The May/June MSDN events have been announced (http://www.msdnevents.com). This series is focusing on Developer Productivity and looks to touch on various topics including a few of the Microsoft Application Blocks, IDE enhancements in Whidbey, XML features in “Yukon” and SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. It looks like the MSDN Developer Champions have a full boat with this one. I’m looking forward to it.

If you’re in the Midwest region (IL, IN, WI), Jacob (blog) will host a .NET Pub Club if your event exceeds 100 active attendees, so pass the word and spend Jacob’s money!

Here’s the May/June synopsis:

Leveraging Application Blocks in your Application Development: Application blocks are reusable code components from Microsoft for common programming tasks that encapsulate best practices and real-world requirements. We will examine three of these: the Exception Management Application Block that logs exception information to the Windows Event Log; the Configuration Management Application Block that manages configuration data and the Updater Application Blocks that implements a pull-model self-updating capability.

Rapid Application Development features coming in Visual Studio .NET “Whidbey”: In this session, we will look at improvements to the Whidbey IDE (integrated development environment), the new code snippet – IntelliTask- feature, namespace shortcuts, and language enhancements.

XML, XQuery and CLR Integration coming in SQL Server “Yukon”: The next major version of Microsoft SQL Server, codenamed “Yukon”, will extend its XML capabilities with a native, full-fledged XML data type, support for the XML Query and XML Schema Definition language standards, and the graphical XQuery Designer tool. We’ll demonstrate how Yukon’s ability to host the .NET Framework common language runtime will enable stored procedures, triggers and user-defined functions to be written in Visual Basic .NET and C#, and then run in its memory managed, type-safe and secure execution environment.

Introduction to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services: . In this session, you’ll see how the Reporting Services integrates with Visual Studio .NET to create and customize reports, and lastly, manage and schedule delivery of updated reports in the Report Manager.