Brian H. Prince

This is the second year for the dog food conference, brain child of Danilo Casino. It is a local event, put on by MS and our partners. This year we have two full days, with four tracks. We have both local MS employees, as well as some blue badges coming in from out of state. Many of the presenters are local rock stars that work for our partners. This event is free (unless you are in pubsec, then you have to pay for your food). It was a great event last year, and I hope to see you there. Since the event is two days, we have two registration links. Please bear with us, it’s just how the machine works. The reg links: Thursday Registration Link Friday Registration Link · **Attendees must register for each day separately** What : · Please join us for the 2 nd Annual Dog Food Conference.  We will have MS speakers, MS partners, ISVs, MS MVPs and community leads presenting 40 topics. The story behind “Eating one’s own Dog Food” When: · November 12-13, 2009; Attendees...

https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=142763 Details on the event is below: When: December 7, 2009 Location Microsoft MTC - Aon Center 200 E. Randolph Suite 200 Chicago, IL 60601 United States Recommended Audiences: Solution Architects, Software Developers, Developers, Architects nPlus1.org is hosting its fifth Architecture Summit on December 7th at the Microsoft MTC in Chicago, IL. The topic of this summit will be Patterns and Principles. Morning Session (Optional): An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM Are you new to OOP? Do you want a refresher on the benefits of Interfaces and the differences between implements and extends? The morning session is a two hour introductory course of Object Oriented Programming. If you are new to OOP the lessons in this session will prepare you for the more advanced topics in the afternoon. If you are already well versed in OOP then feel free to come have a ref...

PSR stands for Problem Step Recorder, and is a tool that ships in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It was designed to help support professionals have users record the steps of their problem so they can see what is going on. It fixes the ‘See the big blue ball in the lower left-hand corner?’ problem. While we have remote connection capabilities, and screen recorders, those can be hard to setup for a typical user, and takes too long to show something simple. PSR is really lightweight and helps with the initial triaging of the problem. And let’s face it, if you are reading this you are probably the IT Support team for your family. You are probably feeling a lot of angst about the upcoming holidays, especially Thanksgiving, which is the one holiday you are forced to hang around with people you actively avoid on Twitter and Facebook. You are not alone, we all feel like this. In the 50’s it was everyone asking the family member who was a physician about medical questions all day. Now ...

I was at the HDC this past week in Omaha, NE. I had a blast! It was a great conference, and I got to speak with a lot of the local developers. People were really excited about the pending launch of Windoes 7 and the keynote from Scott Guthrie on the new VS2010 build. I interviewed a bunch of people on what their favorite Windoes 7 feature is. There is one surprising guest half way through. Thanks to David Giard who was the wizard who edited the video. You should check out his blog, and his webcast. It's a great show.

I have a lot of friends who really like to work in Python and Ruby, so I thought I would pass this announcement on. If you are into Python and Ruby, you might want to check out www.codemash.org , a great event I help with coming up in January. Today we announced the release of the IronRuby and IronPython CTPs for .NET 4.0 Beta 2 . This is the third preview of IronRuby and IronPython running under the Dynamic Language Runtime that is built directly into .NET 4.0. As before, this release allows you to use IronRuby objects and types as .NET 4.0 dynamic objects from within C# and Visual Basic code. These binaries are roughly equivalent to the functionality found in IronRuby 0.9 and IronPython 2.6. Take a look at Harry Pierson ’s blog post about this release as well, especially if you’re more into snakes than gemstones.   Try it out To try out this release: · Install NET 4.0 Beta 2 or Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 · Download either IronRuby or IronPython · Follow any of the...

We have been trying to simplify our product lineup and skus over the past few years for all of our products. Customers want it to be simpler. I have bought software before, and in comparison we have some of the simplest licensing, but we can always do better. Windows 7 has fewer skus, and now VS2010 does as well. Having different skus is important, but the trick is to have the right number. Too much choice leads to consumer confusion and dissatisfaction. Studies have shown that too many choices leads to a dissatisfied customer. Let’s say you go into a store and there are 100 different types of jeans on sale. You spend some time, pick the ones you like and bring them home (preferably after paying for them.) You will be ok with your selection, but not really happy. You will always have the doubt in your head as to the question if you actually picked the right pair. Perhaps the one with the super special boot leg cut would have been better looking with my sandals. Now that I have you...

VS2010 beta 2 has been released. Go get it now. It comes with a go live license, so you can use it in production, and we will support it. You need to understand that it is still a beta though. The RTM date is March 22, 2010, so if you have a project that is going live around then, it might be best to build it with the beta than building it with VS2008. We have committed that there will be a smooth upgrade path from beta2 to RTM so you don’t have to worry about the proper retention of source code, and work items. I plan on posting some unboxing videos soon, but I wanted to hit some of the top features (at least that I think are my favorite features). TFS is now much easier to install. You can install on Windows 7, on a desktop PC, and with SQL Express. It takes about 20 minutes now. There is a new basic profile with TFS that installs the core features, making it super easy to get source control and work item tracking up and running for your team. There is a new code onl...

