Section: Blogs

Hey Scott Seely is blogging!!

Apr 14, 2004 1 min.

Scott, one of my colleagues from my first year at MSDN, has a blog now and he just posted a cool entry illustrating the new configuration system in VS 2005… Configuration is a breeze. _In the current Visual Studio .NET 2005, you’re going to find that a great thing has happened to configuration. Basically, the mechanism for creating, editing, and parsing configuration sections just got really easy. If this particular item snags a bit of interest, I’ll go as deep as I can in future posts.

C# Featurette #3 from Eric Gunnerson

Apr 14, 2004 1 min.

Eric describes a new Whidbey feature focused on creating those ‘utility’ classes in the style of System.Math or System.Environment: _C# Whidbey Featurette #3: Static classes Because all functions in C# must live inside of a class, there are some clases – System.Math is a canonical example – that are merely collections of static methods. Since it's useless to create an instance of such a class, in current versions of C#, you can protect against this by creating a private constructor.

Grant points out a very unknown configuration option for version numbers…

Apr 14, 2004 1 min.

In a very ‘Easter-Egg-ish’ post, Grant Richins (a developer on the C# Compiler Team), explains a configuration option of ‘alink.dll’. _So everybody hopefully knows you can put a star "*" for either of the last 2 version numbers of the AssemblyVersion attribute. ALink will then translate that into the days and minutes since January 1st, 2000. Well, here comes the feature: What if you don't like January 1st 2000? Well, you can change it.

Upcoming Dates/Locations on the Visual Basic World Tour

Apr 13, 2004 1 min.

Waltham 4⁄14 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver) New York 4⁄15 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver) Louisville 4⁄20 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick) Chicago 4⁄21 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick) Philadelphia 4⁄21 (Sean Draine and Joe Binder) Denver 4⁄26 (Robert Green and Jay Roxe) St Louis 4⁄26 (Paul Yuknewicz and tbd) Long Beach 4⁄27 (Sean Draine and Jay Roxe) Dallas 5⁄13 (Steve Lasker and Ed Gruber) Oklahoma City 5⁄14 (Steve Lasker and Ed Gruber) Northern NJ 6⁄8 (Joe Binder and tbd) Albany 6⁄9 (Joe Binder and tbd) note that more dates/locations are coming, including events in Asia and Europe… From Robert Green’s Visual Basic Blog

Eric covers another new C# Whidbey (VS 2005) feature

Apr 13, 2004 1 min.

Not a long post (I’ve included it all below), but useful nonetheless C# Featurette #2 – Inline Warning Control Another feature that we added for Whidbey is the ability to selectively disable warnings within your code. For example: #pragma warning disable 135 // Disable warning CS135 in this block #pragma warning restore 135 Comments on this feature? Click on the “Featurette” link above and tell Eric what you think!

VS 2005 has a blog?

Apr 12, 2004 1 min.

If you are using the CTP (Community Technical Preview) or you are just interested in Whidbey/VS2005, then you’ll definitely want to check out the new blog created to allow various team members to post info on VS2005. Check it out here. You might also be interested in the relatively new VS2005 portal on MSDN.

Developing a Windows Forms Wizard…

Apr 12, 2004 1 min.

I have to admit that I haven’t developed a “wizard” framework yet in .NET, I’ve just been stacking panels on top of each other, naming them step1…stepN and then showing and hiding them as necessary. Not exactly an easy-to-reuse approach, but it works. Justin Rogers, a developer who has worked on the GDN Workspaces system, the ASP.NET forums, Terrarium and more… has released an article on his blog that details a structured approach to create a Windows Forms Wizard:

Generate Thumbnail Images from PDF Documents

Apr 9, 2004 1 min.

This is so very cool… a great idea, good explanations, tons of useful bits of code and information, and even a very graphically pleasing set of diagrams in the article!! **[Generate Thumbnail Images from PDF Documents](http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/pdfthumbnail.asp)By **[**Jonathan Hodgson**](http://www.codeproject.com/script/profile/whos_who.asp?id=49532)** ** This article presents VB.NET code to create thumbnail images from a directory of Adobe Acrobat PDF documents using the .NET Framework.

Are you a student looking for VS.NET?

Apr 9, 2004 1 min.

Make sure you check out your University/College bookstore! “vbjay” mentioned today (on GotDotNet) that he bought the Academic version of VS.NET 2003 from his college bookstore for just a bit over $100.00. I did some googling around and found several University bookstores offering the software for around 99 dollars (to current students and staff only in most cases). If you have an academic reseller nearby, and you qualify to purchase VS.