Microsoft published more information today about Visual Studio 10 and .NET 4.0. Click here to read the Press Pass and here to read some additional information.

Oh, and for SA customers, some really interesting news has come out that will impact you in just a few days:

Microsoft also announced that VSTS 2010 will provide a unified VSTS Development and Database product. As a benefit to existing Software Assurance (SA) customers, those who currently own Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition or Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition will receive all the following products starting Oct. 1, 2008, for free:

 

• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition

• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition

• Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Software Developers

• Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Database Professionals

Last week, Microsoft announced that they had joined the Object Management Group. OMG is the consortium responsible for many distributed, and object-oriented specifications. One of their sets of standards defines the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and I'm sure that's the reason Microsoft joined the ranks.

Knowing what's coming in the Rosario (and beyond) versions of Visual Studio Team System, I'm glad to see this happening, as it reinforces that Microsoft is taking their modeling strategy to the mainstream.

I'm sitting through the two-day Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Developers Conference this week and Rico Mariani gave his roadmap to Visual Studio extensibility. Here are some highlights of the coming, "decade worth of work" ...

VS10 (the version after 2008, a.k.a. "Dev10")

• New editor with fine-grained extensibility
• Build on Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) which is "COM for the managed world"
• All new features that should support multiple languages do

VS11

• VSTA (DLR) used for macros and other end-user extensibility
• Critical mass for managed extensibility models enables several common classes of add-ins to be built purely in managed code
• Common project system
• Richer, common base types and protocols for discovery, activation, and manipulation
• Asynchronous extension and visualization model and showcase examples

VS12

• Stable VSIP API's enabling a high degree of compatibility
• Extensive use of asynchronous extension and visualization model

As you know, Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2008 Service Pack 1 was released earlier this month. Most of SP1 was about bug fixes and performance, but it seems that the profiler team snuck in several new features as well:

• Adding support for instrumenting 64-bit managed C++ applications
• Improved instrumentation experience with pre-compiled web sites
• Shipping the 64-bit performance SDK (VSPerf.h, VSPerf.lib)
• Ability to load a previously saved filter on non-English VS installations

Here is a link to the VS2008SP1 readme and a page listing all of the SP1 downloads.

Let’s face it, going to technical conferences is good for your career, but it’s not a whole lot of fun. What you need is an outlet. You need to have fun. That’s where we step in.

Cheap beer and lousy pizza!

Microsoft is bringing back GeekFest! Join them at Howl at the Moon for a night of lousy pizza, cheap beer, dueling pianos, socializing and one wild rubber duck competition….yes, a rubber duck competition.

There is limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference, you can pre-register here.

Register and pick up your "duck" ticket in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (TLA) information desk. You must have a "duck" ticket to get into the party. One "duck" admits up to two people.

When:
Tuesday, June 3, 2008 from 7:00 PM -10:00 PM ET

Where:
Howl at the Moon, 8815 International Drive, Orlando, FL 32819

Ticketing:
You must have a "duck" ticket to attend the party. One duck admits two.

It's generally known that if you want to run any tests, code analysis, or database project build/deployment that you need to install one or more Team Edition of VSTS on your build server. What's not so well known are the licensing ramifications around these scenarios.

Fortunately Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff, has posted on this subject.

To summarize:

If the users creating the builds are licensed users of the edition in question (or Team Suite), that license extends to Team Foundation Build and you don't need to purchase an additional license. One way to think about it is: the people that are using the Team editions need to be properly licensed which in turn ensures the that the build machines are covered as well. Users who merely queue (execute) and review the automated builds are only required to have a Team Foundation Server CAL.

Back home now, and I have a moment to get the photos downloaded from my camera and uploaded to my blog. Next time I'll take my SD card reader with me.

As you can see, registration was quite busy. I heard that there were 4000 people there, but didn't count them myself. The long lines delayed the keynote by about an hour:

Douglas McDowell and I snuck into the press area. Well, he was officially press (SQL Server Magazine), but I wasn't - still I took more notes than most of the other pressies there.

The main screen was huge, and 3D. We estimated about 80' wide and 20' tall. When no slides were on the screen, there was a spinning 3D Earth enclosed in curley brackets. Hey, what about VB?

After the keynote, there was a short walk to the LA convention center, where the breakout sessions, chalk-talks, exhibitor area, etc. Fortunately, we had these interpretive dancers along the way to keep us from getting lost.

The line to lunch was too long, so we ducked inside to check out the exhibitor area.

