First Day at DevTeach

I'm up in Vancouver at DevTeach and I have to say that so far it's been a great conference! I did a demo of my Visual Studio Tip of the Day browser and built an add-in (like I showed here) for part of the keynote with Ken Levy of the VSX team. This morning I open up VS and low and behold, Sara's next tip mentions my add-in and the conference! Weird, I'm reading about my add-in in my add-in :-).

The TOTD browser is a great example of using LINQ to XML in Visual Basic so I encourage you to download it and have a look at how easy this was to do with LINQ. Also, Sara will be meeting me up here this evening for a panel discussion with Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin on Open Source. Thanks Sara! I owe you some good Canadian beer after the panel ;-).

Yesterday I also did a session on migration strategies for VB6 apps to .NET. I talked about a decision framework and then showed a ton of code that demonstrated interop between VB6 and VB.NET using the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0. I also showed a couple ways to approach debugging as well as showed how to deal with application config settings.

I was surprised by how many people came to the talk and how well received it was. There's a lot of great VB developers here in Canada. If you're scratching your head about how to approach a migration project, please check out the Toolkit and these posts for more information.

Later today I'm doing a session on What's New in Visual Basic 9 and it should be LOADS of fun. I have a few surprises planned :-).