Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Microsoft to explain innovations in Visual Studio and .NET 4.0

Microsoft has selected some of its key executives to explain innovations it planned incorporating in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio. The move is part of an action plan evolved in the recently organised TechEd developer and PDC events.

Code-named as “Rosario”, Microsoft’s next version of Visual Studio is being promoted as a tool set which will raise analysis of application development process to new levels.

The company is committed to democratise application lifecycle management process. It is working on product enhancement which would meet software development requirements arising from cloud computing, virtualisation and parallelism trends.

Delegates visiting the UK to explain about forthcoming tools included Jason Zander, GM for Visual Studio and Matt Carter, Group Product Manager.

Shedding light on Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010), Carter stated that it is strongly focussed on providing insight, in terms of function and structure of code, of the development process. Microsoft is ensuring to make it easier for building web applications. It is also aimed at encouraging departmental business applications development that makes use of Office UI. Microsoft is also looking forward to make development of SharePoint feel like development of Visual Studio to improve usability.

Carter disclosed that Microsoft wants to reach out to those C++ developers who have made big investment on lines of C++ code, so that they could carry those into the Visual Studio environment.

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Microsoft Releases Free Chart Controls

Microsoft has rolled out a software package for the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 users that allows developers to quickly setup interactive charts and graphs for applications without writing any code. The Chart Controls software, released earlier this month, adds data visualization tools for developers creating ASP.NET pages or Windows Forms applications.

The free tools can be used to produce interactive charts that simplify complex statistical or financial analysis. The software package includes a comprehensive list of 2D and 3D chart types, customizable visual appearance features, built-in data manipulation and formulas, and annotations capabilities, among other features.

"This should provide a useful (and free) addition to your standard ASP.NET toolkit of functionality, and enable you to easily add richer visualization and data workflow scenarios to your ASP.NET applications," wrote Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's developer corporate vice president, in a blog posting on Monday.

Microsoft acquired the chart control technology in June of last year from Dundas Software, a Toronto, Ontario-based provider of data visualization technologies. Redmond first employed it in its SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 release. The Data Visualization Group within the SQL Server Reporting Services Team gets credit for creating the new ASP.NET Chart Controls.

For new developers, Microsoft is providing a sample environment with more than 200 samples of ASP.NET and Windows Forms, as well as the C# source code. Every major feature in Chart Controls for the .NET Framework is covered in the samples. Users can see the Chart Controls in action and use the code as templates for their own Web and Windows apps.

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30% off in the mother of all online Microsoft Press promotions

Delegates who attended the TechEd in Durban this year bombarded the Intersoft stand to take advantage of the heavily discounted books.
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Chief amongst the titles bought were: Windows Server 2008, Admin Pocket Consultant, System Centre Config Manager 07, Visual C# 2008 Step By Step, Exc Server 2007 Admin Companion, Introducing Silverlight 2e, Office Communication Server 07, Powershell Scripting Guide, Programming Visual C# 2008, Visual Basic 2008 Step By Step, Programming Asp.Net 3.5, Programming Linq, Win Server 2008 Admin Comp and Windows Server 2008 Inside Out.

Visit www.microsoft-press.co.za for publishing dates on all SQL Server 2008 titles.

If you weren't at the Durban TechEd (and even if you were) you can take huge advantage of this success by checking out www.microsoft-press.co.za. This is an online promotion only for tech-savvy people and by the by, you can seize the opportunity to get great Xmas gifts for techno-wise friends or eager-to-learn family. If your purchases total over R500, delivery is free too!

Enjoy spreading the experience of the love of learning and finding neat tricky ways of getting more out of what you do – get online at www.microsoft-press.co.za and take your 30% off.

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Monday, December 1, 2008

Writing from a windows form to microsoft word 2007 using VSTO

First of all I want to thank all these people who read my posts and thank them for their encouraging comments.

In the feedack I receive I get some “complaints” that my posts are targeted towards the asp.net side of development. Well you are right. I am more knowledgeable in Asp.Net. But I promise to write more about windows forms in the future, starting from this post. And to all VB guys out there, i will try (starting from this post) to write more samples in VB, which is here to stay…

In this post I would like how easy it is to use Visual Studio Tools for Office. If you have never heard before of VSTO just google it. In a few words it is a component of Visual Studio(since Visual Studio 2005) that provides a robust, .NET-based environment for building business applications using classic Office programs like Word and Excel. So that means you do not have to learn the specific Office object models, and of course you do need VBA anymore.

