Well, I got what I wanted for Christmas this year… a brand spanking new startup to launch! I’m launching a new consultancy and product company… you can now find me at DreamTimeStudioZ . If you need Visual Studio Extensibility expertise...

I discovered a bug (missing code) related to the processing of item templates.  I’ve also updated the documentation for the Map describing how to use content:// links (such as used in the hyperlink to The Tools ) to navigate within your documentation...

I’ve been working on guided developer experiences at Microsoft for the past 6 years.  Beginning with helping Jack Greenfield and Keith Short deliver a full-day tutorial on Software Factories at OOPSLA 2004, cruising through Project Glidepath in 2005...

When you create a Feature Extension, the name of the Feature Extension is calculated by copying the name you provide for the solution/project. This name is stored in multiple places within your Feature Builder solution as it is required by multiple components...

Just in case you were thinking about attending the P&P Symposium , October 18th-22nd, here in Redmond, the Early Bird registration discount expires at midnight (Pacific Time) tonight, so you’ve got a little less than 8 hours! Register here .

My new video podcast, Behind The Curtain, hosted on Channel9, is now sporting a brand new episode (#2). In this episode, I talk with Ajoy Krishnamoorthy , Product Planner for P&P, about how we pick the topics for which P&P provides guidance and...

Every fall patterns & practices team hosts an annual p&p event at Microsoft Redmond Campus. This year’s event called “p&p Symposium” is being held Oct 18th-22nd 2010. This year’s event has got a new name and a new price...

Welcome one-and-all to my latest podcast series: Behind The Curtain - tips, tricks and insights from Patterns & Practices @ Microsoft . In this video podcast, I'll be pulling back the curtain on the architects, developers, designers, program managers...

Interested in Patterns and Practices? Come to the P&P Symposium, October 18-22, 2010, in Redmond on the Microsoft Campus. http://tinyurl.com/pnpsymposium

I am very happy to announce the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 v1.0 is now live on the Visual Studio Gallery. Please visit http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/FeatureBuilder for more information and links to the download. Note: While...

I ran into a problem today while trying to iterate over the files in a ProjectItem as I wanted to look at the item.Kind property and compare it to values in EnvDTE.Constants. Turns out there's something weird going on with VS2010 related to our old...

The RTM-Preview Release of the Feature Builder includes a new mechanism for extending the Feature Extension authoring experience. Feature Builder Guidance Extensions are small Feature Extensions which enhance the "Map" and the "Tools" inside the Feature...

The RTM-Preview version of the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 has just been posted to the Visual Studio Gallery. These bits are compatible with the RTM release of Visual Studio and will also run side-by-side with the upcoming Visual...

It’s been nearly a year since I posted this: “ Since February, I … have [started] spending my time working more closely with the Visual Studio team and am looking forward to seeing what comes from that collaboration. ” Today, I am finally able to talk...

Q: #1 What do I need to have installed to use Feature Builder? A: Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition Release Candidate, the Visual Studio SDK for RC Q: #2 What do users need to run my Feature Extension? A: If it is an Ultimate Feature Extension...

In November, I decided to write to write a blog-post-a-day and got through 8 before I fell “off-the-wagon” because time for blogging fell down the priority list due to customer needs. Shortly, things I’ve been working on should finally become public and...

V3.0 of the Facebook Developer Toolkit was just released on Codeplex . Major Updates: • Provide better doc and samples • Provide support for Silverlight • Provide support for ASP.NET MVC • Provide improved support for WPF • Provide improved support for...

I spent a bit of time searching for the magic of how to use XmlSerialize with the Dictionary type this morning and thought I’d share the easy-to-use result: Assuming you have an object, let’s say it’s called “data” that is of type Dictionary<string...

Cameron Skinner, Product Unit Manager, for the Visual Studio “Team Architect” group, has a great blog post about discovering the new modeling tools within Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. Check it out!

Using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 to do Entity Framework Model First Development for Visual Studio 2008

When using Visual Studio Extensions (aka VSIXs), sometimes you may want to use those Extensions when debugging in the Experimental Instance of Visual Studio. However, when installing VSIXs via the Extension Manager or by double clicking on a .vsix file...

While I "fell off the horse" of daily blogging, I'm climbing back on and will still do a post-per-day, it's just that I'm going to do 5 of them today :) Today's post is about the "sticky toolbox" feature you can use with the UML designers. So many...

Yesterday I started a personal challenge of writing something on my blog every day this month. Today's hint for Visual Studio 2010 is that it would be very wise to start coming up-to-speed on the new Visual Studio Extension mechanism known as VSIX...

All over the world people have taken inspiration from the folks at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) http://www.nanowrimo.org/ and are creating other types of month-long creative self-challenges (vlogging, etc.) so I'm going start my own and see...

For the past 4 years I have had the enjoyable task of being the MicroISV Evangelist for Microsoft. Recently based on some organizational changes and task assignment realignment, I have begun to focus my attention full-time on other efforts and thus, effective...