 

I was there (where it says "You Are Here")

Attendees attending one of Doug Seven's chalk talks on Team System.

Doug was all about the writing quality code and the 3 C's in his talk (Code Coverage, Code Analysis, and the new Code Metrics)

After I turned in my evaluation form, I picked up the attendee bag, which had  lots of goodies, including a hard-bound, coffee-table style book called "Heroes Happen Here" which contains IT heroes from all around the world, photographed by Carolyn Jones. And yes, I got my book signed!

Microsoft announced today that PDC 2008 is on!

 

October 27–30, 2008
Pre-conferences October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California

 

PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. Mark your calendars and save the date. More information coming soon.

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008

I just came across this download at Microsoft. It provides an introduction to the concepts and step by step instructions for creating and customizing TFS reports.

The zip file contains instructional PDF documents as well as several sample reports.

Microsoft has released a new version of VSTS Web Access Power tool. This release is a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of what will ultimately be the 2008 version of the VSTS Web Access Power Tool.

• Built against the TFS 2008 object model - In previous versions of Web Access you had to install Team Explorer 2005 on any machine you were installing Web Access on. With this version, you will now be installing Team Explorer 2008 instead. In some future version, Microsoft hopes to remove the requirement to install any version of Team Explorer.
• Custom control support - added support for web based work item custom controls and have included a folder of documentation and samples on how to create them.
• Build queuing - added UI for the new TFS 2008 feature of build queuing. You can start new queued builds and view the build queue (in addition to the preexisting abilities - like viewing build details).
• Localization support - added support for localizing the web interface. Microsoft will also be localizing text for the final 2008 Power Tool release.
• Bug fixes & Performance improvements - Microsoft has received a number of reports and done more testing on the current version of the Power Tool, and has fixed everything thus far.

This release (and the final 2008 release) can be used with either a TFS 2005 or a TFS 2008 server.  In either case, you will need to install a TFS 2008 Team Explorer on the machine you install Web Access on. Since TFS 2005 did not support build queuing, that functionality will not be available when this and future versions of Web Access are used with a 2005 server.

 

You can download it here and read more about it at Brian Harry's blog posting.

Microsoft's Patterns & Practices group recently released the final version of the “Team Development with Team Foundation Server” Guide. This guide has been in beta for the last couple of months.

 

It shows you how to get the most out of Team Foundation Server to help improve the effectiveness of your team-based software development. Whether you are already using Team Foundation Server or adopting from scratch, you’ll find guidance and insights you can tailor for your specific scenarios. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

 

 

Some quick facts:

• 496 – Total number of pages
• 18 – Total number of chapters in this guide
• 11392 – Total number of downloads of the Beta version of this guide
• 8 – Number of attempts to get the Adobe build to work to generate the guide in .pdf format
• 60 – Number of external and MSFT contributors and reviewers

Download the guide from CodePlex.

Microsoft (and others) had announed that its Fall Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) would be October 2-5, in Los Angeles. Yesterday, they canceled the event and are in the process of rescheduling it.

From their site:

We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term. We will update this site when we have a new date for the PDC that is better timed with the next wave of platform technologies.

During my recent upgrade, I moved to Vista and Outlook 2007.  I have to say, I LOVE the Outlook 2007 UI.  I'm much more productive, and it introduces some very, very nice features, like overlapping calendars and integrated searching (although I still prefer X1, since it is MUCH faster and has a better UI). 

Still, I ran into this problem...  I couldn't use it to connect to my email server hosted on Windows Server 2003.  The email downloads were WAY to slow.  Retrieving 15 emails with a total of 100 kb took several minutes, and if I had an attachment larger that 1.2 MB I physically couldn't download it, since it would time out every time (after 30 minutes or so).  Yuck.

It was so bad that we gave up hosting our email on our own servers and found a service that would host all our email addresses, giving us POP3, internet access to our email, calendar and many other features free.  I looked all over for a solution to the slowness problem, including contacting Microsoft.  No one could help.  So we moved, and are quite happy with the new service.

Anyway, I've found the solution.  It wasn't Outlook 2007, but Vista, and it's a very common problem (based on Live and Google searches), without a well publicized solution.  It's the same solution as the last post. 

Go to the command line as an Administrator (in your Vista client) and execute the following command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

Works like a champ!  Hopefully, this post will help a few people before they end up having to also migrate off of Windows Server 2003 to another solution. 

PS.  This problem doesn't affect all Windows Server 2003 (Win2K3) installs, only some.  Evidently it is a hardware issue.

