Yesterday we released Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (bootstrapper or ISO) and Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (self-extractor). There is also a download available for just the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (bootstrapper and self-extracting package). These are also available from the Subscriber Downloads area of MSDN for MSDN subscribers.
If you want to see what’s new in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 have a look at this article on MSDN.
These are the main features of Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1:
- Support for Windows Server 2008.
- Support for SQL Server 2008.
- The Add to Source Control dialogs have been improved to be easier to use and more scalable.
- Drag & Drop from Windows Explorer to add to Source Control.
- Support for Version control operations on files not in bound solutions.
- Right-click access to set Working Folder/Cloak of folders from within Source Control Explorer.
- Check in date/time column in Source Control Explorer.
- Editable path field for the Source Control Explorer.
- Email work items and queries to someone.
- A new API to download files to a stream.
- Links to Team System Web Access pages from notifications.
- Improvements to the number of projects per server.
- Performance and scale improvements.
- Improvements to the VSS converter to make it much more robust.
- Support for creating Team Projects from the command line.
I decided to install Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 from scratch on one of my servers, so I could install it on Windows Server 2008 and the RTM version of SQL Server 2008. Patching an existing server is just a matter of running the TFS 2008 SP1 package, after backing up your database first just in case, but starting from scratch requires a few extra steps. You can find the exact process in the updated Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 Installation document here (note the instructions on the download page about how to open downloaded CHM files for display). In a nutshell, you need to create an installation source of TFS 2008 that has SP1 merged. The installation document explains how. Once you have created the merged installation source, everything else proceeds as before.
Also note that if you are installing TFS 2008 on a server that already has Visual Studio 2008 installed, you need to apply Visual Studio 2008 SP1 first.
Update: Oh, and if you’re working with Silverlight 2 Beta 2, it has been updated so the tools now work with the RTM version of VS 2008 SP1. Download the updated version here.
We know we have some disappointed customers that missed out on TechEd NZ tickets this year due to the speed with which it sold out. An alternative may be to head to the Aussie TechEd which runs from 2-5th September in Sydney. There are many of the same tracks and speakers as TechEd NZ and we are offering a discount to New Zealand based companies (and individuals) that want to go.
To help offset some of the additional travel cost we are offering a 20% discount (usually AUD1999.00, reduced to AUD1600.00, including GST).
To take advantage of this deal register by heading to this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/nz/teched08/australia_discount.aspx
and then follow the simple steps.
The registration site for TechEd NZ 2008 has gone live and the Early Bird registrations are selling fast (and I mean very fast; you can see for yourself with the early-bird-sold-so-far-o-meter on the site) make sure you get in soon if you want to take advantage of the Early Bird Pricing.
OneNet, in association with KPMG, Microsoft and IBM have organised an event for New Zealand ISVs seeking to understand what qualifies as "an appreciable element of novelty" under the new R&D tax rules.
Successful R&D tax claims generate 15 cents tax refund for every qualifying dollar spent.
SEMINAR OBJECTIVE:
Don’t miss this highly targeted seminar series designed for the principals of independent software vendor firms (ISVs), and their tax advisors. In particular the seminar will focus on interpreting the key words every ISV leader will need to understand before any successful claim can be made – to make a successful claim as a software developer, there must be “an appreciable element of novelty”.
DATES:
The seminars will be presented by the global R&D team of the “big four” accounting firm KPMG, in the following cities:
- Christchurch 6th of May
- Wellington 7th of May
- Auckland 8th of May
REGISTRATION DETAILS:
Further information and registration details click here.
WHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND?:
Find out what does “an appreciable element of novelty” really mean for ISVs and learn how to construct a winning case.
PRIZE PACKAGE:
Each seminar attendee will be eligible for a prize with a retail value of $10,000 – click here for more details.
Event Sponsor
Our New Zealand Architect Evangelist, Mark Carroll, is organising the next round of Visual Studio Team System user group meetings for May. Richard Vowles, from specialist development tools reseller Developers Inc. will be speaking on the topic of:
How does your team manage its work?
In this talk we will be discussing how various team members can keep track of work allocations, progress and overall software project completion.
