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Bill Sheldon via
Bill Sheldon
on
6/3/2009 2:12:50 AM
Did I mention I was planning on speaking tonight at the San
Diego .NET Developer’s group ? I was asked to do a short presentation on
Generics as part of tonight’s meeting, as part of something we’ve introduced called
.NET Fundamentals. The idea is that User Groups are meant to help people come
up to speed, but of late it seems more and more like we’re only focusing on the latest
what’s new, whiz-bang stuff. So to help with some of the folks who really are
just getting starte ... [ read more ]
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by
Bill Sheldon via
Bill Sheldon
on
5/27/2009 8:22:07 PM
So a couple weeks ago I posted a note prior to the start of TechEd (Time
for Tech Ed North America) talking about how if I could have gone this year the
one session I would have been certain to not miss was DTL336 Future Directions
for Visual Basic with Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Aneja. Well good news
this video has been made publicly available. The video is the full hour of the
session and starts with Anders discussing the future of programming languages.
Before I give ... [ read more ]
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by
Bill Sheldon via
Bill Sheldon
on
5/10/2009 5:02:01 PM
So I won’t be at Tech Ed this year. I just started my job with Rubio’s ( www.rubios.com )
- home of the world famous fish taco. I accepted a position in the corporate organization
and only started last week which makes heading off to a week long convention a little
unrealistic. I will be up in LA at Tech Ed today (the day before it actually gets
started, Microsoft is hosting a few sessions for MVPs today.)
Fortunately although I won’t be there Microsoft is making a great deal of technical
... [ read more ]
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via
Bill Sheldon
on
10/28/2008 12:33:28 AM
So
although I've been heads down, I have noticed that .NET 4.0 and the latest Visual
Studio 2010 CTP have been released. There are alot of great things coming but
one which may cause a little confusion based on it's name is CoVariance. Both
C# and VB are getting CoVariance but what does that mean. Well let's start with
generics. When teaching I like to introduce generics by saying “OK now this
feature is called ‘generics’ but it’s all about specifics.” I ... [ read more ]
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Bill Sheldon
on
10/15/2008 11:05:55 PM
I ran into some code today which caught me off guard. In the event handler for
the Exit menu item was the command:
Application.Current.Shutdown()
(Note I've omitted the ; for C# syntax vs VB)
Now traditionally I've always used:
Close()
(I've omitted the 'this' or 'me' as well as the ; for those looking for language specifics...)
So is there a difference and is one better? Well there is definitely a difference
and in my opinion each is definitely better ... [ read more ]
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via
Bill Sheldon
on
4/18/2008 12:27:25 AM
This is one of those 'hey look at me' posts that always make me feel like... well
if you recognize the title of the movie that the quote which is the title of this
movie comes from - that pretty much sums it up.
Anyway a few 'ads'.
First off, I have a new article available over at SQL Magazine. It's a very
introductory article to LINQ for SQL so if you are looking for a good starting point
for just getting started with LINQ, here's a short article that might be of assistan ... [ read more ]
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via
Bill Sheldon
on
12/24/2007 6:36:36 AM
This weblog hosted by Orcsweb Managed Hosting .
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by
via
Bill Sheldon
on
11/16/2007 10:11:24 PM
It's Friday so in a slightly more light hearted spirit I thought I'd link to a
less serious post. I for one have written about and certainly talked
about the persona Mort. Mort for those not up to speed is a Microsoft 'persona'.
Microsoft created these persona's to help them focus on the type of person that used
a given product. Paul Vick has a fun little post describing (with pictures)
three of the main developer persona's and suggesting that it's time f ... [ read more ]
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Bill Sheldon
on
11/2/2007 5:44:06 AM
This winter I'll be taking my first crack at a new class at the UCSD Extension.
It's surprising that I'm heading into my third year teaching the Visual Basic .NET
Programming II class and now I'll get to do my own lead in. I'm looking forward
to this opportunity especially since I'll be updating the materials to account for
Visual Studio 2008. As always I'll make certain the course supports those who
only have access to the VB Express Edition in terms of lab work.
So if y ... [ read more ]
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by
via
Bill Sheldon
on
11/1/2007 9:06:18 AM
Often as a new release
of Visual Studio approaches there are posts regarding, where are the two primary languages
in .NET going? In short as has been noted
on one or two places around the net the VB MVPs posed the question of, what is the
strategic long term expectation for VB and how is VB doing in the market? Which
language should I learn, which will help me get a job? etc.
