Ahmed Salijee

Silverlight 2 Released

2008-10-14T14:57:31Z

Get the runtime from here

Get the tools from here

Want to do Silverlight Development from Eclipse. Check this

Don't forget the Devchat in November where we have 2 sessions on Silverlight

"Realizing value through the software development lifecycle" Breakfast event - Cape Town

2008-10-14T12:01:47Z

This event is mainly targeted at developer managers/leads, project managers etc. Developers are free to attend as well but this focus is not on the code.

"Only 30 percent of all application development projects are deemed successful." Source: The Standish Group, 2006

As part of a select group of senior technology professionals, you are cordially invited to the Developer Managers' breakfast event, to engage in a dialogue around the imperative issues faced by developer managers and the software development industry in South Africa.
The session will cover the realities of development departments in organisations and the technological advancements to support the objectives of all software/application development stakeholders. A real case will be presented by a prominent financial services company, showcasing some of the projects they have undertaken.
Prof. Barry Dwolatzky from the software engineering department at the University of the Witwatersrand will also talk on the current industry challenges and developments.

Attendance is limited, so please register early to secure your place.

To register visit http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032392000&Culture=en-ZA

Date: 12 November 2008
Time: 07:30 to 08:00 - Registration and Breakfast
08:00 to 10:30 - Presentations and Q&A
Venue: The Cape Town Hotel School, Beach Road, Mouille Point, Cape Town

"Talking Agile" Breakfast event - Johannesburg

2008-10-14T11:59:16Z

These events are mainly focused around developer managers or lead, project managers etc. It is also useful for developers but the intention is not to drill into code. We did the first of these events in Johannesburg earlier this year. Below are the details:

Talking Agile - Developer Manager's Breakfast

To register visit http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032391541&Culture=en-ZA

As part of a select group of senior technology professionals, you are cordially invited to the Developer Managers' breakfast event, to engage in dialogue around the imperative issues faced by developer managers and the software development industry in South Africa.

Agile Development is the big buzzword in software process improvement. Do you know what it encompasses, when you should use it, the requirements placed on the organization that uses them and how it differs from other methodologies? Ernest Mnkandla, senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa in the Department of Business Information Technology will provide insight into the world of agile software development.

The session will also present some learnings from Microsoft services on some recent projects.
Attendance is limited, so please register early to secure your place.

Date: 5 Nov 2008
Time: 07:30 to 08:00 - Registration and Breakfast
08:00 to 10:30 - Presentations and Q&A
Venue: Buitengeluk - Broadacres Estate, Fourways
Audience: Development Managers

Hot Team System News

2008-09-29T14:16:31Z

The Developer and Database editions are being merged. This means that if you have the developer edition today, you get the database edition for nothing (and vice versa). You do need an active MSDN subscription.
The next version is now formally known as Visual Studio Team System 2010. You can find a bit more here and here

My first webslice

2008-09-29T13:11:24Z

I wanted to play around with webslices in IE8. A webslice is a portion of a page that a user can subscribe too. The "page" is added to favorites bar and it checks for updates at regular intervals - so things like sports games, stock prices, weather are potential good scenarios. In business KPIs might be useful. Creating a webslice turns out to be reasonably easy.

This is the code before

<div>

Chiefs 1 , Pirates 1

</div>

This is the after code with the key bits highlighted

<div class="entry-content">

<p class="entry-title"> My IE8 Soccer demo </p>

Chiefs 1 , Pirates 1

</div>

Microsoft to ship jQuery library

2008-09-29T10:39:10Z

jQuery is a very popular Javascript library that assists with HTML traversing, event handling etc. Microsoft has decided to ship this library with our developer platform.

Scott Guthrie provides the details

Silverlight 2 RC0 available

2008-09-26T07:37:18Z

If you developing apps for Silverlight 2, and expect to have it done soon after we release it, you probably want to check out the RC0 release. This is a developer only release. This means it is not intended for broad consumer release and no auto-update will occur. You should use it for testing your apps in preparation for release.