We will look at how the team’s operational roles (developers, testers, architects and DBA’s) can use Team system to receive their work stream items and report progress on them through to completion. We will also look at how Team leads, Technical project managers and Enterprise project managers can integrate with the team’s operational roles for both planning and progress reporting.
This talk will cover aspects of Team system’s work item tracking and its integration with management tools along with the other progress tracking and reporting tools available.
There is still room left at the Christchurch (Mon 5 May) and Auckland (Thu 8 May) events but you need to RSVP so head over to Mark's Blog and RSVP to the event you want to attend.
Concept to Market are running a seminar on successful technology development that will be of interest to New Zealand ISVs:
Many companies are building and marketing technology products, some quite successfully others less so. The overall business value added by technology development is less than it could be; often dramatically less. Why is this and what can we do about it?
Successful technology development is, among other things, a complex game of balancing the interests of the different groups of people. Typically this includes:
- Showing the CEO or division manager that the project aligns with the overall business strategy.
- Providing the finance department with concrete forecasts and budgets for a project that is probably a very fluid undertaking with many unknowns.
- Making sure the product being built aligns with the marketing department’s idea of how it is positioned in the market, and with the message the sales team is giving to customers.
- Ensuring that the product provides clear value to the customer, and also that it meets the needs of the end users (often not the same person as the customer).
- Finally, of course, ensuring that the development team itself is engaged and producing the goods.
With all these parties pulling in different directions, the result can be either positive creative conflict or (too often) confusion and lack of direction.
Seminar Content
This seminar will help your technology development to succeed by:
- Understanding these (often conflicting) business drivers,
- Describing the problems that can arise if they are not taken into account early in the development process.
- Presenting a set of tools that will help you to construct a solid technology strategy that integrates the different drivers.
- Showing how this technology strategy can be used to help provide each of the parties with the information they need.
About the Speaker
Stephen Fenwick is a Technology Development Specialist with Concept to Market, and is passionate about ways to increase the value that the world of “technology” can add to the world of “business”. He has a strong commercial technology background, and holds a PhD in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Commerce.
Stephen has recently worked as Engineering Manager at Navman NZ, where he was responsible for the core navigation functionality of Navman’s land navigation products. Past positions have included Software Development Manager at Sysmex NZ, Team Leader and Software Engineer at Intel NZ and Software Engineer at ECONZ.
Date
Wednesday 24 October, 2007
Time
5:15 pm Registration
5:30 pm Seminar
6:30 pm Questions, Networking and Drinks
Venue
AUT Tech Park,
Level 4,
James Fletcher House,
581 Gt. South Road,
Penrose
Cost
$25 payable by Direct Credit or Cheque in advance.
Registration
RSVP by email to admin@concepttomarket.co.nz by 19 October, including the name of your company, the name of the person(s) attending, and your contact telephone number.
Hosted By
Printable flyer:
Back in May 2007 we held a Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded mini-seminar in Christchurch where Mike Hall, Derek Snyder and Rob Tiffany all talked about various aspects of the Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded products including developing line of business applications.
We have made the presentation decks available:
Mike Hall's Windows Embedded update is here.
Derek Snyder's Windows Mobile Update is here.
Rob Tiffany's Accelerating Windows Mobile Line of Business Application Development is here.
We had a bit of a pre-spring spring clean and changed the blog theme. While the old theme was more "Web 2.0"-ish it was a little too narrow for all the things we have to say.
Speaking of Tech Ed 2007, some of the discussions I had with ISVs revolved around Office Open XML and the current activity with the ISO standardisation process. There were basically two types of things ISVs wanted to know. The first was about the ISO standardisation process itself, why it matters, how it affects ISVs and how Office Open XML compares to existing document standards. The second common topic of discussion was around development resources and how to actually work with the Office Open XML formats. By the way, if you haven't seen the Ecma Office Open XML standard (Ecma-376) it is available on the Ecma website.
