10:35 AM (Los Angeles) A fictitious developer, from the fictitious company "Fourth Coffee" is demonstrating the new, agile development features in Visual Studio 2008. She's showing off how to manage team development projects (a.k.a. team projects and work items), giving her tasks to make some changes to her code. Mostly she is showing off the split-screen editor, synchronization of code and designer, integrated design tools, and the new JavaScript debugger. 
Oops, she just called it "Team Services" as she closed out her work item. Well, we get the idea. 
In this, my first post of (hopefully) several today, I'm sitting in the keynote session (next to Douglas McDowell), listening to Tom Brokaw warm up the audience. What a nice surprise. It definitely stopped all the geeks in their tracks, to listen to his wise words, gathered from years of experience in all matters mankind.  I loved his opening line "I'm not here to write code, or wire this room". He did, however, wax poetic on the future of technology, the spirit and energy of the types of people who will drive it, and how we must handle it to get their safely." Some of his quotes during the keynote (some paraphrasing): - "The test or our place in this world is not yet complete. We don't want to become Easter Island or the Mayan civilization. The use of this technology is not just a virtual experience. If we develop capacity and leave out common sense, what then is the reward to each of us, collectively or individually? If speed overruns reason, what else gets trampled?"
- "We will not solve climate change by hitting backspace. It will do us little good to wire the world if we short circuit our consciousness, our souls and if we don't use this technology to advance mankind."
- "When I left Nightly News I said that I'm not only going to spend my time at suites in the four seasons ... but to spend time in the trenches to meet people who make a difference"
- "One day I woke up in Pakistan in a packing container with Americans who had been there for six months, trying to assess medical and health needs. When they hiked out, they put their hands on the keyboard and distilled what they had learned ... and in so doing, made a big impression ... of those of us in the West who have so much, while they (people in Pakistan) have so little."
- "This technology takes a guiding hand, an imaginative approach, and a hope ..."
- "We have the opportunity to become the next, greatest generation."
Steve Ballmer came on stage next to thank the many platinum sponsors, and discuss how "Dynamic IT" can help manage complexity and achieve agility (especially in the realm software development) 
I heard the term "Agile" about 10 times in the span of 3 minutes. More to come ...
I just got sent this announcement from AppDev . I was about to delete it when I noticed a familiar looking face of my friend (and second-time, new dad) Scott Cate! 
Time flies. It's been a year since Dr. Gray, a Microsoft research fellow and Turing Award-winner, went missing while sailing off San Francisco. A year ago, at Boise Code Camp 2.0, I hosted a session on finding Jim Gray, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Now, a year after Dr. Gray went missing, the Association of Computing Machinery (the organization that holds the Turing Awards), the IEEE Computer Society and the University of California-Berkeley have joined to announce a tribute to Gray, planned for May 31 at the UC Berkeley campus. Jim Gray attended UC Berkeley from 1961 to 1969 and earned the school's very first Ph.D. in computer science. Fittingly enough, the tribute will also feature technical sessions for registered participants.
You can find more information about the tribute here: 
I know. I know. This doesn't sound like a very interesting post, but it saved me time, and hopefully it can save you some too. When you install Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft creates a "Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt" shortcut, under that program group. 
I like to take this shortcut and drop it on my Quick Launch toolbar: 
The problem is that when you install the Team Foundation Server Power Tools (or other new command line utilities) you need to put them in the path. Well, if you look at the file the shortcut calls, it's vcvarsall.bat, but don't bother editing that file because it calls vcvars32.bat, but don't bother editing that file, because it calls vsvars32.bat. If you go ahead and edit that file, you can find where the PATH is getting set, and add the Power Tools path to it: @set PATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\BIN;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools;C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5;C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\VCPackages;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools;%PATH%
One is an award winning anti-virus writer, and the other is an expert in .NET architecture and ALM tools ... 
Do you know your geeks?
Last week I had a chance to meet some of the brains behind gridGISTICS - a .NET development company in Atlanta that gets it. Not only are they up to speed on the latest .NET 3.x technologies, but they have some killer products as well. The one that struck me as the coolest was their Aware Server product, which is a grid-computing based deployment and management environment. In other words, the missing pieces to Team Foundation Server's build and (ahem) deploy automation. Packaging up applications by system and version into manifests, these binaries can be automatically deployed, registered, launched, and monitored by various Aware Agents installed around a company's environment. From the development side, they provide many Visual Studio 2008 templates and add-ins to help generate Aware-compatible applications very quickly. 
