It's my life... And I live it...

Yeah check it out...

http://soapbox.msn.com/

Definitely a cool site where you can view and upload your own videos. Go and add your videos to the site. Searchable, Tagable, and RSS enabled!

ASP.NET [AJAX] functionality is created from 2 parts. First there is the server side of the equation and a client side [JavaScript] or [JScript] that allows for integration to the back end.

The [Ajax] core toolkit is available from the ASP.NET [ajax] site and is available through a Microsoft open license format.

This allows you to create a component that would operate with the Microsoft [ajax] kit.

Yeah I took that one as a "fun" talk to attend. XNA is pretty cool to get into. XNA studio express is a way to get started working with games.

The Development tools were based on Visual C# Express edition. The game can be debugged on the XBox and played as well.

Game development has grown increasingly expensive and risky to create a super quality title.

It is hard to find staffing for game development as well. The environment is very specialized and training for new people is very difficult.

Sharing of media is problematic when using models for various platforms. Development costs had ballooned too. Instead of 5 to 10 developers, you are funning into the 100's of developers and artists.

XNA Studio Express focuses it energies on students, home brew game development, and prototype development.

The XNA platform takes care of most of the issues you would see developing games for the platform. From content items such as sounds and graphics, to the actual game engine code. Included are starter kits, and templates for XBox 360 and Windows. Lots of documentation in the samples and outside of the product. Video samples and tutorials are available as well.

Yeah we had the designer of BMW speak. He is interesting and discussed how you need to be a doer of works and not talkers.

He is a person that believes in working with people and doing things. People are the connecting factors. Treat different things differently, but connect through the people.

Make something different. Do something different. Plan for something new. Be prepared to take a risk on something new.

"A mind expanded to a new idea never returns to its original shape" - O.W. Holmes

Designing is a process. Understanding, Believing, Seeing.

Understand what you want to do. Believing is saying what it is you understand and how you want to achieve it. Seeing is looking closely at what you believe and inspecting closely.

Leverage your resources. Make your decisions based on the real world not just the virtual one. People are your superheros. Make sure you take care of them.

"When you are in the field, You are the union" - A. Lincoln

Sow the seeds for your own revolution. Industry and humanism should be brought together. Empower the consumer and work together with them to make it even better.

It is about your people, all about opening your mind, all about doing your homework, and all about knowing when to let go.

Server based applications should be load tested using some sort of tool. Through Visual Studio Team System there is a tool with the Team Suite Tester Edition and the Team Suite Edition.

The tool does not use [IE] to do the tests. It uses the .NET HTTPRequest class. It does not record the [AJAX] requests. Errors under load that call to redirect do not actually fail. You have to add a validation rule that checks the resulting page for the appropriate message on the error page.

The next version does not have some of these limitations.

Also you can create a .NET class that calls for whatever SQL Server or web service you want to call. Really if you want to open a file, read it, then close it, you would have a test that verifies a file share performance.

Just think of the ways that a Unit or load test can be performed to validate all your shares and web servers.

The core SQL Server team moved to using Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server for development of the next version of SQL Server server.

Really interesting to hear the number of changes and work loads that are being supported. Over 600,000 changes so far. Really nice way of using the tool to prove out the performance. There are some custom tools that were created for the SQL Server team to use, but it is not hard to do in your own environments. They even have a sync setup between the previous tool and Team Foundation Server. However over 70% of the people are using Team Foundation Server directly as opposed to using the previous system. Most of the automated tools are still taking to the legacy system. But there is a conversion in process to migrate all remaining items to Team Foundation Server.

Remember Team Foundation Server comes as a basic platform that you can use to add your own tools and items for your specific process methodology. Plan to spend time to really customize Team Foundation Server to get how you want to develop you environment and have the right tools for what you want to do.

More and more teams in Microsoft are adopting this model. You may end up seeing only CTP (Community Technology Preview) releases for several products in the future instead of Beta and Release Candidate builds.

Like it ever stops. ;-)

But keep your eye out. Lots of great stuff and it will blow you away. SQL Server Server is an animal. Definitely something that you can bet will be even better going forward.

Can't say much more yet, but boy will it make working with the system even better than it is today.

The way Team Foundation Server works with branching is really slick. It only actually stores changes to the source and not everything in the stack.

Typically you want to use shelve sets to store changes that are not ready to be checked in. Can't stress this enough.

YOU SHOULD NOT CHECK IN CODE THAT DOES NOT WORK.

Current sites using Visual SourceSafe should consider perhaps using multiple Visual SourceSafe repositories that are stored on servers that are backed up. That way individual changes can be exported and saved and backed up. But you don't check into the main branch. Perhaps you actually have a repository for each developer and all items that they are working on can be saved and backed up without affecting your main branch or repository.

The next version of the tools improve the build process by allowing better interfaces to the build agents and incorporating some Continuous Integration concepts from Agile Development.

It is interesting to listen how within Microsoft they used the Team Foundation Server tools to create a methodology for developing a project and how the managing of the project operates.

Iteration and Features play a role in the project management in Team Foundation Server.

The important thing to take away is that the data has to be entered by the people working on the features. So getting the data became important but was simple enough that the process did not interfere much with the planning and development.

This is a really cool tool. It is not really understood well. The first thing I would recommend is check out the video from Channel 9. It gives you a good reasoning behind why the tool exists. It is not just for Application developers, but for the DBA's/Database Developers who need to track changes to a database.

It gives you the capability to not only version control the database schema but create tests and validate the test using the tool before you create a real database. You can have different ratios of records compared to other core tables.

Interesting, that was a talk when discussing how ISA Server changes the concept of what a firewall should do. If you have ever thought about the attacks at a fundamental level, then you know that potentially you are at risk even with a standard firewall. So ISA Server solves this problem buy combining (since 2000) a firewall product with application level inspection of traffic.

For the past 2+ years, there have been no vulnerabilities for ISA Server reported (got this from class so don't shoot the messenger). That's pretty darn impressive.

All of the traditional methods of security don't necessarily stop all the issues so you end up spending hundreds of thousands on various tool to add functionality that should have been in the firewalls all along.

Cider and Expression Blend have an extensibility model. The good thing is that the two models are identical except Expression Blend does not have some functionality as Cider. Cider is the Designer in Visual Studio for Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML.

And from the class, creating a design time experience for a control in Windows Presentation Foundation is at least the same if not easier than in Windows Form Controls.

Really Cool...

It is really cool to see the guys from Mono progressing how they have.

They have released a new version of their CLI implementation with a Visual Basic compiler that targets the same functionality as Visual Basic 8.0. What is really cool is that it is written in Visual Basic. Really an awesome development.

Great work guys. Keep it up.