"Heroes Happen Here" Microsoft Launch Event

Yesterday I travelled up to Birmingham for Microsoft's launch event for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.

The event was a bit of a mixed-bag, and developers on Twitter and Channel 9 seem to be quite vocal about being treated as 'second class citizens' (the event focussed more on IT department staff), with many talking about not attending a similar event in the future. For my part I thought it was an event worth attending. Of course that may have more to do with the fact I'm 'between contracts' and so didn't lose a day's pay on top of the travel costs of around £60 than anything else!

Microsoft seem to have abandoned evaluation forms, presumably relying on the fact the event 'sold out' (how can a 'free' event 'sell out'?!) as a measure of its 'success' instead. Their bad! A lot of folk are disgruntled that the much-touted free software for attendees turned out to be something of a 'sleight of hand' confidence trick. The promised 'free copies of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008' turned out to be evaluation versions, albeit with a full year's evaluation period, with SQL Server actually turning out to be a CTP from 4 months ago. For those of us with MSDN subscriptions this 'swag' is largely irrelevant anyway, but for students who'd rushed to book the event based solely on the promised software it was hard not to feel totally conned! The official explanation from Microsoft is apparently that they had to offer '365 day evaluation versions' instead of the full product "for tax reasons", which strikes me as one of the lamest reasons ever for going back on a promise!

The logistics of the venue were pretty appalling, causing much delay and frustration, particularly for pre-registered attendees who found they had to queue for half an hour just to have their badges swiped, and many are pointing out how much better organised community events like Developer! Developer! Developer! are. Coloured badges were used to denote tracks (I.T. or Developer) but there appear to have been variations on a theme (eg yellow and brown badges for developers with brown badges getting priority) and there are stories of people being turned away from sessions because they had the wrong colour badge, even though there was plenty of room inside the session room, or of rooms being full despite people rushing to them straight from the keynote (which over-ran by over 20 minutes for no valid reason) etc etc.

People also seem to be unhappy with the technical content (if not the speakers) for Visual Studio 2008 - perhaps not surprising given that this newly launched product has actually been in widespread use since it was made available on MSDN back in early November, while these talks were (rightly!) aimed at someone new to the product. For my part, I thought the sessions I attended were all good, given that by necessity they had to be pretty much at the '101' level. No complaints about any of the speakers from me, and even though many found the keynote much too obviously sales-oriented I thought the UK Managing Director managed to give a far more charismatic talk than Ray Ozzie had done a couple of weeks ago at MIX08 in Las Vegas.

The only real disappointment for me was the final keynote - an excellent talk, but one which I'd already seen (and which has been available via video download for some time) at last year's paid-for UK MIX07 event. It was disappointing to have travelled all that way, only to find a months old repeat being the only offering for the last hour-long session of the day.

By common consent the biggest disaster area of the day were the Hands on Labs. Reports of lack of power, missing software files, inappropriate equipment (American keyboards instead of British), lack of readable instructions or even lighting to read instructions abound and I've yet to read a single report that says anything positive about the labs. The Americans seem to handle this sort of thing so much better than we Brits do.

On the positive side the community-organised events all seemed to go down very well. I caught a few of the competitions organised by the NextGen UK crowd and they looked like a lot of fun, and were getting appreciative yelps and cheers from those gathered to watch. In what's becoming a common theme in these reports of conference and community events, the highlight for me was the chance to network and catch up with folks I've met at previous community events.

MIX08 Blogging

I'm blogging all the MIX08 announcements over on the new Daily.NET Show web site. Already announced pre-conference is the new version of Expression Studio 2, available in April.

I'll probably also be using my mobile phone to post snippets of news throughout the conference on twitter 'irascian' account

Recommended Daily Link Blog/Prepping for MIX08

It's been too long since my last blog post, but in the background I've been working on a few things. Technology wise I've been getting to grips with JQuery (which I prefer to Prototype/Script.ac.ulous) and Castle Windsor, an interesting Inversion of Control system that looks more robust, agile and elegant than Microsoft's own upcoming Unity system, currently available as a CTP.

This time next week I'll be in Las Vegas for the Microsoft MIX08 conference event. I'm hoping to be video podcasting from the event on a daily basis in preparation for an eventual launch of The Daily.Net Show which will be a "daily news show" replacement for my daily .NET blog listing summaries that never really got off the ground. Throughout MIX08 video podcasts should be appearing on dailydotnetshow.blogspot.com, so keep an eye on that!

For one of the show's "weekend extra's" it looks like I may also be able to cover the UK launch event for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Birmingham on March 19th. Discussions with Microsoft's PR company are ongoing, so fingers crossed!

Although Mike Gunderloy's daily .NET link listing stopped at the end of last year, several other folks have risen to the challenge of providing a replacement, and are doing much better than my half-hearted attempt earlier this year. By far and away the best in my view is the one published on Jason Haley's blog - he seems to capture all the useful and important stuff from amongst the horrendous hundreds of brown-nosing "xxx is awesome" posts that pollute the MSDN blog space. If your 'research' time is as limited as mine Jason's blog should be at the top of your list if you want to make sure you don't miss some good stuff out there in the 'blogosphere'.

