Deborah's Developer MindScape

We are lucky to have two of Redmond’s finest down here in Silicon Valley for a full day .NET 4.0 and VS 2010 event on May 15, 2010. Click here for more information or to register.

I am happy to be providing one of the talks at the event. I am giving the "What’s New in VB 10" talk. VB and C# continue to get closer together in terms of feature set, so that means more feature parity.

With parity in mind, VB 10 has the following new features:

• Auto-implemented properties
• Collection initializers
• Statement lambdas
• Multi-line lambdas

My talk covers these items and plenty more. If you want the sample code for the talk, you can find it here.

Enjoy!

We have the top experts on Entity Framework (EF) and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) coming to the San Francisco EastBay.NET User Group on March 3, 2010!

Both Julie Lerman and Kathleen Dollard will be here.

During the FUNdamentals portion of the meeting, Julie introduces EF in Visual Studio 2010:

Introduction to EF designer in VS 2010
The Entity Framework designer gained a slew of new features in Visual Studio 2010. In this short session, we’ll create a model using the designer and take a look at some of these improvements such as entity name pluralization, complex type support, improved stored procedure support and more.

Then the main meeting is a double-header:

First look at POCO Support in Entity Framework 4 (Julie)
One of the most important additions to Entity Framework in VS2010 is its support for POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) classes. In this session you’ll see how EF is able to support POCOs, how to create POCOs that EF can work with and the difference between super simple POCOs and those which use dynamic proxies at run time to emulate EntityObject behavior such as change notification. We’ll also take a quick look at the critical change to EF code generation that allows us to generate and customize POCOs.
With POCO capabilities in hand, you will be able to build persistent ignorant, flexible and testable code using entities while still benefiting from the features of Entity Framework.

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) (Kathleen)
Composable applications are made of building blocks – like Legos.
Composability is an extension of many ideas that have fueled architecture evolution in the last twenty years, including isolation, the creation of tiers, and testable applications. Silverlight and .NET now contain the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF to provide composability. MEF is available in .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 3.0 via downloads and in the box for .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.

MEF is as simple as Import, Export, Compose! You’ll learn how do each of these steps with the attributed model to define and retrieve parts in your application. I’ll also cover what composability is and the three broad categories – extensions, fully composed applications, and architecturally composed applications. You’ll leave understanding when MEF might be a good fit for your applications today and insight into how profoundly MEF is likely to change architectures in the relatively near future.

Come and check out these great talks by these great .NET experts!

For more information and to register using this link.

Enjoy!

The Silicon Valley Code Camp is coming up tomorrow (October 3, 2009). I am looking forward to attending!

My presentation is on Lambda expressions in C# and VB. You can find the code here.

If you are interested in finding out more about this FREE code camp, check it out here.

Enjoy!

We had the pleasure of having Beth Massi present at our local .NET developer’s group, EastBay.NET, last night in Livermore, CA (East of San Francisco). Her excellent talk was on VB 10, C# 4, and Visual Studio 2010.

She showed off all of the new language features that are coming in the next release of Visual Studio with energy and great humor. I have not enjoyed a technical talk this much in a long time!

Beth covered the new features in VB 10 such as:

• No more line continuation underscores (“_”) required in most situations, including LINQ statements.
• Auto-implemented properties that save you time when your properties have no additional code in the getters and setters.
• Collection initializers so you can create an entire collection of things in one line of code. (Thank goodness this does not require line continuation characters!)
• Multiline lambda expressions and routines. Since lambdas are one of my favorite new things in VS 2008, it is good to see VB getting the same functionality that C# has now.

For more information, check this out.

She also covered the new features in C# 4 such as:

• Dynamic support so C# can also have “late binding”.
• Improved office programmability.

For more information, check this out.

Plus some features that are new to both languages:

• Parallel processing (our EastBay.NET talk next month will cover this topic in detail)
• Covariance and Contravariance. This is one of those technical features that if you ran into it while coding, you understand exactly what this is for, if not then it is more challenging to grasp. In less than two minutes, Beth provided the most concise and clear description of this feature I have ever heard (and I have heard many over these past few months).

Also at the meeting, Peter Tweed of Magenic gave a concise and informative FUNdamentals talk on AJAX options in ASP.NET. EastBay.NET does a half-hour session before the main meeting on short, fundamental topics. This month, Peter was able to cover five different options for using AJAX in an ASP.NET application. It was amazing to see him cover all five techniques including full code examples in just a half hour! For more information on his talk, check out his blog posting.

The attendees enjoyed the meeting and submitted comments: “Excellent!”, “Useful stuff!”, and “Very well done tonight!”