I've been in Redmond all week (some Windows 7-related fun that I'll discuss later) and rented a car. Look at the license plate I happened to get:

I don't know why it's Oregon. Probably all the Washington DEV plates are taken . When I first saw it, I said to myself "somewhere here there's a 22 year old developer who wishes this plate was available." It was several days before I remembered that Gregory Consulting was founded in 1986. Nice.

Kate

The Visual Studio site has been completely revamped.

It's fun and a good source of information even for those of us who already know our way around Visual Studio. Check out the Community tab for videos and links to blogs.

Kate

I love hand-edited blog aggregations. You get relevant technical material without the cute cat pictures. I have a gadget that shows me headlines from the blogs of my fellow Regional Directors, but anyone can have it. Here's how it looks on my sidebar:

If I click a headline, it pops out with a summary:

Click the more link and it goes straight to the post on the original site.

You can get the gadget from Live Gallery and install it on your own machine very easily. Alternatively you can see the aggregation in a browser at http://www.microsoftregionaldirectors.com/. I've said before what a smart group of people this is and how very much you can learn from following their blogs. It's all the more true when someone else does the monitoring and editing for you. Enjoy!

Kate

Brian Marble reports that the session selection process is almost complete. I submitted a few talks, of course, and I also know of at least one talk submitted by someone else in Microsoft with me as the speaker. The dust hasn't quite settled yet (the session titles should be on the web in February) but I do know that at least one of my sessions has been accepted. Yay! I'll add more details when it's official, but for now ... see you in LA in May!

You can register now, by the way, and get a nice discount and snag a good hotel room...

Kate

You know the deal when you demo beta (or worse, pre-beta) software. That stuff has audience detectors in it! Sure, it works on the plane, but just wait until you get in front of people. I’ve had my share of demo deaths, but I don’t think I’ve managed to look this cool about it:

Steve Teixeira tells the story in this blog entry.

Kate

I attended more events than usual in 2008, and I spoke at roughly the same number as usual, for me. But many people are saying they plan to attend fewer events in 2009 than usual, and what’s more they’re saying that might not be a bad thing. In a time when sessions are online, when you can search the web for the blog of the person who wrote the feature you’re interested in, why would you pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room, not to mention a substantial admission fee? I can think of at least three reasons why I do it: for the time spent with likeminded attendees, for the time spent with speakers, and as an oasis from my other obligations that’s devoted to this particular topic. There’s a fourth that you won’t notice unless you go to conferences that are well-curated: somebody is taking the time to select sessions, to select speakers, and even to get the sessions delivered in a sensible order. For more on this point, you should read Andrew Brust’s blog entry on the importance of track chairs in the 21st century.

Kate

Short answer: yes, you can open up Visual Studio 2008’s Team Explorer and point it at your not-upgraded-yet 2005 TFS server and be happy. If you are curious about other levels of mixing and matching and compatibility, check Grant Holliday’s chart.

Kate

I was working on a service recently (pretty cool actually, it is a Windows Service that hosts a WCF Web Service) and I was fiddling with it and installing and uninstalling it, and I was getting frustrated. I couldn’t install the new version because it already existed. I couldn’t uninstall it because it was “marked for deletion” whatever that means. I found a knowledge base article which suggested rebooting my machine. Sure, that’s no trouble at all. Grr. Then I found Avner Kashtan’s blog entry. I can’t believe the simple fix he provides. And it WORKS! Go on, read it there. You’ll thank me.

Kate

Leon Bambrick, aka Secret Geek, reveals the true differences between small businesses and enterprises. Like Dilbert, it’s only funny because it’s true.

Kate