Status Report – June 27, 2002

Hey everyone. VSLive last week was a lot of fun. I got to meet a number of you and present a few sessions. Plus, I got to spend some time in NY as a visitor instead of as a native – quite a difference. <g>

I’ve been spending a lot of time working with members of the VB Product Unit who’ve been going online and helping out here and in a number of other newsgroups and websites (btw, if you’re into ASP.NET, check out www.asp.net for their new forums).

The highlights for the week:

1. I’ve got the VB Community website running on an internal server and being tested. Next job is to make sure it’s in great shape (sure seems to be) and then “pour” it into the Gotdotnet template so we can go live. The admin pages aren’t in beautiful shape, but hey, I can deal… <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 just about done with August and moving into September. As always, if you miss them, the transcripts are put online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats.

-yag

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

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.

Creating Accessible Applications with Visual Studio .NET
Tuesday, July 9, 2002, 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific time (21:00 – 22:00 GMT)
Did you know that making your applications accessible is an important aspect of development? In many cases, it is now required by law. Visual Studio .NET has a number of features to enable developers to easily accomplish this task. Come chat with experts about ways to incorporate this into your development practices and have your questions answered.

Chat with Visual Basic Management
Tuesday, July 23, 2002, 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific time (21:00 – 22:00 GMT)
The management of the Visual Basic team would like to hear your suggestions for what features should be in the next major version of Visual Basic .NET. We’ve been collecting feedback via newsgroups and meetings, but we’d like to here from everyone.

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

ADO.NET and XML: Two Great Tastes That Go Great Together
There are many ways to view and work with data today. Traditionally we've used data access technologies such as ADO.NET, which provide us with powerful capabilities primarily focused on relational data. ADO and ADO.NET allow interaction with non-relational data, but the real focus is on traditional tabular data views. More recently we've seen the rise of XML, which is focused on hierarchical data representations In this article, Rockford Lhotka runs through the basics of using ADO.NET to work with XML.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnadvnet/html/vbnet06252002.asp

Tales from the Crypto
This article started with a quest. I wanted a way to store my passwords in an encrypted file because I have a couple of dozen passwords and my memory is not what it once was. I know there are commercial tools to do this, but it looked like a useful exercise for learning a new technique in .NET. I ended up with a simple but complete program in Visual Basic® .NET for encrypting and decrypting a file, and I learned a lot along the way. Since encryption is an important topic for several kinds of development, this article shows you how to construct that program.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnadvnet/html/vbnet06252002.asp

Creating a Design Surface Using Windows Forms and GDI+ in Microsoft .NET
This whitepaper covers techniques used to create a GDI+-based design surface for the user to create and position various graphic elements within a Windows Forms control in Microsoft .NET.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/designsurface.asp