http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh456392.aspx

There are also a bunch of great articles included, by the team, which I would strongly recommend checking out:

1. Asynchronous Programming: Easier Asynchronous Programming with the New Visual Studio Async CTP by Eric Lippert
2. Asynchronous Programming: Pause and Play with Await by Mads Torgersen
3. Asynchronous Programming: Understanding the Costs of Async and Await by Stephen Toub'

Enjoy!

Abhishek Kumar pulled together a great trip report for our team from TechEd. Lots of great resources below, that are available for on-demand viewing.

Keynote:

Keynote address was given by Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Marketing, and Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President, Visual Studio . If you missed keynote address then it’s available for viewing on Channel9 and complete transcript is available here.

Sessions:

TechEd is packed with different sessions -- Foundational, Breakout, Interactive, Birds-of-a-Feather, Certification Preparation and this year was no exception. TechEd  this year featured 551 unique sessions and 250 Hands-On-Labs and for the first time live streaming of many sessions were available.

This year there were 16 Visual Studio Languages & IDE related sessions.

Technical Learning Center  and Expo:

TechEd boasts a huge expo hall dedicated to showcase products, demos and ample opportunity to interact with customers, users and partners. There were over 200 unique partners contributing to the success of this year's event.

This year our team had 3 booths -- Visual Studio Languages, Visual Studio 2010 and Extend Visual Studio.

Teched Atlanta 2011 - The Closing Party

TechEd closing party was held at the World of Coca-Cola and the Georgia Aquarium

Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks by Lisa Feigenbaum

Join us for a demo-packed Visual Studio 2010 session and leave with a fun application you can use to analyze trends on Twitter! While developing this application, we’ll see how you can code faster with new C# language features and code focused tools. We’ll use new capabilities like the Parallel Extensions, WPF drag and drop data-binding, and DGML graphs. We’ll also optimize the development environment using new features like multi-monitor support, zoom, and Start Page customizations.

This hands-on session was delivered by Lisa Feigenbaum and she took us through some of the new features, whilst building an application (Twitter Analysis), of Visual Studio 2010.

It was great to see an awesome turnout for this technical session and Lisa delivered in style.

Definitely worth the download.

Click here to download the recording

Earlier this month, I presented in Dubai at the second annual TechEd Middle East. TechEd was held under the patronage of the Crown Prince of Dubai, who also visited on-site. There were 20 primary countries represented, and it was an important event for the region. Microsoft Senior Vice President S. Somasegar gave the opening keynote, and made several exciting announcements including VS 2010 SP1, TFS-Project Server Feature Pack, and Load Test Feature Pack. The keynote also featured developer demos by Polita Paulus on Windows Phone 7, and Jay Schmelzer on LightSwitch & Hosted TFS. There were 2,000+ people in attendance, including 80 speakers and 200+ sessions across Dev & IT Pro. My talks did very well, including “The Future of C#” (#4 Dev session) and “VS 2010 Tips & Tricks” (#3 Dev session), and I scored as #2 Dev speaker. Congrats also to Vishal Joshi, who gave several Web talks and scored #1 Dev speaker. Together with Scott Hunter, Brian Keller, and Shy Cohen, we led a Meet The Team session, which yielded great interaction with attendees. I also presented on a Women in Technology panel, which was new in the region and received considerable press. Overall, it was a great experience.

Keynote: A New Era of Opportunity

The keynote emphasized new opportunities arising with Microsoft software in the cloud and devices space. Here were the announcements Soma made:

• Visual Studio 2010 SP1, TFS-Project Server Integration Feature Pack, Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature Pack
• SQL Azure and Windows Azure targeting in LightSwitch Beta 2, coming soon (JasonZ later announced availability 3/15 at the VSIP Summit)
• Yalla apps, immediate availability in 69 countries
• Windows SDK for Kinect, coming this spring
• Broad availability of Windows Azure for production in UAE, coming in the first half of 2012

Polita Paulus demoed Windows Phone 7 development, using interesting local applications. Jay Schmelzer demoed LightSwitch, as well as TFS on Windows Azure. Bryon Surface showed the process of building & managing private clouds, and Ayman Sadek showed Lync Server 2010.

