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by Ged Mead

I've been away on the road for a couple of weeks. When I arrived back home on Tuesday, one of the things waiting for me in the small stack of mail that had arrived in my absence were a set of discs containing the latest Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2005.

Should I take the plunge, I wondered? I checked the package carefully to see if it had a "WARNING! Beta versions can seriously damage your sanity" label stuck on it somewhere. But no, there were no such dire warnings to be found. Maybe it was safe to continue?

But if I opened the package and installed it, would I shrink so small that I wouldn't be able to reach the keyboard? Goodness knows, my brain seems to have shrivelled to half its size since I first set out on the .NET adventure almost three years ago. I couldn't afford to damage any of the few remaining cells that still do work.

Or worse still, maybe I'd grow and grow until my head just simply explode, having been filled to bursting point with the welter of super new improvements that have been crammed into the latest version.

Decisions, decisions...

Seriously though, I've been looking forward to having a play with the latest version and I hope to be able to try out some of the new features - and the not-so-new features, too - in the very near future. The "Not-so-new" features of course including the reinstatement of some tried and trusted friends from VB6, finally included in .NET after much gnashing of teeth and shaking of large sticks from a number of disenfranchised (and often disappointed) VB Classic Upgraders.

I see with interest that one of the key features that has been added back in is the Default Instance of Windows Forms. Judging by the number of people who have Googled their way to the multiple forms articles on our DevCity articles page, the loss of this feature seems to have been one of the biggest initial hurdles for many VB6 upgraders. From the many feedback comments on the article, it's clear this relatively simple but very fundamental activity had left several folks totally mystified.

It's a dilemma for the VS development Team, of course. Those handy-dandy default instances made multiple form handling a doddle in Classic VB, but were really a bit of a politically incorrect OOP fudge to make life easier for developers. Bringing them back in to VB.NET in this next version will have a small negative impact on VB.NET's fully OOP language credentials, but it will probably warm a few chilly VB Classic hearts as people continue to make the change from VB6 to VB.NET. According to the old proverb, familiarity breeds contempt, by my goodness it doesn't half make programming easier if you can carry forward core concepts you've used for years!

Probably based on the same kind of reasoning, it's good to see that the VB 2005 team have removed another of the VB6-VB.NET upgrade gotchas. This one being the feature in VB.NET where closing the StartUp Form automatically closes the application down. Once again, the reasoning for doing this was well-intentioned and is easily controlled by use of an appropriate Sub Main, but - as with the Default Instance scenario - it seemed to generate a lot more frustration for upgraders than had been expected.

So now VB6ers changing to .NET will be pleased to see that they have ready-made choices of how closing a StartUp form will affect the closing of the application, i.e. when the StartUp form closes or when the last form closes (as with VB6). Plus there are several handy ways of applying developer coded control, e.g. by using Application.Exit to force the closure or by watching for the Application.ApplicationExit event and taking appropriate action.

And finally it's nice to see that the long lost Masked Edit Control has made a reappearance, now in the guise of the MaskedTextBox. I'll be interested to see what features have been carried over from the original concept, plus any new ones.

So, once I've caught up with my backlog of mail, VS 2005 Beta 2 installation is next on the agenda. No doubt I'll be keeping diary readers up to date with the success (or lack of it) in future issues. In the meantime, I'll get the decks cleared and ready for the VB.NET version of the Mad Coders Tea Party.

It's certainly going to be an Adventure in Wonderland. Tea, anyone?

XTab in Wonderland

- Junior (Ged Mead aka XTab, xtab@vbcity.com)

by Mike McIntyre

This is the fourth in a series of articles which discuss evolving to VB.NET from a previous version of Visual Basic. This article continues where Part three left off, by presenting more .NET features that MAY be of use to you. Read Part three to understand why these features are being presented.

