Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

One of the cool new productivity features that you'll find in VB 2005 is Code Snippets.  These are snippets of code, to perform various different common actions.  In addition to the large set of snippets that will ship with VS 2005, there is a also an extensibility model so that you can add your own and/or team/company snippets to the the standard collection.

While this is well documented, it still requires defining the snippet and all of its attributes in XML format.  In order to avoid that, download the free Snippet Editor for Snippet Editor for Visual Basic 2005 (Beta 2) and get yourself an easy to use editor to define your new snippets.

Here is the description of this tool:

The hundreds of code snippets that ship with Visual Basic 2005 certainly help your productivity. But what about developing your own library of custom snippets? With the Visual Basic Snippet Editor you can use this Windows Forms application to rapidly build and test your snippets.

• Visually define custom replacement parameters for your snippets
• Add custom metadata such as title, author and description to your snippets.
• Easily define keyboard shortcuts for your snippets to provide fast access.
• Define reference assemblies your snippet use

Note also that this is a shared source project, so you can have an active role in this at well.  Check out the details at the VB Snippet Editor Workspace.

The VB team took alot of heat for the fact that C# had much better refactoring tools than VB.NET.  Quite frankly, I also felt that this was a painfull lacking and only added fuel to the "VB isn't a serious language" fire.  The main reason this functionality was missing from VB was simply a matter of priorities / lack of time before release. 

Well, the VB team has come up with a great solution to answer this need - they have worked out a deal to include the Refactor! tool with VB 2005.

Read about it here and then download the VS Beta 2 version here (use this download link, not the incorrect one on the MS site).

Check out this new Microsoft e-Learning site for developers - high quality training for free !

Developer eLearning’s first available course is Windows Server:  Taking Advantage of 64-bit Computing.  More are on the way:  Smart Client, Connected Systems, SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

If you complete a course and fill out a survey, you are eligible to win one of these prizes:

Grand Prize Sony 50" Plasma WEGA High Definition TV ultimate home theater package
2nd Prize Nikon D70 SLR Digital Camera package
3rd Prize Bose Acoustic Wave 5-CD Music System
4th Prize Bose Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones

Enter the DevSource Programming Trivia Contest
Are you proud of knowing all the answers to obscure programming questions? Here's your chance to find out if you really are a geek guru.

Start here and see what you are made of !

I got back this week from VSLive! Toronto, where I did 3 different presentations.  They all went very well, although the session on business object data binding in VS 2005 (while a great topic) had some challenges in terms of getting the demos to work with build of VS that I had.  Of course, that was pre-Beta2...

For the next three months, I have a conference speaking engagement every month:

May - VSLive! Las Vegas

June - TechEd US

July - TechEd Europe

If you plan on attending any of these events, please drop me a note and let's try to get together for a beer...

Update:
I forgot to mention that in-between, I will be making another guest appearance - details to follow ! :-)

Are you ready to experience SQL Server 2005?

Announcing the launch of the SQL Server 2005 Virtual Hands on labs. In these labs, you will get to experience many of the new features in SQL Server 2005 including CLR integration, XML support and deep business intelligence integration.

Just follow the link and experience SQL Server 2005 for yourself

Registration link:
http://msdn.demoservers.com/login.aspx?group=sql2005

Yes, that does say VB6 :-)

Here  is a new resource center for VB developers still developing applications in VB6 and/or just starting to move to VB.NET.  It contains "VB6 Greatest Hits" content on VB6, as well as content on learning about and migrating to VB.NET.

Check it out.

Actually, my Mom doesn't read my blog, or do anything having to do with computers.  But it is true that I have been selected as a Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional) for 2005, in the category of Visual Studio - Visual Basic.

It is a honor to be associated with some extremely talented people who are dedicated to the Microsoft technologies and the Microsoft technical community.