Focused primarily on the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) developer communities, the beta experience contains the latest news, free resources, training, and a free newsletter. Note: You won't find United States in the dropdown list, so try United Kingdom.

Besides the main launch event in San Francisco, on November 7, there are a few others in the West. Please feel free to register using code: LaunchTour2005.
  
Tuesday, December 6
  Colorado Convention Center
  700 14th Street
  Denver, CO.  80202
  303-228-8000
 
Tuesday, December 6
  Anaheim Convention Center
  800 W. Katella Ave.
  Anaheim, CA.  90802
  714-765-8950

Rich, my business partner and coblogger (his personal blog is here), is presenting a full day on Visual Studio Team System at the Wintellect Devscovery seminar at Microsoft.  Great presentation that follows a development lifecycle all the way from Project Manager creation, to Architecture design, to Development and Testing.  All the major roles and technologies are covered.  Fun stuff! 

Listening to Jeff Richter talk about Application Domain and Remoting.  He's a good presenter, and very fun to listen to!  Lot's of energy, but more importantly, very knowledgeable!  I have a weakness for low level computer details (compiler details, behind the scenes optimizations, etc), and Jeff has tons of great nuggets!  For instance, the ThreadAbortException is rethrown by the runtime, even if it is caught!  In order to stop this, you need to call the ResetAbort() method, which requires certain permissions.  Great use!  This allows us to load possibly malicious code into an app domain with restricted permission, then any malicious code can't swallow an aborted thread, and continue to consume resources.  Cool.  See?  Neat stuff!  If you haven't seen Richter speak, or read one of his books, I recommend it!

Up front:  I believe that Lines of Code is a USELESS metric.  However, people are often shocked by the raw number of lines of code that are written each day by a developer.  What's your guess?  1,000?  200?  Try just under 20.  This is basically the number of lines of code in a released project divided by the number of programmer days, so, just because you can write 1,000 buggy lines of code per day, that doesn't make you productive!    It's the post bug-fix, post integration testing, post-everything lines that count.  (You can find some background here and here.)

Every time I show the show off the wonderful reports that are automatically generated by Team Foundation Server, I usually get asked about the Code Churn report, and what Code Churn is.  After months of giving a good, but unofficial definition, Dave Bost, on his blog, did the hard work and discovered a wonderful (but academic) whitepaper on the Code Churn technology used by Microsoft in VSTS.  The PDF can be found at Microsoft Research.  It's called Use of Relative Code Churn Measures to Predict System Defect Density, by Nachiappan Nagappan; Thomas Ball.  Here's the abstract:

It's my math background...  But I just have to post this!

Google is offering 14,159,265 shares of stock.  That's the first 8 digits of the decimal expansion of Pi.  Cool.

Here are some of the points from Soma's blog entry this morning ...

• We're 77 days out from launch
• In September, there will be a Release Candidate (RC1) of Visual Studio 2005
• This RC will be available to MSDN subscribers, early adopters, and beta customers
• Beta 3 of Team Foundation Server (TFS) will be released at the same time as the RC1
• TFS Beta 3 will including a "Go Live" license with technical support for Premier customers
• TFS Beta 3 will carry us through the launch of Visual Studio 2005
• TFS RTM will be in the first quarter of 2006

Please re-read that bottom bullet!

When
  09/08/2005 (8:30 AM - 5:00 PM)

Where
  Microsoft Boise, CW Moore Bldg, Basement Conference Room A, 250 S. 5th Street, Boise, ID 83702
  Click here for directions

Registration
  Registration is free; however, seating is limited. Click here to register and use code # 304061

Agenda and Session Details

Microsoft is entering into the software lifecycle tools market with the release of the new Visual Studio Team System product. Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) expands significantly on Microsoft's demonstrated successes in delivering highly productive tools, by offering businesses tightly integrated and extensible lifecycle tools to increase the predictability of their software development process. VSTS offers developers, architects, testers and project managers a seamless way to communicate and increase the effectiveness of software development and the successes of projects.

We have put together a free, day-long comprehensive technical training to help our customers understand the power and value of Visual Studio Team System. This session will cover the core features of the product and the details around Developer, Architect and the Test editions.

Some agenda topics:

• Designers – Class Designer, Logical Datacenter Designer, Application Designer
• Code Analysis, Methodologies and Source Control Management
• Unit Testing, Web Testing and Load Testing
• Build Server, Reporting, Work Item Management, Integration

Breakfast and Lunch will be provided. See you there!

For more information:
  Contact Jason Mauer (jmauer@microsoft.com)

David Anderson of Microsoft will be hosting a Webcast and Chat on August 18th. The Webcast will run from 11 AM to 12 PM Pacific Time (GMT -8), with the chat starting at 12 PM and running to 1 PM Pacific Time. Bring your MSF/CMMI questions and be there.

Thanks to Rob Caron for the original posting ...