008 3:25:00 PM
Come join me and Rob Windsor in 30 minutes for a webcast on how to move your VB6 investments to .NET!
Live From Red Bethmond: Migrating Your Visual Basic 6 Investments to .NET
Hope to see you all there. If you can't make it live, the download will be available this evening.
Enjoy!
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Beth Massi via
Beth Massi
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3/21/2008 7:00:00 PM
That's right, I'm doing this one again on April 4th since I got such a great turnout! (Let's hope the recording works this time... grrrrrr)
Live From Red Bethmond: VB9 - Working with XML in Visual Basic 4/4/2008 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) | Duration:60 Minutes XML permeates every modern application today from XHTML, XAML, RSS, SOAP, Office Open XML just to name a few. Even your Visual Studio project files and configuration settings are XML files. The latest version of Visua ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
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3/21/2008 2:00:00 AM
I'll be delivering a webcast tomorrow morning on LINQ to XML in VB. I'll show lots of cool demos I promice!
Live From Red Bethmond: VB9 - Working with XML in Visual Basic 3/21/2008 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) | Duration:60 Minutes XML permeates every modern application today from XHTML, XAML, RSS, SOAP, Office Open XML just to name a few. Even your Visual Studio project files and configuration settings are XML files. The latest version of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008 s ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
Beth Massi
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3/18/2008 11:15:00 PM
Bill Burrows, Visual Basic MVP has just released a new set of video tutorials on using Excel for business intelligence using the Excel 2007 Data Mining Add-in . Bill has done a lot of tutorials in the past. If you haven't seen them, I also recommend the tutorial series on Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9.0 and LINQ to SQL . Thanks Bill!
Enjoy!
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3/18/2008 4:02:00 PM
We added 48 How Do I videos ( Forms over data , Windows development , Office development and Security ) to the Visual Basic developer Center in addition to adding new download formats for 12 others. This includes audio files, and additional videos files to make these videos as accessible as possible. You can go directly to the How Do I video series main page to see the complete list.
Many thanks to Rob Windsor , Pat Tormey and Steve Hansen for doing these videos. I also hav ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
Beth Massi
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3/10/2008 3:34:00 PM
Thanks to all who attended Friday's webcast. Unfortunately VOIP in the new version of Live Meeting isn't what it's cracked up to be. And even though I set up a conference call, a lot of people couldn't dial into the toll-free number from other countries. I apologize, and the rest of the webcasts I'll set up through the phone line like we used to do in the old version.
I heard a lot of great feedback from the people that were on the phone (thanks for the encouraging emails!) so I decided to r ... [ read more ]
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Beth Massi via
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3/7/2008 1:45:00 AM
I'll be delivering a webcast tomorrow morning on an intro to LINQ in VB. If you're lost or just want to get started with it, join me and come see what it's all about.
Live From Red Bethmond: VB9 - Introduction to LINQ in Visual Basic 3/7/2008 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)- 3/7/2008 10:00 AM | Duration:60 Minutes LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and it allows you to query over things like objects, databases and XML in a standard way with a new syntax available in the ... [ read more ]
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