Let’s show VSTO with a simple example. We will have a simple table(1 row and 3 cells) in a word 2007 (.docx) document and fill in the values of these 3 cells from a windows form.

1) Start Visual Studio 2008/2005 project.

2) From the “New Project” window choose a Office 2007 and from the templates Word 2007 Document. Select VB as the development language.Give a name to your project and Press OK

3) In the next window select “Create a new Document” and give name to your new word document, e.g “mydoc”.

4) Click “OK” to any window that asks you for access to the Office programs

5) If you have done everything right up to this point, you will be ablw to see in your visual studio window a blank word document,

6) Add a table with a single row and 3 cells from the ribbon

7) Add a new item in your project, a windows form and call it “wordform”

8) Add 3 Label controls on the form. Name them, Cell1,Cell2,Cell3.

9) Add 3 textbox controls on the form. Leave the default names

10) Add a button on the form. Leave the default name.

11) In the mydoc.vb(this is a file in my example-if you named your word, inputword, it will be inputword.vb) choose the Document.Open event.

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Is the Cloud Looking Like HDDVD vs. Blu-Ray?

I was reading through this post from Mary-Jo Foley about cloud computing, but more specifically about approaches to (in this case, data caching) how it gets done. I have to admit, for me, I sort of thought of the cloud options as being "out there" to the point where it just happens - who cares how? But now, after reading this and doing more poking around the 'net, reading articles, etc., I am beginning to wonder if we'll have emerging standards that impact how you develop applications, deploy those applications and support them.

If this ends up being a "war of formats" something like the HDDVD and Blu-Ray format wars, it would seem like this could really cripple adoption of the whole cloud computing model, certainly to the point where you'd have to add a new layer of testing and working with your systems to see what works best.

Mary-Jo's article focused on the cache element - how data is made available in a high-performance environment. It bleeds over into content delivery (since the platforms define it differently), which brings up additional points that you'll want to understand.

Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding, perhaps I'm over-estimating the amount of choice you really have in how things are done "up there" - but it's certainly worth trying to understand and see where the performance, security and implementation differ between options and platforms.

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Fixing the Enter Keypress Event in ASP.NET with jQuery

One of the most frustrating things about working with .NET from a front-end developer’s viewpoint is the Single Form Model. Enclosing an entire website or web-application in one single
element poses a number of accessibility and usability problems surrounding form input and usage. One of these is ensuring the correct default actions are assigned to sets of input fields when the enter key is used.

Traditionally, the default action for a is to fire the first submit button found within the current element. Every form has one default action.

Striking the enter key within a text input field should submit the current set of—logically grouped—fields; this is the expected behaviour. For pages with multiple forms and actions, this is easily separated by having multiple elements, each with their own submit buttons and actions. Each form operates independently, has its own default action, and doesn’t interfere with other forms.

In the Single Form Model, the presence of just one element, means that different default actions cannot be easily separated. Every input field on the page is automatically tied to just one default action – the first submit button on the page.

Take a blog site as an example – like this very page! It has a search form at the top, with associated submit button, a comment form further down the page and perhaps another form for signing up to a newsletter. Implemented with the Single Form Model, only the search form will produce the correct behaviour as it introduces the first submit button on the page. All subsequent fields will be tied to this same button as their default action – submitting a comment by pressing enter would cause the search form to submit, as would signing up to a newsletter. Not particularly useful.

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Using the .NET Assembly in PHP

Using the power of COM interop, you can write code in VB.Net or C# and use it in PHP, VB6, or any other language that can access COM. In this article Jayesh shows us how.The .NET Framework is a new computing platform that simplifies application development in the highly distributed environment of the Internet. The .NET Framework is designed to provide a consistent object-oriented programming environment, a code-execution environment that minimizes software deployment and versioning conflicts, which guarantees safe execution of code and to build all communication on industry standards to ensure that code based on the .NET Framework can integrate with any other code.

An assembly is the primary building block of a .NET Framework application. It is a collection of functionality that is built, versioned, and deployed as a single implementation unit containing one or more files. Each assembly contains an assembly manifest.

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