What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 – A webcast series…
I’m doing a series of webcasts on VS2010 from the developer perspective…BTLOD is “BenkoTips Live & On Demand” a semi-weekly webcast show I’ve been running since 2008. The schedule for the webcasts on Visual Studio includes:
1/20 – BTLOD: What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 (http://tinyurl.com/btlod42)
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 takes great strides at making your development environment faster, easier, and more intuitive. In this introduction to the webcast series on Visual Studio 2010, Mike takes a look at what has changed and what remains the same in this latest release. From project types to the start page to the toolboxes and more we explore how you can use the new integrated development environment (IDE) to build great software
1/26 – BTLOD: What’s new in .NET 4.0 (http://tinyurl.com/btlod43)
The Microsoft .NET Framework has empowered developers to create great software by building on a solid base and expanding what is possible. In this webcast, we take a quick look at what is new in the latest release of the .NET Framework and how the .NET Framework 4 can make it easier to harness the power of your applications.
2/10 – BTLOD: What’s new in ASP.NET Web Forms (http://tinyurl.com/btlod44)
In this webcast, we review several of the improvements to Microsoft ASP.NET in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 that give you more control over the HTML in your application, making client-side development easier, and we cover the enhancements being made to server controls.
2/24 – BTLOD: What’s new in AJAX 4.0 (http://tinyurl.com/btlod45)
Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 4 introduces several improvements for client-side development, including new controls and templating capabilities that enable rich Web development for applications built using a variety of server-side technologies. In this webcast, we dispel several of the myths about ASP.NET AJAX and then show you how to use the new features of ASP.NET AJAX 4.
3/3 – BTLOD: Visual Studio 2010 from VSS to TFS, Getting started with Team Foundation Server (no url yet…will be btlod46)
In this session we take a look at how you can take advantage of the great facilities and features of Team Foundation Server, from simplified setup to tracking tasks and tests. TFS 2010 is an exciting addition to the MSDN Subscription and we will take a look at how you can get started using it to simplify your code management tasks.
3/17 – BTLOD: Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4 and WCF Ria Services (btlod47)
Creating rich user experience and exposing data has never been so easy. In this session we explore what’s new and possible with WCF Ria Services and your Silverlight application. We will show how you can create an entity model and then expose it out to your client application and built compelling interface by using the great data binding features built into the latest version of Visual Studio 2010.
3/24 – BTLOD: Visual Studio 2010 Debugging and Intellitrace (btlod48)
When the unexpected happens, how do you figure out what went wrong and recover gracefully? In this session we take a look at the debugging features and capabilities of the latest version of Visual Studio 2010. See where you can take advantage of the tools to simplify and streamline the complex job of debugging software.
3/31 – BTLOD: Visual Studio 2010 and Developing for SharePoint 2010 (btlod49)
This week we take a look at how the tooling for working with SharePoint has evolved and become a great platform for building and extending the capabilities of this compelling platform. From building workflow and custom lists to creating a visual web part we show you how you can take advantage of the tools for building on SharePoint.
[Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:02:52 GMT]
Want a free Win7 Touch Screen computer?
I just saw this & thought I’d share the link. Enter to win a fully loaded HP TouchSmart tx2 tablet by coming up with a great Windows 7 Application and writing an article about it on codeproject. Learn more at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9702415.
Enjoy!
[Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:27:05 GMT]
Windows 7 for Developers Series: Build Innovative Applications Using Familiar Tools
Here is some information about the webcast series I’m working on for Windows 7 for Developers. We’re taking the examples we’ve used for the launch events over the last couple months and expanding it to include additional features. You can download the code sample at http://benkotips.com/code. Then check out the live and on demand webcasts below that are part of the series. You can also get more information by downloading the Windows 7 Developer Kit and going thru the labs.
