I have been given a new opportunity at Microsoft, for the last three years I have had the position of Developer Evangelist. In that role, I have had the opportunity to work with all the Microsoft focused user groups in Southern California. This has allowed me to work with some of the most local, community-focused people I have had the privilege to know. This was a perfect fit for me as I had been active in running user groups for almost 20 years. As a Developer Evangelist, I also was able to represent Microsoft at events where the attendees were not always the most positive (and often quite hostile) about Microsoft. This included events like JavaOne, OSCON, various BarCamps and many other. I enjoyed each of these engagements, and while I hope I encouraged Microsoft sceptics to have a more open mind to Microsoft, I know that I learned a lot about the startups, entrepreneurs & angel\venture investors. In the past, I have started a product company, two service companies and worked at a product startup but I had never needed to or been able to get involved into the angel\venture investor side of being in a startup. This made the last few years quite interesting and educational.

With the new job I have moved into the Western Region Developer Platform & Evangelism Strategy Team where I will be managed by the only person that objected to me being hired at Microsoft, but I think he is over it now :). The new position will let me work full time with startups, entrepreneurs & investors. I will get to help startups implement or integrate with Microsoft products and services. Once I do what I do, others on my new team will work with the startups to create white papers and case studies that will be used to help produce PR for the startups as well as Microsoft. I don’t know all of the details of my new position, I have a team meeting next week where I will learn more about the job, but I am looking forward to this new opportunity.

The only bummer is that now I will not get to go to Hawaii a few times a year.

I just found out that Microsoft is now offering this! Cool now I can tell people where they can get help…

From the support page:

Free unlimited installation and compatibility support is available for Windows Vista, but only for Service Pack 1 (SP1). This support for SP1 is valid until March 18, 2009.

Here is the link: http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?LN=en-us&prid=11274&gprid=500921&x=15&y=14

I know I am slow but I did not know we had a great set of resources for learning SharePoint but if you are looking to get in to doing any level of development on SharePoint check out www.MSSharePointDeveloper.com. There are Virtual Labs, Quick Start guides, Webcasts and more of a wide range of topics around SharePoint development.

Mark Brown in is blog post CNET article on Google Capturing 3D Data talks about Microsoft's UltraCam that I heard about for the first time at ETech in 2007. At the time they had plans for the next version but even at the time it was the coolest image collection device I had ever seen (and I saw some cool stuff on airplanes when I was in the Navy) if you search on ETech ultracam you will see a lot about that session. With the imagery this camera can produce the Live team built algorithms that allow them to build the 3 dimensional data needed to build the maps that you can see on maps.live.com.

I have a great story about how I discovered that we were producing this type of map\imagery while I was I Devconnections a few years back but you have to buy me a beer or 6 to get it out of me ;).

I know I am just a lowly developer but I due use some administrative tools and I have loved for a long time and continue to use the Sysinternals set of tools. They have just opened up a new way to access there tools from there blog entry (with way too long of a title so I shortened it) Introducing Sysinternals Live Beta:

Sysinternals Live: We're excited to announce the beta of Sysinternals Live, a service that enables you to execute Sysinternals tools directly from the Web without hunting for and manually downloading them. Simply enter a tool's Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname> or view the entire Sysinternals Live tools directory in a browser at http://live.sysinternals.com.

I love it now I can download or just run the apps in a batch file!

I don't know about this offer but it looks like you can get some cash by using Live Search cashback. Let me know if you try this and how it works.

@shanselman pointed out an interesting blog post titled "Building a web app the Microsoft way" where the author Jeremy Baines dose a good job of giving the facts that he and his team found while developing ‘Meet with Approval’. I could not find the case study that was mentioned but that is because the case study site sucks, I will try to find it internally and find the external link.

I know that I have tainted opinion but I don't see why more people\companies\startups don't evaluate the MS stack. From all of the comments only one that I saw was accurate and that is that Windows hosting is quite abit more expensive than LAMP hosting but I think that price will be coming down with the new support we have in Windows Server 2008 for hosters. I also think that a company looking at long term success and would want to look at the cost of self hosting, there are a lot of reasons that Windows for self hosting can be more cost effective but the big one for me is support.

