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SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

SQL-Server & .NET DevCon 2009

• Thursday, November 12
• Friday, November 13
• Saturday, November 14

Thursday, November 12

by Jan Vít

Hello again!

It is November in Frankfurt. The traditional time and place for another year of the German Visual FoxPro and SQL-Server & .NET developer conference. The UT reporting is present and I am here again to bring you the latest, right from the very hands of the developers’ community.

I managed to arrive one day earlier to settle down nicely and as the last evening before the conference is closing by now, I am starting to feel the atmosphere around me. Just as captains on their ships at the eves of all battles, all the speakers and many of the attendees are already roaming around the Lindner Congress Hotel hallways.

Just as every year, there are many proven German speakers as well as foreign ones, bringing the news from abroad. Among the well known foreign speakers who accepted the invitation for this year are Ken Levy, taking the Keynote again, Doug Henning, Craig Berntson, Kevin McNeish and Rick Schummer. We also have a new speaker from Holland, Boudewijn Lutgerink, a nice guy I have already had a chance to meet at the conference in Prague earlier this year.

Again, we have full three days of sessions. They start in the morning and continue to the evening in the form of late night sessions. As usual, there is a plenty of choice available as there are always four sessions running in parallel.

The event is just about to start. Stay tuned!

Welcome Session – Rainer Becker

After the breakfast, everyone gathered in the Auditorium for the Welcome Session, where Reiner Becker, the organizer of the conference is to give his opening words.

The first change that had stroked me right when I entered the room was the fact that there were not only chairs as usual, but also comfortable tables with power plugs to have your laptop on for instance. For me as a reporter this is a very welcome change. When I looked around though most attendees also were taking their notes and the table made it just much more comfortable.

At the beginning Rainer welcomed everyone on the already 16. Visual FoxPro Conference and, in parallel, on the 8. SQL-Server & .NET Conference. Apart from many organizational topics, Rainer also talked about the attendance count and what it means for the conference as well as the German developer community. The inter-annual drop in attendance is lower than the last year and reached 12%. This does not however mean that the user base of VFP shrunk by 12% as well. Not at all, Rainer believes that this is due to the overall drop in conference and fair attendance all over the world. This is especially apparent today, when the major cost cutting applies.

Even though there is the mentioned attendance drop, which by the way allowed for the convenient tables, Rainer is committed and happy to continue with organizing the conference for the next year again. Moreover, together with the German user group he plans to organize a Visual FoxPro road show in several German speaking cities. This has been tried already in 9 cities when VFP 9.0 was released and it has had an enormous success. It is planned as a one day event, making it even more affordable for attendees from both, time as well as money cost perspectives.

Unfortunately, Rainer also had to make a last change in the session schedule as Tamar E. Granor could not make it to the conference due to a loss in her family. Her mother passed away after being long time ill. We all convey out condolences Tamar.

Rainer again welcomed everyone at the conference and wished everybody to have a good time.

Friday, November 13

by Jan Vít

Microsoft Virtual PC for Developers – Doug Hennig

Doug started his session with an introduction to the Microsoft Virtual PC technology itself. He showed how to create a new machine, new disk, install an operating system and install the Virtual Machine additions. He then explored all the various settings and configuration options of the product as well as explained the main advantages and disadvantages of various disk types.

After this “how to use the product” part, Doug went on to the possible ways of using it in the real developer’s life.

First example is the installation testing. After creating an installation package of your application, you can test the installation and uninstallation on a clean machine to make sure you have included everything that is necessary in the installation package.

Another good use is for application testing. If your application works on your powerful development machine, it does not necessarily have to mean it will not be slow or maybe even unusably slow on the customer’s machine. The virtual machine allows you to set a specific memory size and network settings to make the machine performance more similar to the customer’s one.

Testing on different operating systems or under different languages and regional settings might also be a reason to use it.

If you would like to test the performance of your application, test application conflicts, do any kind of beta testing (even those of an operating system) or give training or presentation, virtual PC can help you do all that and not pollute your original machine at the same time.

