The RC has JUST been released – so get out there and get it!!!

http://bit.ly/1MuRz1

There are quite  a few interesting (and cool) events coming up in SCD over the next couple of weeks… Check these out, mark your calendars and let ALL your friends know about them!

Launch Event – Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM

The event date is now SOLID, but the location is not.  We’ll be showing off VS2010, Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2.  More to come on this launch once we have the info – I only just got the final word on dates this evening.

MSDN Events Presents: Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0 and SharePoint Development

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 1:00 PM, North Little Rock, AR

Join your local Microsoft Evangelism team for a lively tour our latest version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. We’ll start with an overview the IDE and explore how you can use the latest features to develop great applications in a flash. Next, we’ll look at the newest changes to the .NET Framework and how you can leverage them today. Finally, we end the day by looking at the new tools in Visual Studio that will supercharge your SharePoint development.

SESSION 1: What’s New in Visual Studio 2010
SESSION 2: What’s New in the .NET Framework 4.0
SESSION 3: SharePoint Development using Visual Studio 2010

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Software Engineering 101

Saturday, February 27, 2010 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM

This is a one-day, FREE event focused on core skills that modern developers need to have to be successful today.  This isn’t about learning the basics of Silverlight, WPF, or <insert_new_tech_of_day>, rather, this conference will help you understand how to build software that is better designed, more maintainable, and more testable. They’re spending the morning on fundamentals around object-oriented programming, the SOLID principles and a few other important skills, while the afternoon is all about hands-on skills development using Pair Programming techniques to work through a series of challenges. 

If you’re in Nashville, you can attend in person, but for those of you not in Nashville, there is still a chance to participate! The event will have an associated webcast that will allow people to play along from home.  You will need your own laptop with Visual Studio 2008  (or 2010) pre-installed before arriving.

There is more stuff on the horizon, but I’ll save that for later blog posts.  If you have any questions about these events, just let me know!

Been a while since I tried out a new theme, so here it is. What do you think?

Our own Eric Sowell, better known to the Twiteratti as @mallioch, will be speaking at the next episode of Dallas DevCares on January 29th, 2010 on ASP.NET Testability and Scalability.

Here are the abstracts for the event:

Putting Some Testability in ASP.NET

In the world of ASP.NET development, testing has been recognized as being more and more important in recent years, and for many reasons. From a development perspective, testing helps us write better code both in quality and usability. From a business perspective, it helps in reducing total bug counts. If the testing architecture is expanded to cover more than just automated unit-testing into A/B user testing, business-impact of changes can also be measured.

At Match we have learned a few things about both. ASP.NET Webforms is not necessarily built for automated testability but most of those limitations can be overcome with some thought. It also has no built-in mechanism for selective user testing to measure the impact of changes. In this talk I will discuss some of the techniques we have used to help us write better applications for our sakes (better code) and our users (a more useful site), outlined in the following:

• Automated testing by abstracting away difficult-to-test bits of ASP.NET.
• A/B testing and measuring the impact on users by reducing the risk of flaws in both design and implementation.
• Testing flows to determine the most effective of various ways of constructing a user interface.

Putting Some Scalability in ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a great toolkit for building scalable websites. In this talk we will discuss the core techniques that Match uses to scale out to handle about 35 million page views a day. We’ll talk about:

• Handling user state across the lifecycle of a visit to the site
• Employing caching to ease load on the data tier
• Bifurcating the data tier to handle different classes of data

Speaker

Eric Sowell is an avid .NET developer who gets into as many technologies as he can though with a focus on ASP.NET. He is a Senior Application Engineer at Match.com on the international platform and enjoys writing code which serves up Html millions of times on a daily basis. Eric is the father of three children and the husband of one wife. He has no pets but does want fish. When not being a geek or hanging with the family, he enjoys reading, writing and doing research primarily in the realms of ancient Greek, biblical studies and early Christianity.

If you’re interested in attending, check out these links:

I want to be there live and in person!

Can’t be there, but I want to watch via Live Meeting.

Do you want to be? 

I just heard about a FREE SQL Server 2008 Certification Boot Camp coming to OKC.  Full details are at the registration site, but here’s a teaser:

Course: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Certification Boot Camp 70-433 (31.5 hours)

Time: 6:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.

Session Dates: Monday, February, 8th, Tuesday, February 9th, Wednesday, February 10th, Monday, February 15th, Tuesday, February 16th, Wednesday, February 17th, Monday, February 22nd, Tuesday, February 23rd, and Wednesday, February 24th

Given the expertise and time commitment being provided by Michael Hotek for free, we ask that all registrants be able to attend at least 6 of the 9 sessions of this course.

Location:  1100 N Lindsay, Service Center Bldg, Room SCB-111, Oklahoma City, OK 73104. You can see the campus map and look for Service Center Bldg by going to this link (http://www.ouhsc.edu/about/findus.asp). Surrounding buildings are the Dean McGee Eye institute and the Oklahoma City Clinic.

