This looks promising. IronScheme is available in RC form at CodePlex. Nicely, it’s under the MS-PL. There is an MIT Creative Commons-licensed HTML version of the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs textbook for Scheme at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/. The Scheme Programming Language (4th Edition) is also online.
Hat tip: InfoQ: IronScheme Nears Final Release
I haven’t tried it out, but I’m interested in looking at it.
Oh, if you’re interested in Scheme, you can look at the article on Wikipedia, or the tutorial on WikiBooks.
It’s out—go download it and look at the info->Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2.
There is a “Go Live” license, so if you call product support, they’ll give you product support. This is what “Go Live” means->http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2009/10/19/going-live-with-visual-studio-2010-beta-2.aspx. There are support engineers staffed and trained, but you need to read the license agreement and make sure it makes sense for you.
You can post questions about TFS 2010 Beta 2 here->http://bit.ly/4dKu7i (thanks @JasonBarile)
Huzzah! The launch date is March 22, 2010. I feel much less vague now.
Martin Woodward (VSTS MVP) just posted an Radio TFS interview with Doug Seven, VS2010 Product Manager, on todays announcements http://bit.ly/47JXYp
Channel 9 10-4 show on downloading and installing beta 2->http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-33-Downloading-and-Installing-Visual-Studio-2010-Beta-2/.
Scott Hanselman talks about what he likes->http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudio2010Beta2.aspx
Soma’s announcement->http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/10/19/announcing-visual-studio-2010-and-net-fx-4-beta-2.aspx. Ditto Jeff Beehler->http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2009/10/19/going-live-with-visual-studio-2010-beta-2.aspx. Brian Harry gives some pointers->http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/10/19/learning-about-vs-2010-beta-2.aspx. Cameron Skinner lists features and discusses the new SKU structure->http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/2009/10/19/visual-studio-2010-and-net-framework-4-beta-2.aspx. The work item team provides a compatibility matrix->http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2009/10/19/compatibility-matrix-for-2010-beta-2-team-foundation-server-to-team-explorer-2008-and-2005.aspx. Jason Zander gives some screenshots with the announcement, but not too many->http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/10/19/announcing-vs2010-net-framework-beta-2.aspx.
The SharePoint conference has streamed video showing the VS2010 support for SharePoint development. I’m sure you’ll see more, but for now you can see updates at http://mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx.
Tim Heuer->Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Silverlight updates - http://bit.ly/3dp7Yu.
Training kit for VS 2010 and .NET 4.0->http://bit.ly/16mtG
Starting tomorrow, everyone can download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 from here: http://tinyurl.com/o949y9
I’ll post more when I know what I’m allowed to post.
The long and short of it is that Chuck Sterling and Ed Holloway and other members of the TFS Setup and Admin team will be giving an overview of setting up TFS 2010. They’ll also talk about scaling up or scaling down the server to your needs. The webinar will be a LiveMeeting with a concurrent chat and internet computer audio.
For more information, look at Ozzie Rules Blogging : Get ready for Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta2: Chat with the TFS Setup and Admin Team
Today I presented “Building Next Generation User-Interface with Multitouch and Ribbon on Windows 7” for the Windows7 launch event in Atlanta. The slides and other materials should be posted to “http://www.thenewefficiency.com/” sometime soon.
In the meantime, I’ve posted my slides to my Office Live Workspace at http://bit.ly/4TT40.
It’s not every day I get a standing room only audience, most of whom got a few laughs out of my presentation. I got to do multi-touch demos with an HP TouchSmart TX2-2700. I’ll miss it—I had to send it to the next event. Dell also has the XT2 Tablet PC. Of course, some people asked about the Courier, but I haven’t touched one myself yet.
If I’m lucky, I can update this post with more Multi-Touch and Surface information.
For many people, the most valuable slide was the last one, which had resources for developers who want to create Windows7 compatible applications and take advantage of some of the new features. I’ve reproduced that content below:
Technical Resources
Training Resources
Community Resources
Update 1:
Joe Healy presented similar information at the (Miami/Ft. Lauderdale) Florida launch. You can download the code he used and see a video linked from his blog post at MultiTouch materials from FLL / MIA Launch Event.
