I am watching the webcast from the Toronto VB User Group's presentation of Pocket Build, their entry into the Canadian Inter User Group Competition. The task was to improve the quality of a developer's life. TVBUG came up with an amazing application to alert developers of build issues remotely. Not only does the app blow me away, but the presentation and the depth that they went to is amazing. It is a thoroughly designed and planned application. I just can't get over that they put togehter such a professional project.

More details and all of the links to the webcasts are here, on Sasha Krsmanovic's blog. Sorry I forgot this link earlier!!

I haven't watched the others yet, but apparently they were all very high quality, though everyone agreed that TVBug's had to be the winner.

Congrats to everyone.

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Malek Kemmou, will no longer be "the guy from Casablanc" among us as he moves to Istanbul tomorrow (as a new Microsoft employee). Yesterday Stephen wrote about some departing shenanigans that I'm sure he strong-armed Malek into and today Malek gives us a beautiful poem about leaving the city he has grown up in. I look forward to the day that Malek can introduce me to both Casablanca and Istanbul.

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http://www.theserverside.net/cartoons/TalesFromTheServerSide.tss

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I totally repaved my Whidbey test box with the intention of using Norton Ghost to create an image of a completely fresh machine before I install the beta 2 bits on it. The last step of the process is to install Ghost and it gives me the message:

"To run Norton Ghost, you must first install Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1"

There goes my pure and clean machine! I'll have to install .NET 1.1 and then uninstall it after I make my backup. Darn!

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There were so many awesome submissions (speakers and topics) for the MAD Code Camp that poor Andrew Duthie and the track chairs had a really hard time fitting it all in. I made a bit of a nuisance of myself so that I would be able to present my ADO.NET 2.0 session (in addition to my WSE2.0 talk) which ended up meaning that Geoff Snowman, the local Developer Community Champion, gave up his session so that I could do mine. Thanks Geoff! I sure hope I was doing you a favor though!!

Also, my talk will be right before another ADO.NET 2 topic by Sahil Malik. He will be drilling into concurrency in ADO.NET 2.0, so that will be a great pair of sessions back to back.

Watch this space to see the session schedule which will be put up soon. The Code Camp is from 9am - 9pm with 4 tracks. It will be awesome. It is at Microsoft's Reston office. There is still plenty of room for more attendees, so go sign up!!

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I love this concept! Go DevTeach!!

Montreal
June 18-22

SQL Track (39 sessions)
.NET Track  (62 session)
FoxPro/Win32 Track (27 sessions)

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Do you know that worldwide, INETA has (at the moment) 769 member user groups? INETA NORAM (that's North America, as in US & Canada) accounts for 250 of those groups. About 200 of them are in Latin America. APAC is about 120, Europe 130 and MEA (Middle East & Africa) is about 70. We have groups in places like Bulgaria, Iceland, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Micronesia and even little ol' Vermont .

Anyway, what started me off was that I wanted to welcome a few of the new liaisons in NORAM: Rob Windsor from Toronto, Scott Spradlin of Missouri and Morgan Baker in Florida.

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I have DSL - with 1000K downstream, but these CTP downloads kill me.

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I gave up on this problem many many months ago and my one touch is sitting in a corner of my office detached from anything. There is hope for me yet to solve my backup problems. I am sure that when I plug it back in, I will discover that it is formatted as FAT. THANK YOU KIRK!

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Pretty pretty please???? Without having to install Team System? (or do a 20 hour download...)

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it used to be the butt of a great joke by Leon Bambrick - with his now famous VB Refactoring menu, but now thanks to the genius of Developer Express, VB Refactoring is real and being offered by Microsoft as a free plug-in for VS2005.

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I have had a problem for a few years that when I vpn into a client's network, Windows Messenger automatically starts up and signs me in. Without even showing me anything in the systray. It's a little frustrating only because if I am VPNing in, that means I'm working and don't have time to chat.

I finally googled the problem today and discovered that there is a somewhat hidden setting in Windows XP which allows you to stop Windows Messenger from starting up on it's own. Here is the MSDN Support article on it.

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Sahil lists a bunch of interesting (good and not so good) things that he is finding with beta2.

I have downloaded and not yest installed cause I realized I don't want no dang STANDARD bits!

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Josh Trupin definitely hit on a pet peeve of mine with his editorial on invented words (eg "performant"). I blogged about that recently.

Another one that has been hitting my radar a lot lately is "asks" as in "what are your budget asks?".

We don't need to invent a word for this! What's wrong with "request" or some of the words from this list of synonyms?

appeal, application, asking, begging, call, commercial, demand, desire, entreaty, inquiry, invitation, offer, petition, prayer, recourse, requisition, solicitation, suit, supplication

 

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Nice to see this kind of forward movement! Cheers to everyone who has worked so hard on these specs.

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Are you proud of knowing all the answers to obscure programming questions? Here's your chance to find out if you really are a geek guru.

Enter the DevSource Programming Trivia Sweepstakes, and you could win some really cool stuff. The Grand Prize winner will win a Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20" Flat Panel LCD Monitor! The runner-up gets a red iRobot Roomba 4100 Bagless Robotic Vacuum (to clean up after all those late nights of coding, where people slid pizza under your office door).

GO HERE

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PC Magazine lists the top computing websites and amont their 17 picks, TabletPC Post is there! Woo hoo! Not only congrats to Lora Heiny, but to brothers Layne and Loren who have a hand in this as well.

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I have a nasty cold and can't go too far from the kleenex today as I have a runny runny nose (in between some impressive sneezing fits). I am getting really sick of my nose being so runny.Where on earth does all of that stuff come from anyway. Are my brains melting? Thank goodness for Puffs Plus or I would probably have no skin left on my nose by now!

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I blindly downloaded the standard version of VS2005 Beta2 because the only other option was Team System (not for me and also a an extra GB which would have added at least 6 hours). Mike Gunderloy pointed out that this is standard and we don't have access to Professional as yet, so I went and checked the product version comparison chart for a reminder.

Here are the key differences between Standard and Pro

User Experience="Streamlined" instead of "Full" - I have no idea what this even means!

Deployment Tools - Standard has "Click Once", Pro says "Yes" (probably MSI Installation as per current versions)

Extensibility: In Standard you can only consume extensions, but not build them

Reporting: Standard has Crystal. Pro also has SQL Reporting Svs

Debugging: Standard does NOT have remoteo debugging

SQL Server: Standard does not have the explorer for SQL Server and there is no SQL Server 2005 integration

Included with intstall: Pro has SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows 2003 Server Developer Edition included. Standard does not.

 

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Beta2 is already available to non-MSDN Universal Subscribers. You can order a DVD from Microsoft by starting at the VS2005 home page.

Also for a limited time, orders in US & Canada will get free shipping  & handling on the discs.

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