The Visual Basic team has put together a "Live from Redmond" webcast series aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named "Orcas". The series will start April 18th and will continue into June. Some topics that will be covered: Orcas Overview, LINQ Overview, LINQ to SQL Server & O/R Designer Deep Dive, Building N-Tier Applications, Offline Data Caching, Building Service-Oriented Applications, Using the Interop Toolkit to Migrate your VB6 Application and a couple more!

Blog Visual Basic Team...

On the website of SubMain you can download a free copy of the ebook: C#/VB.NET Coding Guidelines. This 100+ page book can help you to write better readable and structured code.

Topics covered:

• Naming Guidelines
• Class Member Usage Guidelines
• Guidelines for Exposing Functionality to COM
• Error Raising & Handling Guidelines
• Array Usage Guidelines
• Operator Overloading Usage Guidelines
• Guidelines for Casting Types
• Common Design Patterns
• Callback Function Usage
• Time-Out Usage
• Security in Class Libraries
• Threading Design Guidelines
• Formatting Standards
• Commenting Code
• Code Reviews
• Additional Notes for VB .NET Developers

 Downloadpage C#/VB.NET Coding Guidelines ebook

Yesterday Microsoft released the long awaited Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005. Many bugs are fixed and there is also new support for processors or for for example SQL Server Compact Edition.

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1 (Standard, Professional, and Team Editions of Visual Studio 2005);
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1;
• Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1;

It is currently installing on my machine... Unfortunately, the service pack which fixes issues with Windows Vista is still in beta and isn't available yet. Expected 2007Q1...

Two days ago Microsoft released to the web the Microsoft Printer Compatibility Library 1.0. The Printer Compatibility library is a new Visual Basic 2005 PowerPack and will help you with migrating your Visual Basic 6.0 projects to Visual Basic 2005. By simply adding a reference to the Library, declaring a Printer, and making a few minor syntax changes, your project will be able to print using the Printers collection and Printer object as it did in Visual Basic 6.0. This will give you more time to focus on enhancing your project with Visual Basic 2005.

 Get it now

Maurice de Beijer (also a Visual Basic MVP) wrote a review of my book: Visual Basic 2005 - De basis. It will published in the upcoming Software Developer Network Magazine (SDN Magazine). Not a member of the SDN? No problem, he published it also on his website (Dutch) 

 Review Visual Basic 2005 - De basis

If (VB6.Importance > VS2003.Importance) Then
    Me.Eat(Devices.Mouse)
End if

Wow... Today's blog post of Soma Somasegar was suprising. Visual Studio.NET 2002 and Visual Studio.NET 2003 will not supported under Windows Vista! That's bad news for many and many developers who needs to support their product under this new OS.. Okay, your .NET 1.1 programs can run, but developing on this platform is not possible.
Good news.. The Visual Basic 6 runtime, as well the Visual Basic 6 IDE will supported.

Some guys suggested to develop in an Virtual Machine like Virtual PC, but I think that will not be an option for most developers. Visual Studio 2005 is already slow, don't even speak about using it in a VM... Why does MS skipped the support? I can imagine that things like debugging can give some troubles, but as even MSFT developers cann't get it working.......?

Today I needed to open a Windows Installer (msi) file to check some settings/code. Microsoft provided us a little tool, called Orca, to fix that job. The Orca database editor is a table-editing tool available in the Windows Installer SDK and it can be used to edit your .msi files. The Orca editor edits and creates also merge module (.msm) files , Internal Consistency Evaluator (.cub) files, and patch creation files (.pcp).

But before you can use this tool, you must install the Windows Server 2003 Platform SDK. A download of about 400 Mb! Pretty big download for a tool which takes only 1,8Mb. I'll save you this trouble by providing the direct download here. Have fun!

Download orca.msi

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Beta (also known as “Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Beta” or “VSTO 2005 SE Beta”) is an add-on to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 that enables you to build application-level add-ins for the 2007 Microsoft Office system as well as the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions.

VSTO 2005 SE Beta features several new important investments in the area of Office programmability. Whether it’s in the revolutionized and highly extensible Office user interface, or in the support for managed add-ins in Office applications not previously covered by Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office, there exist a number of great new opportunities and challenges for Microsoft Office solution developers. VSTO 2005 SE Beta leverages the solution development environment of Visual Studio 2005 to help you use these opportunities and challenges to take your solutions to the next level.

VSTO 2005 SE Beta also includes support for Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 forms, previously available as a separate download for Visual Studio 2005. You can design InfoPath 2007 form solutions right in the Visual Studio 2005 environment.

Feature highlights:

• Application-level add-in projects for six applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system: Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office Visio 2007, and Microsoft Office Word 2007.
• Support for the new Ribbon user interface extensibility model.
• Support for the new application-level customizable task pane.
• Support for managed code behind InfoPath 2007 forms, which enables the InfoPath 2007 design environment to appear inside Visual Studio 2005 for an integrated experience across your Visual Studio projects. You can use it to design forms with or without managed code.
• Support for Outlook custom form regions.
• Application-level add-in projects for five Microsoft Office 2003 applications: Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office Visio 2003, and Microsoft Office Word 2003.

Check it out!

Microsoft released the first two Power Packs for Visual Basic 2005. The first Power Pack is the Interop Forms Toolkit. This toolkit provides tools and components that simplify the process of building forms with Visual Basic .NET that can be easily consumed from Visual Basic 6. All the required COM interop components can be created with the click of a button, allowing you to quickly create powerful applications. The Toolkit makes it easy to expose .NET form methods, properties, and events to Visual Basic 6. In addition, functionality is provided to share application state and signal application-level events.

The second Power Pack is the PrintForm component. This component is designed to bring back the ability to easily print a Windows Form. With this the new PrintForm component, you can once again lay out the Windows Form exactly as you want it and allow your users to print the form as a quick report.