Section: Blogs

Just a quick reminder, VB6 upgrade chat tomorrow

Jan 26, 2004 1 min.

MSDN Chat: Upgrading Visual Basic 6 Skills and Applications to Visual Basic .NET On January 27 at 1:00 P.M. Pacific Time, join members of the Visual Basic .NET and Visual Studio teams and talk about best practices for upgrading your old projects (and skills) to Visual Basic .NET.

Multi MSDN Multimedia

Jan 23, 2004 1 min.

A new .NET Rocks! has been posted: http://msdn.microsoft.com/dotnetrocks/ In this, Mark’s last show, Carl and Mark welcome Rory Blyth, who writes a very popular blog at http://www.neopoleon.com. Rory talks about the .NET community and the Open Source Software (OSS) community, writing, blogging, driving to the PDC from Las Vegas, Longhorn, and more. A new MSDN TV has been posted. http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20040122VSNETAK/manifest.xml **The Whidbey Chronicles: MSBuild ** During this episode, Alex Kipman shows how to fundamentally alter the Visual Studio build process with the new build platform for Microsoft: MSBuild.

New RSS Aggregator

Jan 22, 2004 1 min.

I’m sure we all feel that the world needs another RSS Aggregator, and lucky for us… someone has written one 🙂 Darshan Singh has created an excellent RSS aggregator using Windows Forms (and C#). RSSConnect supports skinning of the post viewing pane, searching and indexing of posts using the integrated database support as well as a number of other customization points. Download RSSConnect from PerfectXML.com Seriously though, it looks like it has some interesting features around searching/indexing, so I’m sure it will add to that great pool of desirable aggregator features that all aggregator writers are helping to advance.

Netscan Queries

Jan 21, 2004 1 min.

Microsoft Research is a cool place… and if you had any doubt, you only need to look at some of their publicly exposed data, such as the NETSCAN system. I pulled a description of the system from their site… The Netscan System provides detailed reports on the activity of Usenet newsgroups, the authors who participate in them, and the conversation threads that emerge from their activity. Using the Netscan tool users can get reports about any newsgroup for any day, week, month, quarter, or year, since September 1999.

Short but sweet little example from today’s .NET Wire

Jan 20, 2004 2 min.

I was just reading the latest dotnetwire newsletter and this article caught my eye. Synchronize Identity Values between Database and DataSet During Updates After inserting the rows in the database your DataTable does not automatically reflect the identity values of as assigned by the database. The problem can be solved by the clever use of stored procedures and output parameters. It gives a very brief description of an important idea, how to return identity values from an insert without having to do another complete select query (even if you batch it together).

CLR SPY

Jan 19, 2004 1 min.

Adam Nathan (author of this book) and the overall master of Interop between managed and unmanaged code, blogged last week about his CLR SPY tool. If you haven’t seen it, download it from GotDotNet and let him know what you think (through the comments on his blog entry). CLR SPY: Feature requests for the next version Now that I’m set up at my new blogging home, I’d like to get some feedback from anyone who has used the CLR SPY tool that I’ve uploaded to gotdotnet.

Application Interop (.NET and J2EE)

Jan 17, 2004 1 min.

Check out this info from the Patterns and Practices group on Microsoft .NET and J2EE interoperability. This book gives you the best information available about how to ensure that enterprise applications based on J2EE work in harmony with components based on Microsoft .NET and vice versa.

Pretty cool new Webcast series coming for VB.NET

Jan 16, 2004 1 min.

A series of 15 webcasts & lab exercises for the VB6 programmer… (see the full list here) ** MSDN Webcast: Program Execution in the 21st Century – Level 200 ** _2/3/2004 1:00 PM – 2/3/2004 2:30 PM Live Meeting Webcast _ This is the first webcast in the 15 part series “Modern Software Development in .NET Using Visual Basic”. Developers shouldn’t miss this opportunity to examine the following topics with renowned author Joe Hummel, PhD: Virtual machines, sandboxes, garbage collection; Class libraries; Execution in .