UPDATE:  More information here:  Outlook is slow, RSS Broken from Tim Anderson's blog.  See comments 60-64 for more information and the solution presented here.

The next Ask An Expert Live Chat is scheduled for Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 12:00 PM PDT. 
  
Mark your calendars (or click this ICS link). For more information, visit Microsoft Technical Chats.

As many of you may know, Dr. Jim Gray (Microsoft Researcher and Turing award recipient) went missing a week ago, on his sailboat Tenacious off the coast of San Francisco. I've had the pleasure, on several occasions, of speaking with Jim and learning more about his research. If we cannot find him, it will be a huge loss.

The search for Tenacious (and Jim) is underway, in a big way. Many news agencies are calling it the largest private search for a missing person ever. This blog is aggregating all of the latest information. Best of all, YOU CAN HELP! Visit Amazon's Mechanical Turk site dedicated to finding Jim, and help by searching new/updated high resolution satellite imagery. All of the instructions are provided, you just need to donate some time.

Wow!  As I was downloading a file from MSDN that requires Genuine Windows, I was prompted to download the required tool.  What was interesting was the prompt!  They noticed I was using Firefox and even showed me Firefox screenshots for how to install the Genuine Windows tool!

Microsoft works when they get feedback about their software and services. Their Connect site enables this and allows you to participate in several ways, such as downloading the latest software and written material, taking surveys, exchanging ideas in newsgroup forums, and, most importantly, providing and reviewing feedback about your experiences.

Here are the types of resources you will find at Connect:

• Announcements - New information for connection participants
• Articles - Articles that are related to the connection
• Surveys - Surveys can be used to collect information
• Events - Dates for upcoming events that are related to the connection
• Links - Web site links that relate to the connection
• FAQs - Frequently asked questions about the connection or program
• Downloads - Software, whitepapers, and other information
• Product Keys - The product keys that you need to run the downloaded software
• Newsgroups - Forums for discussing current connection issues
  

Microsoft will be releasing an Express version of their XNA development environment free!    That means that folks like you and I can create our applications for the XBox 360 (and, simultaneously for Windows) much more easily!  That is cool!  I expect a development community to spring up with free games, trial games, and all sorts of non-game applications as well.  Fun!  You can read more about it here.

One of the main sticking points with many people is the lack of integration between Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Microsoft Project Server.  Sure, you can indirectly connect the two through a MS Project file, and there's some light integration there.  But most people want to use VSTS as part of a complete lifecycle management too... and that means tracking resources across multiple projects, and many across several organizational stovepipes.  That's where MS Project Server comes in. 

In the future, Microsoft will likely do a great deal of integration between the two, but for right now you'll need to download the Project Server Visual Studio Team System Connector.  I haven't used it yet, but am planning on taking a look at it once it's been upgraded to support either TFS RC or TFS RTM.  I'll let you know!

Rich Hundhausen and myself just spoke to crowds of over 1,200 people at the Dev breakouts at the Seattle Visual Studio 2005 launch.  I provided a Team System End-to-End, while Rich made sure everyone knew how to create enterprise applications using the Architect features of Team System, SQL Server 2005 and some of the cooler features of BizTalk Server 2006. 

A huge adrenalin rush!  No matter how many times you speak in front of large audiences, it's still a rush! 

Photos coming!

Don't miss the upcoming MSDN chat, this Wednesday at 10am (PST) on Developer & Tester Tools in Visual Studio 2005.  If you haven't attended one of the MSDN chats, I strongly encourage it!  Not only do they provide a bunch of solid information, there will be an entire series of Visual Studio and Team System experts on hand to answer any specific questions you have.  I attended one of these recently, and got to ask some hard questions that ended up revealing bugs in the latest release of Team System.  The folks there not only thanked me for my support, they worked overtime to get a workaround to me ASAP!  I can't recommend the chats enough!  Be there!

 

Team System MSDN Public Chat

Visual Studio Team System for Software Developer &

Visual Studio Team System for Software Testers

When: Wednesday 10/19/05 @ 10am PST

What: Join us to discuss the Profiler, Test Tools (Unit, Generic, Manual), Web & Load Testing, and Code Analysis (FxCop & PREFast).  We have questions for you, will answer questions from you, and will chat about the exciting new technology.

Where: http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats

 

I've been heads-down all week building content for the big launch on November 7, but I wanted to blog about Dave Bost being hired on by Microsoft. He'll be assuming the role of Developer Evangelist for the midwest district, and he's joining at a great time, what with Team System, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and BizTalk Server all launching soon!