I recently received the following email message regarding a Podcast interview I did about 6 months ago: Hi Jackie, Hope all is well! We did an interview with you on VB6 to VB.NET migration back in the early part of this year for .NET Cast. I wanted to give you a short update - the Feb 14th episode "XML...

The SQL Express / Visual Studio Starter Kit that we developed for Microsoft is now available for download ! The Teacher Starter Kit is a desktop Winforms application that uses SQL Express as its data store. It is not designed as an enterprise application - it is targeted to less experienced developers...

One of the coolest controls in VS 2005 is the ReportViewer control. It is a powerful control for previewing, printing, and exporting (XLS or PDF) reports based on data in your database. However, t his control is something of weird animal - it is not part of the .NET framework, but is an add-on control...

Back in December, I had a great time chatting with Mark Baker on as they interviewed my for a series on Upgrading to VB.NET that they were doing for their .DevNet .NET podcast series. The interview is posted in approximately 15-minute chunks and the first 2 segments are already posted on CMP Media sites...

There is a newly published article on the VS 2005 TableAdapter up on MSDN - TableAdapters in Visual Studio 2005 . This is a great companion/drill down article to my MSDN article New DataSet Features in Visual Studio 2005 - and if you listened to my latest .NET Rocks interview , you'd know that the TableAdapter...

Bill Vaughn points out that we should normally NOT be using @@Identity to fetch the last-set identity value with SQL Server. This is definitely an important, and often misunderstood (and misused) point. I want to note that the code generated (for typed DataSets) by the latest builds of VS 2005 (post...

I have always been a very big fan and proponent of MSDE and now SQL Server 2005 Express - it is a great way to start building production quality applications, without having to shell out alot of money for a full version of SQL Server (until you really need it). It also means that you can avoid of the...

No sooner than we have a release candidate build of Visual Basic 2005, we start getting lots of details on the next version of Visual Basic ( ver. 9 / "Orcas"). The epicenter of this new information is here , from where you can click to additional articles and blog entries from the VB Dev Team, including...

Last week I had another fun appearance on the .NET Rocks show. I really enjoy recording the show with Carl and Richard - even though it is from 1:00 - 2:30 AM for me ! You can download the audio files for this show here . We talked about ADO.NET 2.0, the VS 2005 Data design time tools (at least a few...

One of the new features that has first appeared in Beta 2 of VS 2005 are the ReportViewer controls and associated Report Designer. This is basically a version of the SQL 2005 Reporting Services engine that can be rendered totally on the client (that means no SQL Server installation/license required for...