In two weeks is the VSLive! Conference in New York City, where I'll be giving two presentations. This promises to be another great conference, and especially fun for me to be back in my home town. You can still sign up to attend - see the details at http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/ If you make it over...

Yes, it is that time of year again (and I say that most happily!) to go out to San Francisco to speak at the VSLive Conference. This year I am focussing on real-world use of DataSets, both with VS 2005 and VS 2008. But don't attend just for that - there are many other great sessions and speakers that...

Although it has been around since this past TechEd US, The Region has now moved to ists permanent home at http://www.theregion.com/ The Region is basically the public global center for the 140 Microsoft Regional Directors around the world. It is a single view into the blogs of all of these technical...

Yesterday's major developer event for Microsoft developers, Microsoft Developer Academy , was a great success. Over 2,000 developers attended the event, which offered a choice of 25 different breakout sessions, plus another 6 panel discussions. I sat in on several sessions, and was very impressed...

VSLive! is coming to Boston this week and I'm scheduled to give 2 presentations: (1) SQL Server 2005 Everywhere (2) .NET Worst Practices - What's Wrong With This Code ?! According to an email I received a few weeks ago, the latter session is rated one of the top 5 sessions in the Smart Client track....

If you want to get your hands on the first bits of ADO.NET 3.0, you can download the CTP from here . Pablo Castro announced it over here - here is what you get to play with: The ADO.NET Entity Framework, which includes: The Entity Data Model (EDM), which allows developers to model data at a higher level...

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...