- MSDN Webcast: BTLOD - Diving Deeper into Windows 7 for Developers (Level 200)
Original Air Date: August 5, 2009 - MSDN Webcast: BTLOD - Windows 7 Taskbars and Ribbon (Level 200)
Original Air Date: November 11, 2009 - MSDN Webcast: BTLOD - Windows 7 Troubleshooting Platform (Level 200)
Original Air Date: November 25, 2009 - MSDN Webcast: Windows 7 Multitouch Support (Level 200)
Original Air Date: December 1, 2009 - MSDN Webcast: BTLOD - Windows 7 Background Services (Level 200)
Original Air Date: December 8, 2009 - MSDN Webcast: BTLOD - Windows 7 Shell Libraries (Level 200)
Thursday, December 10, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time - MSDN Webcast: BTLOD - UAC and Privilege Isolation (Level 200)
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time - MSDN Webcast: Windows 7 Sensors and Location (Level 200)
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time - MSDN Webcast: BTLOD - Version Checking and Installer Detection (Level 200)
Thursday, December 17, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
Windows 7: Build Innovative Applications Using Familiar Tools
[Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:53:18 GMT]
Win7 for Developers – Troubleshooting & Windows Error Reporting
Today we covered a lot of ground where the rubber hits the street in application failure & recovery. Kevin Hill joined me to talk about what happens to that data after it leaves your machine and showed us how to use it to help solve the issues that cause the problems. We also talked about psr.exe (Problem Step Recovery) as a tool to capture what caused a crash, and how to use the troubleshooting packs to design scripts to make your application appear to be self healing.
Troubleshooting Pack Designer. In the Win7 SDK there’s a Troubleshooting Pack designer that makes it easy to create the “Try this…” scripts that the user can choose to run to resolve their issue. These scripts are based on Powershell and can include logic to go thru a variety of scenarios based on logic you define.
Windows Error Reporting. So what happens after the fact? Where does that collected information you click “Send to Microsoft” go? Kevin Hill showed us how to get to that information and report against our registered applications to see where failures are happening and help us troubleshoot and resolve those issues.
Links of interest…
[Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:42:50 GMT]
MSDN Flash: Volume 13, Number24 - November 23, 2009
Editorial News and Notes from Mike Benkovich
There's a lot to talk about that's new in the technology world these days. From the recent launch of Windows 7 and the Windows Server products to trying out the new betas of Visual Studio and Office, to the tools for making us more productive and effective, it's hard to keep up with all the latest things. For example, if you're looking to buy a new laptop, how do you find the right one? One new place you might look is Bing Visual Search, which features a gallery of over a thousand computers you can compare by weight, price and size.
Of course, if you want to find out firsthand what's possible with all this technology stuff, I can suggest you check out an old standby that's been brought up to date, with a list of the latest Microsoft events for developers - msdnevents.com. You can also check out the user group map on the community connection page on my Web site. Not only are there pins for user groups, but also pins from Community Megaphone, which lists events coming to your area. Check it out, and we'll see you on the road.
Enjoy!
Mike
Upcoming Microsoft Events
MSDN Events Presents: Highlights from the New Efficiency Launch
December 3, 1:00 P.M., Omaha, NE
Join us as we explore how Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 deliver on the new efficiency where cost savings, productivity and innovations come together. At this free half-day MSDN event we'll cover the "best of" content and deliver highlights from the "New Efficiency" launch events taking place nationwide.
- Session 1: Taking Your Application to the Next Level with Windows 7
- Session 2: Light up Your application with Graphics, Multi-touch and Ribbon on Windows 7
- Session 3: What's new and changed in Windows Server 2008 R2
Community Events and User Groups
Iowa
Cedar Rapids .NET User Group
First Monday of the month, 5:30 P.M., Cedar Rapids, IA
Cedar Valley .NET User Group
First Tuesday of the month, 5:30 P.M., Cedar Falls, IA
Dubuque .NET User Group
First Tuesday of the month, 5:30 P.M., Clarke College, Dubuque, IA
Iowa .NET User Group
First Thursday of the month, 6:00 P.M., West Des Moines, IA
Kansas
Kansas City SharePoint Saturday
December 12, 8:00 A.M., Overland Park, KS
SharePoint Saturday KC is a free, educational, informative, and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of topics focused on Microsoft SharePoint technologies.
Kansas City .NET User Group
Fourth Tuesday of the month, 6:00 P.M., Leawood, KS
Kansas City Office Geeks
First Thursday of the month, 5:30 P.M., Leawood, KS
Minnesota
Minnesota Silverlight User Group
Third Tuesday of the month, 12:00 P.M., Bloomington, MN
MN VSTS User Group
Third Wednesday of the month, 5:00 P.M., Bloomington, MN
Twin Cities .NET User Group
First Thursday of the month at 5:00 P.M., Bloomington, MN
Twin Cities Cloud Computing Group
Second Thursday of the month 3:00 P.M., Bloomington, MN
Twin Cities Developers Guild
Second Tuesday of the month, 5:00 P.M., Bloomington, MN
Twin Cities Languages User Group
Second Thursday of the month, 5:30 P.M., Golden Valley, MN
Twin Cities XNA User Group
Third Thursday of the month, 6:00 P.M., Golden Valley, MN
Missouri
Mid-Missouri .NET User's Group
Second Wednesday of every odd-numbered month, 2:00 P.M., Jefferson City, MO
St. Louis .NET User Group
Last Monday of the month, 6:00 P.M., St. Louis, MO
St. Louis SharePoint User Group
Second Tuesday of every odd-numbered month, 8:00 A.M, St. Louis, MO
Nebraska
Omaha Team System User Group
November 24, 6:00 P.M., Omaha, NE
Mike Douglas, Deliveron Consulting Services, presents Getting Agile with TFS 2010.
