Here are my slides from yesterday's presentation at Tech-Ed 2006 SEA. Thank you to the many delegates who joined me for the session.

Visual Studio Team System Public MSDN Chat

Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope to see you there!

Join the chat on Wednesday September 6th, 2006 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific time.

To add this to your calendar, click here.

To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.

Some students told me about this book, and I think I'll pick it up. Steven Borg just bought a copy as well.

The book is titled "Expert .NET Delivery Using NAnt and CruiseControl.NET (Expert's Voice in .Net)", a hardcover by Marc Holmes (APress) and has received good reviews.

Thanks to Eugene and his crew over at Attrice, the makers of the Team Build Sidekick and other Team Foundation Sidekick widgets. They have just published a nice article describing how they have used the Team Foundation Server Version Control object model and VS automation to implement their product's functionality.

Check it out.

If you are in the Seattle/Redmond area, join me tonight while we look at CTP 5 of the Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals.

I'll be starting at 7:15 pm tonight in building 40 at Microsoft. Click here for more details.

I was recently at a client site in Phoenix, teaching a VSTS/SCM course. They have integrated an Ambient Orb Device into their automated build process. If the build passes, it glows green. If it breaks, it glows red.

The orb is inside the developer manager's office, so the devs can peek inside. My understanding is that they have about 15 minutes after seeing red to fix the build and re-run it, before the manager gets an email message.

I just ran into this blog while doing some surfing.  It wasn't on my blog roll, but it is now.    It's by Eugene Zakhareyev from Attrice.  If you remember from our Widgets page, they are the makers of the TFVC Workspace Sidekick and the MSBuild Sidekick.  Both of those are tools you should be checking out!  But back to the blog.  Eugene is blogging many of his own personal observations about TFS, and since he's so intimately involved with TFS, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on his findings and comments!  His blog can be found here.

We do a lot of training around the US, and often we depend on computers at the company to be trainined.  However, in many cases, we need to provide computers.  For our training next week at a large government contractor, I decided to look outside our normal channels (which is a training center that has a mobile lab, but is often booked out for their own training) and look for someone new.  Although I got bids from several companies, one company really stood out:  Bit-by-Bit Compnuter Rentals.  The customer service rep who I spoke to was Josh Highland.  Not only was he very helpful, he was very capable and knowledgeable.  Since they are nationwide, and provide such good service, we'll definitely be working with them in the future.  If any of you have a need for computer rentals, I recommend contacting Josh at Bit-by-Bit. 

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.