Anith Gopal

This week in the UK the BBC are running a week long series of events called Stargazing Live . If you were at the BETT show last week you will have seen us give a brief demo of WorldWide Telescope.

Context I was introduced to the integrated development environment (IDE) in the 80’s with the CTOS development environment and in the 90’s with the Windows development environment. Since then the evolution of Visual Studio has been astounding and looking at what is to come with Visual Studio 2010, see Better Coding with Visual Studio 2010 for more information, we can merely stand  gobsmacked and in awe. Since the IDE emerged my excitement was, however, stifled with the fact that in practise the “integrated” environment was far from reality.

Late last year we started the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Guidance project … probably the worst time as December is a very inactive month with everyone enjoying a well deserved break and January  being a very active month to re-start initiatives, thus having little time and bandwidth for these kind of projects. Nevertheless the team has ensured that the guidance project is picking up momentum and recently released a DRAFT of the core scenarios to the Rangers for comment and are hard at work on a BETA release for the core scenarios and a DRAFT release for the extensibility and Hands-on-lab (HOL) scenarios.

If you are using or considering using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 Team Build, then you must have a look at the AIT Build Suite 2010 at http://www.tfsblog.de/2010/02/07/company-wide-build-processes-a-vision-within-reach (German article: http://www.tfsblog.de/2010/02/05/unternehmensweite-buildprozesse-eine-vision-rckt-in-greifbare-nhe/ ). In collaboration with the Rangers we are considering a build quick reference poster as part of the VS 2010 Quick Reference Guidance , which includes this Build Suite, and have requested AIT to deliver a step-step walkthrough to make this “free” nugget an invaluable asset to the power and standard users of TFS 2010. Take a look at the referenced blog post9s), download  and evaluate this nugget!

If you are a CRM developer, there are quite a few beta technologies coming fast your way and you better be ready. First off, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 are really great products to watch out for and if you haven’t had the time to play with it yet, there is a Virtual Machine available for you to download and start right away.

In a recent custom adapter development we stumbled across another weird run-time error, which became even more obscure as we started discussing,  debugging and troubleshooting the phenomena: The exception which is relevant in the above screen snippet is: “ Method not found ”. Looking at code, reverse stepping and discussing it with the platform project team resulted in no idea what the mysterious exception was caused by. An inspection of the project settings revealed, however, that many of the copy local properties were set to TRUE, which which unfortunately is the default in Visual Studio

This is my last year for part-time studies at UNISA and I hope … somehow I doubt it though … that once I complete the part-time degree in November, that I put aside my private time for more relaxing adventures such as Farmville or just reading a thriller or science fiction book. This year I have to complete one semester course and two year courses, which include “operating system concepts”, “advanced programming” and “formal logic”.

Got a good one to share with the group; Q: Can I make a kernel mode driver that opens a handle and talks to a UMDF based driver in another device stack? A: Why yes you can!  Quite simply done provide you follow all the rules .

A big focus of my time these days is on introduction to computer science courses. What might be called CS0 at the university level.

/by Amy Sorokas   Recently, Deanne Fitzmaurice was interviewed by Marc Silber on his photo show .

Charles , alias Chuck , who works with us in the DevX Customer and Project Management team, is hosting internal, interactive, informal, invaluable and fun presentation skills sessions. Chuck and his sessions are truly amazing and therefore you should make a point of attending them when available … I, for one, cannot wait for the next session and strongly believe that the value I got from the first session, far exceeds the value I got from the numerous presentation skills courses I went to in the past

Thanks to everyone who attended our TFS Migration Tools TR9 re-run and a special thanks to Bill Essary and his team for supporting the VSTS Rangers “again”.  Apart from me running on my server after re-installing my laptop with Win7 over the weekend and an “important update install and imminent restart” warning message on the server just before the start of the session, the re-run went fairly well.