The Future of C#

This talk covered both asynchronous programming in Visual Studio vNext as well as project codename “Roslyn”. It was held in the main keynote room, so it was a great stage with plenty of space. I showed how to make the Netflix sample app run asynchronously using previous programming models and then using Async in vNext. I also did a similar demo with a Music Player app, but this time I challenged the audience to call out the changes for me. This was a lot of fun, and the crowd did in fact rise to the challenge! Both demos were using the Async CTP. I closed with a section on “Roslyn” and demoed a Paste As VB tool.

Here are the session materials:

• Slides: 4544.DPR301_TheFutureOfCSharp.zip
• Netflix Solution: This sample code is available as part of the Async CTP download: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx
• Music Player and Paste As VB: The code for these two demos is not yet available for release.
• Recording: TechEd Middle East attendees can access audio recordings through the TechEd website: http://www.teched.ae/

Here is the feedback I received:

• Few people in the audience had used Tasks in .NET 4
• There were lots of web developers at the event, and interest in web scenarios.
• Unit testing was raised as an important scenario to influence the feature design.
• There was a question about Script# support.
• Request for a refactoring to make code use the new async pattern.
• There were a couple of current pain points raised, that are out of scope for the vNext Async feature: 1) cancellation in async COM operations; 2) computationally intensive operations that overwhelm the .NET Thread Pool (these should be scheduled on  separate thread).
• For Async, the most popular questions were about how it works behind the scenes, and when other threads are sometimes used (from the Thread Pool or the kernel OS).
• For Roslyn, I received a few questions about how the project will benefit “me” as an end user developer. End user scenarios include the REPL, rich IDE features in the product itself, as well as from third parties.

Visual Studio 2010 Tips & Tricks

This talk covered tips & tricks across the languages, IDE, ALM and .NET framework. This includes features like DGML graphs, IntelliTrace, WPF drag & drop data binding, TPL, PLINQ, DLR interop with IronPython, Start Page customizations, Extension Manager & extensions, Pro Power Tools, Navigate To, Call Hierarchy, VB language (statement lambdas, auto prop, line continuation), C# language & COM (indexed properties, optional parameters), and No PIA. It’s a whirlwind tour while building a fun Twitter trends applications. It gives attendees a sense of the breadth of improvements in VS 2010, and they usually leave with a handful of tips they can try out back at the office.

Here are the session materials:

• Slides: http://cid-2ed5f9373d7b7a4a.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/DEV204%5E_VS2010TipsTricks.zip
• Code: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/twitter/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4362

I received a couple of feature requests after the session:

• One was for printable documentation of user-authored libraries. I pointed the attendee to SandCastle as the best current solution for this.
• The other was for additional formatting options of specific code elements. For this, you can customize formatting in Tools->Options.

Other Comments:

• “At @lisafeig’s session, VS tips and tricks. Shortcuts galore! #techedme”
• “I loved the session, with a continuous smile all the time. An event that i will come yearly too. Thanks”

Geek Girls Panel

There were 160 women in attendance at the first ever Middle East Geek Girls event, which was a great success. I spoke on the panel, which included women from both inside and outside Microsoft, as well as a variety of ages. Top questions were around successful career strategies and work/life balance. There were a huge range of cultures represented, so it was inspiring to see how we could all relate to the issues and tips on a common level. All shared a passion for technology, and wanted success in both their personal lives and careers. I made some great contacts at this event, and exchanged ideas about how to think about these issues. Tips for career included knowing & sharing with others what you want to do, building a network, and finding great mentors. Tips for work/life balance included making sure your work is something you enjoy, and also scheduling firm personal time. One interesting framework that many found helpful was the idea that we all want to be supermen & superwomen in all aspects in our life at all times, but sometimes we may need to pick & choose which aspect we want to prioritize at various life stages. Another interesting distinction was that whereas in the US, there is an emphasis to get more women involved in math & science in both school and work, in the UAE it seems like there are much higher numbers in schools, but that the drop off happens with work.