(The
short answer regarding which language to learn is - if you are g ... [ read more ]
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by
via
Bill Sheldon
on
10/26/2007 8:07:11 PM
One of the most highly anticipated features of Visual Studio 2008 is XML Literals.
It doesn't sound like much until you start thinking about some of the ways that you
can leverage this capability. One creative way is to replace code, Beth Massi
of the VB Team recently made a post highlighting a little of the power that you can
have with XML Literals in Visual Basic 2008.
http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2007/10/23/avoid-underscores-in-your-multiline-strings.aspx
Wh ... [ read more ]
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by
via
Bill Sheldon
on
8/28/2007 10:05:05 PM
Matt Gertz of the Visual Basic team has posted an excellent discussion describing
the release process for Microsoft's product development teams. Often as
a presenter I'm asked 'how does Microsoft do it?'. Matt's post does an
excellent job of talking about the project management details of managing quality
for a product release.
http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/08/27/endgame-matt-gertz.aspx
This weblog hosted by Orcsweb Managed Hosting .
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by
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Bill Sheldon
on
8/28/2007 12:11:54 AM
I keep meaning and forgetting to add a link to an excerpt from the latest edition
of the Profession Visual Basic .NET 3.0 book. The editorial staff chose to excerpt
a portion of one of my chapters to let you see some of what is new in the current
edition. We of course are already working on the next edition now that Visual
Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are in Beta 2, but for the time being this book offers some
insight into the new .NET 3.0 technologies.
http://www ... [ read more ]
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by
via
Bill Sheldon
on
4/23/2007 4:28:55 PM
I'm planning to teach the Spring quarter's edition of Visual Basic II. The class
is designed to pick up for students who have been through an introductory .NET Framework
class and an initial Programming with Visual Basic I class. Previously the class
has focused on .NET 2.0 but with the recently released .NET 3.0 now available we'll
be spending some of the additional class time looking at things like XAML, WPF, WF
and LINQ (part of the .NET 3.5 feature set). Additionally for ... [ read more ]
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by
via
Bill Sheldon
on
4/16/2007 9:15:42 PM
One of the items I learned when I was requested to speak to the LA C# User Group,
was that they were essentially affiliated with the SoCal .NET User Group ( http://www.socaldotnet.org/ ).
Apparently the same speaker coordinator works both groups and they meet one after
the other. Thus I was also requested to speak to the Orange Country group on
the following night April 4th. Since some people attend both meetings I agreed
to adjust my topic slightly.
In this cas I ad ... [ read more ]
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Bill Sheldon
on
4/16/2007 8:06:36 PM
So I'm currently planning my next MSDN presentation which will occur May 9th and focus
on the Microsoft Office Suite. I'll have more details and a link to that presentation
in the near future.
In the interim I suggest checking out the upcoming "Live From Redmond" web cast series
which the VB Team is putting on. This series will focus in on the new features
in Orcas (next version of Visual Studio) and Visual Basic 9.0 (VB 9.0). The
presentations are linked as a group on th ... [ read more ]
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by
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Bill Sheldon
on
2/21/2007 6:45:00 AM
So earlier this week I finally completed my final chapter for the next Visual Basic
book from Wiley/Wrox, "Professional VB 2005 with .NET 3.0" book. The
book is due to be released right around Tech Ed and you can view more information
on it here:
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470124709.html .
For those of you familiar with the "Star Trek" movies - lets just say this is an even
numbered release, but more on that at another time.... which since it ... [ read more ]
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by
via
Bill Sheldon
on
8/5/2006 8:51:40 PM
On Tuesday August 1st I was one of the presenters at the San Diego .NET Developers
Group ( http://www.sddotnetdg.org/ ).
The evening focused on a discussion of new features in Visual Basic and C# under .NET
2.0. I handled the Visual Basic portion of the presentation, while my coworker
Adam Calderon handled the new features in C# presentation. Attached to this
post are the slides that cover some of the new features in Visual Basic .NET.
NewVBin2.pps (1.76
MB)
... [ read more ]
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Bill Sheldon
on
7/21/2006 7:03:45 AM
This August I'll once again be teaching at the University of California San Diego
(UCSD). I've now got a couple semesters with the Visual Basic .NET Programming
II class under my belt and so I'm more comfortable suggesting that folks come on down
for the class. The entire class is .NET 2.0 and focuses on the language and
it's use in smart client applications. If you are interested check out the registration
pages from UCSD at: http://extension.ucsd.edu/studyarea/index.cfm?vC ... [ read more ]
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