From Brian Keller: “I’m very pleased to announce the availability of the Visual Studio 11 Beta ALM Virtual Machine along with 6 hands-on-labs / demo scripts. This marks an exciting milestone in our journey towards RTM. You can now roll up your sleeves and start learning about the many capabilities we announced at TechEd North America last year and have been talking about in greater detail since then. You can download and install the beta of Visual Studio 11 (and Team Foundation Server 11, .NET Framework...
In 2007, Microsoft created a "Tips for the Newbie" page for TechEd (which is apparently no longer available) and I created a follow-on post called Tech·Ed for Novices. I created a similar post in 2008 as well. With TechEd 2012 around the corner, I thought it would be good to bring it back. TechEd is a huge event, topping out at over 14000 people (usually), with an equally huge amount of content. This post is designed to give first time TechEd attendees a fighting chance of finding their way around....
The SQL Azure Federation had been publically launched several weeks ago and this is one of the most existing features I’m looking forward. This might be the first post of SQL Azure Federation, and hopefully not the last one. Some Backgrounds SQL Azure Federation was mentioned in about 2009. The Microsoft told that there will be a feature in SQL Azure allow users to split one database into many based on some sort of rules But from the client side perspective, user can interact their data as if in...
It’s been a long time since my last post here. Life has been quite busy, I’ve moved house twice, gotten married and on top of all of that there have been various projects (work and personal) that have competed for my attention. Last week was TechEd Africa 2011 and I was lucky enough to attend for the 4th year in a row. As ever it was a fantastic event, there where great speakers, great talks and fantastic exposure to so many new things and people. At last years TechEd I entered a competition called...
Here are the slides and code samples for MVVM Programming Introduction given at TechEd Africa 2011...
In the closing keynote at TechEd Africa 2011, Clifford de Wit (Microsoft South Africa) made improvements on his previous years attempt to geekily give away a prize, but unfortunately still got it wrong… here’s why. At Teched 2010 Clifford gave away an amazing prize of a wheel barrow full of tech goodies – if my memory serves me right, it included a laptop, xbox, kinect as well as a whole bunch of other fun stuff – a geeks delight. Unfortunately he was given some flack on how he decided to pick the...
Today TechEd Africa 2011 ended. It was a great conference and the first time I have ever had the opportunity to present an hour long topic – I had the joy of presenting two sessions at this conference, one session based on a topic which I should have been able to cover easily and one with a topic that I battled with and felt totally out of my depth. In retrospect, there are a few bits of advice that I would like to give other people that are thinking of presenting at a conference like this for the...
On 13rd Oct, I had had a presentation on TechED 2011 Beijing. It was about how to build a multi-tenant application on top of Windows Azure platform. Thanks to the people attended my session, and special thanks to my friend Wang Tao, Robin Lo, Jason Lee, etc. I had uploaded the PPT and demo here please feel free to download (The PPT was in Chinese). Hope my session helps, and looking forward to see you all in TechED 2012. Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without...
With TechEd Africa starting in two days time I thought I would briefly blog about two useful extensions I use for VS2010 when presenting. They are Presentation Zoom by Chris Granger ZoomEditorMargin by Benjamin Gopp The Presentation Zoom extension creates a global zoom level so that if you zoom a single window, all editor instances will be updated to that zoom level. Before I had this extension I had a few circumstances where I was not aware of the resolution restrictions of the projector until 5...
I'm down in Los Angeles this week for my first ever Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference! This is the biggest industry conference I've ever attended, with more than 15000 people from around the world! It's also a bit different too because I don't know *anybody* here. WPC is more of a business/sales/marketing type of conference, not so much technical. As a result, its an entirely different crowd than the usual suspects at TechEd, PDC, etc. That's not a bad thing though! I'm meeting some great people...
Back in May, I presented at TechEd 2011 North America – Atlanta. I just now realized my ppt never made it to the materials section on the myTechEd website. Here is the link to it …...
One of the things that I have really enjoyed in the process of working with SQL Azure is the SQL Azure Management options. Mind you, it does not have a built-in backup tool, yes there are other options. redgate SQL Azure Backup Currently, Red Gate has a SQL Azure Backup tool (since it is Beta, it is free for the time being). Obviously, in order to use the tool the network/ip address from which you will be connecting has to be enrolled into the Azure Firewall for your account. The first step … connect....
As I already blogged a while back, native code has been on the lips of many since TechEd 2011. Microsoft seems very committed to actually putting the language to use again after all these years of radio silence. Regarding this I urge you all guys to watch this video interview of Mohsen Agsen about C++ Today and Tomorrow http://channel9.msdn.com/Sh... on Channel 9. What I find very inspiring about this interview is that Microsoft has a number of internal...
