I'll Be Speaking at Code Camp in Victoria, BC

I'll be speaking at the Victoria Code Camp on January 26th so if you're in the area and you have nothing else to do on your Saturday come on up to beautiful Victoria. This is going to be a GREAT code camp! I did the same sessions at DevTeach in Vancouver in November and we had a lot of fun (read about them here and here). 

What can I say about VB 9 -- it's AWESOME! This language has really come a long way. There are so many language enhancements this version that I don't know where to start. I plan on talking about LINQ and as we write a variety of queries I'll show how the new language features tie into them to make them work. I'll also be showing the new XML features that are very specific to Visual Basic like XML Literals, Embedded Expressions and Axis Properties that make querying, transforming, and creating XML a total breeze. If you're using any language to manipulate and work with XML then you'll want to have a look at VB 9. There's a good set of How-To's on the VB Developer Center under the Video Tutorials page to help you get started.

I'll also be doing a session totally dedicated to XML in VB 9. I'll start with the basics there and then move deeper into the LINQ to XML API and show a bunch of examples using XML Literals and VB's unique, easy-to-use, LINQ syntax. Some of the examples I'll show I've blogged about like the Word Mail Merge example, an Excel import/export example, an RSS Viewer and we'll have some fun mapping customers in Northwind using Virtual Earth.

I'm looking forward to this event. Hope to see you there!

Enjoy!