In the home office I've installed Vista Service Pack 1, which sneaked onto MSDN downloads a week or so ago, albeit hidden under a 'Top 10 Downloads' banner rather than in the main downloads area. This is a 'high risk' patch and is being held up by Microsoft pending lots of reported problems with certain drivers. However on my pre-installed Dell Vista system I was just getting too many blue screens of death, together with an annoying hotfix that kept failing and then re-attempting installation every boot up - problems which have plagued me for a year now! I have to say that for me SP1 for Vista has been a blessing. No blue screens since I installed it, and no "failed" hot fix reattempts either.

I've also got Windows Server 2008 installed in a virtual PC on my vista laptop and that's looking to be in good shape although I haven't really used it in anger yet. No doubt the anger will follow when I try and do real stuff in it, but for now I'm happy with how quickly and easily it installed - it's by far the easiest and most straightforward install experience I've had (and yes, that includes Apple's Leopard OS installation).

Although contract-wise things have been a disaster for me this year (when management keep using the phrase 'a challenging environment' while the troops on the ground repeat a different phrase 'denial of reality', you know you're in trouble) and wretched viruses have taken me down twice (stomach flu and then the 'ordinary' one), technology-wise things are getting exciting with new versions of the MVC framework for ASP.NET, the first look at Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 2.0, new Unity CTPs and no doubt some last-minute surprises due to be announced and demonstrated in Las Vegas the week after next. Stay tuned!

Daily .NET Update / FeedDemon is now free!

Well that didn't work very well did it (the daily link updates I mean)?! Too many priorities (clue: learning Sony Vegas Pro 8 and chroma keying!) and not enough hours in a day, but stay tuned because I'm working on something that will probably be more useful, and will hopefully be ready to launch around the same time as MIX08 (that's the beginning of March for those not paying attention).

In the meantime the really good news is that my favourite RSS reader FeedDemon has announced that it's now going to be free. I paid for my copy, and it was worth every penny. It's how I keep track of all the different blogs there are out there and is infinitely better than using your browser to keep track.

You can download the latest version from Newsgator. Enjoy!

Daily .NET Blog Update #2

Not a lot of 'signal' around today, with seemingly endless "I'm an MVP" and "I've been renewed" blog posting 'noise'. A few new Team Foundation Server links again today, but if you could check out just one link then the one to check first is Karl Seguin's Foundations of Programming!

.NET Development: Foundations of Programming - Are you an MSDN.NET programmer struggling with token attempts at OOP using complex APIs, or are you an ALT.NET developer using domain driven development and comfortable with unit tests, dependency injection, interfaces, O/R mappers and everything else that goes with it? Karl Seguin hopes to turn you from the former into the latter with an excellent series of posts on CodeBetter.com that have now been compiled into an easily digestible 47 page PDF. Excellent stuff!

Knowledgebase: Recent .Net Framework KBs enumerated - a tidy table showing what KnowledgeBase matches which framework and language id now that .NET 3.5 has shipped, from Aaron Ruckman.

TFS 2008: TFS Times - All about the Build - There's a new monthly newsletter about TFS 2008 and the current issue is all about the Build process.

TFS 2008: Visual Studio Team System Sample 'Scenario Help' Topics. - A while ago the Team Foundation Server User Education team at Microsoft blogged about replacing the 'orientation' topics in the help file that ships as documentation for TFS with new 'scenario' topics (you can read that blog entry here). Now they're soliciting feedback on sample documentation that demonstrates this scenario-oriented approach to documenting the beast that is Team Foundation Server.

WinForms: DataGridView Watermark Cell - If you've got a custom column in a Windows Forms DataGridView control and want to place a watermark in it the Windows Forms User Education Team at Microsoft have some code to help you out.

Windows Home Server: HP MediaSmart Server getting security, media streamer updates - If, like me, you've purchased an HP MediaSmart Server (highly recommended!) Engadget has good news on some new updates that will be 'beamed out' shortly.

Daily .NET Blog Update #1

One of my most useful blog RSS feeds was Mike Gunderloy's Larkware Daily Grind, which collected the most interesting .NET developer -oriented links and posted them daily.

Apparently Mike has been moving further and further away from .NET development over the last year, and on New Year's Eve announced there would be no more 'Daily Grind' updates.

Given that my own intermittently posted link listings were getting too unwieldy to publish on a weekly or monthly basis, I've decided to take up the slack a little and start the new year by publishing my own 'daily grind' link listing here on this blog.

This is NOT a replacement for Mike's more public service - hence the name change to The Daily .NET Blog Update - but will at least help ME (and hopefully others too?) in keeping track of the relatively few 'signal' items amongst all the 'noise' that emanates from so many of the so-called .Net focussed blogs. I make no excuse for only including links to the .NET stuff that's of interest to me personally.

