Visual Studio 2010 Announcements - Finally!

I'm finally able to discuss the new Visual Studio 2010 SKU's. In an effort to simplify things, Microsoft has eliminated the Team role SKU's. No more Architect Edition, Database Edition, Development Edition, or Test Edition. There's now:

• Professional
• Premium - Code Coverage, Test Impact Analysis, Coded UI Test, Database Tools, Code Analysis, Code Metrics, Profiling
• Ultimate - includes Web and Load Testing, IntelliTrace (formerly "Historical Debugger"), Architect Explorer, UML and Layer Diagramming Tools (very cool!)

Additionally, there's Test Essentials and Team Lab Management. These are my favorites! (Although the Database Tools are a very close second!)

All of the editions will provide new tools for cloud development and new WPF/Silverlight designers. (There's also a mentiong for improved Office & SharePoint development tools, but I'll believe it when I see it. Up to now, the tooling for those products has been seriously underwhelming.)

Pay special attention to the newly announced deal here as well. It can get you upgraded!

St. Louis Day of .NET 2009 is over!

It was a lot of work by just a few people, but I feel very fortunate to be one of them. We have received a lot of feedback from many participants and it is nearly all positive!

I really enjoyed meeting a lot of new people - veterans to rooks! I hope everyone else made new contacts because IMO that's what these gatherings are all about. Learning how to do something new or being exposed to new platforms and technologies is great, but there are other channels for these things (e.g. classrooms, blogs, books, and more). The opportunities to really talk to people face-to-face in our industry outside of our regular circles are few and far between.

Some personal mistakes I made:

• I titled the session I was most excited about presenting: "ALM Quantified". Because I've lived with the ALM acronym for a few years now, I assumed more people would know what it was (Application Lifecycle Management). Next time I'll know better.
• Another assumption was that if I put a lot of exciting sessions at the end of the day on Saturday, people would be more likely to stay throughout. It was naive to think I could push people this hard. The attendees started very early on Friday and were in session until after 5pm that evening. Many stayed several hours after in the Home nightclub and got up early again on Saturday. Thank you all for enduring and I hope you don't feel cheated of some of some great sessions.

Day of .NET 2009 Registration

I'm one of the organizers of this event and we have finally announced that registration is officially open for this year’s highly anticipated St. Louis Day of .NET conference and there’s a special surprise – it’s two days! That’s right - two full days of technical content. The flyer below has the highlights and you can get all the details and sign up here: http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/.

Please join us for this awesome event and pass the word along to your friends and coworkers as well.

Hope to see you there!

TechEd 2009

No really big announcements at TechEd this year, but it was still a great conference.

I worked a couple of the Visual Studio Team System booths throughout the week. It was great to talk to both the Microsoft people and those interested in ALM and the Team System products.

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend a couple of sessions due to all my networking efforts. I will likely be spending the next several nights catching up on the recorded sessions. (I love playing them back at fast speed in media player anyway!) Here are the sessions I attended in the order I liked them most:

• Zen of Architecture (ARC315)
• Agile Development with Microsoft .NET (BOF54)
• Implementing the Entity Framework in an n-Tier World (BOF65)
• Integrating Application Lifecycle Management and Project Portfolio Management (OFC03-INT)
• Keynote Session
• Building Rich Business Clients in WPF: Getting the Most Out of Windows Presentation Foundation (WUX305)
• Adding Communication to Your Applications with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 (UNC301)
• Building Custom Applications in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 (OFC325)
• Microsoft Certification 101 (COM06-INT)
• What's Hot with Windows Mobile 6.5 and the New User Experience (WMB03-INT)
• Leveraging WPF in Windows Embedded Standard Code Name "Quebec" (WEM203)
• Focus on Fundamentals in Windows Applications (Graphics, Power, Services, Profiling) (WCL305)
• Metrics That Matter: Using Team System for Process Improvement (DPR03-INT)

There were other sessions I wanted to attend, but booth duty got in the way. There were several sessions on System Center, WPF, and Team System sessions, but I just had too many conflicts.

I also heard from others that these sessions were extraordinary!

• Tough Lessons Learned as a Software Project Manager (DPR307)
• Patterns for the Rest of Us (DPR401)

Microsoft put on a great conference and I appreciate their efforts immensely.

