Here are the resource links for the Administering Team Foundation Server 2010 Class from last week in Minneapolis. Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 RTM virtual machine for Microsoft® Virtual PC 2007 SP1 http://www.microsoft.com/do... Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 RTM virtual machine for Windows Virtual PC http://www.microsoft.com/do... ......

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Thanks to everyone who attended the “Flip on LightSwitch!” at the Kansas City Office Geeks User Group last night! Lots of great questions and interaction from the group! As promised, here are the resources we talked about: First, you need a place to play with LightSwitch. As it is beta, a vpc is always a good idea. Currently there are three flavors of the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VPC: Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 RTM virtual machine for Microsoft® Virtual PC ......

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From a message from Brian Keller: “Back in December we posted a set of virtual machines pre-configured with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2, and 7 hands-on-labs. I am pleased to announce that today we have shipped an updated virtual machine using the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate bits, a brand new sample application, and 9 hands-on-labs. This VM is customer-ready and includes everything you need to learn and/or deliver demonstrations of many of my ......

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Sorry for the rather lengthy post here. I get asked this all the time so I decided to post it…Visual Studio 2010 editions will be available on April 12, 2010. Product Features Professional with MSDN Essentials Professional with MSDN Premium with MSDN Ultimate with MSDN Test Professional with MSDN Debugging and Diagnostics IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger) Static Code Analysis Code Metrics Profiling Debugger Testing Tools Unit Testing Code Coverage Test Impact Analysis Coded UI Test Web Performance ......

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Interested in getting up to speed on Windows Azure? Then check out this FREE boot camp, all across the US this spring. What is a Windows Azure Boot Camp? Windows Azure Boot Camp is a two day deep dive class to get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. ABC is more than just a class, it is also an event in a box. If you don't see a class near you, ......

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Meeting tonight!!! Food! Great giveaways including a full license of Infragistics for a year! See you there!! Meeting for March 23rd, 2010 WHERE: Centriq Training, 8700 State Line Road, Leawood, KS (Click WHEN: 6:00 PM TOPIC: Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle for Agile development Microsoft recently added secure development guidance for agile methodologies within their SDL. During this presentation, Nick will summarize the new guidance and discuss what makes this guidance successful for ......

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Recently I was in a meeting to discuss the new features of Team Foundation Server 2010. The senior management team asked many questions and was duly impressed. Afterwards, I thought that the QA would make a good blog post. It was then I remembered this great post from Brian Harry earlier this year. Read it for a great introduction. Oh and Happy New Year ......

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Hello, Here are the companion resources for the “Dancing with SharePoint” presentation at SharePoint Saturday Kansas City! We talked about best practices to create a SharePoint virtual development environment, ways to get the most functionality out of the box, and some great development tools. Thanks to all who came!!!! “Power User Books” – For getting the most out of the box The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users Essential SharePoint 2007: A Practical Guide for Users, Administrators and Developers ......

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Visual Studio Team System 2008 vpcs with new expiration dates!!!! The last set of images was set to expire December 31, 2009. These images were updated with new expiration dates (January 31, 2011) and all of the latest Windows updates. This virtual machine is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP2. It contains a full installation of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server SP1, Team Build 2008 SP1, Team Explorer 2008 SP1, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite SP1 and ......

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Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Team Foundation Server 2010 – Beta 2, WITH SAMPLE DATA This VM included everything you need to learn and demonstrate the ALM capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 (with the exception of Lab Management – the product team is hard at work on a solution for configuring Lab Management in a VM). This VM is available in the virtualization platform of your choice (Hyper-V, Virtual PC 2007 SP1, and Windows [7] Virtual PC). Hyper-V is highly recommended because of the performance ......

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In a recent post I told you about the online PDC videos available for free. Now the DE’s have picked their favorites. The Developer Evangelists and Architect Evangelists spend a ton of time supporting the local user communities and are great! My AE, Clint Edmonson, rocks! Anyway, from the ISV DE Blog… “Our team has put together a list of videos from Professional Developers Conference (PDC09) that we think are important for ISVs. All the videos are online. You can access the video itself or just the ......

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If you have been playing with the SharePoint 2010 beta then you may have run into a few issues. The Microsoft SharePoint Developer Documentation Team has put together a list of issues that the developer community is running into on a regular basis!

