Status Report – June 13, 2002


Another week gone by. I catch a plane tomorrow to NY for VSLive! I’ll be doing a couple of presentations there. Any of you who are attending, please stop by and say hello.

I haven’t gotten any feedback on the MSDN walkthroughs, so I’ll let the question stand for one more week. What types of walkthroughs would you be interested in? What improvements would you make?

The highlights for the week:

1. I hope to get the RC1 version of the VB community website at the end of next week (when I return from VSLive!). The middle tier and back ends are running, along with a (not really pretty) front end. Guess what the work this week will focus on? <g>

2. Lots of work on getting people online and more user group support. Lots of great feedback on the newsgroups this week.

3. Work on the next version of VB .NET

4. Work on rolling out community awareness and feedback to the worldwide subs. Continuing to work with many others on a plan now so that we can do it properly.

5. More chats planned – we’re into August now (with a few weeks in July being finalized). If you have any topics you’d like covered, let me know! This past week’s chat (on the datagrid) was incredibly well attended. The transcript should be online soon at http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats.

-yag


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

Forms and the Windows Forms Designer
Tuesday, June 18, 2002, 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific time (21:00 – 22:00 GMT)
Join us for a discussion of developing Windows applications using Windows Forms and the power of the Windows Forms Designer.


Web Forms General Discussion
Tuesday, June 25, 2002, 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific time (21:00 – 22:00 GMT)
Join Microsoft experts in an online chat about WebForms. Any and all questions are welcome; from basic to advanced!

Windows Forms Custom Control Development
Tuesday, July 2, 2002, 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific time (21:00 – 22:00 GMT)
Recently, MSDN featured a number of whitepapers on Windows Forms control development. "Developing Custom Windows Controls Using Visual Basic .NET" (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/custcntrlsampover.asp ) is an overview with links to a number of specific walkthroughs. In this chat we’ll discuss these whitepapers and some of the issues involved in developing controls.

Building International Applications Using Visual Basic .NET
Tuesday, August 6, 2002, 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific time (21:00 – 22:00 GMT)
Planning and executing the development of an internationalized application can be difficult without the right preparation. Come talk with the experts about any questions you have regarding internalization.

White Papers
Exception Management Application Block
The Exception Management Application Block provides a simple yet extensible framework for handling exceptions. With a single line of application code you can easily log exception information to the Event Log or extend it by creating your own components that log exception details to other data sources or notify operators, without affecting your application code. The Exception Management Application Block can easily be used as a building block in your own .NET application.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/emab-rm.asp
Updated Data Access Application Block
The Data Access Application Block is a .NET component that contains optimized data access code that will help you call stored procedures and issue SQL text commands against a SQL Server database. It returns SqlDataReader, DataSet, and XmlReader objects. You can use it as a building block in your own .NET application to reduce the amount of custom code you need to create, test, and maintain. The download provides full C# and Visual Basic .NET source code and comprehensive documentation.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/daab-rm.asp