The primary author and primary instructor of this course, Michael Hotek, brings about 2 decades of SQL Server experience in some of the largest and most complicated environments in the world. Mike is an accomplished speaker and trainer having delivered hundreds training sessions across dozens of training events spanning a decade or more with thousands of people having attended training from him.

Course Modules

• Module 1 – Database Design
• Module 2 – Indexes
• Module 3 – Data retrieval
• Module 4 – Data Modification 
• Module 5 – Programmable Objects
• Module 6 – Partitioning
• Module 7 – Full-text Indexes 
• Module 8 – Service Broker
• Module 9 – Performance Analysis and Tuning

If you have any questions about this event, please e-mail BOTH president@okcsql.org and vp@okcsql.org.

I recently released a new blogging platform for GiveCamp.org, but forgot to update the RSS feed back to Feedburner.  That means that any of you that have been subscribed to the feed there haven’t gotten any updates since it went live a couple weeks ago.  Sorry about that, but the problem is now fixed.

If you haven’t been over to GiveCamp.org lately, you should check it out.  Following the advice of a few friends, I switched the platform over to PHP on Windows using Wordpress.  So far, I’ve been really happy, although the plethora of plugins, themes and widgets, while at first seemed awesome, quickly became overwhelming. I finally did find a theme I liked, was able to customize it enough, and plugged in all the right widgets. I even added a map with all the known (and future) GiveCamp event locations that will get updated as the events evolve.

SO – back to the original topic of this post.

IF your feed reader recently found our new little web site at http://givecamp.org and you subscribed to the RSS feeds, it’s time to refresh your pointer because we’ve moved the RSS feed over to FeedBurner at http://feeds2.feedburner.com. If you have any trouble with the feeds, just let me know and I’ll do my best to fix your problem.

I discovered a quirk today related to  Windows 7 and .NET 3.5 SP1.  I’m classifying it as a “quirk” and not a “feature” since it was fixable <grin>, but since it took me several hours over several days to slog through it, I will hopefully save you the time that you could otherwise spend with your significant other, watching your favorite movie, or indulging in your favorite comfort food.

Goal:  Install the Windows Azure SDK and Tools for Visual Studio 2008

Error:  .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is required, but not installed

Here’s the weird part:  I’m running Windows 7 Enterprise Edition, fully patched, and everything in Add/Remove Windows Components related to .NET is selected:

I also verified this during the install of the Azure tools in the Web Platform Installer

Just for fun, I decided to try running the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer, but received the following error message:

Harumph.  After hours of searching on the web, including every search engine I could think of, and s a last ditch effort, I decided to swallow my troubleshooting pride send a mail to one of our internal mailing lists.  As a side note, I really hate sending mail to that alias for 2 reasons:  first, too many people abuse that list and send questions without even trying to look for an answer and I didn’t want to look like one of those, and second I was betting the solution was so simple that nobody had blogged about it for reasons obvious to everyone but me.

The answer came within 10 minutes from Wade Wegner:

Since Twitter doesn’t keep tweets in the search results for very long, the tweets didn’t turn up in my searches.  I tried Wade’s suggestion and it worked. 

SO

If you run into this problem (or I do again and don’t remember the pitifully simple solution) it’s here for everyone that wants to learn from my pain.  Turns out this problem will affect ANY installation that has a dependency set on 3.5 SP1.  I’m not sure what the cause of this problem was, but I hope it doesn’t happen again.

Hey all – just wanted to let you know about an upcoming MSDN Event in Dallas on Windows Azure. Here’s all the deets:

MSDN Events presents:  Take Your Applications Sky High with Cloud Computing and the Windows Azure Platform

Join your local MSDN Events team as we take a deep dive into cloud computing and the Windows Azure Platform. We’ll start with a developer-focused overview of this new platform and the cloud computing services that can be used either together or independently to build highly scalable applications. As the day unfolds, we’ll explore data storage, SQL Azure, and the basics of deployment with Windows Azure. Register today for these free, live sessions in your local area.

SESSION 1: Overview of Cloud Computing and Windows Azure

The Windows Azure platform is a set of high-performance cloud computing services that can be used together or independently and enable developers to leverage existing skills and familiar tools to develop cloud applications. In this session, we’ll provide a developer-focused overview of this new online service computing platform. We’ll explore the components, key features and real day-to-day benefits of Windows Azure.

