04 Jun 2008

Tech-Ed 2008 – Day One

Conferences
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…
Read More
03 Jun 2008

Tech-Ed 2008 – Day Zero

Conferences
After roughly eight hours of travel time (including layovers) I finally made it to Orlando.  This is my third time here in Orlando for a Microsoft conference (one PDC and, now, two Tech-Eds) and it's nice to be back.  This year I am traveling with another Tech-Ed veteran, and co-worker, Philip Wolfe. We basically went straight from the airport to the hotel just long enough to drop our luggage off and head over to the conference center.  We planned on attending the INETA mini-summit and arrived at the conference center about 15 minutes before the end of the session.  However,…
Read More
12 Apr 2008

Tech-Ed ’08 Birds of a Feather Session

Conferences
I have been planning on attending this year's Tech-Ed "Developers" conference for a while now.  This will be my 3rd trip to the Tech-Ed conference so this year I decided to see if I could become more involved and submitted a couple topics for Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions.  I just found out a couple of days ago that my submission, Using Team Foundation Server in your Organization, has been accepted.  This will be my first time moderating a BOF session and I am looking forward to it.  I have no doubt that we will be able to learn…
Read More
31 Oct 2007

Getting Ready for Patterns & Practices Summit 2007

Conferences
It's almost time for this year's Patterns and Practices Summit and I'm excited for many reasons.  There is a list of great speakers lined up along with some great sessions.  One thing I'm looking forward to with this summit over the typical conference (e.g. TechEd or PDC) is I don't have to pick-and-choose between a dozen (or more) tracks when deciding which sessions to attend - there is only one track with about seven sessions per day.  I'm also looking forward to visiting the Microsoft campus since I've never been there before.  So, all-in-all, it promises to be a great…
Read More
19 Oct 2007

What’s New in TFS 2008

Conferences, Orcas, TFS
I just completed my presentation on the new features of TFS 2008 at this year's Tulsa TechFest.  It was a relatively small session held in one of the classrooms here at the OSU campus which allowed me to more easily address questions during the presentation.  The topic I presented on is called What's New in TFS 2008.  Although the presentations run roughly 75 minutes, I had to skip over a couple of my demos because there are so many new features in TFS 2008.  It was easy to tell that I'm not the only one excited about some of the…
Read More
07 Sep 2007

Tulsa TechFest 2007

Conferences, TFS
The second annual Tulsa TechFest is coming up next month on October 19th and 20th.  There are currently over 50 speakers geared up to present at this years conference with around 15 tracks.  Some of the current speakers include: Jason Zander - General Manager for the .NET Framework Sean Alexander - Director of Silverlight Michael Scherotter - Microsoft Developer Evangelist, San Francisco Wally McClure host of the ASP.NET Podcast Bill Vaughn - Awesome INETA Speaker RETURNSAnd, let's not forget myself :-)  I'll be presenting on What's New with Team Foundation Server 2008 on Friday at 1:00.  This will be my…
Read More
28 Jun 2007

Gearing Up for HDC 2007

Conferences, Orcas, Team System, TFS
It's that time of year again here in the heartland - preparation for the fourth consecutive Heartland Developers Conference.  Last year's conference went very well (Philip and Joe did a great job putting it all together) with a lot of great presentations and this year is looking to be even better.  A new track, “Manage It”, has been added this year which will focus on providing cutting edge content on topics like virtualization, technology driven project management, strategic process management, empowerment tools, and other topics that will help you to manage the development and implementation of your development projects. Although the speaker…
Read More
17 Apr 2007

71-510: TS: Visual Studio 2005 TFS Beta Exam Results Are In

Certification, TFS
As you may have noticed in other posts, the results for the 71-510 beta exam are starting to show up on participant transcripts (on the MCP member site).  If you took the test a couple of months back then you may be able see your results by now.  I checked mine today to find out that I passed the exam. Now that the beta results are starting to appear, the "live" exam will probably be available soon.  If you're planning on taking the exam, here are a couple of links to help get you started: http://devmatter.blogspot.com/2007/02/beta-exam-71-510-study-links.html http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1302626&SiteID=1
Read More
24 Feb 2007

Beta Exam 71-510: Study Links

Certification, TFS
Like several others out there, I am planning on taking the Beta 71-510 exam next week.  Being that this is the first time this test has existed, it is difficult to figure out what to study and where to find study materials (other than the obvious - experience with TFS itself).  I've put together a few links that I've been using while studying for the exam so I thought I'd post them here in case anyone else finds them useful. Preparation Guide for Exam 70-510 - this is Microsoft's guide detailing what items are covered on the test. Team Foundation Administrator's…
Read More