Nicely done.  Check it out here…

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If you’ve ever wanted to play around with a Microsoft Surface app but didn’t have the resources to get your own table. This is for you! Until recently, even the SDK was very hard to obtain without access to the device. Microsoft has expanded access and created several new resources for you to try. check it out! Surface Web site (http://www.surface.com) A new Technical Resources section to help you connect to the other available resources and support. MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com) A new Microsoft ......

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If you were like me last week – bummed because you weren’t able to make one of the coolest PDC’s in years. You’ll be happy to know (as I was) about a very generous and cool offering from Microsoft – made possible by some very hard work from the channel 9 guys! You can view ALL the sessions here! All of Day 1 is up (including PPTs) and Day 2 and 3 content will follow shortly with the plan being everything up by mid week! Great job guys!!!!!!!!! And thanks ......

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I stumbled across a recently released collection of guidance and best practices for SharePoint DBAs and those who love them. From the download page… “ This book is a guide for database administrators who implement or maintain Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It provides guidelines for improving the performance of Office SharePoint Server 2007 solutions that run on Microsoft SQL Server 2008…” Get it here in either doc or pdf formats ......

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I’m sure by now you know that the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta has been released. If not, get it here. There are also some great training resources already available! The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including: C# 4.0 Visual Basic 10 F# Parallel Extensions Windows Communication Foundation ......

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Hello, Here are the companion resources for the “Dancing with SharePoint” presentation at SharePoint Saturday Kansas City! We talked about best practices to create a SharePoint virtual development environment, ways to get the most functionality out of the box, and some great development tools. Thanks to all who came!!!! “Power User Books” – For getting the most out of the box The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users Essential SharePoint 2007: A Practical Guide for Users, Administrators and Developers ......

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I’ve needed to pull together some resources for SharePoint training: Figured I’d post them. Virtual Labs: Get first-hand deployment experience through the Virtual Lab series. The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 will teach you about installation, organizing content, managing user permissions, creating Web Parts for custom tasks, and much more.It's simple: no complex setup or installation is required to try ......

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Recently I’ve been engaged to integrate Dynamics GP Manufacturing and SharePoint. It’s been a daunting task to say the least to navigate the database.

Here is a good link to assist with learning more about the data structure in GP.

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My good friend and fellow Microsoft Regional Director Adam Cogan asked me the following question today. I was curious what you thought so I decided to ask you as well: What are you going to be using going forward (and why)? 1. WINDOWS 2008 R2 Release Candidate 2. WINDOWS 7 Release Candidate 3. VISTA ? 4. OTHER Respond in the comments if you would. I'm really curious! Thanks ......

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The hits keep coming! First they announced Beta 1, now here's a link to the piping hot WCF/WF4 Training Kit from Ron Jacobs! "The WCF/WF 4 training kit contains a set 6 hands on labs that will help you quickly get up to speed with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in .NET 4. The labs include Introduction to Workflow, Workflow Services, Flowchart, Workflow Designer, Service Discovery and Monitoring. " Ps. Here's the video version from endpoint.tv ......

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Soma posted about the BETA 1 RELEASE of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4!!!! He waxes eloquently here about it! This is a major release and you should be evaluating it to determine how best to apply it. Here are some resources to speed you on your way: Articles here at the MSDN .NET Framework Developer Center Forums here Microsoft .NET Framework: Overview and Applications for Babies - Scott Hanselman Enjoy! I know I will ......

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The Microsoft Web Platform guys have released a video on youtube that pays homage to one of my favorite detective shows. Check it out here!  This is just a teaser and I can't wait for Episode 1!

Who knew that installing apps could be this exciting! Go Cannon PI!!!! Soma and ScottGu rock!

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Thursday during the keynote at PubCon in Las Vegas Microsoft announced “Project Silk Road” which is a collection of services, including a new version of the Live Search APIs for developer community – basically Search API 2.0 Beta + Search Ads pilot. I can tell you all from firsthand experience that this is very slick! As one of the first implementations of the Live Search API 2.0 Beta , we got it up and running on GeeksWithBlogs.net very quickly and couldn’t be happier with the results. Search API ......

