This is a great idea that Thom Robbins, the New Englend DE for Microsoft, put together. It is a weekend (9a – 9pm!!) full of many training classes on a variety of .NET topics to help developers get up to speed over the weekend.

There will be three separate tracks during each session, so coders can pick and choose throughout the day what they want to focus on.

The schedule is here.

There is someone coordinating anyone from our area (Burlington VT) that wants to make the trip to share rides and hotel/motel rooms. Comment on this post if you would like that email information.

This* is a humongous honor, especially since I am third in line after Chris Sells and Paul Vick.

I’m a little embarrassed by that title, but it’s just what the article is called.

I’ll be hanging around DevSource’s forums for a few days if you really want to harrass me or anything. It might be a good way to promote a few things, like BOFs at TechEd or whatever.

*that’s the home page link and of course that page will eventually change, so here is a more permanent link…

For my data friends out there ,I would just like to point out that my previous post is about the VERY first thing I wanted to look at when I had the new bits installed!! 🙂

I have been bitching for a while about the loss of the debugger’s ability to drill into a dataset/datatable in the same way that we could in VB6. There is even a project (I have yet to look at…sorry) on GotDotNEt to make up for this.

I have been told – just wait, visualizers will help!! But the Whidbey PDC bits did not have everything necessary. The new bits (VS2005 March Preview) do. And there are two great articles on using them. One is in Scott Nonnenberg’s weblog and the other is an article by Morgan Skinner in the current MSDN Magazine, which also explains DataTips and the totally awesome DebuggerDisplay attributes.

Before I get to Visualizers, I want to point out datatips if you haven’t seen or heard of them quite yet. DataTips are very much like QuickWatch, except they are available by hovering over the object you want to get information on. In general, debugging has been greatly improved for ado.net objects. In .NET 1.0 and 1.1, when you used Watch or QuickWatch to drill into a datatable, you could see how many objects were in the columns collection or rows collection, but you could not inspect those objects without explicitly typing that object (eg: mytable.columns(1)) into the debugger you were using. Now you can open up the datatable, and keep drilling in, right into the column and other objects to see the properties. Here is what that looks like using the datatips instead of QuickWatch, but the effect should be the same:

1) hover over object and datatip will popup up (note the plus sign is for the datatips, the spy glass is for visualizers)

2) clicking on the plus sign exposes the structure of the datatable which is similar to what we see in 1.0/1.1

3) clicking on Columns is just basic info on the collection, again, not new yet…

4) Finally I have selected list (the dimmed window behind), which shows the guts of the array that makes up the collection and from there, I selected items and …voila, here are the individual data columns. You can see that I can continue into them from here if I wanted.

So this is where I will want to go do something with an inherited datatable class that uses debuggerdisplay attributes so that I can see something useful. Instead of
“(1) System.Data.DataColumn“, I’d MUCH rather see the name of the column.

But, not this weekend! Instead, what I did today (in C# no less and here’s the proof…)

was write a visualizer that quickly exposes the info I am most often looking for quickly from a datatable. How many rows, how many columns and what are the names (and positions) of the columns.

Here is my visualizer in action. You will notice that there are two of them here. One is a pre-written visualizer that was included in the install. It displays a simple grid of the actual data – the other most obvious thing I would be looking for. The second is the one I wrote.

And here is what you get when clicking on mine (JL DataTable)

This is just the beginning – a few experiments. I only used a little messagebox. Imagine creating a gridview and populating it with the properties of datatable the way you want to see them and then drilling into the various properties, methods, collections that are exposed.

I like that idea!

I am even more excited about the debuggerDisplay attributes. I saw that at PDC (Kit George’s BCL talk) but he wasn’t using PDC bits and I spent a lot of time trying to get that to work in VB or C#, before I was finally told that I needed to wait for new bits. So those are here now, too. Whoopee! Morgan’s MSDN article gives a really great first look at the DebuggerDisplay and only your imagination (and some completely locked up classes) will stop you.

This evening I received a reply to an email that I wrote 16 months ago!

In January 2003, I sent the following email to my user group:

Folks, go check out: http://www.crystalreportsbook.com

Basically the story goes that this book was written for APress and then the contract was cancelled due to a lack of .Net book sales. Too bad. Maybe O’Reilly can print it under their “Missing Manuals” category…

So, anyway, here is the link.