Update 2:
It wasn’t part of the presentation, but I didn’t mention that there are multi-touch overlays that can be mounted on the face of flat panel TV’s and displays. N-Trig provides the multi-touch screen technology on the HP and Dell computers. NextWindow has overlays that can be mounted on existing LCD and Plasma displays. Touch TV Networks also has multi-touch capable interfaces.
I only used two fingers during the demo, but N-Trig drivers for the HP and Dell support up to four fingers at a time.
On upgrading a VS 2008 project to VS 2010 beta 1, some of my unit tests didn’t upgrade fully. There were some references to version “9.0.0.0” assemblies.
I need to go back and let people know about the problem, but I pursued a “nuke everything, it’s the only way to be sure” fix. I removed the test projects from my solution, moved those folders to a scratch folder, and deleted the folders from source control.
Then I got the message “TF14050: Cannot change item xxx because it already has a pending change that is not compatible”. It only took a couple of minutes to figure out—the file was new, marked as “add”, but was “read-only”. I just changed the read-only bit and I could check in.
The Patterns and Practices team has just “finished” Developing SharePoint Applications. I’m sure they’ll add more to it, and it’ll be a growing document, but it’s become a polished and well-rounded set of guidance. You can find more at
http://www.microsoft.com/spg
http://www.codeplex.com/spg
and you can download the document here
I’m glad that it includes advice on testing, building, and designing the SharePoint applications. With some of the capabilities coming in VSTS 2010, I’m sure some of the advice will be revised. For the time being, we have see Using Continuous Integration, How to: Create an Automated Build and Deployment Solution with Team Foundation Server Team Build and Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 on MSDN.
Kirk Evans also put together a number of videos and SharePoint resources, and they’re listed under his “Water Cooler” tag.
If you want some more information about the P&P guidance, I’ve attached some summary information below:
Customer Value |
| SharePoint provides a comprehensive platform for application development combined with extensible customer ready applications. However, using the full breadth of these capabilities takes experience and know how. patterns & practices Developing SharePoint Applications guidance helps customers accelerate constructing advanced applications through examples and documentation. The guidance compliments product documentation and helps architects and developers in the following areas: · Use SharePoint capabilities to make more powerful applications - Integrate information from Line of Business Systems
- Take advantage of publishing and content oriented capabilities
- Create collaborative interactions around business processes
- Design multi-site topologies with complex security and isolation needs, such as a partner extranet
· Build applications that are easier to scale, maintain, and grow - Improve maintainability, testability, and layering through patterns
- Use techniques to improve flexibility, diagnostics, operations and performance
- Show how to use SharePoint’s feature and solution framework
· Improve application quality through testing - Demonstrates unit testing and integration testing SharePoint applications
- Describe experiences with acceptance testing SharePoint applications including stress and scale testing
· Improve and accelerate team productivity - Accelerate adoption of recommended practices with library components
- Show how to build an effective team development environment
- Understand fundamental design and implementation decisions
|
What’s in Developing SharePoint Applications? |
|  Developing SharePoint Applications guidance integrates new guidance with the original release, SharePoint Guidance – November 2008, into a single download.
The guidance contains the following components: | Component | Description | | SharePoint Guidance Library | A set of reusable components that helps developers manage configuration, build repositories for SharePoint lists, log traces and events, and use service location. | | Guide | The documentation includes a variety of topics, such as how to use design and application patterns, how to integrate LOB systems with SharePoint applications, building scalable applications, upgrading SharePoint applications, and using SharePoint capabilities to create, and deploy content. It also includes the design decisions made for the Partner Portal and Training Management applications and explanations of their implementations. | | Contoso Partner Portal Reference Implementation | This SharePoint application shows how Contoso created an extranet where it can interact with its partners. Among the items demonstrated are techniques for building manageable and scalable enterprise applications, and how to incorporate publishing and page composition features, flexible navigation, collaboration sites, and LOB integration. It includes more advanced techniques than the Training Management reference implementation and requires Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2. | | Contoso Training Management Reference Implementation | This SharePoint application illustrates how the Contoso Human Resources department manages its training course offerings. It shows how to solve many basic SharePoint challenges that you might encounter when you develop your own applications. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is required. | Click here to download this release. |
Goals of This Release |
