And the fun begins for real.... :)

If you haven't checked it out yet, go to http://soapbox.msn.com/ and get your video fix :)

Let's get this party started :)

In the midst of attending the TechReady Summit and hanging with my fellow Developer Evangelists, I am nearly done with the last HP book.  No spoilers but I do have to say this book rocks! 

I'm chilling out at a group meeting with my bud form Australia, MIke.  Totally cool guy and hooked me up with one of his blog stickers.  You can check out his blog (and my freaky face) at the link below. 

Delicate Genius Moblog » Blog Archive » Another convertee

Wheeeeee!

So.  I have to admit I don't know much about him yet but his blog is very intriguing.  Going to check him out and get some feedback to those that need to have skills to convince management about new technologies, etc...

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/

If you have some thoughts let me know...

By now I'm sure you have heard about this whole launch announcement thing from Doug Seven among others.  We said that we will have launch events for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 on February 27th, 2008.  But unfortunately there seems to be a disconnect in some people's minds between what exactly "launch" and "ship/release" mean.  Granted the confusion sits squarely with us and therefore I feel compelled to make sure we all know the difference:

Ship/Release = when we will actually RTM the bits for distribution

Launch = something cool the marketing folks do to have synergies with their paradigms so they can have more diagrams about market penetration and other coolness

So...Ship/Release is when we will get it out and Launch is when we will have a BIG party courtesy of the marketing folks -- pretty much the only time we let them out of their cage.  With this in mind we intend to ship/release the products several months before they are launched.  How soon?  While I don't have any official word on all the products ship dates yet, I can say unofficially that it will be before the launch events.  As my partner in crime, Chris Koenig, pointed out, from Doug's original comments:

"[...] Visual Studio will [ship] before the end of [the calendar year 2007]"

While we are on this topic there is one more thing I would like to bring up.  Some may ask why aren't we calling the products Visual Studio 2007, etc...?  After all they are going RTM in 2007, right?  Well yes and no.  They are going RTM in the calendar year 2007 but at MS our fiscal year is from July to July.  So we are now in fiscal year 2008 (FY08) thus for us it basically is 2008 for all intents and purposes. 

That's pretty much it, enjoy :)

Thanks to Joe S. for shooting me this cool site for actually getting a human on the phone.  Sweet.

http://gethuman.com/

I get a lot of questions lately about what is and is not going to be in the new .NET 3.5 Framework .  Here is a link to Daniel Moth's post on that subject.

So...I like GREP and SED from my old UNIX days and am VERY happy to see that PowerShell can do the same type of functionality with a lot more power in most cases.  I though some of you might like some really simple examples of how to take a text file and do GREP-ish and SED-ish actions.

GREP-ish

cat somefile.txt | where { $_ -match "expression"}

The command above will search each line of "somefile.txt" to see if it contains the regular expression "expression" and return the entire line if there is a match.

SED-ish

cat somefile.txt | %{$_ -replace "expression","replace"}

The command above will search each line of "somefile.txt" for the regular expression "expression" and replace it with the string "replace".

EXAMPLE:

==============DATA.TXT==============

Mary had a little lamb,

It's fleece was white as snow,

But the lamb made Mary mad,

So she ate it.

=================================

GREP-ish

cat DATA.TXT | where { $_ -match "Mary"}

returns the following:

Mary had a little lamb,

But the lamb made Mary mad,

SED-ish

cat DATA.TXT | % { $_ -replace "Mary","Susan" }

returns the following:

Susan had a little lamb,

It's fleece was white as snow,

But the lamb made Susan mad,

So she ate it.

================ Edit 7/14 ==================== 

A question came up the the other day about putting these results into another text file.  Using redirection this is quite easy.  Here is how it is done:

cat DATA.TXT | % { $_ -replace "Mary","Susan" } > newfile.txt

============================================

enjoy :)