Anyway, to kick things off here's the first set of links, for Wednesday, 2nd January 2008. If there's any important links I've missed please feel free to email me or send me a tweet via my twitter id of 'irascian'.

.NET 3.5: Visual Studio 2008 - Three free E-learning books from Microsoft Press - I already have the published copies of Introducing LINQ, Introducing ASP.NET AJAX and Introducing Silverlight 1.0 so free pdf versions are somewhat redundant for me, but given that the blogs are full of the link to the free version I guess it's worth posting it here too. To be honest, I think there are much better books around than these to cover the subject area but I guess beggars can't be choosers and at least these are now free.

.NET 3.5: How is the .NET Framework 3.5 different from .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0? - If you're as confused as most are by the different versions, service packs and component version numbers (C#3.0 is part of .NET 3.5 - go figure!) then this handy guide from Zhiming Xue serves as a useful quick reference.

ASP.NET AJAX: Performing Asynchronous Postbacks from JavaScript - UpdatePanels have several drawbacks, one of which is that execution is normally synchronous. Here's a neat function that lets you execute asynchronously, written by Martijn Veken after poking around the Microsoft-supplied JavaScript framework.

Internet Explorer: Running multiple versions of IE at the same time - It's a pain in the arse trying to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same PC so that you can test your web sites thoroughly, because Microsoft, for all their claims of 'previous release compatibility' are determined you should only run the latest version. Fortunately there are solutions available and here's a positive report on one of them from Dan Vega

TFS 2008: Power Tools for Team Foundation Server 2008 - Details were actually posted back on December 7th, but bloggers seem to only now be catching up on the details and providing this link to the original details from TFS guru bharry.

TFS 2008: Team Foundation Server 2008 Webcasts - There's a whole bunch of Team Foundation Server webcasts, covering 2008 and Rosario, scheduled for the next month, with the first two taking place tomorrow (3rd). The sign-up links are all here, courtesy of Microsoft Events.

TFS 2008: Reporting Code Analysis Defect Counts - You can hook up Excel to the Team Foundation Server data warehouse to show code analysis counts in a pivot table. The Visual Studio Code Analysis Team have all the details.

Visual Studio.NET: Change the RSS feed on the Visual Studio start page - If you're as annoyed as I am at how out-of-date the default RSS feed area on the Visual Studio start page is here's a handy tip on how to change the feed that's displayed, as part of the daily Visual Studio Tip series. If you're not subscribed to this daily tip blog from Sara Ford you should be because each day there's a new little gem you may have missed.

Visual Studio.NET Tools: Mole v4 Visualiser with Property Editing for Visual Studio.NET - Visual Studio ships with several simple visualisers but Mole, which is a free download, gives you unlimited drilling down into objects and sub-objects. And it's fast! Silverlight isn't yet supported but WPF and WCF are.It's been made available with source code, test benches and pdf manual by Karl Shifflett, Josh Smith and Andrew Smith.

WCF: How to get started with WCF - Windows Communication Foundation is a complex, if rather magnificent, beast to get to grips with and there are a plethora of books out there claiming to teach it, but most of them are, frankly, not very good (reviews of some coming to this blog soon!). If you want to avoid wasting money you can always try the free webcasts by the author of O'Reilly's Learning WCF, the links to which have been posted in one nice simple blog post from Daniel Walzenbach.

WCF: 'Learning WCF' updates for Visual Studio 2008 - If you've got the above-referenced O'Reilly book you should check out this blog from That Indigo Girl since it contains updates to the book and source code which make it applicable to Visual Studio 2008. Having got seriously burnt with an early book by a different author on WCF based on the beta which promised updates but then not only didn't deliver them but blocked comments to stop people complaining (you know who you are - I sent you email!) it's nice to see that not all authors just take your money and run, leaving you with something that's worthless even when you buy it on publication date!

Windows Server 2008: Developer Training Kit for Windows Server 2008 (Beta 3) - the latest beta version of the Longhorn Developer training kit including material for IIS7, Management, WCF, WF, Windows CardSpace, Windows PowerShell, Virtualization and the Transactional File System (TxF), has been made available via Microsoft Downloads.

MIX08 = "Go Live" License for Silverlight 2.0?

Scott Guthrie has just announced that common sense has finally prevailed and that Silverlight 1.1 will be renamed Silverlight 2.0, and that a beta with a 'Go Live' license will be available 1Q 2007.

I thought it was very disingenious of the Microsoft Ireland who gave a talk on Silverlight on the Silver Screen a couple of months back, to indicate that Silverlight 1.1 would go RTM 'very soon', when all the indications at the UK's MIX07 event had been that we were about a year away from it being RTM.

Reading between the lines, I'd be very surprised if Silverlight 2.0 didn't officially go beta, with its associated 'Go Live' license, to coincide with the MIX08 event in Las Vegas as the start of March, hopefully with RTM around June or July next year.