When I was at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, I had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of the DevExpress folks and working out some of the details for a series of Windows Phone Development webinars. Here they are, for your viewing pleasure: #1 Introduction to WP7 Development with Silverlight and XNA - http://tv.devexpress.com/#W... #2 Deeper Dive Into XNA on Windows Phone - http://tv.devexpress.com/#W... The source (in C# and VB.NET) for the demos in this talk can be found in my book, or...
If you were at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, you likely heard or saw what is coming in the next release of the Visual Studio product line and technologies. Here is a summary of some of those items: Visual Studio Roadmap http://www.microsoft.com/vi... The Future of Microsoft Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management Presentation from TechEd http://channel9.msdn.com/Ev...
I was pleasantly surprised by my inbox yesterday to find that my session submission for VMWorld 2011 had been accepted! I had been trying for many years to break in to doing some sessions at Microsoft's TechEd - always to no avail. It always seemed like you had to know the secret handshake, be an MVP or work for Microsoft. I felt like I was destined to settle with speakling at user groups, no matter how badly I tried to get more experience in front of larger groups. So when my local VMWare account...
PhillyNJ.NET short demo on how to view TechEd 2011 Session Videos and Presentations In case you missed it you should go check out the free content. Here is how to get started!! The presentation was held at http://www.phillynj.net which is a sub group of http://www.phillydotnet.org . We’ve been meeting at the Greenwich Township Branch Gloucester County Library System 411 Swedesboro Road Gibbstown, NJ 08027 PHONE: (856) 423-0684 If your looking for talent to employ, or just out to find fellow geeks...
For those that attended TechEd NA 2011 last week in Atlanta it should be no surprise that more and more companies are betting on the Azure platform, whether it is Windows Azure or SQL Azure. There have been developments, changes and improvements for every aspect of the Windows Azure platform in general. And with that tools from 3rd parties to enhance or extend the experience. That is the case when we look at SQL Azure Backup from Redgate. A way to simplify and sync your SQL Azure data to local SQL...
This week was TechEd in Atlanta and an opportunity for the Windows Azure Platform product groups to make some announcements on new and future technologies and services. I’m collating them over on my team blog – check them out: Windows Azure Platform announcements from TechEd Atlanta May 2011...
You probably have already visited Channel 9, and if you have not I would recommend to definitely check it out. There are literally thousands of videos about development using Microsoft technologies (and more). You can watch the videos on the site using Silverlight player or you can use links on each video page for downloading. This usually works fine if you are interested in just one or a small number of videos, but it might become somewhat tedious if you want to download a bunch of them. I recently...
Tomorrow am returning home, to Tokyo. Atlanta has been fun, but it does seem like city where you need a car or seriously figure out the metro. Next years TechEd is in Orlando, I like the convention centre, but it seems to in the middle of nowhere. In Tokyo, I live close to middle of city, with plenty to do everywhere. It's funny, when I was living in England, my passport lasted 10 years, but in 4 years in Japan I've filled up the passport with all the trips, exploring Asia. Actually happy going home,...
Next years TechEd will be in Orlando, with registration starting around 24th. Planning on going, but do wonder how it will go. This year have not gone to as many 400 level events, nor has there been as many 'famous' speakers. Perhaps they are holding off till PDC - got to make this years one, missed last year due to being too busy. The content has been good, with some talk of VS vNext - which I want now. One of the main focuses seems to be on simplifying the developer experience. They will have a...
At TechEd this year, there's only a few sessions and expo booths aimed squarely at devs rather than sysadmins and DBAs, but one of the things I picked up on was what's going into Visual Studio vNext. There's no shiny new UI features (that they've announced so far...) but they are doing a whole lot of work improving the performance and memory usage of VS - parallel builds (already supported in core MSBuild, just not used in VS up to now), and spinning off a separate process to do each build. This...
Well not really that long ago, this is actually a brand new for me. I just decided today to start blogging about my experiences as an IT professional. Since none of you know me, I am a systems engineer for a NJ based energy company. My main areas of expertise are in Microsoft server technologies specifically Exchange, Active Directory and plane old Windows Server along with vSphere and many more. My job responsibilities entail life-cycle management, developing infrastructure standards and solutions...
Somehow it happens that my first ever blog post is at the same time as TechEd 2010 in ATL. Being occupied with work I didn’t have a chance to attend this enormous event this year, but wanting to learn more on new tools I am trying to keep up by reading your posts. Thank you for the news! Hopefully next year I will be an active participant ;) --- The first question you will ask me is why blogging now? Finally I decide to focus on my professional skills more and get up to speed with everything I missed...
Geeks With Blogs has been given the opportunity to host a blogger’s lounge at MS TechEd 2011 this year. I highly encourage anyone who loves to blog about technology, Developer or IT Pro, to head on over and introduce yourself. I have been blogging off and on (as life and time permit) with this group for a long time now and you couldn’t find a better bunch of guys that are passionate about both community and technology and their site really supports this. Be sure to say hi to Jeff and John. They are...
