The second annual Houston TechFest is coming up on September 13 at the University of Houston. If you are in Houston on the surrounding (huge) area and would like to come and geek out you should sign up. Last I heard from the organizer, there were 500 signed up to attend. This year there is a great cast of speakers including my buddies Christian Thilmany (Microsoft), David Walker (SharePoint MVP), John Cook (Virtualization MVP and SQL Guru) and Tim Rayburn (Biztalk MVP). I am doing two sessions this...

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Sorry this is a little late. Two important things about the GDR for Data Dude. 1. No more design-time databases. 2. There is now a provider model for databases. This is how they will support DB2 when then GDR is released and how they will also support Oracle in the near future. From Gert Drapers: The team is happy to announce that we just released CTP16, of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR release. ... This release adds the following features: VSDBCMD.EXE We added independent...

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MSDN Unleashed Session 1: Demystifying WPF Today’s applications need to do more than simply work. They need to draw in the user, and provide a differentiated experience. This means moving beyond battleship gray forms, boxy UIs, and providing a positive user experience. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides powerful capabilities to develop a compelling user interface, the kind that makes an application stand out. In this session, we’ll examine the core concepts of WPF such as layout panels,...

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Last week was the debut of MVP TV. The idea behind MVP TV is to use Live Meeting to allow for a lot of user interaction with the presenter and create a recording for others to view. The presenter last week was Team System MVP Steve Andrews. Steve covered Team Build 2008 and MSBuild 3.5. I lurked for a bit to get an idea since I think I am the next one to present. Check it out when you have a chance. Happy Coding...

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So if you are like me and you can't live without Hyper-V, then there are some things you miss going to Windows 2008 and using it as your desktop. I was searching for a tool that would allow me to use LiveWriter on 2008 today and I came across an awesome website. Basically, this site has all of the things you need. In addition, there is a tool that allows you do all of the hacks and edits you need without doing all of the leg work. Freaking amazing. Happy Coding...

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Microsoft ArcReady Architecting Modern Distributed Applications Nearly every application we build today has dependencies to other systems. How do we design them to work together to meet our goals? How do we decide what to build and what to buy? Do we host it ourselves or in the cloud? With a bewildering array of choices, the biggest challenge we face today is how to architect robust applications with the right technologies to meet our user’s needs and integrate nicely into our existing IT ecosystems....

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I came across an interesting issue with ASP files recently and I wanted to share it. My customer was working on some old ASP files that were written in Visual Interdev and wanted to make them editable in Visual Studio 2005. We added the files to TFS Source Control, and when we opened them in Visual Studio here’s what we saw. To fix this, all you need to do is open the file in NotePad and then save the file with an Encoding of UTF-8. Hope this helps. Happy Coding...

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