Here is the roadmap. It seems like they are finally positioning it were it belongs - For individual developers or small teams who need a lightweight, client-only, file server application for source code control only.

[Via Sam Gentile's Blog]

(New features will include remote web access over HTTP and process automation...)

I ordered this book a few weeks ago. When it gets here, i will read it, write a review and post it here and on SADeveloper.net.

It got a great review from Eric Sink, here. But, regardless of how good or bad the book turns out to be, i think the foreword written by Joel Spolsky is required reading for anyone who would like to call themselves A Developer.


[Update: The book arrived today, but I ordered it through the company, which i resigned from in the interim. Hopefully i will find some time somewhere to read it by next week Friday...]

MSFT JHB - Yukon Overview - 1 Day Conference

General Event Information:
Products: SQL Server.
Recommended Audience: Architect and Developer.
This is a one day event that provides an overview of SQL Server Yukon for Developers, Database administrators and Data Analysts. The content for this is event is based on content from the PDC.

Date:

2004/06/01 09:00 AM - 2004/06/01 05:00 PM (First Tuesday of June)
Welcome Time: 08:00 AM
Language: English

Register here.


MSDN Whiteboard Walk-In session

General Event Information:
Products: .NET, Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio.
Recommended Audience: Architect and Developer.
Do you have a burning developer question around .NET Framework development? Attend an informal whiteboard session where you get to interact with peers and Microsoft consultants. The focus is on high level developer and architectural guidance for developers using or evaluating the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. The session is not focused on resolving low level coding or product support issues. Note that these sessions are informal and ad-hoc in nature. You can walk in at any time during a timeslot and leave as you need to.

Date:

2004/06/04 09:00 AM - 2004/06/04 12:00 PM (First Friday of June)
Welcome Time: 08:30 AM
Language: English

Register here.


10 Pin Bowling

General Event Information:
Social event for developers. Microsoft Developer and Platform Group Team invite you to join them for an evening of fun-filled excitement at their own exclusive 10 pin bowling evening.

Register here for the one at Menlyn in PTA on the 1st of June (same day as Yukon event above), or here for the one at Rosebank (the Zone) on the 3rd of June.

Maybe I am just in a sour mood caused by lack of sleep, but I found this Dilbert cartoon particularly amusing this morning...

[Via Dilbert]

'nuff said.

DevDays JHB has come and gone, and it was a great experience! Went to the smart client track - those looking to get their hands on IssueVision, you can find links and more info on the event on Armand's blog here.

Ok, well, lets now take a look at the scorecard from yesterdays event:

   1   x   Golfball
   1   x   Cool SADeveloper.NET mug
   1   x   MS Flight Simulator 2004
   1   x   128Mb Flash Drive
   1   x   MS Wireless Optical Desktop Pro set

Yup, it's offical: I win!!!

I have been going to pretty much every local MSFT / Developer meeting for a good few years now, and this is pretty much the first time i have ever won anything...what a day!!!!

As usual the dinner afterwards was also very interesting & informative, it's really great to sit down and disect these meetings with a group of guys (& gals!) who really know what they are talking about.

"Windows Media Audio and Video 9 Series is a breakthrough set of codecs that enables multichannel audio and high definition (HD) video at resolutions up to 1080p. See high definition in action for yourself. Download samples of HD content in 720p and 1080p."

These clips are tuly amazing - they show just how little of the potential of our monitors we actually use currently. If this technology gets integrated with Longhorn....mind blowing stuff!
br> Warning: The clips need a 64Mb graphics card minimum, so these probably won't play well on your office PC!

As described by Mike Epprecht...

This is very short notice but we have a venue and a room, so we were thinking that getting some people together to thrash out:

CURSORS vs. WHILE loops

Will be well worth it.

We will get a box and endeavour to conclude with intelligent summaries. We have some pro CURSOR people and some pro WHILE loop people…can only be fun.

It might also be a great opportunity to come and ask some like minded people about DBA, Infrastructure, Development issues that you are currently experiencing, think you will come up against in the near future and/or have always wondered about. It doesn’t look like we will have food & drinks but if there is….cool

VENUE: Presentation Room, Microsoft Offices, Sunninghill
TIME: 19 May 2004, Wedensday, 15:00 – 18:00

Further information: shauntj@microsoft.nospam.com

A few people have asked me how to get to DevDays 2004, so, using an advanced GPRS plotting system passed on to me by my good friend Armand, i have created a map to the Theatre on the Track in Kyalami which is where the JHB version of DevDays 2004 is going to be held...

Map to Theatre on the Track

Happy Trails.

This might not be a great piece of news for everybody, but certainly under SAfrican bandwidth restrictions it is great news that providing local users with downloadable dotnet programs will be more feasible now that a far lesser percentage of people will be turned off by the 20Mb fx download prerequisite...

One of our newer dotnet.org.za bloggers Sonja, blogged about RSS and it's usefulness in applications other than blog/news feeds.

That got my mind working as well, and i found a few more links that might be of interest to people...

Harvard Law Site:
Version history of RSS. See links down the left of the page for more interesting RSS related stuff.

The XML Files
All About Blogs and RSS. Answers questions like...

"Which RSS version is the most current?"
"What do RSS 1.0 and 2.0 look like?"
"So, what is Atom anyway?"
"How can I generate an RSS feed for my Web site?" and
"Are there any Web service APIs for interacting with Web logs?"


Mike Schinkel's blog
Mike discusses the application of RSS and periodic report distribution.

I implemented a FlexWiki test site at work recently with a view to suggesting that we use it as a central location for keeping bug tracking information, release notes etc - something to replace those mental and 'post-it' type notes that are made on projects and soon lost or forgotten. Sometimes we make design descisions etc and then six months later when the project gets implemented :-P - we forget why we made them. I thought this might be a nice tool to help with that. I am still undecided myself as to it's usefulness.

These were my bosses comments:

"The place for release notes is with the project - please ensure that is happening. If you wish to store it, additionally, anywhere else thats fine. Similarly, anything to do with a project belongs with the project. If one can go to the trouble of creating/placing stuff in a wiki it means that one could go to the trouble of ensuring that the project had it in the 1st place...if it wasn't there then it indicates a lack of disciipline so regardless of where it sits it won't happen."


Does anyone have any comments they would like to add to this? Do you use Wikis at your place of work? What is your feeling on them?


Any comment appreciated...


(Anyone who is currently thinking Wiki? huh? Should start here)

You may have heard of Knoppix - well here is the WindowsXP version!...

Since this is on a public site I guess I can talk about it, I found WinPE not long ago on one of the servers. WinPE is a bootable cd that loads a small version of WinXP with network support thru command line. I use it for installs, since the build of longhorn does not come as a bootable ISO but rather as files, I need a way to boot it into a new machine so I use WinPE to boot the machine and then connect to a file share. Now you can do it yourself too thru BartPE

---

[Yosi Taguri]

Chris Sells writes "After Business Week reported the death of WinFS, some folks have been justifiably worried that such a cool feature would, in fact, be missing when their copy of Longhorn showed up at their door. Today Toby Whitney, the Group Program Manager of the WinFS team, stepped in to report that WinFS was alive and well: "WinFS is in good shape and hasn't been cut from Longhorn. We're going to ship it :-). What we need is your feedback on whether we're building the right thing. It'd be great if you went to MSDN and downloaded the newest bits. They're much more stable and represent a big evolution of what we're doing.""

---

Chris Sells

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