Meet the Microsoft Visual Studio Team

Speakers: Brian Keller, Lisa Feigenbaum, Scott Hunter, Shy Cohen, Vishal Joshi

We held this session as a big round circle discussion, to better integrate with the attendees. We had about 50 people by the end, and kept widening the circle during the session. :-) Many attendees were doing web development; many were also working in various government offices. Here were some of the topics discussed:

• One big topic was the rate of Microsoft releases. Some wanted more frequent releases, so Microsoft could keep up with competitors and release features faster. Others wanted less frequent releases, due to the time to upgrade, as well as the task of convincing their management. Similarly, some wanted more features, while others wanted more time to catch up and learn existing features. Finally, others compared Microsoft’s investments in technologies, based on the frequency they release. (Another wanted more frequent releases but was still using VS 2005!) As you can see, it was a very lively discussion with a lot of attendee participation and a lot of fun for us on the team. :-)
  2-3 years is the appropriate cadence we’ve determined to release the .NET Framework, so that companies can get new runtime features at a reasonable pace but don’t need to spend all their time upgrading. On the tooling side, we have more flexibility to release on a more frequent cadence. Examples of this are the Pro Power Tools, Feature Packs, and tools for Microsoft plaftorms (Azure, Office, etc.). Vishal Joshi and Scott Hunter represented the Web team, and explained that the team is equally invested in Webforms and MVC, and that the cadence of these two is different because of the ship vehicles.
• Another major topic was Webforms vs. MVC and LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework. In this case we clarified the roadmap for each example. We will continue to support LINQ to SQL, but future investments will be in Entity Framework. However, the Web team is equally investing in Webforms and MVC. Vishal and Scott listed recent enhancements in each, and are also redesigning their website to improve this messaging. There were strong advocates of each model in the audience, so we explained that we need both Webforms and MVC in order to accommodate both groups of users.

Other Comments (including some entertaining ones):

• “Bring more of those people, and more of this kind of sessions/meetings it was really amazing”
• “It was a good experience meeting the team - 'who makes the developers life hell with new versions all the time.' All the guys & yes the gal too, were cool with the answers. Shy Cohen was a lookalike of Vin Diesel:) & really cool.”

At the end, we stayed for about 10min while attendees could rotate in and take pictures with the team.

Ask The Experts

I staffed the Development Practices table at Ask The Experts, along with local developer evangelists and MVPs. This was the first year that they held Ask The Experts, and I hope it will continue to grow in future years.

Overall, it was a great event! I really enjoyed meeting all the attendees and talking about the development they are doing, as well as the latest Microsoft releases.

http://www.coderadio.co.il/?p=48

You can find more information about Ariel on his blog. Shay is a C#/IronRuby MVP and author of IronRuby Unleashed. They asked many questions about the developer community, as well as Visual Studio, and working at Microsoft. The questions are recorded in Hebrew, but my answers are in English.

In case you’re interested in more details, here is the list of links to people / products / things mentioned in the program. As you can see, they covered a wide variety of topics!

• Lisa Feigenbaum ( blog )
• Post on the history of Visual Studio
• Visual Studio
• Increasing fonts in Visual Studio 2010 with the click of a button
• Harvard University
• Applied Mathematics
• Book on Facebook - "billionaires case"
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Mazda
• DPE: Jaime Rodriguez , Yochay Kiriaty
• Social Networks: Twitter , Facebook
• Community sites contact: Microsoft Connect , MSDN Forums , Stackoverflow
• Program - Microsoft MVP
• Small Basic
• PEX

Enjoy the show!

http://www.coderadio.co.il/?p=48

  Code Radio #05 - Interviewing Lisa Feigenbaum [39:09m]: Download

Stay tuned for the next couple of months when we will provide additional details on these plans.

[UPDATE] May 24: Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 ("Mango") Beta released today, including Visual Basic support for XNA and Windows Phone! Download the bits and then see the VB XNA documentation and VB WP7 code samples and starter kits to get started!

Overview

Last November (28-30), I presented at TechEd Israel 2010. TechEd Israel is a good-sized event, with 3000 people in attendance this year (which is a huge number given the size of the country). There was a lot of focus on the Cloud at the conference. Israeli developers are taking the cloud very seriously, and demonstrate a lot of interest in moving to Windows Azure. Israel is a hotbed for innovation and startups, and is the first country in MEA (Middle East + Africa) to obtain access to Windows Azure. The conference attendees were fairly up-to-date with current with Microsoft technologies. I also spoke at TechEd Israel and local user groups in 2008, and I often run into the attendees I met there at other Microsoft events around the world, especially at PDC. Most of the conference was in Hebrew, except for the sessions by Redmond speakers. There was also an IT Pro side to the conference, which covered technologies like Office 365, Lync, and SharePoint 2010.