Event Details | Map & Directions | Add to Calendar
AITP - Cornhusker Chapter
Lincoln, NE
Omaha Team System User Group
Omaha, NE
Omaha Microsoft Technology Group
Omaha, NE
Regular monthly meetings on .NET, Visual Studio Team System, BizTalk, and SQL Server
Third-Party Events
Intertech: Complete WPF
November 30 - December 2
Intertech: Complete WCF
December 10 - 11
[Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:33:59 GMT]
Download the Beta of SharePoint 2010 Today!
Some exciting news was announced this morning at the Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles: You can get started exploring SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 by downloading the beta trials from www.microsoft.com/2010. SharePoint 2010—together with Office 2010 and other related products—ties together your PC, browser, and mobile device to offer the premier productivity experience.
In fact, I'm blogging to you right now from the SharePoint booth at PDC 2009, where I'm helping developers see what they can do with the new SharePoint tools. We’ve announced dramatic innovations that make it easy to build new solutions with SharePoint 2010; see them for yourself and participate in the beta by downloading the new versions of SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.
Some of the new features you’ll want to explore include the ability to design workflow in Visio 2010 and the interface for surfacing your application’s features with the new Ribbon. If you’re a developer working with SharePoint 2010, you can install the SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 on your Windows 7 machine and develop against it using new Visual Studio 2010 project templates. These templates make it much easier to create compelling new solutions and package them up for simpler deployment, such as the new visual web part.
We’re also giving you easy new ways to connect with your social network. The Outlook Social Connector lets you connect with people on Windows Live, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. There’s even an SDK for developers that makes it possible to extend and customize code and enable great new scenarios for building connected applications.
Combining Sharepoint and Office 2010 lets users communicate in real time through Outlook, not to mention share/edit Excel, Word and other Office documents simultaneously. And that's just one example of how combining these tools will drive greater efficiency. To dive deeper, visit www.microsoft.com/2010
[Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:36:58 GMT]
Patterns anyone? Check out Rob’s new series!
Rob Bagby has started a new series (blog posts and screencasts) on Patterns-Based Development with Silverlight. The series illustrates various design patterns while building a sample application (see screenshot below). The patterns covered include the Repository, the Pipeline, the Service Agent and Model View ViewModel.
[Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:08:07 GMT]
Kansas City Code is posted
I’ve posted the code from today’s launch onto http://www.benkotips.com/code – Includes the demo application we built from scratch showing how to work with jumplists, ribbon, Sensors and Multi-touch.
[Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:52:00 GMT]
Posting code…a bit behind
Thought I’d let you know that I’ve posted code from the MVC webcast with Jessy Houle as well as code from the Heartland Developer Conference in October. More code postings to come…
[Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:36:21 GMT]
VB Source Code for Launch Demo available for download
I just added the sample we wrote at the event coded in VB to the download on http://www.benkotips.com/code, click on the “Windows 7 For Developers Launch” link and you’ll find the solution has a VB version of the project added to it. I’ve also got a SQL script that creates the IMAGEDATABASE used by the XP2Win7 Application in case you need it. You can get the XP2Win7 reference application at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/xp2win7.
[Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:21:51 GMT]
"Who I Am and What I Do Around Here?"
Ok…if you’ve been following my blog over the years you may have some idea of who I am and my current role/job at Microsoft. This post is to help shed some light on the topic and also is cross posted to another blog I’m just starting up that is focused on SharePoint for Developers. You should be able to find this post on http://blogs.technet.com/sharepointexperts as well as http://blogs.msdn.com/benko, which is syndicated on my site at http://www.benkotips.com.
One question I sometimes ask is what was your first computer? I can say that the first computer I worked with was an old Commodore CPM machine that a friend of mine had at his house over summer vacation. It was a school machine that his parents who were teachers were able to bring home and that we quickly appropriated to our own purposes. Starting with loading games from a cassette tape player to typing in code we found in magazines, we figured out how to customize and make the computer do things. The language was Basic, and to check and change memory you’d peek and poke specific locations.
