I'm proud to be one of the folks acknowledged for making Visual Studio 2005 the thing of beauty that it is.

Congratulations to all recipients!

Here's a good resource on MSDN for troubleshooting ClickOnce deployments.

I've been hearing that there's been some issues with ClickOnce and RTM.

We've been getting some questions lately on this, and here are the answers:

• Partners at the Certified Partner level will receive the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription.  As before, this will include 5 MSDN licenses.

• Partners at the Gold Certified Partner level will receive the enhanced version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers with MSDN Premium Subscription. As before, this will include 10 MSDN licenses.

Notice that neither level include Architect or Test editions, nor do they include Team Suite. Read Ajay's post for more information.

In two recent articles, in eWeek and SearchVB.com, it seems that Ivar Jacobson (one of the fathers of UML and RUP) has recently joined the Microsoft VSIP program. He is working on the Essential Unified Process (Essential UP) that is going to be integrated into Visual Studio 2005. Essential UP will be a more agile and lightweight development process based on good practices and principles of both MSF and RUP.

Thanks to a student, Jim Munn, for originally asking the question "When adding a property to an object that uses System.Collections.Generic.List<> the designer doesn't show a relation to the class that the generic collection is typed to. Why not?"

So, let's assume you have two classes: Customer and Order

Notice how, by default, the association is not displayed between the Customer and Order class. By right-clicking either the mOrders field or Orders property and selecting Show as Collection Association, the association will be visualized:

My fellow Team System MVP, Willy-Peter Schaub from South Africa has been putting together many cool VSTS posters. These are print-ready JPG drawings, covering things like installation, security, and source control.

You can watch Steve Ballmer's keynote here. I've also uploaded a few photos from the event. My personal favorite was meeting Paul senior from Orange County Choppers (American Chopper).

Tip: To view my photos, select Conferences and Launch 2005 - San Francisco.

Now that VS/SQL/VSTS are available for download, I've been getting a lot of licensing questions, especially about MSDN/U subscriptions and the elusive Team Suite. Ajay Sudan put together a nice, consise FAQ at the VSTS forum.

Today is the day. Visual Studio 2005 (including all VSTS editions) and SQL Server 2005 are available to the public for download from MSDN.

The Team Foundation Server setup experience has been evolving for over a year now in response to feedback Microsoft has received. While they’ve made significant progress since the first release last year as Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, there’s still more that can be done. Microsoft has created a survey to ask some specific questions based on your experience with Team Foundation Server Beta 3. If you have attempted (successfully or otherwise) to install Team Foundation Server Beta 3, Microsoft invites you to participate in this brief online survey.

The survey can be taken anonymously, or you have the option of providing contact information should wish to be contacted about your setup experience. Partial surveys are not preserved, so please complete the survey before navigating away from the page.

Microsoft has listed the VSTS MVPs on their site. You can view their profiles here.

What is an MVP?
The MVP award is a one-year renewable reward given to just under 3,000 customers worldwide who are community leaders for their past year's accomplishments in a specific competency (ex: ASP.NET, C#, VSTS). A non-Microsoft employee is nominated by an employee or other MVP, their contributions to the community are evaluated, and they are voted on by an MVP Lead and PG Lead. Contributions can include answering MSDN Forum questions, writing articles & books, having an active & popular blog, working with the product teams, running a local user group, giving presentations, etc.   A quick intro to what an MVP is can be found on the MVP Website.

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

 

A bit belated in this posting, but Steven Borg and I are both Microsoft MVPs now! I attended the MVP summit a few weeks ago as an RD, and I've got to say that I am in some good company, and am really impressed at the level of support Microsoft gives to this program.

Seattle Code Camp is just around the corner - about 10 days away. Steven Borg and I are going to be presenting a couple of Team System and SQL Server 2005 topics at camp and we hope to see you there!