Sessions

Jason Zander presented the Developer Keynote, as well as a CTO session, entitled A Decision Makers Perspective on Development on the Microsoft Platform Now and In the Future. These sessions provided an overview of Microsoft developer technologies, and included many demos. Stephen Toub was at the conference and gave two parallel computing talks, including .NET 4 TPL, PLINQ and more & Patterns of Parallel Programming, and Shy Cohen presented Why move to .NET 4.0?. You can find the full list of Dev Tools & Framework track sessions here and the CTO track here.

I presented a session on “Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks”. You can find the video recording here. There was also a blog post about my session by Gad Meir. The original post is in Hebrew, but you can view translations using Microsoft Translator or Google Translate. The session covered a lot of tips across .NET 4, Languages, and IDE, and was very well received. I showed a Twitter demo which searched for trends about the conference using hashtag #teched_il, and then used the DLR to script against the application with a custom search for “משינה” or “Mashina” (the English & Hebrew versions of the same word). Mashina is the name of a popular band who had broken up 15yrs ago, then got together again and played at the attendee party, which generated a lot of excitement at the event!

Here’s the full list of session materials:

• Video: http://www.techedagenda.mscom.co.il/online/?pq=75
• Slides: http://bit.ly/DEV_318
• Code: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/twitter/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4362

Here are some questions and feedback I received at the session:

• Excitement for block selection typing and align assignments features
• One attendee told me that Move Line Up/Down is her favorite feature in the Pro Power Tools
• Request to see the Image Insertion extension (Demo’ed)
• Question about how to invoke intelliSense when it’s not active (Ctrl+J to List Members)
• Question about the performance of dynamic versus reflection (dynamic will be faster in many cases due to DLR call site caching)
  

Ask the Experts

Guy Burstein (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) was the track owner, and he organized an “Ask The Experts” panel session with all the Dev Track speakers. The session started off with questions Guy had collected and had been hearing from the Israeli community. Then he opened up the floor to questions from the audience. Here are some of the questions we received:

• Should I take the Cloud seriously? (Short answer: Yes. :-) Longer answer: We have a lot of confidence in the cloud. There are many examples where we’re betting on it within Microsoft, such as Hosted TFS.)
• Are Cloud Applications secure? (Shy enumerated the 5 elements of application security, and explained how cloud applications can actually be more secure than on premises.)
• Is Silverlight dead? (Jason explained Microsoft’s two-pronged strategy, and cited examples of Microsoft products taking dependencies on each. He also pointed people to the Silverlight Firestarter event.)
• What are the current trends in Programming languages? (I described the declarative, dynamic, and concurrent trends, and talked about the work we’re doing on Async.)

Customer Meetings

There were a lot of MVPs at the event, so it was great to meet them in person, and discuss our community engagements. This included Ohad Israeli, Sasha Goldstein, Alon Fliess, Pavel Yosifovich, and Eyal Vardi. We met up at one of the evening events, and also coordinated a lunch meeting.

I recorded a CodeRadio podcast with Ariel Ben-Horesh and Shay Friedman. Shay is a C#/IronRuby MVP and author of IronRuby Unleashed. They asked many questions about the developer community, as well as Visual Studio, and working at Microsoft. The questions are recorded in Hebrew, but my answers are in English. You can find the recording here:

http://www.coderadio.co.il/?p=48

I also joined Jason in a meeting that Guy had arranged with the Microsoft MVPs. The meeting was sponsored by Sela. Sela is a large technology company in Israel, and does a lot of work with Microsoft. There were also a group of MVPs present from a new company called CloudValue, who’s developing a product to analyze the dollar cost of each line of code in the cloud.

Here are some question topics from the MVP meeting:

• What are some areas you’re working on for the future? (Hosted TFS, Async, Pro Power Tools)
• How do you decide when to make things obsolete? (There’s a high bar for this. Security flaws are an example. We show warnings while phasing out.)
• Questions about the break from WM6.5 (Unfortunately a hard break was needed here, but this is rare for our products which usually place a high bar on compatibility.)
• When will Visual Studio run natively on 64bit? (We don’t have plans for native 64bit, but are investing in memory consumption and performance.)
• What Microsoft technologies are built on Silverlight? (LightSwitch, SharePoint parts, Windows Phone 7)
• Microsoft should have a centralized list of all the current releases, and also better integration between different sites – MSDN, DevLabs, MSR, Visual Studio Gallery, CodePlex, Etc. (Feedback taken)

Below is a picture from the meeting.