When school started back up and the computer was no longer available I was able to convince my parents to invest in a Commodore Vic 20…this was an 8 color machine (6 more than the CPM) and simply plugged into a TV for a monitor. I used this machine until we upgraded to the C64 (http://www.c64.com) which again gave us another magnitude of memory and graphics capabilities. Woot!
Well to keep a long story short I won’t go thru all the gyrations and twisted path that led me thru school and my early professional life, except to say that I eventually found myself as a partner in a computer consulting company with my brother. As a business owner you do a lot of things, but what I enjoyed the most was when I could get into building code. The challenge of figuring out how to write supportable, deployable scalable applications and infrastructure was not only fun, it keeps you learning as the tools change and new technologies become available.
In 2004 I saw an opportunity to be a “Technical Presenter” for events that Microsoft puts on in the developer community. This role allowed me to dive into new tools and share with other developers around the US how to best leverage their capabilities. I started with this on the MSDN team of Microsoft Across America which was focused on delivering these seminars. I remember my first event in San Jose, where I lost my voice but was saved by a patient audience who gave me their time & attention as we talked about hackers and application security exploits.
Since then I’ve been one of the faces of MSDN Events and Webcasts, and have a webcast show on Wednesdays called “BenkoTIPS Live & On Demand” that brings the MSDN content to developers when and where they want to catch it. We cover the full gambit of technologies drawing from the MSDN Events that we are also delivering live to audiences around the US. One of the series of webcast that I worked on with Lynn Langit was on SharePoint for Developers and started right after we released Microsoft Office 2007 SharePoint Server (MOSS). This series has grown to about 17 webcasts and is due for a refresh when the next release of MOSS becomes available.
In the meantime, I’ll be on the road and online to help provide the developer community with info on how to take advantage of the new tools and and technologies to simplify their jobs. From XAML to WCF, from SharePoint to Win7 to IE8, from Visual Studio to Expression Suite, you can join me to explore the possible both live and online!
[Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:13:30 GMT]
Community Jam - 2009
Announcing Community Jam! Are you passionate about community? Always wanted to start a User Group, schedule a developer event or just curious about what is a TechMasters chapter? You're invited to the first annual Community Jam being held at the Upstream Brewing Company in Omaha on Wednesday Oct 14 from 2:00 to 6:30 before the Heartland Developer Conference kicks off.
The goal of this summit is to bring together the developer community enthusiasts to share goals and best practices for building great things for our fellow technologist. We will take an open spaces format to make sure you get value for your time.
Proposed Agenda:
2:00 - 2:30 : Welcome – meet & greet
2:30 - 3:30 : Open Session 1 (3 groups...topics to be determined)
3:45 - 4:45 : Open Session 2
5:00 - 6:00 : Open Session 3
6:00 - 6:15 : Closing thoughts
This is meant to be open to any and all members of the technical community, both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. Ideas for topics for the open sessions might include how to start a user group, presentation tips 101, how to create a killer demo, event logistics for the beginner, social media 101, TechMasters 101, etc. It will be a great chance to network with technical professionals that are as enthused about the community as you are
Please let me know (mike.benkovich@microsoft.com) if you’re interested in attending! We’ve got a site to register at http://tinyurl.com/comjam.
[Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:42:17 GMT]
Visual Studio 2008 – Customizing your IDE Webcast
In today’s webcast we looked at how to customize Visual Studio to meet your working style. To make it easier to find things I compiled a list of links and locations we talked about.
Install Locations:
- Install dir = C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0
- User stuff = ..\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008
- Templates = ..\Common7\IDE
- C#, VB, C++, Test, etc depending on what’s installed - Visualizers = ..\Common7\Packages\Debugger\Visualizers
User install = ..\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Visualizers
Here’s some links:
[Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:21:35 GMT]
This week’s webcast…Customizing the Visual Studio IDE
Over the years that I’ve been delivering MSDN Events there are little things you discover that make it easier to write code and demonstrate features with Visual Studio. In the webcast for this week’s BenkoTIPS Live & On Demand series we’ll be taking a look at some the things you can do to make it easier to get Visual Studio to work the way you do as well as tips and trix for leveraging the power of the tool. Not only that, but we’ll also cover the in’s and out’s of settings, tabs, toolbars, snippets and more.
Join me on Wednesday…same time as usual. See you there!
[Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:10:27 GMT]
