On April 29th, the Visual C# and Windows Forms product teams are coming to Brussels for a full day of presentations on their products and technologies in Visual Studio 2005. Both Dan Fernandez (C# Product Manager) and Joe Stegman (Lead Program Manager for .NET Client team) are very experienced and good speakers. In fact, I still remember one presentation by Joe Stegman on WinForms 2.0 on PDC. In fact, I was so impressed that I even blogged about that particular session. More information and registration on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/events/.

BTW: Dan Fernandez invites for a meet up when he's in Brussels.

See you all in Brussels on April 29!

Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft released its Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System version 1.0.  Reza Chitsaz brought an excellent preview of the new features in "Trinity" or VSTO 2.0.

Here are some facts, based on the demos:

• This version will still only work with Word & Excel (version 2003). Other Office tools may be supported in the future.
• On top of Word documents, Word templates and Excel documents, VSTO 2.0 will also support Excel templates (from beta 1 on).
• Excel and Word will now be hosted inside the IDE of Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey" while developing.
• To avoid menu cluttering, the Excel menus will be cascaded inside Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey"'s menus. For example: when you click on the Tools menu, the first menu item will be "Microsoft Excel Tools menu" which can expand and include Excel's Tools menu in the sub menu. This will also be true for Word.
• In Excel you'll be able to create a named range, for example 1 cell. In your code each range is accessible as an object and will have its own events. One example of an event would be the "Change" event, making it possible to trap changes to one or more cells.
• VSTO 2.0 will be available as part of Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey" and will also be delivered with the betas.
• An assembly can still be linked to the document, but with VSTO 2.0 it can also be embedded in the document.
• All (rich) WinForms controls can be on a document with VSTO 2.0.
• There are Excel specific controls (List and Range) to enable developers using their usual way of working.
• Data binding is now natively supported, no workaround, no hacks, you bind your data to a control, just as you would do with a regular WinForms application. You can even data bind to for example a chart and other native Office controls.
• External data can also be embedded in the document for offline working. This data is stored in a data island, which is actually a DataSet (read: XML)
• SmartPane objects are getting smarter! They can now be created with only one line of code:
  SmartPane.Controls.Add(mySmartPaneControl)
  These SmartPanes can now also be created like building a WinForms user control. They can also host the rich WinForms controls;
• After you apply an XML Schema to your Word document, objects are created for each element in the schema. You can use events to respond to, for example, data changes.
• There will be a "server" class for working with Word and Excel document data on the (web)server. High scalability is a priority for VSTO 2.0, so it won't create an instance of the application. The purpose of this "server" class will be to modify the data in the data island. This makes it possible to work with the data inside the document, but you won't be able to create a completely new document on the fly with VSTO 2.0.
  Well, actually you can, but you can do it right now without VSTO: just create a Word document using WordML (XML schema for Word document)
• ClickOnce technology is supported. It won't be the real ClickOnce which only supports executable, but the Trinity-team is making something similar for VSTO. That solution will have the same possibilities as ClickOnce. One side note: documents which are protected with DRM won't be able to get automatically updated, since DRM enforces this.
• Security is also high priority, but I don't think they made many changes to version 1.0. Except of course for the embedded assemblies, which can only be trusted by their signature (since there is no location).
• You'll need Office 2003 for making full use of the VSTO 2.0, both on the client and on the server.
• VSTO 2.0 will be available as part of "Whidbey". The first test version will be made available with "Whidbey" beta 1, so it's currently not in our "goodies bag".

Gee, I'm writing too long posts here...

I still remember one keynote from last PDC (in 2001): the one of Microsoft Research. I'll probably remember this one too. Not only does Rick Rashid knows how to deliver his presentations, the things he and his colleagues demonstrate are the result of long and hard work. Hard work for which Microsoft didn't get paid at all. Of course, it will pay of on the longer term, but Microsoft Research is probably one of the important branches to have Microsoft build great software.

The details are mostly listed in other blog posts, so I'm not going to repeat them over here.

I didn't know that the URL was made public already but since Rob Howard posted about it, I guess there is not problem with giving you the URL where you can download the Whidbey ASP.NET hands-on labs: http://asp.net/whidbey/pdc.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1. There are some pretty screenshots in it of what to expect from ASP.NET.

Be sure to have a look at HOL-301 and HOL-302, these are the ones I talked/wrote about earlier. See that I didn't lie about it.