Some good information to summarise the first category of discussion is available over at Sean McBreen's blog. Sean is the Director of the group that looks after ISVs in New Zealand and has done a good job of answering some of the popular misconceptions around the Ecma Office Open XML standard; in particular around Intellectual Property Rights and why we need multiple standards. Rather than posting all the information I am going to link to the relevant posts on Sean's blog. I recommend you read them to help you understand the current interest and activity around the ISO standardisation of Office Open XML.
The post titled IPR on Ecma Office Open XML explains the three options an implementer of the standard can select from to use with their implementation of the Office Open XML format.
The post titled My top 4 questions on Ecma Office Open XML and simple answers answers the questions we hear asked most commonly.
Another thing to make clear is that Office Open XML is already a standard, an Ecma standard known as Ecma-376. All the discussion at the moment is around whether it should be an ISO standard as well. One side of the debate is of the opinion is that there is already an ISO standard document format (ODF) and we don't need another one. My top 4 questions on Ecma Office Open XML and simple answers and Why have another document standard? provide our view on why it is important to have multiple standards.
The other popular misconception is that the Office Open XML format is a Microsoft only format. While true that the initial work was done by Microsoft, the technology was first submitted to Ecma in late 2005 and since then has been through significant change based on the recommendations of the Ecma Technical Committee (which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress). Actually, I noticed recently that Apple's latest version of iWork '08 mentions as one of the features that it can import Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents that use the OOXML format.
For the second category of discussion, the meat and potatoes of how to use the Office Open XML formats I can recommend the following resources.
The OpenXMLDeveloper.org web site is a great place to start:
Earlier in 2007 a series of Open XML developer workshops were run in 30 countries. The content of the workshop is available on line, including all the presentations, samples, and lab manuals. This is a great way to get up to speed fast on using Open XML formats.
There is a book called "Open XML Explained" available for download. The sample documents shown in the book are available here. The author of the book, Wouter Van Vugt, is a software development trainer/consultant who specializes in the Open XML file formats. He participates in the forums here on OpenXMLDeveloper.org, and has a blog where he covers Open XML and other .NET development topics.
There are also all sorts of interesting articles about working with Open XML in the Library section of the OpenXMLDeveloper.org website.
On MSDN there is the XML in Office Developer Portal which contains information about using Open XML and includes a link to a preview of the SDK for Open XML Formats. The SDK provides strongly-typed part classes to manipulate Open XML documents. There is also an MSDN Forum called the Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats where you can get assistance with the SDK.
There are a bunch of videos on Channel 9 about using Open XML including this one about how MindJet (an ISV in the U.S.) are using Open XML in their latest version of MindManager Pro.
I know a number of New Zealand ISVs are already using Office Open XML to output content from their own applications for reporting, automatic document generation, document re-purposing, archiving etc. If any of you have found Open XML resources that may be useful to others, why not share them in a comment?
It was great to see so many New Zealand ISVs at our recent Tech Ed 2007 event. If you weren't able to make it this year or missed out on purchasing a ticket, you can download the presentation decks on the TechEd Live site. Australia and New Zealand are very fortunate to have our own Tech Ed events and the great turnout we get each year is one of the reasons we can keep doing these events locally.
The feedback we received on the event was great and it sounds like Lou Carbone's keynote talk on creating great experiences resonated with a lot of you who build software for a living. If you didn't see the keynote because you weren't there, I highly recommend you watch the video. We have to thank Nigel for organising such a great keynote.
User Experience is something that is getting much more attention these days and a lot of ISVs I talk to either already have or a looking to hire a User Experience* expert to help improve their products. "Improve their products" here means designing their product or service for humans to use in the real world rather than just adding all the features the product design team thinks a customer might use. As Lou talked about, products and services that give users a great experience will keep them coming back for more.
I also want to thank our ISVs that participated in Tech Ed 2007 by either presenting in the Voice of the Customer track (Xero, ActionThis and WhereScape) or by participating in the "Make your mark video" (Xero, Ambient Design, Right Hemisphere and Animation Research). I always enjoy seeing what customers and partners are doing with our technology and products and Tech Ed is a fantastic chance to show it off at New Zealand's biggest technology conference.
So, another awesome event and I hope to see you all at next year's Tech Ed.