Follow their story here.
Man, I need to keep a closer eye on the work product over at .NET Rocks. I had meant to link up this transcript last Summer, but I dropped the ball. Apologies. So, what this was was a VSTS panel discussion at Tech-Ed in Orlando last June, with Mike Azocar, Steven Borg, Doug Seven, Joel Semeniuk, and the hosts Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin. Here's the panel (with Barry Gervin running the microphone)
 And some of the audience (you can see Rob Caron and Mickey Gousset in the back).
 There's some pretty good questions in there, especially those asked by yours truly!
This month’s meeting topic is Blogs and Wikis in SharePoint - what’s available out of the box and interesting ways to extend and use Blogs and Wikis presented by Ben Hickman of Microsoft. They will also be having a presentation by Certeon around their S-Series Application Acceleration Appliances, which provides the industry’s only solution with Application Intelligent Networking to deliver application acceleration, security and scalability from the desktop to the data center. Meeting Date: Wednesday, December 19th, 2007, 11 am – 2 pm Meeting Place: 250 S. 5th Street, Boise, ID 83702 Meeting Agenda: 11:00 - 11:15 - Arrive at the meeting...visit with other users. 11:15 - 11:20 - Announcements and other group administrative topics by group coordinator 11:20 – 1:45 - Presentation by Ben Hickman and Certeon (Lunch will be ready at about 12:00 so help yourself when it arrives). Find more meeting information on their web site.
Microsoft announced today that PDC 2008 is on! October 27–30, 2008
Pre-conferences October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. Mark your calendars and save the date. More information coming soon. http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008
In addition to adding support for the .NET Framework, Microsoft is taking the next version of Silverlight farther by adding a comprehensive control model, powerful skinning and “theming,” data binding, and over 20 controls in the box. To better capture the scope of the feature set for the next version of Silverlight, Microsoft will rename Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0. Microsoft will also commit to delivering a Silverlight 2.0 Beta with a Go-Live license in Q1 2008. As for customer evidence, the NBA began engaging with Microsoft to deliver key interactive applications on NBA.com deploying Silverlight. By utilizing Silverlight, the NBA will be able to further broaden the scope of its online experience across video and photos. From a broader Web development perspective, Microsoft will also release a preview of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions in early December. Key features of the preview include MVC, Dynamic Data Controls and REST Services. Silverlight and ASP.NET are core technologies enabling better user experiences on the desktop, Web and beyond. Microsoft’s user experience approach is part of the broader Microsoft Application Platform strategy, formed with the goal of helping customers realize the benefits from more dynamic applications. For more information on Thursday, please check out Scott Guthrie’s blog, Jesse Liberty’s blog, and the Silverlight homepage. Also, feel free to check out the new Microsoft Download Center Beta, now powered by Microsoft Silverlight.
Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System group on Wednesday, December 5th. Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008. There will be two sessions that day:
Wow, I found this old photo of me at COMDEX in 1990. It was my first such event, and I was completely blown away by the size of it - and who was there. I remember Borland had a giant quiz-show, asking questions and giving away prizes if you got the answers correct. I met Jeff Duntemann, who was the editor of PC Techniques magazine. I also met Phil Katz (think "PK") at the event. He had become a hero to the BBS community, because his PKXARC/PKARC software was good at compressing files for transfer over 300 baud modems. After he was sued by SEA, he released an even faster PKZIP and became everyone's best friend. Most everyone in the world still uses PKZIP, or a derivative today. 
Unfortunately, Phil Katz lead a troubled life and he died from alcoholism at age 37. Here is an article on his life. 
I've been so involved with the VSTS RTM yesterday, that I almost didn't notice this one. Click here to download the latest SQL Server 2008 Community Technology Preview (CTP) and try out the latest features of SQL Server 2008.
Hmmm ... it still has that fresh .ISO smell. Seems that we'll have something extra to be thankful for this week. VSTS 2008 Team Suite is available for download today! 
I hope you are an MSDN subscriber, so you can access the subscriber downloads.
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