Yesterday I finished the day by doing a hands-on lab on the new ASP.NET technology. It seems that major enhancements have been done here too.

Databinding

I actually created a webpage to view data in a grid, complete with editing, sorting and paging support, filtering by data selected from a combobox and much more. I didn't have to write one single line of code!

SQL Server Caching

Everyone knows page caching in ASP.NET. There was one case you couldn't use it: when the application needs to reflect changes in a SQL database. Well, the new ASP.NET will support invalidation of the cache when data is changed in SQL Server. And it's not marketing talk, it does it already.

I found one disadvantage for this, you need to execute a command line tool to set up the database for SQL Server caching. This might be quite difficult in scenarios where don't have full access to the webserver, like for example in Shared Hosting at a hosting company (like HostBasket or WebHost4Life) scenario's. Perhaps Microsoft will change this later.

Personalization, authentication, membership

Actually, I didn't take a lab on this creating these features, but they are all supported with a minimum of coding. Quite amazing!

Internet / Intranet website

A full blown internet site with quite a cool layout is provided as template. The Intranet website template even supports personalization and authentication right when it's created. Can you imagine that different parts of a website can be moved on the page, removed or added from/to the page? All of this is already in the template, you don't have to code anything for this. I guess I can't write out exactly how excited I'm about this!

Master pages

Didn't do this in the lab either, but I feel the urge to mention it here too. You have some sort of visual inheritance in ASP.NET with Whidbey! Create a master template (which is fully compiled) and reuse it in different other pages Great!

A conclusion, the PDC is just over it's half and I can already conclude that it succeeded big time for me. Yes, it's a great succes. One major disadvantage of this conference, one will have to go back home and continue developing real world applications with Visual Studio .NET 2003 for quite some time. Perhaps I just should go back to the hotel and forget about everything that has been said here. On the bus over here, I heared two people talking: "I slept very bad tonight, I was too excited about the stuff they show us". While I had a very good night of sleep, I do understand what that guy was saying...

Due to the popularity of some sessions, I decided to do a hands-on lab instead of following a session in an overcrowded room. Due to my love for Visual Basic (hey, just shoot me :)), I chose to do the lab on new features of VB.NET in Whidbey. Here's an overview of what I think to be exciting new features:

Generics

Yes, VB.NET will support generics.

Dim myProducts As New List(Of Products)

The previous line will create a list collection of objects of the Products type.

Operator overloading

Yes, you will be able to overload operators. This enables you to specify how the compiler should treat operators, such a plus, minus, ...,  for your own type.

Shared Operator +(ByVal person1 As Person, ByVal person2 As Person2) As Couple

This will allow you to specify what must happen when 2 Person objects are added. In the previous example it will return a Couple object.

I know, I know, C# had this already since v1.0, but hey, it's coming to VB.NET too...

The "My" object

The "My" object lets a developer do things he might need to do regularly, like:

• Retrieving information about the logged on user (domain, user name, Windows roles)
• Retrieving application information (description, file name, name of the special folder for storing user & application bound data)
• Retrieving information about the computer
• Event logs
• Keyboard information (is caps or num lock pressed)
• Mouse information (is it a wheel mouse, how many buttons are on the mouse)
• Screen information (resolution, boundaries)
• Network information (connected, IP address)
• Accessing the registery
• Accessing printer information

Well, as you can imagine, quite a full set of things a developer might want to access.

XML Comments

After typing '@ the editor will automatically generate an XML comments template with all parameters defined for the method.

Unsigned types

Visual Basic .NET is going to support unsigned types. You know, a "word" for example is an unsigned integer: in VB.NET is will become a UInteger if I recall it correctly. This allows developers to save memory in some cases. Example: you want to store a number between 0 and 40,000. Currently you have to use a Long for that which takes 8 bytes. By using an unsigned integer you will be able to store this value in 2 bytes.

IDE tools to create data driven forms

I actually created an application with one form displaying categories of products and in detail the products themselves. In addition filtering of the detail data was also provided (on stock or unavailable). All with no code at all.

Smart tags

Smart tags (and not Smart Tasks like I wrote earlier) for great help in doing some common layouting stuff. For example changing a DataContainer control from displaying a grid into individual fields for a record can be done just by clicking.

