Scott Stewart

vb.Net World Tour / Road Show

Just got in from attending the vb.net world tour / road show in Albany, NY tonight. Overall it was a pretty good event - check it out if you get a chance in your area (although, I think this might have been one of the last currently scheduled).  

Some of the current stuff we talked about was:

• A soon to be released “Power Pack“ of new Win controls (no word of any new web controls - I asked.) The new Win controls were pretty cool and have an xp/office look to them. We looked at a few of the controls:
• A Utility Toolbar - it had some real cool pre-build templates that included basic File, Edit, Tools stuff with fully populated sub-menus (open, close, save.)
• A “you got mail“ like pop-up notification control
• An Office like Task Pane (with collapsible frames)
• An Ink Tool control that was described and demo'd with the “tablet“ people in mind. Gee, I have an upcoming project that will involve some handwriting capture. It won't be on a tablet, but will be on third party hardware that plugs into a PC. I wonder if this tool will already do what I thought I was going to have to build...I'll have to look at this one further.
• We then were demo'd some interaction with Excel. I didn't get that excited about this. I mean this doesn't seem new. It's cool and serves a purpose...but it seemed exciting a few years ago when I first pulled some data from a database onto an excel form with VBA, and with VB6, and now it's polished up a little and is still being done with .net. This is pretty powerful stuff for the standard office user, but wasn't that much of a “World Tour“ thing to me.

We then moved on to 2005

• First we were told about how much faster the IDE was going to be, and the presenter's IDE did in deed open pretty quickly. As the presentation went on however, we talked more and more about all the new help, code suggestions, quick start code snippets, squiggly line “hey you didn't initialize this variable“ stuff, and I got thinking...How much faster can this thing be, if it also going to be doing all this additional stuff? Time will tell on that.
•  The presenter then started building a hello world to let us see the IDE a little. He dropped a textbox on the form and guess what? The textbox's text was not set to Text1!!! Wow, sometimes the little things mean a lot.
• Some fancy “snapping“ and visuals with control alignment. This looked pretty slick.
• He demonstrated Generics. I had already heard these were coming, but it was cool to see the line of code that created one. I don't think these will do away with the need to create true strong typed collections that inherit from CollectionBase like today. Especially, when you want to include some additional business logic along with your collection. However, it will still be really nice to use Generics when I just want a list of things that is strong typed, and don't have a need for a full collection class.
• We then talked about Partial classes. It was demonstrated how the IDE will use partial classes to separate the “Windows generated code“ from your code. As he was demonstrating the way the IDE separates these, the light bulb went on for me on where I might find this very useful - data access code. Regardless if you are populating business objects or returning datasets from a DataLayer, it could be slick that the code that wires this all up is in one file, and the code that actually imports the SqlClient namespace, or uses the OleDb ado, or Oracle, or a XML reader/writer, is all in a separate file - but of the same class. I am assuming that a partial class could still access private member variables between files (or they wouldn't really be one class). This could be pretty helpful. I'll have to think about this one some more too...
• Edit and Continue...say no more
• Some better binding support for custom Business Objects. There was a quick demo that involved having a form's labels, edit text boxes and data navigation controls automatically created for a given bound business object. While maybe it wouldn't created a form the way you want it to look, it might be a good time-saver to at least get some of that busy work done, and then move things around, clean up, cut and paste to another form etc.
• We talked about the new Class Designer. If you haven't heard about this one yet, its a little like what an ERD is to your DB. It’s sort of a UML that is wired real time to your code. As you change your code, the UML changes, as you change the UML (oops Class Designer) the code changes. I think this is a step in a good direction, but I got the feeling that it was limited in its capabilities. I asked if it would support any “template“ like mechanism to allow for custom things you want to add to your property get/set statements. For example maybe inside every property set statement you want to call a private function to mark the b.o. as dirty. The speaker didn't think that it would be able to support any code template mechanism. That’s a shame, it looks like it could be a cool useful tool, but will probably ship with too little functionality to make it really useful.

Hello blog world

Well, it looks like I finally broke down and decided to push my daily time balance further into deficit. Despite that, I am really looking forward to babbling even more then I do already about .Net, application development, and other fun stuff. I’ll try not to ruffle too many feathers on the first day by not talking about things like DataSets versus BusinessObjects or “Is SOA a replacement for an n-Tier application development” because we all know that custom BusinessObjects are the way to go, and web services are just about talking to other people’s n-Tier applications not your own. Like I said, not on the first day.