Windows 7,160GB USB Drives and more at the PDC

2008-09-25T10:46:13Z

The PDC is just about a month away, and we have made some exciting announcements in the last few days:

Windows 7 will feature big time. Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President will do one of the keynotes that is focused on Windows 7. A total of 22 sessions are now published on the PDC Site. Check out the list at https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx
Attendees will get a 160GB USB drive with all the bits!
Scott Guthrie (I was wondering where his name was) and David Threadwell will be part of the keynotes.
Announced awhile ago, Don Box and Chris Anderson will deliver an all code keynote. Yeah

Important Rosario Planning Information

2008-09-25T10:35:53Z

Rosario is the codename for the next version of Team Foundation Server. Brian Harry has just blogged about charting a course for TFS Rosario. This is an important entry that I would recommend anyone using or investigating TFS to read. Important snippets for me:

Rosario will only support SQL2008 - to take advantage of some of the new Reporting Services capabilities
Better and more flexible support for Sharepoint - we have better support for MOSS but at the same time will make portal support optional.
Full support for 64 bit

Back to the future?

2008-09-08T09:13:37Z

With PDC 2008 around the corner, it got me thinking about other PDC's I attended. The first one was in 2000 when .NET first get announced (can anyone remember what it was first called?). This was in Florida and still sticks out as the best event I attended. Besides the cool content, there was a great bunch of people and nice parties (at Seaworld if I remember correctly).

The second one was in 2001, and is often known as the Hailstorm PDC. Hailstorm, aka .NET My Services, is the basis of this blog entry. The idea behind this was that we would store many of our common entities, like contacts, address information etc up on the web. The market at this time really was not ready. I can remember many people asking if these services would be available on premise rather than being hosted by Microsoft. Around that time, there was quite a bit of press around Microsoft and the court cases. Privacy was also a big deal. The interesting bit, when I reflect on this PDC, is that this would have marked some kind of entry into the SAAS (or S+S) space. At that stage, there really was no other players around, and Microsoft would have been a leader. Hailstorm more or less died. The chief architect, Mark Lucovsky, moved on. To where? Yep you guessed it - to Google.

I can remember a presentation from Bill Gates a few years ago. He talked about products and technologies and mentioned the concept of

1) The first person/company with an idea.

2) The first to implement or take the idea to market

3) The first to make money out of it.

With Hailstorm, it seemed like we were great on point (1) but probably overtaken on point (2) and (3) simply because at the time, the market was not ready for it.

At PDC 2008, we expect to hear lots of information on cloud computing. These services, I expect, will be way beyond just Hailstorm where the focus was mainly around CRUD functionality. It should be exciting.

Finally, the third PDC I attended was in 2003 where the details of Whidbey (VS05), Yukon (SQL05) and Longhorn (Vista) were provided.

MSDN Low Bandwidth view

2008-09-01T10:48:55Z

I picked up the blog entry by Jon Galloway - and it really is worth sharing. For us souls living in bandwidth constrained South Africa, this is really cool. As indicated on Jon's entry if you want to visit the low bandwidth version of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx just add loband like so - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx. This view is also great for mobile devices.

Off to the PDC...

2008-08-26T12:34:08Z

Yay. Of all the Microsoft events, the Professional Developers Conference is the one I most look forward to. It really is THE event to attend. Microsoft employees attendance at these events is very limited. Luckily, I have been allocated a pass to attend and will be heading to LA at the end of October.

The PDC is THE event you want to attend if you need to understand the future of the Microsoft development platform. This year, I am looking forward to information on products and technologies like

Software + Services - or what some refer to as the Cloud Platform. There is some stuff in CTP format like SQL Server Data Services and BizTalk labs and I expect more information in this space.
Oslo - Next generation modeling. Not lots of information out there today on Oslo but BillG promised some bits at the PDC.
Visual Studio and .NET Framework futures - Anders is doing a session on C# v4 and there are other sessions on VB, Workflow and WCF futures

Check out www.microsoftpdc.com for more information. I find https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx to be most useful to get an indication of what will be covered. If you can make it, let me know.

