As Conference Chair for VSLive Las Vegas, to be held October 13–17, this time at the Mirage Hotel right on the strip, it is my pleasure to lead the second "re-tooled"  VSLive event, and to invite you all to participate as speakers.

What does re-tooled mean?: for the remaining VSLive 2008 shows, we are making a concerted effort to break with long-standing formulas around tracks, content and, in some cases, format.  Rather than forcing all content to fit within 3 or 4 tracks/topic areas, we are instead pushing for a variety of content covering a variety of subjects relevant to Microsoft developers of all stripes.  We are also creating an additional full day of sessions.  And with a "pay one price" registration model, all attendees will be able to attend any session. 

The end-result of these changes is new freedom and subject matter flexibility and 50% more breakout session content than in past years at our "regional" shows (including New York, Las Vegas and Austin). 

A general call for papers (CFP) has already been announced and closed, but I am taking this opportunity to solicit additional content from speakers who perhaps have not spoken at VSLive before. If you have already submitted proposals through the CFP channel, rest assured I will review those proposals and give them every consideration.  However, I would like to make a special appeal to those of you who haven't submitted, and even those who have, to submit additional sessions now. 

The most important thing is to pick topics that you're excited about and will enjoy presenting on.  Meanwhile, if you're looking for guidance, a set of major topics and sub-topics/tags that we hope to include is listed now on the conference's Web site at http://vslive.com/2008/lasvegas/.  Check out the full list on the Web site, but please know that if you have something really interesting that doesn't quite mesh with the topics listed there, that I have the discretion and the desire to accommodate you, provided the topic is likely to be well-received by attendees.

One thing that hasn't changed (yet) is the short timeframes we're working on.  I have been asked to finalize the session matrix this week.  But here's the thing: assuming you can craft descriptive session titles, that's all I really need from you right now (once selected, you'll be asked to produce full abstracts).  So take just a few minutes now and send me titles for a couple of sessions you'd love to present.

Please email content to vslive@vergentsoftware.com

Thanks!

Sunday, June 22, 2008 7:29:23 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Recently setup a new TFS2008 installation out in my colocation and had issues with the report and document nodes in my TFS projects not coming alive.  I had put the correct routes into my ISA Server but those other links weren’t working.

I had forgotten to update the wss and report servers names in the registration data on the application tier.

To get the registration data do a:

TFSReg /EXPORT reg.xml APPTIERSERVERNAME

Change the following values to the FQDN of your application tier:

ATMachineName

ReportsService

BaseReportsUrl

WssAdminService

BaseSiteUrl

There are a few settings in the registry also:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\ReportServer\80\Sites

Has BaseReportsService and BaseSiteUrl that also needs to be changed.

Finally clear your cache at (for vista):

c:\users\@username@\appdata\local\microsoft\team foundation\2.0

and delete the cache folder in that location.

Found a great article here somewhat after the fact: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/mglaser/archive/2007/01/31/hosting-team-foundation-server-on-a-fully-qualified-domain-name-fqdn.aspx

Friday, March 14, 2008 10:01:05 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]   VSTS

I have been having a great time playing with the new MVC Preview 2 bits released on www.asp.net.

I am working on a project however where I needed a url like:

/home/view/2008/spring/easter/morning

and I wanted to put in a route like:

{controller}/{action}/{id}

and I wanted id to get

“2008/spring/easter/morning”

This could be N levels deep so

{controller}/{action}/{id1}/{id2}/{id3}

is not a great solution.

After spelunking around on the www.asp.net forums I found I could do a route like:

{controller}/{action}/{*id}

This directs everything after the action to the id.  Works great!

WideOpen Web

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 2:27:34 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

Hear ye, hear ye!  MIX08 to debut the first ever MIX UX Track which is 3 days of solid content dedicated to creatives / designers.  Lou Carbone, David Armano, Dan Roam, Kim Lenox and others will speak.  In conjunction with Adaptive Path, the User Experience track is just one of the many great reasons for all types of designers and creative professionals to attend MIX this year.  http://visitmix.com/2008/mixux.aspx

The deadline for this year’s CSS contest, RESTYLE, has been extended.  Folks can still restyle the MIX08 Homepage and win a pass to MIX08, 3 nights at the Venetian, $$ and more, more, more! http://visitmix.com/2008/restyle/

Have you been listening to The Signal?  Each week a new episode debuts featuring a speaker or MIX crew member talking about some of the upcoming coolness happening at MIX08.  Listen to their interviews with Molly Holzschlag, Kip Kniskern, Jonathan Snook and others as we countdown to Vegas.  http://visitmix.com/blogs/TheSignal/

Perhaps you remembered last year’s MIX, in which we featured Flotzam, a WPF screensaver mash-up that showed MIX07 feeds from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and blogs. Well, we are doing it again this year with a twist: we are running a contest and will feature community created skins of the application on the big screen and on the screensavers of the computers available to attendees at the show.  The best skin will win an XBOX 360.  Entering the contest is easy: everything you need to know can be found here http://www.visitmix.com/blogs/News/403/ including links to screencasts and instructions that show how easy it is to do the restyle.  

Monday, January 28, 2008 10:36:31 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Microsoft is finally bringing back the PDC.

October 27-30, 2008
Pre-conference October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California

Nice to see Microsoft giving plenty of advance notice so I can plan who from my team is headed to TechEd, Mix and/or PDC this year.