I used to be envious of those people who could go to every conference. I would look on twitter and I would watch the streaming keynotes. I wondered how can I get to these events? Somehow I did it I’ve been to SharePoint Conference, The Expert’s Conference, and Best Practices Conference plus 31 or so SharePoint Saturdays. So now what? Well I finally got to go to TechEd in Atlanta as a HOL instructor. It’s kind of nice not speaking for once and just helping other people out. I don’t have as much pressure...
In case you missed it, the Windows Phone Hackathon was last night. TechEd attendees and community folks from around Atlanta showed up to get some free training on Windows Phone development (Silverlight, XNA, Azure) and have some Q&A with various subject matter experts (and free help with their projects.) We had a really good turnout, with most people in the Silverlight room learning about making apps. We had a few folks in the XNA room, some who were brand new to XNA and others who were already...
You have heard, an read about TechEd North America 2011. If you are at TechEd 2011 then you have received some additional information about sessions, the number of miles between buildings (joking) and really the building layout and room numbers. Anyway, somehow the room where the Study Hall is, has been labeled Certification Testing Center. And while there is a Certification Testing Center, that is in room B-316 only. Now, on to the reason behind the post ... room B-315 is the Study Hall. This means...
John walks you through the Blogger Hub at TechEd 2011 Atlanta. If you are here, you should swing by. Technorati Tags: Geekswithblogs,TechEd,Atlanta...
Big room, with space for lots of people, but not the biggest teched keynote room they've had. Breakfast was ok, among the better ones they've served up. They are really pushing the myTech*Ed, formally CommNet - I wonder if they've finally got it right. Taken them long enough. At least it worked on day 1 :)...
This has been a fantastic week of XNA activity and news. Standing ovation the the XNA Team for the interaction they’ve been having with the community as well as the new features they’ve been rolling out for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers. Simply outstanding and I can’t wait to see what might be coming next. It’s also been a fun week to watch people’s Dream Build Play projects inch ever closer to completion. With the submission deadline coming up in June this is the crunch time for many developers....
Next week is a huge week for us at @StaffOfGeeks. We will be at what we think is the best tech conference of the year, Microsoft TechEd. John and I have been going to this event for years and now we have the honor of running the Blogger Hub (formerly the Blogger Lounge) to help generate some buzz around the event, sessions, and experience. So if you are attending, how do you find us? To the cloud….just kidding. We will be in Atlanta! Then we will be at the Georgia World Congress Center: Then we will...
Let’s focus on Exam 70-583 this time. This exam is PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications. This guide itself will be a different approach to preparing for the exam itself. Instead of just taking the individual topics, let’s review the topic in as much information as we can. Here is a set of resources to get started. This is the topic I will be presenting at TechEd North America 2011, so expect more information after 5/18/2011. Here is the link to the session: http://northamerica.msteche...
I have mentioned I will be speaking on a Cram 4 exam session at the upcoming TechEd North America 2011 in Atlanta. The topic is the prep for exam 70-583: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications. This is a PRO Level exam. There are two other exams needed to get the MCPD Azure credential, those exams are TS level exams. Those exams are: EXAM 70-513 TS: Windows Communication Foundation Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 EXAM 70-516 TS: Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework...
Looks like I'm going to TechEd 2011, thanks to GeeksWithBlogs.net and all of you that helped get me there by clinking the Tech Ed link in my previous posts. I'm really looking forward to going, and I wouldn't be if not for your help, so seriously... THANKS!! If you're going too, hit me up on Twitter (@ChrisGWilliams) or Facebook (http://tinyurl.com/2atcqbg) or maybe catch me at the INETA booth or the Blogger Hub (run by the fine folks at GWB.)...
April was maybe the busiest month I have seen. Projects are closing but many are going strong. Many lessons came with it. A deeper and stronger involvement with Windows Azure. Specially around System Center Operations Manager and Windows Azure. Also, that brings me to the next chapter in the Windows Azure adventure. I will be presenting a Cram 4 Exam session at TechEd North America 2011. More details to come on this soon. May, then, looks exciting and with many lessons to learn. For those going to...
It has been too long since I have last posted to this blog. Life has a way of taking over and the next time you put your head up it is 2011. I have been in a long long Exchange 2010 migration as well as some other family related things. Kids growing up, sports, travel, etc. I am sure Twitter and Facebook have also eaten in to my formal blogging activities. I have been posting there when I have had time. They lend themselves much easier to three sentence updates of the hectic lifestyle. I would feel...