The .NET 3.5 Client Profile

2008-08-22T07:12:10Z

One of the cool features we announced for .NET 3.5 SP1 was the client profile. The basic premise was that for developers creating client sides applications (eg addins for Office or WPF), they would need to install the full .NET Framework. Once you took into dependencies, this redist was close to 200MB. The normal redist had many features that a client side developer might not need, like ASP.NET or Workflow Foundation (although you can use Workflow Foundation from the client application). We had from many ISVs that the deployment of the framework can be a blocker.

With this in mind, we created the client profile. Now, when I first read this it said the redist is just 28MB. Cool. Obviously it is just a subset of the full framework but 28MB sounds nice. This week, however, I have been digging into a bit more and there a couple of things to be aware of.

1) There is no offline installer for the "client redist". There is an online installer where you have a bootstrapper that would determine what you need, and then download the client profile if it met the requirements

2) The "client redist" is largely intended for XP SP2 machines

3) The client redist will not install on machines where the full framework is installed.

For more information, check out the Client Profile Explained entry from Jaime.

First taste of 64 bit and Hyper-V

2008-08-20T13:44:46Z

For TechED, I delivered some sessions on Rosario. This included a keynote demo and some breakout sessions. That is not the point of this post though. My main demo machine is a Dell D820 with 4GB RAM (although only 3.5GB is recognized :-(). This is a 64 bit machine but I have only installed the 32 bit versions running Windows Server as I wanted things like Team System to run. Rosario though, does not come in an installable format today - so I had no option but to use the virtual pc.

I was lucky to get a loan hard drive and decided to pursue Hyper-V as I told that would be give much better performance. HyperV runs only on 64 bit so I needed to install Windows Server 64 bit.

This was my first install of a 64 bit OS and overall I was happy. All my devices were recognized. Downloading the video drivers for Vista from the Dell site worked great too. I did not install much else on the machine (not even the .NET Framework) as this machine's goal was purely to act as a host for my virtual machines.

Getting started with HyperV was easy. I found the UI very intuitive - certainly a slot easier for me to use than Virtual Server.

After that, HyperV got a little confusing. I am not a regular VPC guy, but I got use to things like "Discard changes". HyperV does not have this concept. It uses snapshots where you can accomplish similar goals. The networking is also a little different, and I had some challenges there. Also if you had old VPC, when you run it on HyperV you need to activate the OS again - it sees it as a HAL change.

Some resources I found very useful.

How To: Get the TFS "Rosario" April 08 CTP running under Hyper-V is a truly excellent post. I used this as my main basis when starting and it made things easy. You will find the steps useful even if you are not running Rosario.

Getting UNDO functionality with Hyper-V Snapshots was very useful for me to understand how to get a clean state (Very important for demo)

I reckon this might well be the developer environment of the future. At Microsoft, there is guy Keith Combs running a Lenovo laptop with 8GB RAM. You can checkout how he was able to get 14 instances of Vista running.

I think all ISVs should make their software available - at least for trial purposes - through a virtual machine. We even have a program you can review at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/partners/vhdpartners.mspx. From that page

The Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program provides Microsoft’s partners a convenient and simplified process for creation of application images, facilitates its widespread distribution by making it available as a free download and enables accelerated evaluation and testing of these applications by customers. If you are Microsoft partner and would like to be able to distribute your applications in a VHD, you will have to sign the VHD redistribution agreement. To participate in this program, send an email to vhdinfo@microsoft.com and ask for a copy of the agreement to be signed and returned to Microsoft.

A must read blog?

2008-08-20T13:17:54Z

Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan - the 2 guys who manage the Windows dev team have started blogging at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/

At first glance, this blog looks mainly interesting if you are keen on Windows 7- but if you check out one of their first entries, you will quickly see that this is useful for anyone trying to understand the complexities of building large software. I read the Windows 7 Team post last night and it is truly fascinating. I find the comments just as useful.

BTW Steven blogs internally at Microsoft and his blog entries are LONG!.