.NET Windows Development: Everyday Tips, Tricks & Optimization

by Alberto Población

Foreword:

The .NET Framework contains thousands of libraries to help you with just about any modern development task. Whether you are accessing data, creating a user interface, consuming a web service, or parallelizing your application, the .NET Framework has libraries that can help. The challenge for a .NET developer is to learn what types are available, how to use them, and when. This book provides tried and tested solutions to a variety of common .NET development scenarios.

This book focuses on Windows development. With over a billion clients in the world, Windows is by far the most-used platform. Windows 7, in particular, is the fastest growing and most popular release of Windows yet. See the Windows 7 chapter in this book to learn how your applications can light up on this huge, growing platform. Furthermore, many tips you will find in this book are also relevant to other .NET application types, in addition to Windows client.

The Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program honors Microsoft technology experts for their impact in the community. As a Visual Studio Community Program Manager, I have the opportunity to interact with many customers, and in particular with members of this program. We are fortunate to have Alberto Población as a C# MVP. He has been recognized because of his impact in teaching others about .NET development, both as a trainer and as a top answerer in the newsgroups and forums.

“Tips and Tricks” content is popular because of its immediate practical use. It is also highly personal, based on the author’s experience and prioritization. Alberto’s selections in this book draw on nearly 30 years of development, and respond to the top questions raised in his interactions with .NET users. Reading this book will help you expand your toolset, complete tasks more quickly, and write better and more resilient code. Alberto’s writing style is easy to follow and engaging to read. You can keep this book on your shelf as a reference or read it cover to cover as you would a novel.

So pack this guide with you, give it a read, and add some new tips to your toolbox!

Lisa Feigenbaum
Community Program Manager
Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 - Das Entwicklerbuch - Grundlagen, Techniken, Profi-Know-how

by Klaus Löffelmann and Sarika Calla

German Book for sale:
http://www.microsoft-press.de/product.asp?cat0=33&idx0=12&gr=bücher&cat1=750001464&idx1=2&cnt=product&id=ms-5535&lng=0&titel=Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 - Das Entwicklerbuch

Table of Contents and Foreword in German:
http://www.microsoft-press.de/productinfo.asp?replace=false&cnt=productinfo&mode=2&type=2&id=ms-5535&index=1&nr=0&preload=false&page=1&view=fit&Toolbar=1&pagemode=none

English Version of the Book on Amazon (not yet released):
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-Basic-Developers-Handbook/dp/0735627053

Foreword (in English):

Visual Studio 2010 is an exciting version for the Visual Basic language, which reaches double digits in Visual Basic 10. This is a phenomenal achievement for a programming language, and it demonstrates the great utility that the language continues to provide year after year. Visual Basic has always been a premier tool for making Microsoft platforms accessible and easy to use. While the specific technologies and devices have changed over time, this core mission of Visual Basic has remained the same. Starting in 1991 with Visual Basic 1 and continuing through to Visual Basic 3, Visual Basic revolutionized Windows application development by making it accessible in a way that wasn’t possible before. Moving forward to Visual Basic 4 through Visual Basic 6, the language greatly simplified component programming with COM, OLE automation, and ActiveX. Finally, with Visual Basic 7 and beyond, the language has enabled developers to leverage the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and many .NET Framework technologies. This book covers examples of this, using Visual Basic to access .NET Framework data types, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and the Task Parallel Library. LINQ in particular has a significant impact on the language, providing a unified way to access data from objects, XML, or relational data sources. One of the most revolutionary features introduced as part of LINQ is XML literals, which makes Visual Basic the most productive language for programming with XML.