I just mostly successfully upgraded this blog from Das Blog 1.7 to 2.1. The big deal there is now I am running the .NET 2.0 CLR and all the 3.5 components. The only thing I am missing now is with the trust level that GoDaddy supports I can't have the server email anymore. I can't wait until more hosters support virtual private hosting of Windows Server 2008!

I love that now I can work on this site in Visual Studio 2008, I had keep a Virtual Machine with Visual Studio 2005 on it and now I will enjoy reclaiming that hard drive space ;).

If you are going to TechEd this year you should also check out ]inbetween[ my counterpart in Florida Joe Healy AKA devfish and the local Florida community is putting on a great event the weekend between the two weeks of TechEd. I had not wanted to go to TechEd until now but my team is out of budget for T&E for the year so I will have to miss this.

A lot! My two big things are Threaded Text Messaging & Cut, Copy, and Paste on a Non-Touch Screen device :).

The only problem now is Version has not said it would update the Q 9m, looks like it's time to go shopping.

Windows Mobile 6.1 – New Windows Mobile Software for Pocket PC and Smartphone

asp.netPro magazine is looking for feed back as to the best products for developers out there... check it out and lets let the venders know who is on top this year asp.netPRO Readers Choice Awards.

You will now see why we don't do the marking for Microsoft products!

Jason did a killer job editing and setting up the shots for this, good job man!

That's right the Code Trip is coming to Southern California we will be doing some fun events while the bus is here. The bus will be coming from Phoenix to San Diego on the 24th some time in the early evening. We will be keeping the bus at my families winery in Rancho Bernardo (Bernardo Winery) where it will stay  until about 4:30p on the 25th where it will be heading to the San Diego .NET Users Group meeting in Scripps Ranch Library where we will get to hear from Michele Leroux Bustamente and Jon Galloway on SilverLight and WCF. We will have Pizza and a bunch of giveaways!

That night we will be driving to Irvine and staying at the Hyatt next to the Microsoft Office where we will have the next event on the 26th. We will hear from John Bowen about the iZooFari project and David Robinson about SQL Server Data Services. This event is being sponsored by speakTECH!

On the 27th the Code Trip is earning it's pay! We have three event we will be at:

Cal State Fullerton
USC
LA Geek Dinner

At each we will have different things going on so any of them will be a good place to catch us!

On the 28th we have a special party at RedBull planed we will hear again from David Robinson and we will see some cool SilverLight applications but mostly we will be socializing and getting to know other developers in SoCal. Space is quite limited so please register soon!

And finally we will be stopping at Cuesta Community College in San Luis Obispo where we will speak to a few classes and have a community meeting as well.

I hope if you are in SoCal you can make one or more of these events I am sure you will see some new stuff and have a bunch of fun!

I am a D&D fan, the original D&D books were some of the fist non school books reading I ever did. The creator of the original game was Gary Gygax and I found out yesterday that he had died. I did not know what a good tribute to him would be but today from Scott's web site I saw this cartoon from xkcd.

Do you have a big .NET framework poster or some other post showing objects and methods hanging someplace? I do I am a total geek that way but I also thing that it helps to visualize the objects you work with. Well the Office dev group has out done that and created the Office Interactive Developer Map, it's a WPF application that lets you explore the Office object model. Way geeky!

OK maybe not so much but it was kind of spoke to open my copy of the MSDN Flash today and see my own ugly mug staring at me. This was the first time that I submitted content to the Flash news letter so I did not know what to expect (ok so I did not submit it my boss did for me as I was disconnected when this content was due). But from the first day reactions I think I will keep this up, I have received a lot of email from my community and friends saying this is a good thing so look to see my face looking at you if you have customized the Flash for SoCal.

If you are new to this blog (from the Flash or not) welcome, you will note that I am quite inconstant on posting here but I consider it reducing the amount of noise on the web ;).