Autocorrecting mistakes

Visual Basic .NET will actively help you correcting (stupid) mistakes. Suppose you defined a read-only property, but created a Get and Set method in the property. Visual Basic .NET will at design-time tell you there is something wrong, just as it did before. But now, VB.NET helps you by identifying 2 solutions: the first one is removing the "Readonly" from the property, the second one is removing the "Set" method. You just pick the solution you want and VB applies it. And oh yes, this feature has to be triggered manually by using a smart tag on the squizzles (blue line) that appear under the error line.

Edit and continue

Well, it actually works on the PDC bits of Whidbey. Believe me, I tried it. However, I did not push it to the limits. And you can also reposition the line that will be executed by dragging the yellow arrow.

Partial types

You do not longer need to create a type (class) in one file. From Whidbey on, you can create one part of the type in one file and another one in another file. This is especially great if you have several developers working on one type. I know I could have used this in more than one project I worked on.

Code snippets

For many common tasks, Whidbey provides code snippets. Many applications need to save some content to a file in the My Documents folder. Instead of coding this every time again or copy-pasting it from a library, just use the code snippets (right click in the code and go the code snippets popup menu). Code snippets can contain template fields. These template fields are used for data that must probably be changed (in our example this would be the file name and the actual content that you will save). You can switch between these template fields by using the Tab key.

Best of all, a developer can create his own code snippets and define his own template fields in every snippet.

I'm not sure where the snippets are stored and if they can be shared amongst several developers (in a database, for example).

Isn't this great?

Today on the PDC, Microsoft also announced "Whitehorse" which will also be a part of Whidbey. "Whitehorse" will assist in making enterprise deployment of SOA applications easier. A network administrator will design the datacenter layout and specify restrictions set on each part of the datacenter. For example, he can defined that webservers in the DMZ do not allow XML web services installed on it. Another example: he can define that internal application servers must use Impersonation for their data access. The solution architect on his side, specifies which parts of a solution must be installed on specific servers. If there is a conflict between the datacenter restrictions and the solution, Whitehorse will identify it during architecture and solve the issue itself if possible.

There is probably a lot more to know about Whitehorse, but it seems promissing that developers and IT Pro's will be able to work together in a constructive manner for deploying applications in the datacenter.

After the keynote of Eric Rudder, there was another one by Gord Mangione (who was assisted by Tom Rizzo) about SQL Server "Yukon" and the WinFS (part of Longhorn). Both seem to have some quite nifty features and use cases. For WinFS, I think we might need to get a bit acquainted to the possibilities: having all data accessible by using and querying properties sounds nice. It goes a  lot further than just indexing the data with Microsoft's Indexing Service.

In SQL Server "Yukon", it's quite nice use compiled managed code in the database server itself. And the fact that it mixes smoothly with T-SQL and XML (for example XQuery), not only for execution but also for debugging, makes it a great product.

Quite a remarkable notice for SQL Server Reporting Services should be made too. After Analysis Server, this might become a very handy part. It isn't even limited to SQL Server data, you can use any OLE DB, ODBC and ADO.NET supported database in the Reporting Services, like Oracle, ODBC databases, etc... Reports can be published in HTML, Word, XML, PDF, and so on. More info on Reporting Services can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/spotlight/reporting.asp and http://www.microsoft.com/sql/reporting/default.asp. Definitely take a look at this...

PDC 2003 Early Bird deadline has been extended to Sept. 24th.

Through DonXML: MSDN Universal Subscribers can get an extra USD300 discount on top of the USD300 discount of the Early Bird when registering for the PDC 2003. Check out the following posts on DonXML's blog:

• http://weblogs.asp.net/donxml/posts/26824.aspx
• http://weblogs.asp.net/donxml/posts/27039.aspx

While catching up on some RSS feeds, I felt the need for a site/RSS feed which would gather PDC related blog entries. A site like TechEdBloggers.net, but then for PDC related materials. So I checked TechEdBloggers.net and yes, these guys (Drew, Mike and Kevin) have just announced they will kick off a PDCBloggers site, just like they did for TechEd. They say they will open soon... Let's hope their site is up and running next week, as they suggest...

And discussing PDC with people from the Belux community at http://groups.msn.com/PDC2003ForumForBelux/

Microsoft Watch reports that Whidbey (successor to VS.NET 2003) is officially in alpha stage and released to a limited number of testers. They also report, what we all hope for, that a beta of Whidbey might be distributed on the PDC2003.