| This goal of patterns & practices Developing SharePoint Applications guidance is to help customers understand how to develop large scale, content-driven SharePoint applications that extend the value of existing line of business systems. We achieve this goal through the Partner Portal reference implementation and general guidance. We had three primary objectives to meet this goal: · Large Scale – Show customers how to build a large scale SharePoint application. This includes guidance on building in the manageability, configurability, and performance expected from large scale applications. · Content Driven – More advanced SharePoint applications often include many sites and combine custom coded logic with created content. We demonstrate areas like custom navigation and publishing, composing Web parts with published information, and managing a consistent user experience. · Extend LOB Systems – SharePoint can aggregate and extend information from Line of Business systems to end users, enhancing structured business processes with informal processes through collaboration. We show how to integrate security considerations into business services, and demonstrate how to create collaborative sites that help manage business events like incident escalations and order exceptions. The goal of the guidance incorporated from the first version was to help customers build effective development teams for creating SharePoint applications, and understand the fundamentals of building, updating and unit testing a SharePoint application. |
Getting Started |
| The guidance provides value for experienced developers just starting in SharePoint development as well as experienced SharePoint developers looking to expand their skills. If you are new to SharePoint development, the first step is to study the Training Management application, which is based on Windows SharePoint Services. The documentation and the application can help developers understand the fundamentals of SharePoint development, and compliments other training resources and publications. For those that already are experienced in developing SharePoint applications, or who have gone through the Training Management application, the Partner Portal application and SharePoint Guidance library demonstrate these advanced areas. You can explore the guidance and Partner Portal reference implementation based upon your areas of interest. The general guidance refers into areas of the reference implementation that illustrate the covered concepts. This guide enhances product documentation by applying the information to a realistic business situation illustrated in the reference implementations. In many cases, the guidance refers to the product documentation. You can use the guidance to gain initial understanding. You can then use the product documentation for deeper understanding. The following topics may help in understanding the guidance and how it applies to your scenarios: · When to Use This Guidance · Intended Audience · Evaluating the SharePoint Guidance · Developing SharePoint Applications |
Videos |
| Channel 9 videos · Setting up the Contoso RI · Walkthrough of the Contoso Reference Implementation · How to use the configuration component? · How to use the logging components? · How to use the SharePoint Service Locator? |
About patterns & practices |
| The Microsoft patterns & practices (p&p) team is responsible for delivering applied engineering guidance that helps software architects, developers, and their teams take full advantage of Microsoft’s platform technologies in their custom application development efforts. Our goal is to help software development teams be more successful with the Microsoft application platform. We do this by delivering guidance that: · Helps to simplify the Microsoft application platform. · Provides solution guidance to common problems. · Helps development teams grow their skills and learn. For more information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices |
Jeff Barnes has put together a series of afternoon talks about Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 3. This innovation showcase will highlight IE8 and Silverlight 3 features that deliver the best web experience for end users. Some of the other events we’ve done lately have filled up early, so if you’re interested you should register quickly.
During this showcase we’ll have two sessions:
- Expand your Business Reach with Internet Explorer 8 and
- Build a Line-of-Business Applications with Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3.
The presentations target Solution Architects, CIO’s, CTO’s, Development Managers, Lead Developers, Business Decision Makers
| City/State | Date | Microsoft Location | Registration Link |
| Charlotte, NC | September 15, 2009 | Charlotte Directions | Charlotte Registration Link |
| New York, NY | September 16, 2009 | New York Directions | NY Registration Link |
| Farmington, CT | September 17, 2009 | Farmington Directions | Farmington Registration Link |
| Reston, VA | September 17, 2009 | Reston Directions | Reston Registration Link |
| Waltham, MA | September 22, 2009 | Waltham Directions | Waltham Registration Link |
| Ft Lauderdale, FL | September 22, 2009 | Ft Lauderdale Directions | Ft Lauderdale Registration Link |
I’m trying to sync a mpp file with a few thousand rows. I haven’t made assignments for everything yet, so I just want to sync a few rows. There is some help in the documentation, if you remember a few nuances:
There’s a sweet article called “How to: Enable or Disable Publishing of Work Items in Microsoft Project”. To choose the rows that don’t get synced, you have to set the “Publish and Refresh” field to “No”. The add-in assumes “yes” by default. Also, you need to set that for everything.
- Switch to the “Team System Task Sheet” view under the “View” menu. This is after you’ve associated the project plan with a team project.
