Cory Smith delivered a terrific presentation on Vista-fying your VB.NET WinForms Apps!
I have heard only rave reviews! Everyone was excited to finally have Cory Smith, MVP from Ft. Worth, come up and give his presentation "Developing for Windows Vista using Visual Studio 2005". It was even more exciting due to his flight delays and weather influence lay overs, etc. He almost could have drove up faster than it took him to fly. What was even more amazing was the fact that he called me during his short lay over in Fayetteville, AR and he was showing the pilot how to get a weather report that was better than 15 minutes delayed!
Several commented that his presentation hasn't changed their minds about Vista, you can never make everyone see the light until they kick something in the dark, but they were all very impressed with his presentation skills and delivery.
I was dumbfounded and amazed how little Microsoft is actually giving us as developers the toolset to deliver our applications for Vista. I don't want to steal his thunder, but suffice it to say, that there are really some basic controls in question that Microsoft has no plans of delivering even as soon as Orcas. As Cory mentioned, we all know that LINQ is the real culprit and is stealing all the resources. To make us go back to using ShowMessage API calls in order to simply make our TreeView control behave like Vista's seems just retarded and several steps backwards.
Cory did an excellent job of showing each of the new visual features in Vista and showing how you can hack them into your own code. That is why I subtitled his presentation and my experience of seeing it "Vista-fying' your WinForm applications.
Great job Cory!
Comment Notification
If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here
Subscribe to this post's comments using
Comments
Leave a Comment
About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.