*I am lumping User Experience, Interaction Design and Usability into one group here, while technically they are different they all hopefully lead to an improved experience for the end customer/user.
As we can see from Rod’s blog there are many businesses in New Zealand who believe that accepting Ecma Office Open XML as a standard is a significant step forward in providing choice to those already using the formats and those using legacy formats to develop and use Open XML solutions.
Since we first submitted the technology to Ecma International in November 2005, we have been working with members of Ecma Technical Committee including representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress.
This has truly been a cross-industry collaborative effort, to help make the Open XML formats as useful and interoperable as possible. And more importantly, provide a clear, documented set of guidelines for organisations who wish to create or maintain solutions that depend upon the format. (Open Letter from Microsoft’s Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli entitled “The making of an open standard”, available online at www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/openxmliso.mspx.)
The Ecma committee made significant changes to the Open XML specification and also produced more than 6,000 pages of reference documentation on the formats, to help ensure developers could work easily with the formats, whether they wanted to take advantage of just a few specific features, or the full technology set of the specification. (The official statement from Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, Secretary General of Ecma International, (http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.htm) underscoring the organization’s commitment to due process)
Taking a New Zealand perspective specifically, we believe (in addition to many of our customers and partners) that Open XML will:
· Protect our heritage and enable ongoing access to documents that are already in existence now and in the future.
· Give us freedom of choice to choose which application, vendor or platform we want to use in order to exchange documents.
· Secure our future when storing and formatting information without requiring the use of any specific organisation, machine or system.
· Foster innovation and enable the New Zealand IT industry to provide new and innovative software for markets locally and worldwide.
A related whitepaper entitled: “Why care about document formats?” is worth a read as well - http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/f/16fd06b3-7059-4e21-adf4-9fbdcb9a2853/Whycareaboutdocformats.doc
Common Pitfalls in Recruiting International Distributors
The sad truth is that most international channel partners do not actively sell the products they represent. In order to succeed you need to have a careful selection process to identify and qualify the best prospective partners
When a company decides to take its first steps towards international expansion, the road to success can seem deceptively simple. Many times they do not even have to make the decision, as it appears as if the world is, after all, beating a path to their door. For a lot of companies, their international launch was triggered by one or more of the following events:
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Why Resellers Don't Sell
Properly structured and supported, indirect channel are often the fastest, most cost-effective way for a company to scale its business overseas. But, the fact is – most resellers don’t sell. And the reason they don’t sell has much more to do with you than your technology, the marketplace or the reseller’s business.
The prospects of partnering with international resellers and gaining access to new markets is an exciting one for any company. It can be quite gratifying to have someone from another country share your vision and be willing to make the commitments and investments needed to help expand your business in areas where you don’t have the time and/or resources to establish a direct presence.
Signing contracts with resellers is easy – getting them to actually sell and support your product is more of a challenge
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Setting up an Office Overseas
Setting up an overseas subsidiary may be the right move for some companies, but it is not a decision to be made without careful consideration.
One of the most important decisions management will make when it decides to expand internationally is whether or not to set up an overseas office. For many this is a no-brainer: "Of course we want to run our own show!" They know how to run their business at home, so it is simply a matter of transplanting the same model overseas. However, as is true in medicine, transplanting an organ into a foreign body can carry high risks of incompatibility and rejection. It is an operation fraught with risk and the consequences of making a mistake can be critical to the long-term survival of a company.
Let's start by looking at why it might make sense. Setting up a company-owned subsidiary, or buying an existing business, can be the right thing to do in key markets. Some of the advantages of doing this are:
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When going international many companies automatically go after the largest markets, but this is often a mistake.
When a company makes the commitment to expand internationally, one of the first, critical questions they face is that of market selection. Success or failure in the first foreign foray will often determine whether the effort should continue, or whether it is more prudent to sound the retreat and withdraw to the safety of more familiar surroundings.
In deciding where to start, there is often a tendency to equate market size with market potential. This is a fallacy sometimes referred to as the "Chinese Market Share Theory". With more than a billion people, all you really need is 2% to be hugely successful. Unfortunately, the largest markets for technology products, especially software, have significant hurdles that can make them quite a challenge.
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