- Select the title column, highlighting all tasks and subtasks
- Hit “+” on the formatting toolbar or use the “ALT-SHIFT-+” key combination to expand all tasks and subtasks
- The CTRL-END key combination will take you to the last “Publish and Refresh” field on the screen (at least, it did for me). Set it to “no”, and drag it up to the top row. That will set all rows not to publish.
- Now, you can just change the “Publish and Refresh” values on the rows you’d like to sync to “yes” when you’re ready to sync them.
If you need to refresh data from the server, just close the project plan and reopen it. Refresh (on the Team System MS Project Toolbar) will also help, but some fields will only update when the file opens again (like any new users you’ve added, or new fields you’re mapping in the MS Project column mapping settings).
There are a lot of stupid top 10 lists out here, and maybe we should leave writing them to David Letterman. 10 Reasons Why Flash Is Better Than Silverlight | Connected Internet was posted on www.connectedinternet.co.uk by one of it’s writers, but I imagine any self-respecting Adobe employee would be embarrassed by it. Many of the commenters have pointed out the basic flaws. The writer doesn’t seem to have done his basic homework. It’s not like it’s hard to find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight or the Silverlight documentation on MSDN or Silverlight.net.
Here is the summarized list:
-
Platform compatibility Both are client-side technologies, so what how many FreeBSD servers exist on the internet is immaterial. Silverlight runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, which is virtually any client platform you’ll see.
Result: who cares? Both are effectively ubiquitous.
- Market penetration There’s no real friction to installing Silverlight, and it’s already on about a third of all browsers worldwide at this point. Is he somehow suggesting that Silverlight won’t grow to be on almost all browsers?
Result: a will o’ the wisp
- 64 bit web browser support Silverlight doesn’t work on 64-bit browsers? Then why does it work on my 64-bit browser? I only run 64-bit, nothing else.
Result: huh?
- Supported image format Silverlight doesn’t support GIF, but there are patent issues with that format. From a practical point of view, who cares? I have no issue converting a file between the formats, or working with PNG. There are plenty of image manipulation tools out there, both free and commercial, and I don’t know what you can do with GIF that you can’t do with PNG. Look at what thirteen23 did with blu; they hardly seem limited by PNG files.
Result: is this important?
- Package delivery He got this wrong, “corrected it”, but left the result as is…
Result: got this wrong.
- Audio Apparently, he couldn’t find a way to generate audio in Silverlight. There is an example at http://kindohm.com/archive/2009/07/24/silverlight-synthesizer-progress-with-audio.aspx . He based it on Charles Petzold’s Simple Silverlight 3 Sequencer and Pete Brown’s Silverlight Synthesizer. There are also samples of playing wav files in Silverlight.
Result: would you really rather program in ActionScript than a .NET language?
- Portability He didn’t know or consider the out of browser support in Silverlight 3.
- Accessibility There was a nice talk by Mark Rideout at MIX for Silverlight 2, and there is actually some documentation with an index here. There’s even sample code in the article on UI Automation of a Silverlight Custom Control.
- Client-server communication He should really read this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/silverlight_plus_java/. Not only does it show how he got #1 wrong, but it also shows how to do RESTful client-server communication against a Java server (or really, any RESTful service you want to set up). It looks like he misinterpreted .NET RIA Services.
- 3D rendering I can’t get into the details of 3D in Silverlight—I just haven’t tried it. But, the QuakeLight work seems to answer
the point he was getting at, and in Silverlight 2.
Update: Tim Heuer writes a better post about this than I did->http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/08/21/silverlight-flash-comparison-based-on-bad-research-refuted.aspx
As if I’d know “hip” if we sat next to each other on the bus. Still, this was my first impression on Channel 9 today: Ping 22: Microsoft & Linux BFF's! Xbox handheld coming, Bing Jingle, Win a Surface | Ping! | Channel 9.
If you’re out there, look at the 10-4 show to see some of the upcoming VSTS 2010 capabilities: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/. It’s a great show.
Also, looks like there’s a good sketchflow post out at http://electricbeach.org/?p=214.
Over the last few years, I’ve had a lot of friends lose their jobs, have their companies disappear, withstand RIFs, worry about their jobs, not get a raise, or not get promoted. I also know a lot of consultants and contract workers who are looking for their next job. I was a little envious last year when the Thrive program came out for IT professionals, but not for developers.
