TechEd 2005

Visual Studio Team System Beta 2 VPC from MSDN - it's the little things that get you!

Eric Hammersley — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 03:34:00 GMT

Well, I’ve been waiting for them to make this available ever since TechEd. They were giving copies away during the lunch session of the DotNetRocks show and since I left during the show I didn’t receive my copy. Since then I’ve been waiting for them to post it to MSDN downloads… like they promised. Well, as of July 15th they have fulfilled that promise. You can download a fully functional copy of VSTS Beta 2 fully configured and ready to test. Honestly I love this idea and believe MS should start doing this for other “larger” betas. VSTS is somewhat of a pain to install although easier than Beta 1 the Beta 2 bits will still give you fits. This makes it nice and easy.

Anyway, what prompted this post was a little thing that I know they just overlooked but I found it quite funny. The ADVENTUREWORKS domain that is setup on this image has a password expiration policy and as you well know if a service account is not setup with an non-expiring password the service will fail to start once that password expires. Well, when they installed Office Live Communication Server 2005 they used a domain service account, ADVENTUREWORKS/LCService, and it had an expiring password. The LC service fails on startup. A simple fix I know but it just reminds you that the little things are what get you in life. I bet people just poured over this image making sure it was just right prior to release. We can’t catch ‘em all.

For my final Orlando post, Microsoft introduces the Office 12 XML file format

Eric Hammersley — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 03:24:00 GMT

Microsoft provided us (TechEd Attendees) with the first white papers on the new Office 12 XML file format standard. You can get more information at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx. This is a good move in my opinion. Take a look at the whitepaper which is available at the above link to get an idea of what they have in mind. There is some advanced opportunity here to get the jump on tools and utilities for the new Office 12 version so read away and get the wheels turning.

Goodbye from Orlando!

DEVC14 - Reflection: Best Practices

Eric Hammersley — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 03:56:00 GMT

Listen, if you get a chance to hear Joel Pobar (CLR PM) talk make sure you do it. This guy knows his stuff. His cabana talk tonight focused on Reflection Best Practices. Cabana #6 was packed and for good reason. He took us deep into reflection, perf, CLR parsing of assembly meta-data and proper technique. Honestly, and this is just my opinion, I believe Joel is one of the most knowledgeable speakers I’ve had the pleasure to hear. If you want to know the inner workings of the CLR I believe this is your guy. If you catch him around the cabanas tomorrow and you have questions about the CLR you should grab him. I also recommend checking out his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelpob/. You won’t be sorry.

On a side note, someone asked during the session if obfuscated code (don’t remember how we got on this topic) could be debugged via stack traces returned from the field. While the answer given was no, or at least that it was very difficult, that’s not entirely correct. If you obfuscate with the PreEmptive tool (either Standard or Professional) it will output a translation file ( I can’t remember what they call the file) that can be used to translate your stack trace from the field into usable information that you can debug just as you would non-obfuscated code. The PreEmptive team at booth 1041 can explain this a lot better. I recommend you check this out. .NET code protection is something we all need to take a look at and I believe the PreEmptive folks go to great lengths to make it as painless for us as possible.

TechEdbloggers.net Bloggers quoted at ftponline.com

Eric Hammersley — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 19:40:00 GMT

Some of us have been quoted over at the ftponline.com TechEd channel. Take a look here. Lets keep up the good work.

TechEd Postcast Feed, are you watching?

Eric Hammersley — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 19:34:00 GMT

So podcasting is something new for me and since the Microsoft Podcast crew has been flying around all week taping I decided to check the videos out. This page outlines how to get started watching the podcasts and the tools you need to do it. I downloaded the iPodder product and along with the TechEd XML feed on the page above it worked well. You can find out how to watch at http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2005/podcast.mspx.

Win a custom chopper by migrating to SQL Server

Eric Hammersley — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:06:00 GMT

The site is still a little vague but Microsoft is offering a custom chopper as part of the “Cost Chopper Competition“ to the best SQL Server migration story. You can find the details at www.sqlserverchopper.com.

BizTalk Server 2006 CTP released today

Eric Hammersley — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:01:00 GMT

Paul Flessner announced in his keynote this morning that a Community Technology Preview for BizTalk Server 2006 would be released today. I however cannot find a single link to it anywhere. When the Microsoft Pavilion opens at noon I'll go ask the BizTalk team where it is at and I'll report back to you.

Launch date announced for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006

Eric Hammersley — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 13:55:00 GMT

In Paul Flessners keynote this morning they announced the the official launch date for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. The products will launch the week of November 7th 2005. The official launch website can be found at msdn.microsoft.com/launch2005. Bookmark the site for important updates prior to and during the launch.

Flickr Photo Album is up and going

Eric Hammersley — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:53:00 GMT

First off, my camera sucks so the pictures aren't that great. I picked out the best ones and I'll upload more as the week moves on. Maybe I'll win the EMC prize and then I can do this right. Follow the flickr box to your left.

So just how many Hands-On Lab systems are there?

Eric Hammersley — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:33:00 GMT

I promised a number and here it is. There are 990 machines of one kind or another in the Hands-On Lab area. This was according to the MVP manning the main entrance this evening.