I suggest that the first thing to check out is the FAQ’s! Then take a look at the chapters online – for free, until a publisher is found.

I have put this link on our website as well.

Now if *I* were to write a book on Crystal Reports, it would probably look something like this:

“I love it I hate it I love it I hate it I can’t live with it I can’t live without it I love it I hate it I love it I hate it I can’t live with it I can’t live wi…”

I had cc’d the author, Brian Bischof on this email.

Tonight he emailed me back to say that the book, Crystal Reports .NET Programming, has been published and includes much of the feedback he has recieved in the past year and a half.

Brian – Congratulations and thank you for your perseverence!

I swear, I really am coding these days, but it’s nothing new. Just getting ready to crank out the puzzle pieces of a pluggable framework I devised for my client. It will handle possibly hundreds of different data entry forms for the various testing services they perform for their clients. The app leverages a boat load of .Net framework technologies and has been a blast to architect. I know that sounds so generic that I could be completely bullshitting, but most of what I have done for it is written about in a LOT of previous posts.

Thom Robbins is the Microsoft D.E. for New England. He blogs this morning about a recent presentation at a corporation that is heavily invested in VB6 and ready (?) to move to .NET. He makes a point that I have tried to deliver over and over again to developers.

Many times what people miss is that even though the code moves, you aren’t getting the full benefit of the .NET platform. …. In order to fully leverage the architectural paradigm shift and full power of .NET, it is essential that developers and architects approach applications with these expanded concepts in mind.

This is really one of my mantras when I talk to other developers. There is just so much in the framework that will make your life and your applications better. I understand that there are many situations where it is just not feasible to just redesign a whole application. As in independent who has total control over what tools I use, I had the good fortune to make a decision in the spring of 2002 that going forward, 100% of my new projects will be done in .NET.

If you have spent any time on Jonathan Goodyear’s www.angrycoder.com site, you will know that he has never been shy about how he feels about VB.NET (well, sometimes I think he targets the VB developers, not just the language). So in his ASP.NETPro Mag commentary on the lack of Edit & Continue in ASP.NET 2.0 (yes, E&C will only be in Windows Forms!) it is amazing to hear him say (well, see him write…) :

I think that omitting Edit-and-Continue from VS 2005 would be a colossal miscalculation that Microsoft will regret. The future will validate this obvious prediction. Edit-and-Continue is so important to me, that I plan to make VB.NET my preferred development language if C# does not support it (the future of that is hopeful, but still unknown). Those who are familiar with my history of commentary regarding C# vs. VB.NET can appreciate just how big a move that would be for me. If ASP.NET doesn’t support Edit-and-Continue, we’re back at square one.

I don’t really think Jonathan will EVER give up web development of course…

I have not used drag and drop data features since I first started learning VB4, but I don’t mind doing it just to explore the features of the IDE, so even though the README says this

“Drag and drop from data source window onto a form is not very stable. “

I wanted to see how “not stable”. LOL – pretty “not stable”!  It gave me 164 errors. It’s just test bits and I don’t have a problem with that at all… but it was just funny to see. I had to stop playing though since Rich rented a DVD and that box is what we use as a DVD player to plug into the t.v.

Well I ended up just dedicating my laptop to installing VS2005. It already had Whidbey PDC bits on it so I wasn’t planning on depending on it for anything else. I had to do a LOT of uninstalling first – VS.NET Whidbey, .NET Framework Whidbey, then the new install also forced me to uninstall .net 1.1, VS.net 2003, vs.net2003 help files. But after that, the install went just peachy. Sadly, I am not bringing my laptop with me to Seattle tomorrow, so I will play for a few hours tonight and then leave it for a week. My tiny little tablet is coming with me to Microsoft and I plan to bring reading materials – one novel – Scott Spencer’s new book (Scott is a “local” in Rhinebeck, NY where I used to live, so I thought it would be fun to read his latest) and one [JUST ONE] .NET book. Maybe I’ll bring the ADO.NET 2 book with me that is the current book for the .NET book club. Or maybe I’ll bring Paul Vick’s new VB book or – hmm that stack is VERY tall these days….