Looking ahead, there are three major development trends that we see influencing the Visual Basic language now and in the future: declarative, dynamic, and concurrent programming. Declarative programming enables the developer to state what the program should do, rather than requiring the developer to specify in great detail how the compiler should do it. This has always been a design principle for Visual Basic, in which we strive to increase the expressiveness of the language so you can “say more with less code”. Some recent examples of this in Visual Basic 9 are LINQ and type inference. Visual Basic 10 introduces similar efficiencies with multiline lambdas, array literals, collection initializers, auto-implemented properties, and implicit line continuation – all of which are covered in this book. Dynamic programming is another style that has influenced the design of Visual Basic. Late binding is an important feature that has made Visual Basic a great language for Office development and COM programming. In Visual Basic 10, we extended Visual Basic’s late-binding support to work with other dynamic type environments, such as JavaScript and IronPython. This was made possible by the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), which was introduced in .NET Framework 4. Finally, concurrency is an undeniable trend that we see influencing many forms of development. Whether your application is running on a many-core machine, a clustered environment on premises, via distributed computing in the cloud, or even on a single core machine doing IO-bound operations, concurrency can help speed up its execution. .NET Framework 4 provides some great tools for concurrent programming, such as the Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ. Part F of this book shows how to use these technologies in Visual Basic.

Visual Basic is a vibrant environment, and we invite you to dive into it in Visual Studio 2010! Whether you’ve used previous versions of Visual Basic or other object-oriented programming (OOP) languages, or are new to OOP altogether, this book has the information you need to quickly become productive. It explains programming concepts, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework from the bottom up, and establishes a strong foundation. For the more experienced reader, this book also goes deep into these topics and includes dedicated sections on what’s new in the 2010 release of Visual Studio. The book covers a variety of topics, some of them technology specific (like WPF), while others are application agnostic (like garbage collection and serialization). This book establishes a solid foundation that you can leverage when developing applications for any platform that Visual Studio 2010 targets, such as SharePoint, the web, and the cloud.

As Visual Studio Community Program Manager, I always enjoy meeting members of the Visual Studio community. One of the first times Klaus wrote to me, he quoted a motto he had learned from his grandmother: “the worst attempt is the one that you’ll never make.” I knew at that point that he was an ambitious person! Klaus has written computer books for over 20 years, on Commodore 16, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Atari ST, Amiga, Visual Basic 1[MA1] , Visual Basic 3, Visual Basic 4, Visual Basic 5, Visual Basic 6, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, and now Visual Studio 2010. I’ve met with Klaus in various cities around the world: Antwerp, Berlin, and Seattle. His first trip to Seattle was for the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit. The MVP Program honors Microsoft technology experts for their impact in the community, and Klaus was recognized as a Visual Basic MVP for the great support he’s provided through writing books, delivering webcasts, and reviewing German content on MSDN. Klaus’s took his second trip to Seattle while writing this book. He found great inspiration in being at the place where “the magic happens.” I took Klaus on a tour through the Microsoft offices, where he got to connect with other members of the Visual Basic product team. It was a really exciting visit and I could see how passionate Klaus is about Visual Basic!

I was happy to connect Klaus with Sarika, who has been a great partner in writing this book. As a Test Lead on the Microsoft Visual Studio Professional team, Sarika has extensive expertise in Visual Studio. Sarika joined the team in 2002, and has worked on the Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, and Visual Studio 2010 releases. During this time, she’s been deeply involved in the evolution of the Visual Basic language and IDE. As Test Lead, Sarika spends a lot of time thinking about how Visual Basic developers use Visual Studio and the .NET Framework to create client, web, and other types of applications. She also interacts with the Visual Basic community at various phases of the product cycle to gather feedback, review bugs, and present to customers.

Sarika’s and Klaus’s backgrounds were key assets in writing this well thought out book. Sarika has spent nearly a decade working on the Visual Studio IDE, which was a significant area of investment in this release. The Visual Studio 2010 user interface was re-written in Windows Presentation Foundation, which enabled richer user experiences in Visual Studio itself, as well as greater extensibility capabilities for 3^rd-party add-ins. Sarika shares her insight on this topic in the “sightseeing tour” of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE in Chapter 4. Klaus’s experience draws from many years of work as a consultant on Visual Basic .NET and Visual Basic 6 migrations. He’s worked with many development teams on a variety of projects, and he knows which concepts can be the most challenging for developers to pick up. He has a true passion for compiling the most useful information for his readers and presenting it in a way that’s easy to understand. While writing a book can be an arduous task, Klaus tackles it with enthusiasm. He has a great sense of humor that shines through in the playful writing style and makes it fun to follow along.