Well, now you can find Thrive (for developers). Some of my co-workers contributed heavily to it, like Glen Gordon, Peter Laudati, Zain Naboulsi, Andrew Duthie, Joe Stagner, and Brian Prince. It provides a lot of resources, including
- .NET Rocks “Development in a Downturn” podcast series – 10 part podcast series focusing on developers in the community sharing their stories of how they have handled the recession, what they have learned and advice they have to share to others based on their personal experiences
- Step by step resources to help devs ramp quickly on new tasks. Developers are being asked to take on more with fewer resources and limited training, these step by step scenarios help save time and money. You can find a lot at
Ramp Up is a free, online, community-based program that can help you save time in learning Microsoft technology. The easy-to-access content, provided by subject-matter gurus, is specifically tailored for the Ramp Up program and offered in a variety of forms, including articles, virtual labs, “codecasts” and “slidecasts.”
Move from PHP to ASP.NET
Move from ASP to ASP.NET
Web Development with ASP.NET
For the Java Developer Learn .NET
For the Visual Studio 2002/2003 Developer: Learn Visual Studio 2005
- “How to be a better Developer” series – everything from community MVP’s weighing in with their advice, to how to leverage social networks to benefit your career, to “Driving your Career Forward” , a 32 part screen cast series on how to develop key soft skills that can help you be more successful on the job (Download this week's screencast).
- Industry resources and articles on how to land a job; including a 4 part webcast series on “Getting a Development Job in the Current Economy”
- Community Connection to find local developer events and user groups. Networking isn’t just important for finding jobs—it’s also important for finding out what’s happening in your field. It has options for
I’ll add a badge to my sidebar to help find Thrive, and I’ll blog about some other resources too.
The P&P team is looking for feedback and avid readers of their Acceptance Test Engineering Guide. Beta 2 was released yesterday on CodePlex. It’s a svelte 209 pages, in “commentable PDF”.
It’s a thick, thick document. They cover a number of test perspectives, including the solution architect, the development manager, user experience, operations manager, test manager, and enterprise architect. I’ve barely glossed the document so far.
The main authors are Grigori Melnik, Gerard Meszaros, and Jon Bach. Grigori blogged about the new segmentation of the guide and put out a table of contents at Acceptance Test Engineering Guide, volume 1 BETA2 release.
I use FoxIt reader to view PDF, and if you go to “Tools->Commenting Tools” you’ll find a variety of options to comment the PDF. They would like comments to go through the Codeplex site (Issue Tracker or Discussion Forum) or you can email it to Grigori.
The CodePlex site is located at patterns & practices Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance – Home. You can download the document from here.
(I’m back after a few weeks away. Nice to be back)
RDA is giving an Azure deep dive on Tuesday, July 7th at the Microsoft Atlanta Office. Here’s some detail from the horse’s mouth:
We are pleased to invite you to a complimentary day of intensive training on the Azure Services Platform for developing the next generation of enterprise applications in the cloud.
This Microsoft sponsored event is being offered at no cost to you. Breakfast, lunch, and free parking will be provided.
The event is targeted for developers and technical decision makers with a background in .NET development. No prior experience with Azure is required and this training session will provide enough background for software development teams to pilot cloud-based applications in their organizations. The training will be divided into multiple sessions to provide a comprehensive overview of the platform.
You can find out more and register here: Upcoming Seminars and Events from RDA
One of the fine people over at EMC (nee Conchango) describes a permission you need to set to enable the Task Board report to work. Just look at the blog entry Scrum for Team System : Task Board Report for the details.
Bonus points-they have a SQL script that will add the permissions for you. You just need to hit ctrl-shift-m and fill in the info. In my case, it was just the user name "domain\tfsReports".
I get a lot of questions about setup problems, and they're regularly related to a missing user permission. The Team Foundation Application Tier is (typically) composed of IIS Web Services, SQL Reporting Services, and Windows SharePoint Services. Loosely speaking, adding a user through Team Explorer will only set the permissions for the IIS portion-an administrator still needs to set the permissions for the other two components.
You can go into Windows SharePoint Services and SQL Reporting Services and grant the permissions in separate steps. MSDN has a section on Managing Permissions, including some how-to examples for common groups:
If you'd like to use one interface to manage all three permissions at the same time, you can download the TFS Administration Tool from CodePlex. The user will need the right to grant permissions on all three systems. I have a quick walk through in the following video:
Using the TFS Administration Tool to manage permissions