There are also times when you need to use a (very) old application that would no longer run on your (newest) host system. Running a DOS application on Vista can be an example of this. You can do that, but you will have to get a special utility for DOS in particular.

Doug continued by talking about a few tips and tricks of using Virtual PC. Always make sure you have enough RAM on the host system - the more, the better. Try to run the VMs on a separate drive, the USB drive perhaps. On the host system, run as few applications as possible, regularly format the host as well as the virtual machine, use rather fixed-sized virtual hard disk drives than those with the auto-growth size.

Doug wrapped up his session by reminding that a Virtual Machine is also a machine as far as licenses are concerned and mentioned several other products similar to Virtual PC, such as Microsoft Virtual Server, Windows Virtual PC, VMWare or VirtualBox.

Introducing Visual Studio 2010 – Kevin McNeish

In this session Kevin focused on what is new in the Visual Studio IDE, neither the language nor the framework. There are special sessions for improvements in the .NET Framework as well as in C# language.

The IDE of the new Visual Studio has been reworked to use WPF instead of the “old” windows controls. In fact, with the introduction of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft officially dead-ended the development of the WinForms. WPF as its successor is the way to go now. Using the WPF in the Visual Studio IDE allowed for new graphical functionality such as dimming, appearing, zooming, etc. Even though these are mainly minor changes, at times, the zooming functionality in particular, might come in handy.

There is also a new tool inside the Visual Studio named Call hierarchy. This allows you to get the overview of the future “call stack” already at the design time.

The Studio also adds more Silverlight support, new improvements in the Entity Framework, new third-party plug-ins are available from DB2 and Oracle for better integration. It also comes with more support for parallel programming as well. In the area of the source control, there is a new concept of Gated check-in, which prevents checking-in of the code that failed.

The ASP.NET code editor now includes several new snippets for HTML, ASP.NET markup as well as JavaScript. There is a new project type called Modeling. There you can create various UML diagrams, even when they have no real connection to the code. However there is already a class diagram capability in Visual Studio since its version 2005, which allows you to generate and adjust the code of a class based on the changes in the diagram.

Visual Studio IDE has always been very extensible. The version 2010 takes the possibilities even further.

If you consider getting the Visual Studio once it is released, check the comparison of features in its individual three versions. This way you can make sure you get the version you really need.

Whats New in .NET 4.0 – Kevin McNeish

At the time when the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 is coming out, Microsoft is also ending the further development of the WinForms technology. Its successor, Windows Presentation Foundation, has been around for some time now. The new version is coming out with even more new controls, multi-touch support available through Windows 7 and other tiny graphical improvements. To start creating WPF applications you can use Visual Studio IDE directly or a specialized tool called Microsoft Expression Blend, currently in version 3.0.

There are improvements in the Windows Workflow Foundation as well. There is a new set of assemblies (System.Activities.*) that replace the former ones. It also has an enhanced programming model, meaning no code beside, etc.

Windows Communication Foundation also comes with new functionalities. It now has the service discovery, allowing you to discover the services dynamically at runtime, new load balancing, versioning and decoupling.

Microsoft also invested considerable time and effort in parallel programming support. There are new special versions of for and foreach that can use the advantages of multi-core processors. New collections were added that are suited to parallel programming, etc.

Other enhancements can be found in the Entity Framework, security aspects as well as other areas, Kevin did not even had a time to scratch.

The last thing to mention is that .NET 4.0 now also supports a new group of languages, the dynamic languages, such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, etc.

Saturday, November 14

by Jan Vít

What is new in C# and VB.NET 4.0 – Kevin McNeish

Kevin already presented his session on what is new in Visual Studio 2010 yesterday. Today, he went through the improvements in C# and VB.NET 4.0 language.

The common denominator of many updates is the effort to bring the VB.NET and C# languages together as close as possible in the functionality point of view. This way, in version 4.0, VB.NET inherited the functionality already available in C# and the other way around, what was already available in VB.NET went into C# as well.

VB.NET was given the ability to create automatic properties. This way it is no longer necessary to define set and get parts of a property. These are created automatically with their default functionality. VB.NET also lost the need for the continuation character. You can still use it, but it will also work without it. You can just continue your code on the line below.

