If you haven't played with the new Code Snippets features in Visual Studio 2005, you're missing out! It makes it easy to keep an entire library of useful code snippets within Visual Studio 2005, and at the ready to help with any programming assignment. Integrated Intellisense invokes them automatically.

In anticipation of this feature, my fellow RD J. Michael Palermo IV has created www.gotcodesnippets.net which will become the uber repository of such snippets. It will launch officially at PDC.

Why demo your cool application to a few friends, when you can show it off to thousands of your peers at the PDC? This year's PDC will be the first-ever Show Off event, which is an evening event held at the PDC where you can show off your application, tip, tool, technique, animation, or anything cool that can help or inspire other developers.

Read more about it at Channel 9 or Michael Swanson's blog post.

Plan now to attend this four day workshop covering Microsoft’s Business Process, Integration and Workflow to get up to speed on new and updated solutions for Business Process Automation, Integration Services and Workflow, including BizTalk Server 2006.

Click here for more information.

A friend of mine from Iceland emailed recently. His tagline listed a fun Website that he runs.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

• When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. - R. Pattis
• Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. - Michael Sinz
• I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs. - D. Sites
• It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design. - Bruce Tognazzini
• From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request. - P. Williams

Oh, and they have an RSS Feed too!

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

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)

Thank you for attending the Get Ready for SQL Server 2005 event in Minneapolis. I hope you liked my presentation of the new developer-related features. As promised, here are links to the slides and demos from today's presentation.

It was a simple enough question that Ethan, my .NET remoting student, asked me yesterday. I did some research, and couldn't find anything official from Microsoft, just their human readable schema on MSDN. Then I found radsoftware's page, which offers a product providing Intellisense to your VS.NET 1.X config file editor. About half way down the page is a ZIP file containing an XSD schema that they built. It looks pretty thorough, but I sent off an email just to make sure.

Just "of the week"? I'm hurt.

My interview with Simple Talk is online now.

Thanks to Mike Gunderloy for creating this cool INF file. Even though it's been around for a couple of years, I just found out about it!

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 ...

A few weeks ago a student told me about Fiddler, which is a cool HTTP Debugging Proxy. It logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and an endpoint. It event includes a JScript.NET event-based scripting subsystem.

RegEx can be a pain. I regularly check out regexlib.com and regexadvice.com, but Clemens Vasters just pointed out this cool, free tool for learning and testing regex. It allows you to build and verify a regular expression against any text input, file or web, and displays matching, splitting or replacement results within an easy to understand, hierarchical tree.

A week ago, I mentioned that Longhorn is now officially known as Windows Vista. Well, Indigo has also been renamed to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Avalon renamed to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Here's an eWeek article discussing it.
 

Since I have nothing else going on in my life (ya - right), I thought I would start installing the July CTP of TFS and VSTS. This CTP requires a dual-installation, because you have to use the June CTP of SQL Server 2005 which uses a different build of the .NET Framework than VSTS July CTP. Anyway, I've run into some problems, which I will share with you ...

• You can install SQL 2005 June CTP on the same VPC as the DC, because of this problem.
• So, I had to create a separate VPC for the DC (at least it runs with < 200mb of memory allocated).

More to come, I'm sure ...

If anyone is planning on attending the PDC, be sure to come a day early and check out the great pre-conferences. I'll be presenting a full day on Team System development, Sunday the 11th.

See you in LA!