Here's my official VB Roadshow report from last night:
First I did the reverse user group thing. A few developers were picked to represent the local community to give feedback to the Microsoft representatives. A few things we talked about:
- I want it to be an IDE feature that I can take a database table from my server explorer, drag it onto a blank class, and have it generate properties and private variables for each of the fields in the table.
- Some guys where talking about having some disatisfaction with deployment in the enterprise, particularily being able to see which files are actually going to be nuked when you copy it out over the old version. I've never had any problems with this so I didn't have much to add.
- We talked a lot about the VB "Stigma" ie that it's a toy language, and that c# developers get more prestige and pay. Everyone who knows anything about .NET knows that this is silly since they compile the same. But hey, as the Microsoft representative put it: "If a client insists on paying you more to write code in C#, you are morally obligated to take their money". =)
After the reverse user group the actual show started, there were a lot of people there! Here's what we talked about:
- The My namespace absolutely rocks. My is basically a vb thing that allows you to access commonly used pc functions (printing, pulling user names, getting config values, and alot more) It makes me wobble now in my recent switch to c#.
- There are some power pack tools coming out for windows forms. Basically designed to give you a more xp-ish feel. Not really of interest to me as a web developer though they did look nice. Also had some tablet pc controls for handwriting. Again, they were nice, but not really valuable for what I do.
- Generics are pretty cool, they demo'd how to make a collection out of your custom class with one line of code.
- You can bind a form to an object (class) now, then all of the properties exposed by the class appear in a sidebar on the IDE, you can then set the control type for displaying the property (label, textbox, etc) and drag and drop the properties onto a form where they automatically wire up. This was neat but I wonder how it would behave if one of your properties was a collection of another object? Hopefully it will be smart enough to handle that and drill all the way into that object collection.
- You can still interact with office, (the showed Excel). This hasn't changed all that much, they made it a little easier. Someone in the audience asked about working with excel in a web environment and the presenter said you could do it. I had to speak up and point out that running excel on your webserver is generally a bad thing, and that you'd be better off creating a writer, sucking up the html from your datagrid, changing the mime type to excel, then spewing the html into it. Excel will render cells just like the datagrid and it forces the client to use excel, not the server.
- Demo of the 2005 IDE. It's gotten alot nicer, I really liked how much cleaner alot of the configuration stuff was. Too much of that to cover here, when the next beta comes out try it for yourself. They did show a nice little control name editing feature. The entire form's controls all popped up little labels with their names in them in this mode, you could tab through the form and change the names of the controls (much preferable to click, change property, click, change property for those of us who are quick with the keyboard)
- There are some new pre-compiling features (like warnings uninitialized variables). Nice touch.
- Edit and continue is back, yay!
All in all the speakers were very good, better than most of the other MS events I've attended locally.