Wednesday, April 02, 2008
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so yesterday I received some great news, I have been awarded an MVP for Team System..... how do I feel? awesome.....
but I got this through meeting and learning from the most amazing individuals both in my company and inside Microsoft, working with these people has been the most amazing ride... so I'm going to give thanks to my colleagues and friends, because you are the ones that help keep my fire burning
Aaron and ET, thanks for everything I owe you guys so much, thanks for helping me find the role and a place that truly makes me happy... you guys rock beyond words
Jack Greenfield for taking the time to help me understand your vision, so that it can make a difference to the company I work for....
Jochen Seemann for introducing me to my espresso habit and teaching me a new way to model
Don Smith bro you simply rock, your work has helped me sustain this momentum
So this list could go on for quite some time, but.. Tom, Jezz, Gareth, Wojtek, Mark Groves, Erik thanks for listening to me, it really does make a difference
:)
Thursday, March 06, 2008
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So I'm off to Redmond on Saturday to go to the Rosario TAP kickoff being held next week, packing for the trip is now down to a fine art, however my dilemma is what to buy when I'm out there... with the exchange rate working in my favor just exactly what should I get (by the way I'm going from GBP to USD)
So on the list of possible's
- Zune or iPod Touch
- MacBook Air or maybe just a MacBook
- MS Wireless Ent. Keyboard 8000 .... mmm backlit keys :)
- Storage .... a trip to Fry's will see me with some new hard drives
now, I may not actually get any of those, but I'm going to a least take a look.... oh and I also don't need any of those either (except the storage)
but what else should I take a look at?
So the guys over at the Smart Client Contrib site have just published a sample application and a demo script, now that is awesome. For me this is going to be of great help as although I'm known as the factory guy in my org, I don't always have time to keep my own personal factory samples as up to date as I'd like.... and if truth be told sometimes I'm burning the midnight oil to pull together a demo that I've been asked to do for a client, or even just internally... So having a ready made sample app and demo script is cool by me ..... great job guys
Monday, March 03, 2008
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On Wednesday you may want to take a little stroll over to here
Here's an overview
The Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint is source code and guidance for developers describing how to use Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies together in business applications and Internet Web sites. SharePoint applications that use Web Parts can now be built using Silverlight user interface elements. This capability enables a fresh look at data exposed through SharePoint Products and Technologies using the modern graphics capability in Silverlight.
Interesting times....
Thursday, February 28, 2008
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My buddy ET the rockstar.... way to go man :)
Launch 2008, the Toronto press event
Web Client Software Factory - February 2008 is now available for download... here
THEY'RE HERE..... Service Factory Modeling Edition - February 2008 has landed.... download the source from here, binary from here
Happy days :) .... not much to say I'm off to download and install into my VHD's
Web Client Software Factory - Feb 2008 release is almost with us, the wiki has been updated.... just gotta keep hitting refresh on the releases page :)
With all the chatter on the discussion forums for people wanting to get their hands on both this and the Service Factory, it feels more like the launch of a must have gadget ;)
All I can say is that the guys over at P&P have done a stunning job building the factories, to get such a high demand for new bits..... kudos guys
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
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spend all of your day in Visual Studio? Want to make the most of your experience with new products and extensions for VS? you might want to go check out Visual Studio Gallery for a ton and I mean a ton of extensions
Monday, February 18, 2008
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I go away for a weekend thinking meh what could happen between now and Monday, well I'm really pleased to say that GAX 1.4 is with us!!!
or as per this screen grab GAX 1.0 ???? :)
Yeah Baby GAT/GAX (sorry guys, I really can't get used to saying GAX/GAT :) February 2008 Final Release is here. (hmm exactly what does Final Release mean?)
So what are the highlights of this release
- Support for both VS2005 & VS2008
- you no longer need to uninstall GAX to upgrade, guidance packages that are registered with the previous version of GAX will automatically be registered with the current version of GAX .... seriously cool :)
- Note that folks on the forums are having mixed results with this, you do need to uninstall GAT but not GAX.... I will post up any issues as I find them
- well good news is that you can have side by side VS2005 and VS2008 installs.... sweet
- Improved uninstaller, GAX will attempt to uninstall any packages that have been manually installed, you will need to uninstall any packages that were added using MSI's
- various fixes, are included in this release, including the fix to allow us to get our hands on the source for the Service Factory
So congrats and kudos to Grigori Melnik and his team for getting this out of the door....
However, back to this Final Release issue, Tom mentions that GAT/GAX is no longer classed as a CTP, now what does that mean, is it now a product, is it now supported?, can I continue to build my factories using GAT/GAX without having to wait for Rosario tooling?, will there be future enhancements, or does final mean end of the line for GAT/GAX? ..... seriously I have a ton of questions.... anyone from the team or anyone else from the P&P/Team Arch care to comment :)
Anyway.... I'm off to make my factories and GAX 1.0 play nice
if you got to this part in the post I'll reward you with the link, go get it http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DF79C099-4753-4A59-91E3-5020D9714E4E&displaylang=en
Monday, February 11, 2008
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It's late (well for my timezone).... so I'll just point you to Mike's blog
more on this tomorrow :)
Mark has just posted the link to a survey on Team System Architecture Edition / Team Suite, please take the time to go do this survey...... Software Factory tooling needs you :)
See Mark's post here for more details and the link
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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The VSX team have posted a bunch of gotcha's and the associated workarounds for the 2008 VS SDK here.... thx guys.... I've now added that to my favorites :)
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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Is it just me or are we all back up to full speed now that Christmas and New Year are finally over? an example of this is that it feels like the firehose has been opened wide today :)
Anyway
Snippets, samples, resources, oh my!!
The MSDN Code Gallery has just been launched, and it promises to bring tons of goodies for us developer types, see Soma's blog for more details here, also see Pablo's post here for a great sample app, I wonder if this will replace my use of my notes on the Vista Sidebar?
Hat tip again to Gareth for the link to the excellent work being done by Jean-Marc Prieur, so if you need your model and your code to stay in sync, it looks like we have some tooling to help automate this. I've not had chance to have a play with this yet, but its now high on my task list for this week :) .... I'll post more on this once I've had a chance to play, but for now here's the link to Gareth's entry GarethJ's WebLog : Help in tackling the hard problem of model<-->code synchronization