If you have not figured it out I live the MSDN Virtual Labs, they are a quick easy way to lean about stuff with little impact to your system. A few new labs were recently released, use them in good health.

What’s new in C# 3.0?
What’s new in Visual Basic 9?
Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008

I just had a wow moment... I was not paying attention to the presentation I should be paying attention to and catching up on blog reading and found this entry by Adam Hems Link to A British Geek in Texas Pontificates : Caching in Winforms / SmartClient Apps. The interesting thing he suggests is to use the System.Web.Caching namespace on a Windows Form application to cache client data... WOW I have used the winforms namespaces in a web app in the past but I never thought to try the reverse. I can't wait to play with this.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/VS2005SP1

Go get it! Lots of fixes and make VS 2005 work well on Vista (still not 100% but close).

Tonight I will get to talk to a class at San Diego State University about how to use Visual Studio to complete a class assignment.

I will do a in class demonstration but I will also show a lot of the free tanning resources Microsoft has for learning the toolset. I hope others can find this information useful.

First Free software!

There are a set of products Microsoft offers for free that will allow students, and hobbyists program on the windows platform. They can be found at the Visual Studio Express home page. There you can download two different types of Visual Studio, one for doing web development and four different ones for doing Windows development. You can also download SQL Server Express.

For the work in this class students will need one of the Windows Development Express products and SQL Server Express. I also suggest that they get the SQL Server Management Studio Express and the Northwind and Pubs sample database.

Now we have an environment to learn with... How about some lessons?

MSDN Virtual Labs

Some of my favorite things that are available are the MSDN Virtual Labs the Virtual Labs are way cool in that you don't need to install any of the above software locally. You will need to have JavaScript enabled, IE6.0 or higher and the Virtual Server VRMC Advanced Control but that is a small price to pay for free hands on training. I was shocked to see that we have not updated all of the labs to Visual Studio 2005 but you and still learn the basics in 2003 and there are labs what is new for Visual Studio 2005.

Learn Visual Studio

The Learn Visual Studio site on MSDN lists other resources available, these include Learning Plans, E-Learning, Classroom Training, Available Books and Exams.

The Learning Plans are quite cool, you identify what type of development you want to learn and Microsoft will show you resources and let you build a custom learning plan.

More Resources

MSDN
MSDN Flash
Future Versions of Visual Studio
CodeZone
San Diego .NET Developer Group
San Diego .NET User Group

Some great events are planned for SoCal... 

.NET Masters Series event Saturday, August 19, 2006

Link to So Cal .Net Tech Summit Saturday, September 23

More .NET love can then I can stand! What a great community we have in SoCal!

WOW I went to a MSDN event today… all I can say is wow if you have not been to a MSDN event you need to experience this type of event. You can see all kinds of geek information all in a movie theater. And yes if you try hard you can sneak in to a free movie after the event .

At the event today and I am sure at the event coming up this Thursday in Garden Grove for information about user groups and events so here is a list of local resources:

SoCal Resources:
MSDN Flash (http://msdn.microsoft.com/flash)
SoCal .NET Events (http://www.socalnetevents.org)
List of SoCal User Groups (http://www.socalnetevents.org/Default.aspx?tabid=61) I know bad back ground but the list is good!

San Diego User Groups:
San Diego .NET Developers Group (http://www.sddotnetdg.org)
San Diego .NET User Group (http://www.sandiegodotnet.com)

I will have a section of this site soon that list all the groups that I can find\know about so if you know if a group please let me know.

Do you want to see what is new in Visual Studio 2005?

The new Microsoft office in LA (333 So. Grand Avenue, 33rd Floor, Los Angeles CA 90071) will be hosting the 2 day class "What's New in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005" from 9am to 5pm on 4/24 and 4/25 (EDIT: I had the wrong dates the first time, sorry).

You will have to take a train in to downtown or pay for parking, you will be on your own for lunch but the class is free.

To sign-up Click Here I am sorry if the class is full by the time you see this.

On the .Net Security Bolg Shawn Farkas blogs about doing debugging clickonce application, he talks about the gflags tool.

Debugging a Partial Trust ClickOnce Application

I know that security can be a dry topic but of late I have been having some interesting reads on the .NET Security blog. Some gems in there include Detecting that You're Running in a ClickOnce Application and Isolated Storage and ClickOnce.

Have fun and make security a priority to avoid issues tomorrow!

It is well know that the next version of Visual Studio will have all types of new tools to do code refactoring. I have used VS 2005 a little and I thought I liked how it worked but then I saw ReSharper and now I don't think I like the new stuff as much. One big thing I liked in VS 05 is the way it will show where a variable is used so instead of the current Go To Deceleration or Go To Reference you see all the places it is use and the place it is declared. Great that is wonderful but the version of this that ReSharper has implemented is much nicer.

This is the VS 2005 Find All References Window:

This is the ReSharper Find Usages Window:

I get a tone of questions every class about the differences between VB.NET and C# and there are some crazy people who want to know about managed C++. I buddy showed me two good articles that may help to answer some of the questions. Language Equivalents is a MSDN topic that covers common programming concepts with side-by-side examples for Visual Basic, C#, Visual J#, C, C++, and the Managed Extensions for C++, JScript, Visual FoxPro. And Microsoft Programming Languages is a MSDN article that covers the Microsoft postioning of Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, Visual C# .NET, Visual J# .NET.