The Visual Basic team is hosting a series of Live Meeting presentations aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named “Orcas”. The presentations are all done by actual team members working on the specific technology, and are a great way to hear from and ask your questions directly to the product team.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007: VB9 – Orcas Overview. This web cast will cover the breadth of features that you can expect to see in the upcoming release of Visual Basic. John Stallo will demo how all the features such as LinQ, N-Tier, WCF support, and OCS work together to help you build your applications faster than ever before.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007: VB9 – LinQ Overview. This web cast will explore the new LinQ features in Visual Basic. We will show how to take advantage of LinQ to build applications that query and aggregate data from multiple sources, including in-memory objects, databases, and XML.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007: VB9 – LINQ to SQL & O/R Designer Deep Dive. This web cast extends the SQL and LinQ web cast by showing you how to use the new OR designer to build applications that take advantage of LinQ to SQL.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007: VB9 – Building N-Tier Applications. In this web cast, Young Joo will show you how you can separate business logic from data access logic using the new N-Tier features in Visual Basic.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007: VB9 – Offline Data Caching. This web cast demonstrates one of the newest features in Visual Basic. Milind Lele will demonstrate how to use SQL Server Compact Edition to build applications that can cache your data offline and have it automatically sync to your database when you are online.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007: VB9 – Deep Dive into LinQ. This web cast will dive into details how the LinQ features work. In the process, we will discuss anonymous types, type inference, inline functions, extension methods, and how these features work together to give you the LinQ experience. In addition, we will demo how these features can be used independently to help you build your applications quicker and with less code.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007: VB9 – Building Service-Oriented Applications with WCF. This web cast will show you how you can produce and consume WCF services using the new WCF support with Visual Basic and build applications that take advantage of the next-generation service architecture.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007: Using the Interop Toolkit to Migrate your VB6 Applications to .NET. This web cast takes a look at how you can use the Interop Toolkit to migrate your VB 6 applications to the .NET platform, and also discusses strategies you can use to migrate your VB 6 applications to the .NET platform.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007: LINQ Best Practices. This web cast will explore best practices for writing easy to read, consumable queries, including naming, usage, and performance ideas.
(Via Beth Massi)
IBM developerWorks has released a preview of its new SOA development and best practices page, a space that gives developers, architects and decision-makers a variety of technical content – articles, tutorials, workshops and interactive community tools – that help with SOA development, implementation and management.
And if you want to stay tuned with recent SOA adoptions, subscribe to the IBM SOA Newsletter, where Sandy Carter, IBM VP in charge of IBM’s SOA and WebSphere strategy, talks every month about everything you need to know about Service Oriented Architecture.
BTW, congratulations to Michael O’Connell and all of the dW team for their recent Jolt Hall of Fame award.
Mark Dickson has announced that the Eclipse PMC have approved the donation of the DSDM Plugin for OpenUP/Basic through the Eclipse Process Framework.
The plug-in has been donated by the DSDM Consortium. It is designed to extend OpenUP/Basic, combining elements of DSDM with the Open Unified Process. Central to this is the idea of enhancing the existing Stakeholder role through the addition of 4 business roles from DSDM, namely:
- Ambassador User
- Executive Sponsor
- Visionary
- Advisor User
The objective is to increase active stakeholder participation within a project by making these roles responsible for performing tasks and delivering products.
An Ambassador User comes from the business and ensures that the system being built is the right one to meet requirements. An Executive Sponsor is a high-level user who will champion the project and is ultimately the owner of the system being developed. A Visionary is a user committed to the project and its business goals, who will ensure that objectives are being met. An Advisor User brings day-to-day knowledge of the job being carried out into the project.
The plugin will shortly be added to the EPF CVS repository.
S. Somasegar, Microsoft Corporate VP of the Developer Division, has announced that Beta 1 of the Professional version of Orcas, the next version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, is ready for download.
This beta version also includes the .Net Framework release 3.5 and a first CTP pre-beta build of the Express version of Orcas for non-professional programmers and hobbyists. At this Channel 9 video, Somasegar talks more in depth about this new version and about the next release of Visual Studio Team System Tools post Orcas codenamed “Rosario”.
Orcas Beta 1 is available as installation media ISO images or as VPC images with the software pre-installed. In addition, you can download prerelease versions of Visual Basic Express, Visual C++ Express, Visual C# Express, and Visual Web Developer.
As Mary Jo Foley points out, “Microsoft execs said earlier this week to expect a Beta 2 of Orcas later this year. The final version of Orcas may be released to manufacturing by the end of calendar 2007, but could slip into 2008, they said.”
Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is history and Microsoft actually hit its public milestone for the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version.
Nice work from the Developer Tools division in Redmond and Soma must be grinning like a Cheshire cat! It’s almost enough to banish the memory of waiting months on end for Visual Studio 2005 to hit the stands…
If you’re in the mood for announcements, let me add that InnerWorkings has just jumped on the RTM bandwagon by updating our learning content for Visual Studio 2008 RTM. Beta 2 is no more, and we now support the fully released version of the IDE.
