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About Our Group
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We are a professional independent user group
private volunteer membership association whose
members
are 100% committed to the Microsoft
Visual Studio development tool set, emphasizing Visual Basic
and C#. We support our members in that commitment! See About
and History. Please see
Notice.
The Denver Visual Studio User Group meets at a
Microsoft office, but the user group is not operated by Microsoft.
We are a
technically-focused independent group of professional developers who
concentrate our interests in the Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET
Framework development
tool set, emphasizing Visual C# and Visual Basic. At our
Presentation Meetings, Labs, and other events we present information on both general and
specific topics regarding these tools and the development of enterprise
level quality applications. In addition, we may include discussions on
other strategic parts of the Microsoft .NET platform. This includes
Clients (Operating Systems, Smart Devices, etc.), Experiences
(Microsoft Office, etc.), XML Web Services (and .NET Services,
etc.), and Servers (Windows Servers and Windows Servers Systems, including
SQL Server, BizTalk Server, etc.).
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As peers, we support fellow
members through question and answer sessions, as well as discussions. We discuss both the current and next versions of
our development tools. We network for job and career advancement. Our
members include both experts and novices. Our members include
application development
professionals from the greater Denver, Colorado (USA),
metropolitan area
and the Colorado front range of the
Rocky Mountains.  |
Denver Visual Studio User Group
www.DenverVisualStudio.net |
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About
Microsoft .NET
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What Is .NET?
Microsoft .NET is a set of software technologies for connecting
information, people, systems, and devices. This new generation of
technology is based on Web services—small building-block applications that
can connect to each other as well as to other, larger applications over
the Internet.
Application programmers have so many reasons to use .NET. Just about
every common task that Windows and Web programmers perform today is easier to
code, test, deploy, and maintain using .NET.
True interoperation exists among all .NET
languages (Visual Basic, C++, C#, COBOL, and many others) because
.NET unifies the services and functions that those languages offer, the
task of integrating code from several programmers writing in different
languages is almost trivial. The .NET development environment pulls all
the languages that programmers use into one easy-to-use but extremely
powerful tool that includes the ability to debug code no matter where it
runs. After years of sometimes widely divergent ideas about how programmers should write code, Microsoft has constructed an environment
that lets programmers concentrate on writing programs and not on
technology or syntax idiosyncrasies.
Each .NET
compatible language has its own set of constructs which work best within
the context of that language, while using the CLR. The key to these developments is the Common
Language Runtime (CLR). Because the .NET languages provide code for one
common, abstracted environment, programmers have the same functionality
available no matter what language they use -- no longer must they endure
different sets of rules for C++ and Visual Basic. The CLR is the intermediate
layer that translates CLR function calls into function calls that the
host OS supports. If you're worried that .NET languages and CLR sound
like some sort of old-style interpreted language (e.g., Pascal or
earlier versions of Visual Basic), you can relax. The compilation process includes
converting the .NET language code into machine code for the target CPU.
In fact, Microsoft told TechEd 2001 attendees that .NET applications compiled
with the final release will actually run faster and have smaller
footprints than older applications. What makes these enhancements even
more significant is Microsoft's comment that the .NET Framework isn't
limited to the Windows platform. Microsoft tailored its first
releases for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, but the company
has long-term
plans to port .NET to other operating systems and thus no longer distinguish programmers by the Operating System they use.
No matter what your role in IT, .NET has a
significant impact on your professional life. The impact on programmers
is obvious, but the impact on network managers is just as great. To
receive the full benefits that the .NET Framework has to offer, clients
running .NET applications need to run Windows XP or Windows 2000 (or
various Windows
for mobile users) and above, as will the servers that will run the server versions
of the applications, including Windows Server 2003, and above. .NET is based on an N-tier distributed application
design; therefore, servers supporting the various network functions may
be located in many places on the network and may offer direct access
over the Internet. In addition to managing all the services needed to
help servers and clients communicate with each other, you also need
to manage security for local, remote, and Internet users. The world as
you know it has changed. The adoption process has been extremely fast in
some companies and glacially slow in others, but after businesses and Windows
programmers learn what they can do with .NET, adoption will be
inevitable. This radical change in application development affects us
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About Our
Members and Microsoft .NET
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Microsoft .NET includes some of the most significant advancements for developers since
Visual Basic 1.0. Members of our user group are involved in learning about
and exchanging ideas about these enhancements to our development
environment and how to build solutions for our business challenges.
Our group members help provide
each other with additional detailed
information on the .NET platform, including
Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, the .NET languages (emphasizing
Visual C# and Visual Basic), plus the
other parts of
the Microsoft .NET platform and their related applications and technologies. This is an opportunity to learn more about the
current direction of our development on the Microsoft
platforms. This includes information on rapidly building high performance, Internet,
scalable applications,
taking component technology to the next level, moving beyond Web sites to building Web services,
and tying everything together.
These extensive enhancements
to the Visual Studio development tools known as
.NET, no longer include what were called
"language islands". In Visual Studio, the Common
Language Runtime (CLR)
makes development "language-neutral". Now there is much
more that is common than different between the languages. Our group
embraces the .NET Framework development platform as a whole. Our group concentrates on those developers who
choose Visual C# and Visual Basic
as their languages with which to code. The Visual C# examples
are of particular interest to C++ and
Java developers, as well as the broadening nature of the Visual Basic developer.
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About
Microsoft Visual Studio
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Microsoft Visual Studio is the rapid application development (RAD)
tool for building next-generation Web applications and XML Web services.
Visual Studio empowers developers to design broad-reach Web
applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio
is fully integrated with the .NET Framework, which provides support
for multiple programming languages and automatically handles many common
programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications
using their language of choice. Visual Studio includes a single
integrated development environment (IDE) with RAD features for building
Web applications and middle-tier business logic, and RAD XML designers for
working with data. More information about Visual Studio can be found
at the
Visual Studio Web site.
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