Thank you to INETA for hosting a great party at Chaya on Wednesday and everyone for attending that event. It was great talking to all of you.

MIX 2009 Part I

MIX was a great event again this year! I was only there for Wednesday and Thursday in order to save some money. It was great to hang out with our local Microsoft guys (Denny, Clint, and their other brother Clint). I also said a brief hello to Microsoft (and former Quilogy guy) Jon Box. Finally, I spent a significant amount of time with Quilogy's own Mark Riemann, SSE's Kevin Grossnicklaus, and Winchester's Derek Jerrell.

My notes:

• Deborah Adler's keynote was fantastic! She basically reminds developers and designers to focus on the user experience and make the technology and aesthetics secondary.
• Scott Guthrie's keynote was primarily focused on the new Silverlight and Blend features.
• Blend 3 (preview available):
• SketchFlow!!! You can make your comps in layered .psd files and import them into a flowchart that can show simple animations and transitions. You can package up this "working" prototype and send it to a client for interactive playback AND annotation!
• Silverlight 3 (beta available) looks pretty good finally! It still doesn't hold a candle to WPF, but it has enough maturity now to view it as a real option for application development.

Useful sessions I attended:

• "What's New in Microsoft Silverlight 3.0" (Wednesday) - This session was a great run-through of several new features in Silverlight. Joe Stegman covered the very cool new video features including the adaptive video and effects. He also covered the interesting out-of-browser and cross-browser functionality.
• "Live Framework and Mesh Services: Live Services for Developers" (Wednesday)
• "Using Microsoft ASP.NET MVC to Easily Extend a Web Site into the Mobile Space" (Thursday)
• "Improving UX Through Application Lifecycle Management" (Wednesday)

VERY cool, but not very useful, session:

• "Using Total Experience Design To Transform The Digital Building" (Thursday)

All of these conferences and events are about networking. All of the presented sessions are available online, so I focused on attending sessions where I knew the presenter. If you are disappointed that you didn't get to go, because you thought this would be a great jumpstart to your training, do not worry. These conferences are a terrible way to learn something, but the sessions are great for exposure. (You can play these back at double-speed in Windows Media Player and probably do 3x the number of sessions in the comfort of your own home.)

The presentation of the Winchester Ballistics Calculator was alright. They had the Partner Showcase area in a terrible location where very few people walked by. It didn't help that our presentation was first thing in the morning, so people didn't really show up until afterwards for Thursday's keynote. The whole Partner Showcase was really disorganized as far as where we were supposed to be and when. Most importantly though, it will be available on video through the MIX site.

I am going to continue going through the various session videos and I will post my reviews of those as well. I will also add more notes on the conference in the coming days, but I gotta get back to work!

VSTS 2010 CTP Expired?!

Is your Visual Studio 2010 CTP expired? Here's how you can reactivate it.

First, download the bits again. You can use your original .exe and .rar's if you kept them. Extract them to the desired location, BUT DO NOTHING ELSE. Just extract the files.

Second, open the .vmc file in Notepad (or other text / XML editor) in order to view the XML. Find (CTRL-F) the XML element named "</mouse>". Immediately after the mouse element end tag, insert the bolded XML you see below.

<integration>
   <microsoft>
   <mouse>
      <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
   </mouse>
   <components>
      <host_time_sync>
         <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
      </host_time_sync>
   </components>

TFS31004 - Cannot connect to TFS

I recently had one of my developers tell me they were having trouble connecting to TFS. He had no problems connecting while at work, but then he took his laptop home to do some work. (Before you send me hate-mail, I didn't ask him to work any OT from home.) At home, he was unable to connect to TFS, so he deleted the server from Team Explorer and tried to re-add it. At this point, he got a dialog reporting a TFS31004 error. It's important to note here that his laptop was NOT joined to our domain. I'm happy he came to me early on because I knew I'd seen this error before so it didn't take me too long to find a fix. Scotty Wakefield's blog had a posting with exactly what we were looking for.

On the developer's machine, open a command prompt and enter control keymgr.dll
A dialog titled Stored User Names and Passwords should appear. Find the entry in the listbox matching the name of your TFS server. Click the Edit... button, verify your username, and retype your password. Click OK and then Close to exit the dialog. Try again to connect to TFS.