Status Report – Jan. 31, 2002


Hey folks,

Here’s my latest status report – just to let everyone know what I’ve been up to. I’ll be posting these occasionally to let you know what’s coming down the pike.

1. I’ve been setting up the infrastructure so that we can standardize on having a chat around 3 weeks after some of our whitepapers. Then we’ll link from the chat transcript to the whitepaper. Gives people a chance to read up on a topic, and then get assistance on it as well.

2. I’m working with the product team to set up regular “Newsgroup and Web Site” blasts – where we’d get together in a room for an hour and answer messages online. Watch this space for more info as it gells.

3. Once #2 is set up, we’re thinking of setting up a “topical blast” where a topic would be selected, folks could post messages for a week, and then we’d come online and work on those questions and set up white papers on it as well.

4. I got community feedback into an upcoming whitepaper on .NET and Interop – thanks to everyone who helped out – I’ll let you know when the paper comes out!


Upcoming chats (http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats):

Windows Forms
Tuesday, February 12, 2002, 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific time (21:00 – 22:00 GMT)
While this session will initially cover the material in the "Essential Code for Windows Forms Dialog Boxes", "Shaped Windows Forms and Controls in Visual Studio .NET", and "Using Windows XP Visual Styles With Controls on Windows Forms" whitepapers, please feel free to ask any Windows Forms-related questions you may have.

Under The Covers With the Common Language Runtime
Thursday, January 31, 2002, 12:00 – 1:00 P.M. Pacific time (20:00 – 21:00 GMT)
The common language runtime (CLR) is the core of the .NET Framework. Built on top of operating system services, it is responsible for executing .NET applications—ensuring that all application dependencies are met, managing memory, handling security, language integration and so on. The runtime supplies many services that help simplify code development and application deployment while also improving application reliability. Brad Abrams, .NET Framework Lead Program Manager and Jim Hogg, Common Language Runtime Program Manager, will be available to answer your questions about CLR.

.NET Remoting
Friday, February 1, 2002, 3:00 – 4:00 P.M. Pacific time (23:00 – 24:00 GMT)
The .NET Remoting development team will address your questions about .NET Remoting, including how .NET Remoting can be used to create distributed applications with .NET and how it can be extended with pluggable channels, formatters and other powerful extensibility points. The chat will also cover security, configuration and versioning.

XML Web Services Interoperability
Thursday, February 7, 2002, 12:00 – 1:00 P.M. Pacific time (20:00 – 21:00 GMT)
The promise of XML Web services rests on interoperability and ubiquity. Open standards and rigorous multi-vendor testing ensure that a rich community of Web services implementations will proliferate. Join us in this session with Keith Ballinger and Yann Christensen from the team that brought you ASP.NET’s Web services stack as we discuss Microsoft’s work in XML Web services interoperability.


Executive Chat with Jim Allchin: Visual Studio .NET
Tuesday, February 12, 2002, 3:00 – 4:00 P.M. Pacific time (23:00 – 24:00 GMT)
Visual Studio .NET is the comprehensive tool for rapidly building and integrating XML Web services and applications, dramatically increasing developer productivity and enabling new business opportunities. Talk to Jim Allchin, Microsoft Group Vice President, about how Visual Studio .NET improves developer productivity and enables new business opportunities.


Get Into the Visual Studio .NET Integrated Development Environment
Wednesday, February 13, 2002, 4:00 – 5:00 P.M. Pacific time (24:00 – 1:00 GMT)
Visual Studio .NET provides a single shared integrated development environment (IDE) to improve developer productivity and to provide an extensible foundation for 3rd party .NET languages and tools. In this session Doug Hodges, Software Architect for the IDE, will be available to answer your questions and provide tips and tricks for improving your development productivity.


Executive Chat with Eric Rudder: Global XML Web Services Architecture
Monday, February 18, 2002, 4:00 – 5:00 P.M. Pacific time (24:00 – 1:00 GMT)
The Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA) provides principles, specifications and guidelines for advancing today’s XML Web services standards. This allows XML Web services to address more sophisticated and complex tasks in standard ways. Through the GXA, XML Web services will continue to advance while remaining the interoperable fabric of application internetworking. Microsoft Senior Vice President Eric Rudder will be available to answer your questions about the GXA and what it means for XML Web services.


Executive Chat with Yuval Neeman: Enterprise Development
Wednesday, February 20, 2002, 3:00 – 4:00 P.M. Pacific time (23:00 – 24:00 GMT)
Enterprise product development, in many ways, is very similar to traditional development. However, enterprise customers tend to be very systematic as opposed to opportunistic in their approach to building applications. Successfully building complex enterprise applications requires a solid architecture and a common understanding of requirements across the development team. Talk to Yuval Neeman, Microsoft Vice President, about Enterprise development challenges today and how Visual Studio .NET Enterprise toolset addresses some of these challenges including design, development, deployment and security.


Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect Tools
Tuesday, April 2, 2002, 2:00 – 3:00 P.M. Pacific time (22:00 – 23:00 GMT)
Successfully building complex enterprise applications requires a solid architecture and a common understanding of requirements across the development team. The role of an architect is typically to help their organizations build applications that scale, integrate with existing systems, fulfill business requirements, and be maintainable over multiple versions of the product. In this session, Keith Short, Software Architect for enterprise features within Visual Studio will answer your questions about the tools Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect provides for architects to build enterprise applications in a systematic, repeatable and predictable manner.



White Papers released this week - available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/guide/ (dates after the title are tentative chat dates):


Creating Web Server Control Templates Programmatically (2/19/02)
Illustrates how to create templates in code for the Repeater, DataList, and DataGrid ASP.NET server controls, showing examples in both Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# .NET.

Top Questions about the DataGrid Web Server Control (3/19/02)
Answers frequently asked questions about using the DataGrid Web server control.

Working with Single-File Web Forms Pages in Visual Studio .NET (3/21/02)
Provides an overview of single-file Web Forms pages, how to work with single-file pages in Visual Studio, and how to convert single-file Web Forms pages to code-behind Web Forms pages.