Through Lambdas, VB.NET now allows you to write in-line subroutines. New collection initializers in VB.NET make it possible to specify the value of an object’s properties when they are initialized.

Both, C# and VB.NET now have the dynamic support. This makes it much easier to integrate with Microsoft Office or dynamic APIs, such as IronPython.

Language now supports named arguments. This way you can call a method and pass the parameters in the order of your choice, providing you name them properly. It is also possible to mark certain parameters as optional and specify their default value.

Kevin went through these and other improvement bits in his slides as well as showed code examples of it in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE.

Microsoft Keynote – Tim Fischer (Microsoft Deutschland)

We already had the Keynote from Ken Levy on the first day.

Today, Tim Fischer from Microsoft Deutschland came to present the future of IT development technologies as they are seen from Microsoft’s official standpoint.

He talked about rich internet applications, cloud computing and of course the future roadmap of Visual FoxPro as Microsoft sees it currently.

Even though one might have expected a slide-only presentation with colorful marketing images and shapes, Tim went the other way and most of his session was a demonstration of new technologies in code.

Just the way everyone would like it to be on a developer’s conference.

Mere Mortals .NET Framework – Kevin McNeish

A framework for .NET? Why another framework? Is the .NET framework not enough? These are the questions you might ask.

The truth is that even though Microsoft is doing a lot in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE as well as the .NET Framework itself, there are still many areas, where a certain common logic or functionality could be put. Similarly, there are often tedious tasks performed all over again where a wizard might come in handy. That is where the MM.NET comes into play.

The Mere Mortals .NET is not really anything like .NET Framework. It is an application framework. If you take a look into its history, you will see it has been around for quite some time now. Its first version came out in 2002 and over the time MM.NET has accumulated the largest customer basis among all the similar frameworks on the market.

To build a solid application you definitely need a solid base. MM.NET can certainly provide one. Apart from a large base of already written reusable code and code libraries, it also offers various wizards and builders to make creating a new code as easy and fast as possible.

The whole framework gives a large emphasis on the business object approach. Not only that gives your application a good clarity and transparency of the code, it also shields your code against technology changes coming from Microsoft every now and then.

When creating a new project, you can use the Business Object template right from the Visual Studio project templates. That runs a wizard, allowing you to select the data source for you application and automatically generates the necessary business logic for you.

The MM.NET framework can also take care of other aspects in application development. It can handle business rules, translation of the UI, which is available directly to the end user if needed, security rules management, etc. The best of all, if you need to see how the framework works internally or you would like to make any changes of your own in it, you will be happy to know it comes with a complete source code.

There is also a free comprehensive documentation to the framework available online. Even if you do not plan to purchase the product in the future, it is worth checking it out. There is a lot of useful general information in there.

Internet Apps with Silverlight 3.0 – Kevin McNeish

Microsoft Silverlight is already a relatively mature technology to create a visually stunning web interfaces. Its graphics is very similar to Flash. If you have a Silverlight application on a web site, it acts like a black box and requires a small runtime on the client’s machine. With a few configuration changes, you can also run the Silverlight application right on your desktop, not in the browser anymore.

Kevin started his session by playing an HD video. This was to demonstrate the possibility to stream a high definition video over the internet by adjusting its throughput according to the bandwidth of the client’s connection. This is done through IIS Media Services, a free server product for HTTP-based media delivery and is an additional technology to the Silverlight itself.

Thanks to the new GPU acceleration Silverlight 3 now supports perspective 3D which can simulate rotating an object in 3D space. Silverlight 3 also includes the ability to create and apply custom shader effects as well as bouncing and elastic effects.

There are plenty of new controls available in Silverlight 3. It is the DockPanel, DataGrid, WrapPanel, TreeView, Label, ViewBox, HeaderedItemControl, AutoCompleteBox and Headered Content Control. There is also a new DataForm control which makes the master/detail interfaces much easier to implement.

