VSLive! Las Vegas – Day 2

Day 2 is now a wrap and the conference continues to go strong.  As you may have suspected, I spent my time in the ALM sessions around the subjects of TFS Work Item Tracking, Team System Add-Ons, and Branching Strategies.  All the sessions I attended were very good although I didn't attend every session because I spent a little time polishing up my slides and demos for my talk on Thursday morning (Using Team Build in the "Real" World). I would have to say my favorite talk of the day was the one on Branching Strategies by Jeff Levinson.  There…
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VSLive! Las Vegas – Day 1

The first day of VSLive! Las Vegas is now in the books.  This is my first time attending a VSLive! conference so I wasn't sure what to expect. The keynote was given by Stephanie Saad, the Group Program Manager for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.  She discussed the use of Team Foundation Server throughout Microsoft and some of the challenges they ran into while using the product.  The scale at which they make use of Team Foundation Server is somewhat staggering in comparison to the seven developer teams at the company I work for.  Along with one of her co-workers,…
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Presentations, Races, and MVP!

Lately, I've been quiet because I've been busy working on my presentation for this month's VSLive! Las Vegas conference.  I'm looking forward to presenting on Team Build and meeting a lot of new people as well as catching up with some old acquaintances.  This will be my first time to Vegas so it should be a great time all around. Along with that, I was also preparing for my first ever adventure race - the Berryman Adventure.  The race was held this past weekend, September 27th, and took us just under 13 hours to complete.  The disciplines included hiking/running, some…
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VSLive! Las Vegas

Several weeks ago I was informed that I had been selected to present at this year’s VSLive! in Las Vegas.  Although I have presented at other conferences in the past (e.g. Heartland Developers Conference and Tulsa TechFest) this will be the largest conference I’ve presented at to date.  I have to admit, I’m pretty excited about it all. I will be presenting on Using Team Build in the “Real” World on Thursday, October 16th at 08:30. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and learning new things.  So, if you’re planning on attending VSLive! in Las Vegas this year and…
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Tech-Ed 2008 – The Final Day

Well, today officially marks the end of Tech-Ed 2008 for me.  I started the morning by sitting on my suitcase in an attempt to compress all the SWAG into a container that was already full at the start of the week :-)  I lost count of how many T-shirts I ended up with and I believe I ended up with three caps along with miscellaneous “toys” that will provide hours of fun for my kids :-) I attended a session this morning on the Architecture Edition of “Rosario”.  Although I’ve seen most of what was presented, it was nice to…
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Tech-Ed 2008 – the Penultimate Day

Day three is done and now we're down to one more day (more like half a day since I have to leave for the airport shortly after lunch tomorrow). I sat in on another session with Juval Lowy today discussing productivity with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).  As always, Juval was very lively, entertaining, and informative. I sat in on another session discussing project management in Team Foundation Server.  It was interesting in that most of the actual project management (e.g. estimation, work item creation, etc.) was actually handled by Excel and then imported into TFS.  The moral of the story…
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Developer Conference RSS Feed

A while back I created a conference calendar on the Omaha Team System User Group's web site.  As I come across (US-based) developer- or architecture-related conferences, I add them to the calendar.  So, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed if you're interested.  Note that you will also get notifications of user group events in Omaha :-) You can also view that actual calendar page here as well.
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Tech-Ed 2008 – Day Two

Day two is now wrapped up and I'm taking a short break during day three to write this post.  I'm currently sitting in on Philip Wolfe's Hosting Windows Workflow talk which is going extremely well.  There are about 25 to 30 people in attendance with some very good questions being asked and answered. I started the morning off yesterday by moderating the BOF session Using Microsoft Team Foundation Server in your Organization which went very well.  I also attended various sessions throughout the day including one on durable services using WCF as well as others. I also spent some time meeting…
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TFS BOF Session – Check!

I just completed my first Birds of a Feather session here at Tech-Ed 2008.  I moderated the session on Using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server in your Organization.   We had a great turnout with around 70-80 attendees in the audience.  The discussions covered a wide range of topics, including: Issues related to upgrading from TFS 2005 to TFS 2008 Moving/changing TFS SharePoint servers after the installation has been completed Migrating Visual SourceSafe databases to Team Foundation Server version control Integrating Microsoft Project Server with Team Foundation Server Handling 3rd party controls in your application's automated builds Configuration of Team…
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Tech-Ed 2008 – Day One

Well, day one of Tech-Ed 2008 is in the books. The morning started off with Bill Gate's final public keynote as CEO of Microsoft.  The first portion of the keynote was spent watching a video that enacted what Bill's last day of work might be like at Microsoft.  It was a entertaining video with a lot of high-profile cameos by people such as Warren Buffet, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Bono (of U2), Matthew McConaughey, George Clooney, Al Gore, et. al.  Afterwards, Bill, along with the help of some others, spent some time covering various technologies including Silverlight (get…
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