So as Klaus’s grandma would advise, give this book a try! I’m sure you will find that the 10^th version of Visual Basic helps you to tackle your software development projects with greater ease and productivity than ever before.

Lisa Feigenbaum
Community Program Manager
Microsoft Visual Studio

• C# Books
• VB Books
• F# Books
• Visual Studio Books

C# 2010:

• C# Programming Language (Covering C# 4.0), The (4th Edition)
  Anders Hejlsberg, Mads Torgersen, Scott Wiltamuth, and Peter Golde
• Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C# (2nd Edition)
  Bill Wagner
• C# in Depth, Second Edition
  Jon Skeet
• Essential C# 4.0 (3rd Edition) (Microsoft .NET Development Series)
  Mark Michaelis
• Professional C# 4.0 and .NET 4
  Bill Evjen, Karli Watson, Christian Nagel, and Morgan Skinner
• SamsTeach Yourself Visual C# 2010 in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit
  Scott Dorman
• Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition
  Andrew Troelsen
• C# 4.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference
  Joseph Albahari, Ben Albahari
• C# 4.0 Unleashed
  Bart de Smet
• LINQ to Objects Using C# 4.0: Using and Extending LINQ to Objects and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)
  Troy Magennis
• Programming C# 4.0: Building Windows, Web, and RIA Applications for the .NET 4.0 Framework
  Ian Griffiths, Matthew Adams, Jesse Liberty
• More C# 2010 Books…

VB 2010:

• Visual Basic 2010 Unleashed
  Alessandro Del Sole
• Professional Visual Basic 2010 and .NET 4
  Bill Sheldon, Billy Hollis, Kent Sharkey, Gaston Hillar, Rob Windsor, Jonathan Marbutt
• Visual Basic 2010 Programmer's Reference
  Rod Stephens
• Accelerated VB 2010
  Trey Nash, Guy Fouche
• Beginning Visual Basic 2010
  Thearon Willis, Bryan Newsome
• Mastering Microsoft Visual Basic 2010
  Evangelos Petroutsose
• Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Step by Step
  Michael Halvorson
• Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2010 in 24 Hours Complete Starter Kit
  by James Foxall
• Visual Basic 2010 How to Program (5th Edition) (Pearson Custom Computer Science)
  Paul Deitel, Harvey Deitel
• Beginning Visual Basic 2010 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)
  Thearson Willis, Bryan Newsome
• More VB 2010 Books…

F# 2010:

• Beginning F#:
  R. Pickering. APress: 2009
• Expert F# 2.0:
  D. Syme, A. Granicz, A. Cisternino. APress, 2010.
• Foundations of F#:
  R. Pickering. APress: 2007
• Professional F# 2.0:
  T. Newman, A. Erickson, T. Crowell, R. Minerich.
• Programming F#: A comprehensive guide for writing simple code to solve complex problems:
  C. Smith.
• Real World Functional Programming: With Examples in F# and C#:
  T. Petricek and J. Skeet. Manning: 2009
• Visual F# 2010 for Technical Computing:
  J. D. Harrop
• More F# Books…

Visual Studio IDE – Tips & Tricks:

• Coding Faster: Getting More Productive with Microsoft Visual Studio: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010 (not yet released)
  Zain Naboulsi, Sara Ford
• Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: Visual Studio 2005 and 2008
  Sara Ford

Visual Studio Extensibility:

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Six-in-One
  Joydip Kanjilal, Dr. Istvan Novak, Attila Hajdrik, Mitchel Sellers, Peter Smulovics, Andras Velvart, Gaston C. Hillar, Agnes Molnar, Gyorgy Balassy, Adam Granicz
• Professional Visual Studio Extensibility
  Keyvan Nayyeri
• More VS Extensibility Books…

LIDNUG: Visual Studio 2010 Tips & Tricks with Lisa Feigenbaum

http://lidnug24-vs2010-esli.eventbrite.com/

On the topic of Linked In, which is often used for job networking, also make sure to check out the Visual Studio list of job openings at Microsoft:

Visual Studio Is Hiring!

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2011/02/08/visual-studio-is-hiring.aspx

Visual Studio is a great product, and in addition, a great team to work for. Please let me know if you have any questions. I hope you will consider applying.