The data connection builder dialog is a database tool component that’s included in Visual Studio and helps you build a connection string to a database. Last week though the standalone source code was published at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Connection/, so that anyone can use it to build a data connections independently of Visual Studio. According to the license, you can integrate and redistribute the source code with your application. With the data connection dialog, you can perform following tasks: Build/Modify connection strings. Customize the data connection dialog. ...

As you may already know visual studio is going to be built using WPF, so there is great anticipation on how it will look like. Unfortunately the shell wasn’t ready at this year TechEd Europe. Yesterday though Jason Zanders (General Manager, Visual Studio, Developer Division) announced the new UI of Visual Studio. So if you’re qurius (like me) take a peak at the A New Look for Visual Studio 2010 blog post, I think you’ll find it interesting.

Most of the people I meet have this idea that they have to either buy or find an open source third party component, or (even worse) use flash, when it comes to drawing graphs for a web application or site. So I’m guessing that most people don’t know that the Data Visualization Group within the SQL Server Reporting Services Team has created stand-alone ASP.NET and Windows Forms Chart Controls for the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, similar to what has been already available as built-in chart functionality in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. There are...

Yesterday I had the chance to talk at a DotNetZone event about Building Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight 2.0. It went very well, people seemed to have an active interest on this new Technology and anxiously looking forward to build real word applications (like this healthcare one announced yesterday by Tim Sneath) with it. My session was quite long (2.5 hours - thankfully no one slept during it ;-)) so I had the chance to talk about almost all of Silverlight's features and give a lot of demos, after all events like that, where you speak to developers, is...

Quite a few people came to me on Microsoft's Launch 2008 event, asking me how someone can work with Silverlight to present video content. So in case you haven't already seen it, here is a Screencast, I've put together, showing off a few of Silverlight's features combined with Ajax. Currently it's only available on Greek, sorry for those of you not speaking Greek.

Yesterday Microsoft Hellas officially presented Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in its regional Launch 2008 event hosted at Athenaeum Intercontinental. Although I've been working and testing those products for quite some time now, it was nice listening to Eric Rudder (Senior Vice President Technical Strategy της Microsoft) on Microsoft's strategy for Microsoft Servers and .Net Framework. I also enjoyed Daniel Moth's speech on Smart Clients and Sync Framework, although I had already seen most of the things he talked about on his screencasts. I believe that Daniel is probably among the best speakers...

I've been working with VS 2008 for quite a while now and since the beginning I found irritating the fact that web.config files close when you save them. I usually (or constantly ;-)) hit ctrl-s for every change I make without this necessarily meaning that I'm through changing the file. In VS 2008 this means that I have to re-open web.config every time I do that. What's more interesting is that no one else seems to complain about that. I searched the web to find a way to work around that but I simply can not...

I'm one of those that have already installed and use Visual Studio 2008 beta side by side with Visual Studio 2005 on a machine and without any serious problems so far I might add. As you may already know .NET Framework 3.5 gets installed together with the new studio, so my machine contains that too (which is cool by the way, linq, Expressions, lamdas etc are probably the next big leap on programming languages). Yesterday though, while trying to compile a .Net 2.0 web site I've stumbled across the following exception: The base class includes the field 'InformationTBody', but...

As always this time of year I begun thinking on all the things I want to read, listen, view and code during my summer vacation free time, even though I never get the chance to do all the things I plan to ;-). So I've already bought my PSP extra memory (2GB) and plan to fill it with podcasts, webcasts and videos so I can watch on my free time. Technologies and products that I'm especially interested this summer include : Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Visual Studio 2008, Astoria, Jasper, Linq, .Net 3.5, C# 3.0 etc. I've already begun searching for those but...

In case you’ve didn’t notice Marin has posted a comment regarding my WPFSubsonic project and to be more precise a way I can read my application configuration file through my custom Visual Studio Tool. Now I just need to port it to my solution that supports the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and ObservableCollection class so that SubSonic Object can be bound to WPF controls. Thanks Martin