Friday, December 07, 2007 9:36:57 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Interested in SilverLight? Want to hang out with some other interested folks at Microsoft in November?

If so check out the SilverLight 1.0 FireStarter event here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund/archive/2007/11/03/silverlight-firestarter-event-in-redmond-wa-register-now.aspx

Friday, November 16, 2007 9:49:10 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]   .NET Architecture

I just finished judging the Finals for Speaker Idol. 

All I can say is why.  The speakers took every bit of feedback from the initial heats and incorporated it into their final presentations.  It was very, very hard to pick a winner.

The finals started with Bob Roudebush of DoubleTake presenting about a new Windows Server 2003 R2 feature, File Server Resource Manager.  Rob presented in the first heat I judged and I found it hard to believe he had tightened up his presesentation.  I would have thought that impossible.

Next up was Alain Tadros from Falafel Software. “Lino” started with some great humor comparing his nickname to LINQ commenting that he didn’t know why Microsoft mispelled the name of that technology.  He then proceeded inform the audience on how to effectively use anonymous delegates.  While following the previous heats suggestions he stumbled while hand typing some code but recovered very nicely.

Next was Sarbjit Gill. All I can say is wow.  This was the second IT presentation focused on why you might want to use split DNS.  The amazing thing was that he did the meat of the presentation in Windows Paint!  He drew diagrams, with a mouse BTW not a tablet, on the fly and illustrated the problem quite effectively.  What a refreshing change from the typical build slides.

Next up was Rob Windsor from ObjectSharp Consulting in Toronto.  He went a little long at 8 minutes but when you realize he showed an end to end WCF sample in Visual Basic in that time you understand why he ran long.  He was smooth and clearly had done this presentation a number of times.

Finally we had Steven Smith from ASPAlliance.  He showed the Easy ways to increase performance for an ASP.NET Application.  He used the load testing tools in Visual Studio Team Test to show the impact each of his changes made.  Great use of the audience to underscore the drama of the performance changes.  Impressive demo to do in 5 minutes.

In the end we had to pick a winner.  It wasn’t easy.

The judges, Stephen (Tempo Tempo) Forte, Kate (C++ Queen) Gregory, Michelle (Indigo Girl) Leroux-Bustamante, and myself had a very difficult time deciding on who should win.  They were all excellent.

We all had different ideas of who was the best so we had to come up with a unique yet top-secret scheme to choose the winner.

In the end there can be only one.

and that one was Steven Smith!   Steven was a last minute wild card in Heat 4 and did an excellent job coming up with a topic on short notice.

Steven will be speaking at TechEd 2008 June 9–13 in Orlando Florida.

Congratulations Steven on a job very well done. 

Thursday, June 07, 2007 9:53:34 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Speaker Idol is an interesting contest here at TechEd 2007 put on by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from DotNetRocks.

The contest is modeled after it’s eponymous namesake American Idol with the winner earning a speaker slot for TechEd 2008 June 9–13!

I was honored to be on the judging panel for the first heat and was blown away by the quality of the presenters. 

We had Kent Alstad, Mike Azugar, Bill Baldasti, Bob Roudebush all present for 5 minutes.  Then four judges: Stephen (Tempo Tempo) Forte, Kate (C++ Queen) Gregory, Tim (Smart Client) Huckaby and myself all gave the speakers pointers on what they did well and how they could improve.

Bob Roudebush came out on top for the first heat and will be headed to the finals.

Congratulations Bob!

Tuesday, June 05, 2007 10:25:17 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

Bob Muglia kicked off the TechEd keynote this morning with a Back to the Future spoof featuring Christopher Lloyd.  Very fun.  Great piece of self-deprecating humor around Hailstorm and how misguided that effort was.

Loved the Windows Server 2008, Viridian, System Center VMM demos.  Looks really sharp and gives me some hope they may start gaining on VMWare at some point.

The Jamie Cool SilverLight demo was a mediocre at best rehash of what was shown at Mix.

The Brian Goldfarb VSTO demo was interesting only for the possibilities it represented, it was mostly eye candy and didn’t communicate much other than the possibilities…

The Michael Woods BizTalk.NET demo was incomprehensible.  He wanted to talk about BizTalk.NET but again mainly eye candy instead of actually explaining how or why.

The DSI demo was fairly cool.  It got me interested based on the value proposition however it didn’t really help me understand what I need as a developer to play in that space.

Finally in closing I have found out that the Orange County Convention Center is Pepsi-Hell.  In their infinite wisdom it appears that someone thought it was a good idea to only serve Pepsi products.  I have cut down my Diet Coke consumption over the years but it is still my favorite carrier for caffeine.

Monday, June 04, 2007 6:58:20 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I am sitting here prior to TechEd 2007 at a Microsoft Regional Director meeting. 

I got to chatting with a few folks about the decision to postpone the PDC until 2008 and the more I think about it the more I think they made the right decision.

Mix07 covered the latest and greatest of the web technologies.

TechEd will serve as the vehicle for many of the remaining IT and developer announcements.

Orcas should be out the door by the time PDC would hit.

Katmai should be well on the way out the door.

What long lead types of things would they cover?  I would hate to go to a PDC and then have either:

a) them not talk about anything 12–18 months off

or

b) have them talk about stuff that is a ways out but not provide any bits.

Key theme for PDC has always been if you don’t provide bits you don’t get to speak.

I want that to continue and I want Microsoft to have relevant content and if that means delaying until 2008 then so be it…

Sunday, June 03, 2007 1:30:21 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]