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Capsule Review of More Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C# by Bill Wagner I really found Bill's previous book (Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C# (Effective Software Development Series)) very useful. I've recommended in many classes I've taught and also to clients while consulting. More Effective C# enhances the original with C# 3.0 and LINQ additions. Bottom line: If you want to be a serious developer that continually hones his (or her) craft, then you need this book. ......

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October 27–30, 2008
Pre-conference October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California

The next Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been announced!!! It's October 27–30, 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.  Mark your calendars and save the date.

We'll see ya there!!!!!!

 

More information to follow....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008

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If you're like me you love to try out different technologies but you may not want to disrupt your box in the process. That's when a virtual PC can come in very handy. The Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program provides customers with an enhanced server-based software evaluation experience that’s faster, better supported and more flexible. You can now access the entire catalog of pre-configured Microsoft and partner products and solutions in the VHD format and start evaluating and testing today from www.microsoft.com/vhd. ......

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From the Team System Product Team... Two different times to accomodate more Time Zones!!!! Visual Studio Team System Chat – This Friday Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the in the Visual Studio code name “Orcas” Beta 1 releases for Team Suite and Team Foundation Server. Join the first chat session ......

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Steve Loethen has updated the code for you to get 4 classes of Microsoft eTraining for free.  The original code ran out of capacity but the new one should be sufficent... Get it here.. Its good!!! Real good!

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From the This just in department... Receive your FREE copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Groove 2007* when you attend a Windows Vista, 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 launch event near you! At a launch event you’ll be able to: • Attend breakout sessions for IT professionals and developers• Test drive the products and evaluate their functionality• Network with peers and local technology partners• Ask the experts• Receive valuable resources ......

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Wow. I get buried for a week and get transported into a parallel universe. Microsoft and Novell make an historic agreement. And while some folks in the open source community aren't happy, it seems most (including me) think this is a pretty good deal for building software in general... I mean, being able to just these three things: "...Microsoft and Novell will jointly develop a compelling virtualization offering for Linux and Windows..." - Right on! "...make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft ......

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Visual Studio Team System User Education has put out some new tech articles on Process Template Customization... If you've played with Team System you know that the Process Template is your key to making this tool really work for your shop... Check em out here

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These are funny little segments from MSDN! Check it out here. Also, you can play a game and sign up to get the actual figures by attending 2 webcasts or participating in 2 MSDN Virtual Labs each month according to the following schedule: January 2006: Qualification period for the MSDN Webcast superhero February 2006: Qualification period for the Visual Studio superhero March 2006: Qualification period for the SQL Server superhero April 2006: Qualification period for the *SECRET* superhero Kudos to ......

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While the physical Professional Developers Conference 2005 is over and now recorded for posterity, you can still use the Professional Developers Conference 2005 Site (lots of great post conference resources here!) whether or not you attended: If you did attend PDC 2005, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it was great! Make sure you check out the following resources now available. Session Slide Decks and MaterialsSession slide decks and materials are available for download. Didn’t ......

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This looks to be VERY cool. The product team is taking the show on the road. You won't want to miss this if its in your area... I'll be at the KC event. BTW: This is a FREE Event.... Learn from the Indigo team how the Indigo architecture was designed and see firsthand how it works. We’ll build live demos from scratch and answer your toughest questions. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to use Indigo to build distributed systems today that will communicate directly not only with other ......

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The next meeting of AgileKC will take place on Wednesday, July 20 at Centriq at 6:30 PM. Martin Olson will present, "The Principles of Agile Software Development - Part I". He will begin with a brief history of the evolution of agile software development practices and why they evolved. He'll discuss the core principles common among a number of popular agile software methodologies and describe some characteristics of agile environments. Martin Olson is a Project Manager with Visionpace, a software ......

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While the physical TechEd 2005 is over and now recorded for posterity, you can still use these great resources whether or not you attended: "Best Of" Tech·Ed 2005 Webcasts TechEd Podcasts From The Microsoft Podcast Team Regional Director GrokTalks MSDN Virtual Labs If you did attend TechEd 2005, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it totally rocked! Make sure you check out the Recorded Sessions now available. The adventure doesn’t stop there, however. If you haven’t ......

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For those of you attending the presentations on Team System yesterday... Here are the resources I spoke of: Books Introducing Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System Beta Edition Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide Integrating Agile Development in the Real World Directory of folks currently blogging about Team System (courtesy of Rich Hundhausen) ......