We have just wrapped up the first Windows 7 launch tour. We hit all of the major cities. Now that we have brushed the dust from our boots, we are heading back out and doubling back to hit more local cities. If you weren’t able to make it to one of the big launches you should sign up to make it to one of these local launches. There will be some cool prizes as well. I will be speaking at the Nashville event (Franklin, TN), and the Columbus event. I hope to see you there. From the official invite…   ------------------------- TechNet & MSDN Events Present: Highlights from “the New Efficiency” Launch Join us as we explore how Windows® 7, Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Exchange Server® 2010 deliver on the new efficiency where cost savings, productivity and innovations come together. At this free event we’ll cover the “best of” content and deliver highlights from “the New Efficiency” Launch events taking p...

Stephen Toub is on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft. Jennifer has convinced him to spend a week on the road in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, speaking to customers and visiting user groups. See her blog for more details on the tour. He will cover concurrency and tools for how to easily develop parallel solutions. This will be an important part of the framework going forward because of the many core problem. As the number of cores in CPUs increase, we will start to have issues with concurrency. We will also want to write code that leverages that hardware. BUT, writing multithreaded code is very difficult, and is insanely hard to debug. Microsoft’s challenge is to provide a framework as part of the platform to make it easy for developers to build parallel applications, with a great degree of quality and productivity. The official abstract and bio is below.  Date/time Location Registration Mon 10/26, 9-11am Microsoft office 2555 M...

For some time now I have been working on a book with Chris Hay titled “ Azure in Action ”. The book will be published by Manning, hopefully around March 2010. We only have a few more chapters to write, and then we start the long editorial process. But I know many of you can not wait until March to get the book. This is where the MEAP comes in. MEAP stands for Manning Early Access Program, and it allows readers to read the first chapter for free, or buy the book now. If you buy the book early you get access to the draft chapters as they are written, and get access to an authors forum to provide us feedback on the book, and get questions answered. I was in the middle of writing another book for Manning when I mentioned that I was surprised they didn’t have a dedicated book for each part of the Windows Azure Platform. Later I found out this simple little comment set off a flurry (well, maybe a passel) of activity in setting up the other books in the series, and finding the write aut...

I   caught up with Caleb Jenkins at the MVP summit. We commandeered a conference room, and talked about how all developers need to care about architecture. Developers should think of architecture at the code level and the benefits of Dependency Injection.   ARCast.TV - Caleb Jenkins On Dependency Injection

A while ago I wrote a quick article titled “Three Scenarios: When the Cloud Makes Sense”. The article goes into three core scenarios where cloud computing make sense. Not everything should be run in the cloud, and I wanted highlight a few times when it is a clear win to do so. The role of the person making strategic decisions (lead dev, architect, or IT manager) is to look at their portfolio and decide what system benefits from moving some or all of it to the cloud. The benefit could be a cost savings, reduction in management overhead, or enabling a use of the software that wasn’t possible in the limited on-premises data centers we have. Please check out the article.

We recently wrapped up a 17 city road show covering real work experiences with Azure. We had both an IT Pro session, and a developer session. While we were in Nashville we webcasted the event. If you weren’t able to get to one of the events, now is your chance to see the recordings. We cover the architecture, and development of solutions running on Azure, as well as how to manage and provisions the solutions. Just because the app is running in the cloud doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be managed. You just aren’t spending as much time managing the underlying infrastructure. You can replay the videos, or download them for offline viewing. The IT Pro one has also been published to TechNet here . TechNet Events Presents: Real World Azure https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032425946&role=attend&pw=WE45G3T7   MSDN Events Presents: Real World Azure - Live Meeting https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032425948&role=attend&pw=E45W7...

I have been really impressed with Windows 7 since the early internal builds I was allowed to use. I am still constantly amazed how a new version of a product (of any product from any company) can have more features, have a larger kernel, support more hardware, and be faster, lighter, and easier to use. I don’t think that has every happened before. I decided, just for fun, that I wanted to learn why this is the case. Did we remove some long forgotten sleep loop in the kernel? Or did we just delete all of the verbose comments and validation checks? It turns out it was none of those things. And so I set out to put together a talk on the subject. I just think the internals is very interesting, and insight into how things work can make troubleshooting easier. While I do put a lot of time into preparing a new talk (60-80 hours), I still like to beta test a talk with a smaller, intimate audience. David Giard provided me with such an audience with his internal user group at Sogeti in Mi...