Kevin then also talked about DataPager control, Navigation Framework, .NET RIA Services as well as other new Silverlight improvements coming in version 3.

The closing session – Rainer Becker

And there is the end again. After three days filled with Visual FoxPro, SQL and .NET sessions, everyone gather in the auditorium to listen to the last words of the conference organizer, Rainer Becker.

As the subtitle of the session told already, the session was aimed mostly on the future of the conference. We got some information bits already at the beginning of the conference as you can read about at the beginning of the report. Rainer now revealed a lot more about his plans for the future.

The conference dates are pre-set already till 2014 and no change is planned there. There definitely will be another conference next year. A change of its form however could not have been avoided due to organizational reasons.

The next conference will again take the whole three days, but instead of the four tracks, there will only be two. The first one will be targeted primarily at Visual FoxPro development, while the second one at the surrounding technologies and new trends. At certain times, there can be three sessions running in parallel, while those will mainly be the vendor sessions.

As the number of the tracks goes down to two, there will no longer be a guarantee of an English session running at any given time in the schedule. This in fact means that if you understand only English and would like to attend the conference anyway, there might be times to take a break and get some snack for example.

The conference tracks will take a form of a kind of “deep dive” sessions, meaning the given topics will be divided into more consecutive sessions. This will allow the speaker to grasp the topic in a much deeper detail. At the end of the conference, each attendee will also receive a certificate to confirm he/she has undergone the given sessions.

As Tim Fisher from Microsoft Deutschland again did a great job with the Keynote this year, it will be him giving the Keynote next year.

Now, coming out of the next year conference topic, Rainer once more reminded that a Visual FoxPro road show is being planned. He also announced the name of the cities. The road show will stop in Hannover, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich and possibly also in Zuerich and Wien.

The user group will also undergo changes. Its name will change to dFPUG.NET. The two conferences, the VFP and the SQL & .NET conferences will merge into one, the 17th year conference.

The closing session then wrapped up with a traditional raffle where the lucky ones were given several computer products from the conference sponsors. Congratulations!

Final Words & Acknowledgements

At this point, at the very end of the report, I would like to express my gratitude to all the people, who had helped me to make the report as comprehensive as seen above. My special “Thank you” goes to:

Rainer Becker, the organizer of the whole event for still keeping it in its finest shape. He has always been around and very forthcoming in accommodating all my needs as a reporter. Thank you, Rainer!

Michel Fournier, the inventor of the UT reporting, for providing the space as well as the opportunity to present the report directly to you, readers. Thank you, Michel!

Tina, Rainer’s right hand, who has always been making sure that everything went as smooth as possible and that all the attendees were feeling as comfortable as possible. I am always amazed how she can make everything fit together so smoothly without me even realizing it. That is called perfection. Thank you, Tina!

Uwe Habermann and Venelina Jordanova for providing several ready-made texts. Thank you!

Budewijn Lutgerink for quite a few pictures you can see in the picture archive. Thank you, Budewijn!

Lovely hotel personnel, who were always there to take care of me as well as every other attendee.

My extended gratitude also goes to many others, who have made my reporting job easier, if only by creating a wonderful place and atmosphere to be in and where everyone was smiling when the camera was in action. Thanks to you all!

I have very much enjoyed being around and writing the conference report again. Feel free to share your experience from the conference, any notes on the reporting as well as your ideas of the UT coverage improvements. I am always more than happy to get the feedback from you!

So much for this year! Thank you for reading this far!

Jan Vít, Vitsoft   Jan Vít is a student of the University Of Economics in Prague. Since 1993 he has been actively interested in programming as well as other areas of information technology. His computer experience started with PC 80386 with FoxPro 1.02, later followed by higher versions for the DOS platform and since 1999 he has been using the newest Visual FoxPro versions together with other programming languages and tools. Presently he spends most of his time with Visual FoxPro 9.0, MS SQL Server and C# in WinForms as well as WebForms development. He has been a regular speaker on the Czech Visual FoxPro DevCons since 2004 and is also the co-author of many DevCon conference reports from Prague and Germany. His work now mainly consists of developing software for pharmacies.