I can't believe it's almost October, and our team is working on so many things right now. First, we are trying to wrap up the platform components that we own in the VS 2008 product, including the VS Shell redistributable pack pieces. It's actually a very exciting time for the Division right now as we are close to shipping the final bits for VS 2008. Then, we are also trying to finish off VS 2008 SDK 1.0. We are in the middle of our final 5-week feature sprint to add VB support to the SDK, improve the VS Shell development experience and to support Vista UAC. We are also fixing any high-priority bugs that we have. Our goal is to ship at the same time that VS 2008 ships.

Aside from all this engineering work, we are also busy preparing for various conference appearances. We have our October VSIP Summit & Developer Conference from 10/15 - 10/19. This is going to be the largest VSX event we have ever had and it will have both business and technical tracks. Anthony has been doing a great job driving this conference. Then, we are going to be at TechEd Barcelona in 11/5 - 11/09. We are also holding our own Developer Lab at the end of TechEd from 11/09 to 11/10. At the same time, Ken and a couple of other folks will be at DevConnections in Las Vegas. At the end of November, we will be at DevTeach in Vancouver, BC. In fact, Ken is going to be giving the Keynote at DevTeach about VSX. This is very exciting!

 
I will also be speaking at DevTeach about the new VS 2008 Shell. You can click here to see the sessions at that conference. I have never been to DevTeach before and I am looking forward to it.

If you plan on being TechEd Barcelona, DevConnections or DevTeach, drop me a line and I would love to sync up with you!

 
- James