Saturday, February 16, 2008

Cool VB 9 stuff

Beautiful day outside to go to the beach, but I'm recovering from the flu, so I stayed in and thought give some of the "new" VB9 (aka VB 2008) features a try. I must say I got into the .net world thru VB.Net but for one of my projects I decided to switch to C# (also to learn it) and never looked back.

But today I found some amazing new features in VB9 and I wanted to share them. Actually one of them is plain LinQ and we covered that before but I want to comment on VB9's integrated support for XML, and probably the best way to explain it is by showing an example... take a look at the following sub

Dim orders As New OrdersCollection
orders.Fill()

Dim elems = From order As Orders In orders Where order.ShipCountry = "Brazil" _
Select <order><id><%= order.OrderID %></id><customer><%= order.CustomersCompanyName %></customer></order>

Dim doc = <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><orders></orders>
doc.Root.Add(elems)

Console.WriteLine(doc.ToString())

Keep in mind that OrdersCollection is the collection generated by DeKlarit's BusinessObject Addin. Do you have any idea what this writes to the console? well... take a look at it...


Console


First of all, have you ever seen xml displayed like that in the console? not me. And in case you missed it, let me go thru the code. First, I created the collection and filled it. Then I used LinQ to query the orders shipped to Brazil and selected <order> XElements with an id tag and a customer tag, both of them filled with data. Then I created an XDocument just writing the tags, and then just added my previous collection of XElements (elems) to the document and voilá!, to ToString method of the XDocument prints out what you see in the console pic. Ain't that cool or what?!


Others things you can do with your XDocument (doc)

Console.WriteLine(doc...<order>.Count())
Console.WriteLine(doc...<order>(0)...<customer>(0).Value)

 


The first line writes how many orders are in the xml document, while the second line writes the value of the (first) customer of the the first order.

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Friday, February 08, 2008

The truth is out there...

...and so is DeKlarit 4.5

We have just released DeKlarit 4.5 for 2005 and 4.5 for 2008.
Both versions share the same functionality, but this is our last version supporting VS2005, so start your migration right away. I know I said before that you should create a blank VS2008 project with DeKlarit and import your existing objects to it. Now all that changed, I mean, you can still do it that way, but now I believe the best way is to just open your existing project with VS2008. You will have to add the addins back again.

Remember different VS versions of DeKlarit can coexist. Which means 4.5 for VS2008 can be installed in the same box where 4.5 for VS2005 or 4.3 is. But to install 4.5 for VS2005 you have to uninstall 4.3

There are some cool new features like a suggest combo in foreign keys in the WebGeneratorInfragistics Addin, full WCF support, extension capabilities for the generated application menu, and many more.

Give it a try!, and let us know what you think.

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