Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

This year I'll be doing 2 sessions at TechEd US.  I'll also be spending some time at the cabanas, product booths, and Ask The Experts.  And of course, GrokTalk.  If you are in Orlando, please stop by and say Hi !

Last month I did a presentation on ADO.NET 2.0 for the Israel Visual Basic User Group. Being a dilligent presentor, I made sure to run through my demos a few days before.  Many of these demos I had use for previous presentations on ADO.NET 2.0.   Of course, since I was now running on a different version of the Framework and of VS, there  were a few changes - no big deal. 

Is that a good thing ?
Will it make you more attractive ?
Will it make members of the opposite sex run in horror ?

What the heck are GrokTalks ? They are so powerful and secret, they don't even appear on the TechEd agenda - but you'll definitely know that they are there...

In an earlier post last month, I threw out a teaser about a special guest appearance, in addition to my scheduled TechEd and VSLive shows.  Well, the cat is out of the bag - I'll be the guest of the week on the next edition of Dot Net Rocks !  I am looking forward to doing my part to make it an informative and fun show - please tune in !

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.

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. 

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