.NET Technology Feature Example Benefit ASP.NET Use an ASP.NET web service to provide communication between a web form application and business logic components on an application server. A new and easy way to implement communication between presentation and business logic tiers. Microsoft .NET Application Blocks Use the free Microsoft Data Access application block as the data access tier of a distributed application. Save time, same money, and use best practices when implementing a data access tier. .NET CLR Use automatic memory allocation, otherwise known as 'garbage collection', to manage an application's memory. Write less code and avoid memory leaks. Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Write applications for phones and other mobile devices. Prewritten code and device emulators make writing applications for mobile devices simpler and faster. Windows Forms Use .NET Windows Forms data binding classes to bind form controls to data objects. . Greatly expanded data binding capabilities and stability than data binding VB Classic make data binding viable in .NET. .NET Framework Use the .NET 'Delegate' type to create your own multicast delegate to call a series of procedures in or across objects. For example, when a payment is received in an online shopping application, a multicast delegate can call multiple procedures in different objects to do all the payment housekeeping. .NET Framework Create your own value types from the .NET Framework's user-defined value type. User defined value types are like lightweight objects with almost all the features of user defined classes. Value types are allocated in stack memory so they are very fast and memory efficient. .NET Framework Add sort capabilities to the classes you define by implementing the .NET Framework's IComparable interface. Makes it easy to add sort capability to your objects to make them work with .NET Framework built in types that can contain and sort objects, types such as form controls. ASP.NET ASP.NET provides a new full-featured cache engine that can be used by pages to store and retrieve arbitrary objects across HTTP requests. Output caching, fragment caching, and enhanced application data caching are just a few of the features you can use to build higher performing web applications. .NET Framework Listen for file system changes with the .NET Framework's FileSystemWatcher type. Write a file archiving system that listens for file system change notifications in a directory and archives new or modified files. ADO.NET Automatically create and use your own strongly typed DataSet. Get design-time IntelliSense to make coding with tables and columns easier. Take advantage of enhanced validation features in ADO.NET and form controls. Get automatic design-time type mismatch checking. ADO.NET Create your own lightweight database with the DataSet type. Create a DataSet programatically or by using the XSD designer, add multiple tables, add relationships, add constraints, get built in methods for saving the database to file and loading it from file into memory - and much more.

bsGradient ActiveX Control by Shandy

The Right Move by Isaiah D. Williams

The July Edition Of The MSDN Magazine Is Now Available by Shandy

Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers : All 8 Chapters Now Available by Shandy

The Hive : Beta Web Site For Community Leaders by Shandy

New MVP Logo by Shandy

.NET Survey by Shandy

How To Open A Command Prompt From Windows Explorer With Current Folder As Default by Shandy

OnTime User Discussion Group by Shandy

Visual Studio .NET 2005 BETA by Stuart Parr

Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers by Shandy

Free Sql Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 eLearning Courses From Microsoft by Shandy

I Can Finally Access My MSDN Universal Subscription by Shandy

VB.Classic Once Again Graces My Personal Computer by Shandy

Visual Studio 2005 Full Release News by Shandy

My MSN Clock moves. Does yours ? by Shandy

Microsoft MVP Asia Regional Summit - Belated Review by Shandy

CodeSMART 2005 for VS.NET FixPack 3 Is Now Available by Shandy

CodeSMART 2005 for VB6 FixPack 4 Is Now Available by Shandy

MSDN Hard Drive Pilot Program by Shandy

Connected Systems Competition For SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 or BizTalk Developers by Shandy

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 Now Installed by Shandy

Get In-Depth Info on Indigo by Shandy

Visual Basic 2005 World Wide survey! by Shandy

Free Sql Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 eLearning Courses From Microsoft by Mike McIntyre [MVP Visual Basic]

And the answer is... Visual Studio 2005 will be released the week of November 7th 2005 by Mike McIntyre [MVP Visual Basic]

Free Books for VB Programmers at the Microsoft VBRun Web Site by Mike McIntyre [MVP Visual Basic]

Textbox with custom ForeColor whilst disabled by Mark Dryden

VB.NET Master Volume Control Class by Mark Dryden

Whidbey: retrieving all SQL server instances by Robert Verpalen

HTTPWebRequest and silly noises by Mark Dryden

Free ASP.NET Training - Get it while it lasts! by Mike McIntyre [MVP Visual Basic]

I'm back ;-) by Mike McIntyre [MVP Visual Basic]

What happened during May 2005 at vbCity by Shandy

http://blogs.vbcity.com/

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by Newsletter Staff

Larry Blake wrote an article for us in the last issue on the above topic. After it had gone to press, Larry wanted to clarify a couple of points in it, so these have been included in a slightly amended version of the original which you can now access in the newsletter archive.

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