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This just in!!! Prizes. Cool! 64-bit eLearning class... Sweet!!! Developers: Stay ahead of the curve with eLearning from Microsoft. Complete a course, fill out a survey, and you're eligible to win prizes. Grand Prize Sony 50" Plasma WEGA High Definition TV ultimate home theater package2nd Prize Nikon D70 SLR Digital Camera package3rd Prize Bose Acoustic Wave 5-CD Music System4th Prize Bose Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones What is eLearning? eLearning is an effective and efficient system of self-paced ......

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From Jay Roxe, Product Manager, Visual Basic: Today, I'm happy to announce the launch of VBRun: The Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/v... VBRun is a subsite of the VB Developer Center that exposes some of our best Visual Basic 6.0 content from the extensive MSDN library, highlights new content that shows developers how to make VB 6.0 and VB.NET work together and also provides training for developers interested in moving their skills from VB6 to VB .NET. This will make ......

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From the folks at MS learning...

Your chances to pass any Microsoft certification exam have just doubled. Simply register for this offer by May 31, 2005, before taking your exam, and we'll give you a free second shot at success. http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/offers/2ndshot

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From Ron Jacobs, PnP Product Manager... Looks pretty sweet! Enterprise Library Webcast Series It’s March 2005 and nearly 50000 people around the world have already downloaded Enterprise Library from www.microsoft.com/practices. We want to make sure you know how to use Enterprise Library and are happy to bring you a series of webcasts designed to quickly bring you up to speed on these seven new application blocks. You can listen in to patterns & practices live at the scheduled time and ask ......

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The inventor of the wiki and one of the founders of Extreme Programming (XP) joins the Microsoft Prescriptive Architecture Team!!! Read about it here...Very cool!!!!

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This will help. Microsoft Win32 to Microsoft .NET Framework API Map just published on MSDN...

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Recently released, the Authorization and Profile Application Block provides an infrastructure for role-based authorization and access to profile information. The block enables you to: Authorize a user of an application or system. Use multiple authorization storage providers. Plug in business rules for action validation. Map multiple identities to a single user. Access profile information that can be stored in multiple profile stores. The hits just keep coming! If you aren't taking advantage of the ......

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Scott posted a nifty custom functoid sample for BTS 2004...

 BizTalk 2004 makes it's predecessors (and the competition) look like a horse and wagon compared to a bullet train...IMHO

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Registration is now open...DevDays 2004, coming to 32 US cities this March, promises to be one of the most rewarding events of the year for professional developers. With a focus on building secure smart client and Web applications using Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET, this event will help you add power and security to your applications the moment you walk out the door. No matter which track you attend, you'll be able to see a local expert build a real-world application, see the application ......

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From MSDN....“Understanding how a WSDL file describes your Web service is the key to understanding how XML Web services work in general. This article is for .NET developers who want to demystify the WSDL files that Microsoft ASP.NET generates by examining the seven major elements that compose a WSDL file.”

Good stuff...

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If you haven't done so already... Check out these samples that “show you how to build VSMacros projects, add–ins, and wizards to make your teams more productive and to bend Visual Studio .NET 2003 to the ways you like to work.”

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DevDays 2004 T-6 weeks! February 23 - March 22, 2004 32 US cities. 20,000 developers. If you haven't attended this, you really should! It's gonna be great!!! Check it out at: http://www.microsoft.com/se... ......

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I just found out from Steve Loethen (Microsoft Developer Evangelist Extraordinaire) that the 12/4 St. Louis stop on the ASP.NET Exposed Roadshow was the biggest so far with about 450 attendees! 20 of us made the trek via bus from Kansas City to St. Louis for the event and had a great time!!!! If you haven't seen the show, you should try to attend. Rob and Scott show some very cool stuff! The show is sponsored by MSDN and INETA. Bill gives a “man on the scene” report of the event here ......

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Hi. I'm John Alexander. I'm the .NET Practice Manager for Vision Data Solutions and a Microsoft Regional Director . Technically speaking, my passions are Web Services, Biztalk, and Smart Clients.... Non-Technically speaking, my passions are my family and watching movies... Gotta start somewhere. Guess this is it.... Thanks to Jeff Julian for making this happen ......

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