A Developer's Life

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…