Check out the post over on the StaffOfGeeks blog outlining our participation at TechEd 2011 Atlanta. We are so excited to see how Geekswithblogs.net, the best Microsoft blogging community in our opinion, can change the way people blog at TechEd. We are doings so by facilitating a new area we helped design called The Blogger Hub. In this area we have dedicated areas for writing blog post with hardwire network drop and power for your laptops, an education area for learning how to create a blog and...
Going to TechEd 2011? If so, you have an amazing opportunity at TechEd 2011 with the TechEd Bloggers Hub, facilitated by Geekswithblogs.net. Located in the Connect Zone, the TechEd Bloggers Hub is a wonderful resource for the new blogger and the experienced one. In this area, there are experts that can assist you getting started, great tips and tricks on how to run your blog, resources and tools that can make your blog and writing experience better! And Geekswithblogs.net is proud to facilitate!!!...
Every year, as the spring turns to summer there is a gathering we all want to make it to, TechEd North America. Here we are coming from a cajun experience last year ( I actually decided to drive from Indianapolis to New Orleans). And it was a great event, and great to see New Orleans. This year I am going to make the trip again, but not driving this time around. It will be a great event, no doubt. I will be presenting a Cram 4 exam session, helping prep for the Azure MCPD Certification. I will provide...
I'm trying to win a pass for TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, GA. The way that's going to happen is by sending traffic to the Tech Ed site. The more referrer traffic they get from me, the better my chances of winning a pass. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right? Here's how you can help: Click this link: Tech Ed 2011 and go check out the Tech Ed site. It's that simple. Feel free to leave comment below after you do it and I'll be sure to thank you the next time I see you (hopefully at Tech Ed 2011)...
Recently I've found that one of our Hotfix Branches was taking a long time to compile (15min or more). This was strange because our main development branch was OK and compiling the same Visual Studio solution in under 3 minutes. The only difference was that in the hotfix branch we still had the project in .NET 2.0. I saw right away that ResGen.exe (Resource Generator) was executing for a long time and consuming 25% CPU (I guess it would use more CPU if it was multi-threaded :)) The problem you face...
Ahhh, the beauty of having Windows Live Writer on the mac again, I love it. So when I bought this machine, I said I would never run Boot Camp, Parallels, or Fusion on it because it only has 2GB of ram that is not upgradeable and who can run a VM with under a 1GB ram dedicated? Well the answer is Windows 7 Starter Edition. How did I come to that conclusion, trial and error. We are prepping for a big event at TechEd 2011 (the announcement will be coming soon) and I needed Windows Live Writer on my...
So, these are a little late, but I was glad to see that Dave put up some of the pics from DevIdols 2010 at TechEd Africa. The winner of the competition was William Brander who did a great presentation. Jayd and myself got runners up titles. Below is a pic of Jayd, Brendon & Myself (wearing my GeeksWithBlogs shirt) after the final...
At TechEd India 2011 I presented on HTML5 Development with Visual Studio 2010 SP1. I wanted to cover the aspects that were discussed in my session. HTML5 1. HTML5 is the emerging but promising trend in web development 2. Some of the standards have got green signal i.e. they are candidate recommendations. 3. Some others are still work in progress. 4. IE9 implements standardized HTML5 specifications. Visual Studio 2010 and HTML5 Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 comes from basic HTML5 support. Having...
UPDATE: Scott Hanselman has a NuGet package to automate many of these steps and you should check it out, http://www.hanselman.com/bl... Today, at Tech Ed India 2011, I delivered this session – Web Forms vs. MVC choosing the right one for web development. Although its a tricky topic, it was worth clarifying some of the patterns to decide between Web Forms and MVC. One of the demo scenarios I took...
Soma was the keynote speaker at TechEd Middle East in Dubai. And during this, he announced a couple of items being let out the door to now being releases. First, Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Available for subscribers on March 8th, and the rest of the world on March 10th. TFS-Project Integration Feature Pack, Visual Studio Load Test Feature pack and Lightswitch Beta 2 are also part of the releases out and available. Check Soma’s blog … http://blogs.msdn.com/b/som...
Want to win a trip to TechEd 2011? INETA NorAm is hosting a contest with our partners to see who can build an .NET application making effective use of reusable components to solve a problem. The Rules: Any .NET Application (WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, etc.) built in the last year (since 1/1/2010) using at least 1 component from at least 1 approved vendor. Then make a 3 - 5 minute Camtasia video showing your entry and describing what component(s) you used and why your application...
It’s about 3 months later when I registered the SQL Azure Reporting CTP on the Microsoft Connect after TechED 2010 China. Today when I checked my mailbox I found that the SQL Azure team had just accepted my request and sent the activation code over to me. So let’s have a look on the new SQL Azure Reporting. Concept The SQL Azure Reporting provides cloud-based reporting as a service, built on SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Azure technologies. Cloud-based reporting solutions such as SQL Azure...