The GISUG had its inaugural meeting last week. From what Pete Hohenhaus tells me, there was a lot of enthusiasm, participation, and interest. Not including the presenters, they had 35 attendees. All in all an excellent beginning for this promising group.

Owen Allen, Jason Mauer, and Chris Barnard presented on Office 2007/SharePoint 2007. Owen and Jason focused many of the new capabilities, as well as the overall look and feel. Chris did an overview of the product release. Pete presented on some perspectives of what SharePoint is, how it can be used, and how best it can assist with collaborative work.

Pete has setup a controlled access MSN Group and they will be adding content and sending out invitations to join very soon.

Like my good friends Scott Cate and Wallace B. McClure, I have also been accepted to the INETA speakers' bureau. As a former user group coordinator, I appreciate INETA's mission to help bridge the resource-gap with .NET focused user groups around the country. INETA is a group that I have long supported and I consider it an honor to represent them.

I'm looking forward to a new target audience for my continued evangelism in .NET, SQL Server 2005, and Team System!

Read more about INETA here and see the entire rogue's gallery of speakers here.

Visit this site to make your own custom South Park character!

TeamPlain Web Access is a web interface for Team Foundation Server that allows you to manage work items, documents, reports and source control repositories.

These guys also make a Team System plug-in for Eclipse and Visual Studio 2003.

I'm in a weird mood today, so I'll challenge you to see if you can rearrange the letters of NEW DOOR to make one word?

Hat-tip to Scott Hanselman for pointing out CarlosAg's Ajax-style snippet translator.

Give it a try!

MSDN subscription customers can download from the MSDN subscriber download site

Jeff Beehler posted these instructions to upgrade from Beta3/Refresh:

1. Backup your server and copy the data to a safe location
2. Download the Team Foundation Server RC
3. Download the Upgrade Utility
4. Uninstall Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Refresh
5. Follow the upgrade instructions, which are included with the Upgrade Utility
6. Install Team Foundation Server RC
7. Complete the post install upgrade instructions, which are included with the Upgrade Utility

For a reference to the major changes since Beta3 refresh, please see Jeff's posting.

Here is the link to the support site for my Team System book. It contains comments and corrections.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905038

Also, I just found an error today, thanks to a reader:

"In your book on page 179 you put a reference to a figure 8-1 as the Team Model comparison, but the figure shows the Process Model comparison.
Have you ever seen this error ? Do you have the right figure ?"

This should refer to figure 8-4

A student pointed this out in class today. The free editions of Visual Studio 2005 Express won't be free forever - only until November 7th, 2006, which is one year from the launch. After that, it's assumed that the Express editions will be $49 each. You can find this information on the FAQ under pricing.

SQL Server 2005 Express edition, however, will remain free, as was promised during the launch events.

Why am I telling you this? So that you'll go download your free copies today!

Check out this article on CNNMoney. It lists the top 5 jobs in having the biggest demand for employees. .NET Developers made the list!

Here's an excerpt:

Developers who are expert users of Microsoft's software programming language .NET can make between $75,000 and $85,000 a year in major cities when they're starting out. If they pursue a job at a company that seeks someone with a background in a given field (say, a firm looking for a .NET developer experienced in using software related to derivatives) they might snag a salary hike of 15 percent or more when they switch jobs.

Microsoft just announced this a few minutes ago, literally. It appears they are on track for a Calendar Q1 release of TFS!

What:   Tech-Ed 2006
Where:  Boston, MA
When:   June 11-16, 2006
Why:     Dude, it's Tech-Ed!!!

Be sure to visit the site and get registered!

And, if you can make it, be sure to attend an awesome pre-conference seminar on customizing Team System.

I just received an email from Yahoo, letting me know about their Yahoo! Answers service. Sounds a lot like Google Answers.

Some changes this year from Microsoft. It seems that they are merging the usually separate and distinct Tech-Ed Europe (traditional audience of 50% devs/50% IT pros) and Microsoft IT Forum (100% IT pros) into just "Tech Ed Europe". They will be run in two consecutive weeks in November:

• Tech Ed: Developers (week November 6th, CCIB Barcelona, Spain)
• Tech Ed: IT Forum (week November 13th, CCIB Barcelona, Spain)

For more information, check out the Tech-Ed Europe site.

Bookmark this site if you are interested in what Microsoft Research is doing to improve the quality of software through analysis, program verification and software measurement techniques. I wonder how many of these tools might make it into VSTS in the future? MUTT might be interesting.

Here are a couple of interesting articles:

• Use of Relative Code Churn Measures to Predict System Defect Density
• Static Analysis Tools as Early Indicators of Pre-Release Defect Density

This question was recently asked on the VSTS forums.

As Rob Caron explains, the integration depends solely on Borland's ability to integrate TFS into Delphi's IDE. Until then options include using the standalone Team Explorer, command-line utilities, or possibly the newly available MSSCII Provider for Team Foundation Server.

Open the champagne, because on June 30, 2006 Microsoft will bring a close to Extended Support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Me as part of the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy. Microsoft will retire public and technical support, including security updates, by this date.

Read more about this here.

According to Jeff Beehler's recent blog posting, we should see an RC by the end of February. We're getting closer folks!

You may have noticed a bit different look (and feel). I decided to get current on dasBlog, so I downloaded the latest from SourceForge.