TechEd 2005 - Day 1

Yesterday we arrived just a little late at the RAI-center for the Pre-Conference Seminars due to the heavy traffic towards Amsterdam. The check-in on the other hand went a lot quicker than our car-trip. This year's theme is Inspiration Shared.



I followed the Pre-Conference Seminar Visual Basic .NET Programming for Visual Basic 6.0 Developers [Ken Getz and Brian Randell]. I picked this seminar because of a project I will do in the future : moving VB6-developers to VB.NET (Framework 2.0). The purpose of the seminar was to build a complete .NET Application in one day.

They developed on stage a web-based hotel reservation front-end and used as many "pieces" of .NET as possible : .NET Framework System Classes, Serialization and MSMQ, ADO.NET, Windows Services, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, COM Interop and Web Services.

Naturally they didn't start completely from scratch ... they had a lot of code-snippets prepared. During the sessions they gave an overview of the used "pieces" in the application with a focus on VB.NET.

Below you can find a list of topics that were covered :

• the "My" namespace for simplified .NET programming
• code snippets
• serialization/deserialization
• the using statement
• Message Queuing
• ADO.NET
• viewing data while debugging : concept of "visualizers"
• debugging Windows Services
• Visual Inheritance
• enhancements for GUI development
  • smart tags
  • data binding
  • backgroundworker
  • MenuStrip and ToolStrip
  • DataGridView
• ClickOnce Deployment
• COM Interoperability

So, it was a good day to start with! The accomodations at TechEd are also great : a wireless network all over the place, 350+ networked computers, VoIP (Voice over IP), food & drinks everywhere, ... I also like the bag (backpack) more than last year!