Highlights include:

• What is cloud computing?
• Running web and web service applications in the cloud
• Using the Windows Azure and local developer cloud fabric
• Getting started – tools, SDKs and accounts
• Writing applications for Windows Azure

SESSION 2: Survey of Windows Azure Platform Storage Options

Durable data storage is a key component of any cloud computing offering. The Windows Azure Platform offers many options, which can be used alone or in combination. Windows Azure itself offers ready-to-use and lightweight storage in the form of tables, blobs, and queues. Another choice for storage is SQL Azure, a true relational database in the cloud. In this session, we’ll explore the highlights of these implementations and how to both create and use storage in each form. We’ll give you guidance on choosing the right forms of storage for your application scenarios.

Highlights include:

• Understanding table & blob storage
• Programming against table & blob storage
• Working with queue storage
• Managing credentials and connection strings
• Scaling and configuration
• Understanding SQL Azure databases versus local SQL Server databases
• SQL Azure firewall, logins and passwords
• Database creation, deployments and migrations
• Database management using SQL Management Studio
• Programming against SQL Azure databases

SESSION 3: Going Live with your Azure Solution

Windows Azure features a powerful, yet simple deployment model. By focusing on your application and abstracting away the infrastructure details, you can deploy almost any app with minimal fuss. In this session, we’ll walk you through the basics of Windows Azure deployment, including site monitoring, diagnostics and performance issues.

Highlights include:

• Start-to-Finish Visual Studio demonstration of a realistic XML data driven business web site from the desktop to the cloud.
• Windows Azure Deployments
• Start-to-Finish Visual Studio demonstration of a realistic SQL Server data driven business web site from the desktop to the cloud.
• Configuration of your application in the cloud
• Guidance and Suggestions to ensure your success

Come out and join us for a great event!

Dallas, TX
February 4, 2010
1:00pm – 5:00pm
11819 Webb Chapel Rd
Dallas, TX 75234

Attention all you peeps in Ft. Smith, Fayetteville, Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale and surrounding areas!  Tonight and tomorrow night are the first parts of my 2010 #ugPDC tour.  Visiting the FSDNUG tonight and the NWADNUG tomorrow night, I’ll be talking about a bunch of the cool stuff announced at PDC09 including Azure, Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010, parallel programming features, dynamic language features, and more!  Here’s the info for each of these groups so you have absolutely no excuse to skip out!

January 11, 2010 – Fort Smith .NET User Group
http://fsdnug.org
EagleOne Headquarters
4001 Planters Rd. Fort Smith, AR 72908
Meeting starts at 6:00 pm.  Food will be provided

January 12, 2010 – Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group
http://nwadnug.org
Jones Center For Families
922 East Emma Avenue, Springdale, AR 72764
Meeting starts at 5:30 pm.  Food will be provided

There are more #ugPDC visits scheduled for next month, including the Fort Worth .NET User Group and the Dallas ASP.NET User Group.  If you’re interested in having one of our Developer Evangelists come out to your User Group during January, February or March to tell you about all the cool, new and exciting things announced at PDC, just drop me a line and let me know!

Our own local Entity Framework smart guy Zeeshan Hirani spoke recently in Fort Worth about his book Entity Framework Recipes.  Shawn Weisfeld captured it all on video for us so that we could jam it into our brains over and over again until we become EF experts:

Zeeshan Hirani (http://weblogs.asp.net/zeeshanhirani) is working on a new book of Entity Framework Recipes for Apress (http://amzn.com/1430227036). In this talk he gives us a preview of some of the things that he will be covering in his book. Entity Framework Recipes provides an exhaustive collection of ready-to-use code solutions for Microsoft’s Entity Framework, Microsoft’s vision for the future of data access. Entity Framework is a model-centric data access platform with an ocean of new concepts and patterns for developers to learn. With this book, you will learn the core concepts of Entity Framework through a broad range of clear and concise solutions to everyday data access tasks. Armed with this experience, you will be ready to dive deep into Entity Framework, experiment with new approaches, and develop ways to solve even the most difficult data access challenges. If you are a developer who likes to learn by example, then this is the right book for you.

• Gives ready-to-use, real-world recipes to help you with everyday tasks
• Provides guideposts for learning core concepts
• Maps out key landmarks for experimenting with your own solutions

What you’ll learn

• Solve the most common data access problems using Entity Framework.
• Implement basic data access design patterns using Entity Framework.
• Seamlessly model your solutions across both code and data.
• Improve data access performance.
• Use data binding to simplify and reduce your code.
• Leverage the recipes to empower your own exploration of Entity Framework.

Who is this book for?

This book is for anyone learning Microsoft’s Entity Framework—Microsoft’s new and primary data access platform. If you have ever struggled to learn a new technology, programming model, or way of doing something, you know how helpful simple, real-world examples can be. For the beginning developer, this book provides concrete examples for common data access tasks. For developers with experience with previous Microsoft access platforms, this book provides a task-by-task mapping between previous approaches and the patterns used in Entity Framework.

For the full series, visit Shawn’s Ineta Live post: Entity Framework by Zeeshan Hirani on 12/19/2009

Nice job Z! I feel smarter already…