Flickr Updated

Check out our new photos in
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brunomiguelsilva

and

http://picasaweb.google.com/susie.vilaca

TechEd 2007 - A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5

A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5

Daniel Moth

Visual Studio 2008 was shown as a superset of Visual Studio 2005. It supports multi-targeting (as a told in last blog entry), it has a nice helper: removing unused imports :-P, allows nested master-pages in design-view and can be used as an IDE for different variations of javascript (IE specific, standard, Firefox, etc). It has a CSS manager with preview, and by default all appearance settings as fonts and colors are stored in CSS classes and not in-line.

In Visual Studio 2008, unit testing tools will be available in Professional Edition and not only in Enterprise, like in VS 2005.

Daniel made a demo which interested me a lot! Developing add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007. VS 2008 has a visual tool for Ribbon design, for example. A new feature of both C# and VB9 is the local type inference. This means that you don’t have to declare a type for a variable, because the compiler will analyze the code and set it into the correct type. You can declare a variable, assign an integer value (having intellisense for integer variables) and then assign a string (having intellisense for string values from that line on).

There is some syntactic sugar for C# as in-line functions (for example to assign a delegate without declaring a function), object initializers (when creating an object declare the default values for public properties). These features are compatible with .NET Framework 2.0, because the compiler creates the suitable IL definition.

TechEd 2007 - Keynote

Keynote
Speaker - S. Somasegar

TechEd first session was in the auditorium. It was huge! And crowned also.
The speaker was hard to understand, because his English or his accent (I can't tell what the problem was) was awful.
But it was nice anyway. It was a quick overview about hot Microsoft Technologies. Not technically informative at all. It was just meant as a candy to drive us the next sessions.
He talked about Designer/Developers workflow and how Visual Studio and Expression Studio are a great help.
He gave us the information that over 1 million people are currently developing on Visual Studio .NET, and there was over 17 million downloads of this software. He highlighted that MSDN forums gives an answer to approximated 80% of posted questions.

Microsoft Platforms are meant to be used for a rookie hobbyist, academic students, designers and professionals/teams of development.
In this section I heard about a lot of things I didn't knew:
- MSDN wiki - meant to the community of developers.
- MSDN Translation Wiki - designed to expand Visual Studio 8 languages to other languages. He talked about a translation project in Brazil.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for MSDN subscriptions in later November 2007.

Some of the new features of VS 2008 were split view (code/design), hierarchic tag selection, full CSS support, multi-targeting (choose the framework version for a project), LINQ designer, new Ajax Controls, intellisense and debugging support for javascript.

It was announced a license change that allow people to use VS to develop to other platforms than .NET framework. It was shown a demo of two World of Warcraft plugin development in VS using a customization pack that will soon be available in Codeplex. The first one was a board with information about scenario objects, and the other one was a RSS reader.

Another announcement was the release of Popfly Explorer Beta. A VS add-in that allows to use Popfly mashups in a webpage developed in VS Express Editions.

Day One

Finally at TechEd, and after a weekend without internet connection first thing we done was getting online.

Tech Ed 2007 - Weekend

I’m finally in Barcelona! I had a great trip. My first time in a plane!

We spent the weekend sightseeing Barcelona.

You can find some photos in my flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/brunomiguelsilva)

And because this day was spent together with Susana Vilaça, André Sousa, Nelson Correia, Miguel Vicente and Alcides Fonseca, take a look at their blogs to know more about our weekend.

TechEd-Developers

Experimenta o Ruby!

Ontem mostraram-me este site, que além de ser mais um tutorial da linguagem de programação orientada a objectos Ruby tem um conceito muito interessante. Não assume a instalação de qualquer framwork. No site temos uma shell emulada onde são avaliados comandos na linguagem. 15 minutos é um que é preciso para sentir um pouco da sintaxe da linguagem.

Nota: Tive problemas a introduzi o [ no Internet Explorer. No Firefox consegui sem problemas.

Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007

Next Saturday I'll be leaving to Barcelona for a week to attend to TechEd Developers 2007!
This is an international event about Microsoft Technologies. You can learn more about it here.
This is a great opportunity sponsored by Microsoft Student Partner Program.
By now you might be wondering why I am writing this in English. This is an international event, so I thought that it would be a good idea to write about it in a language that can reach a huge amount of people, expanding my blog to the rest of the world.

I hope to post several information and opinions about my experience during next week. I'll write about the sessions I'll be attending, but also about this week as a personal experience. After all, this is my first time away from my family in a foreign country just with friends :-)

I leave here reference to other MSP's blogs. These blogs belong to MSP's that will also attend to this great event.

Alcides Fonseca http://alcides.ideias3.com/
André Sousa http://weblogs.pontonetpt.com/asousa/
Susana Vilaça http://susie-v.spaces.live.com/
Nelson Correia http://nelsoncorreia.spaces.live.com/

I want to give my apologies about my poor english. It has been many year since last time I wrote in this language. I'll try to express my self as good as I can!

TechEd-Developers