This is the fist post have done it quite some time, there has been many reasons for this (death in the family, being sick, traveling too much and more excuses) but I will be keeping up some constant blogging for a while if not here that on thecodetrip.com. I am about to get on a "Rock Star" buss with other geeks on my team for a 40 day code trip (d'oh). We will be going all over the western states and talking to people about the latest technology that Microsoft is announcing at MIX 08 in Las Vegas. We will have a lot of activities in the places we will visit and we will be posting a lot of content to the web site. If you want to know what we are up to go to the web site and subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you have anything you would like to see in future issues of the SoCal edition of the flash please let me know but the lead time is quite long 2 to 3 weeks so let me know sooner than later!

I had not seen this until today but if you want to have an online meeting with up to 15 people here is a great way to do it. It's almost like LiveMeeting but free!

Microsoft SharedView Beta

I found this way too funny not to pass on!

UPDATE: looks like there a some "issues" with the photos used in this video so YouTube has removed this video but for now you can still see it here. If you want to know the issue around the content Scott Beals has a good blog post about here.

UPDATE #2: The video is back up on YouTube, I don't know the back story of it getting back up but I changed my link above to link to it again.

Lynn (my local counter part) did a great blog post about the Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest that I put on on Wednesday night in Irvine, CA. It was a hot night (no I am serous the air conditioning could not keep up) but much fun was had!

Thank you to all the user groups in SoCal for getting there members out to the event, I am just sorry we did not have more room, we could have had double the people if we had more room.

I hope to have more events in late January and early February.

Contagious Curiosity : Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest - Irvine, CA

The Expression team just released the Dec Preview if Blend 2 to see what's new check out the teams blog to download go here.

I was at SliverLight training all last week with a group of Developer Evangelists and we could not stop laughing about the xkcd.com comic below. I know it's way geeky but wow I had no idea how geeky, after half an hour of trying to explaining it to my wife it finally sunk in just how geeky.

I have not read the entire document yet (I will save that for the flight home today) but this is an interesting report. This shows why I have a job, MS has made huge investments in security at all levels but the worlds perception is that we still are not secure, my job to help show the world what the investments we have made mean for users of our products.

Download the report here: Internet Explorer and Firefox Vulnerability Analysis

For a lot of ASP.NET developers this may not seam like a big deal but for cgi users out there this is huge! With FastCGI the windows platform is now a first class citizen for cgi applications. Now PHP developers have a wider choice of platforms. And from a ASP.NET developers perspective now that have away to add functionally or migrate functionally to a more structured environment.

Details on the www.iis.net web site download from there as well.

The Visual Studio partner team has put together a resource DVD with products and information from over 90 Visual Studio partners. It’s loaded with more than 100 add-ins and packages—full and trial versions. You’ll get tools, languages, and components that can help you develop applications for Windows®, Web services, and mobile devices.

From these examples you can find out just how flexible & extendable Visual Studio is. 

You can order their own DVD, free of charge, at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend/partnerdvd/

Yep today, Steve Ballmer at the the Web 2.0 Summit announced that Popfly has moved from closed alpha to open beta! So now go fourth and mash!

If you have not looked at Popfly check out the overview info about with and the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (for the new JavaScript editing) you can build some fun "blocks" of functionality.

OK this may and only may be going a bit too far but I love it!

The best thing you'll see today: John P. Harvard goes Halo - Joystiq

Last night I got to be the local lead for the Halo 3 launch event in the SoCal Irvine office and WOW what I hot event! OK that was a reference to the non-existent air conditioning but event with no air conditioning every one had a blast. We had 6 XBoxes running Halo 3 and one running Garter Hero. 130 people from all parts of SoCal (San Diego, Santa Monica and further) lots of good gammier food (pizza, chips, candy etc.). At one point we had one team of 4 get ganged up on by two other teams because they were just too good :).

I have posted some pictures on flickr with the tag "halo3irvine" check them out and please add your own if you have some.

I would like to point out this event was a huge effort and all I had to do was setup the local hardware and host the event. Many many people (Erin, Jason, Yesenia, Scott, Matt, Jas, Shaina and Chris) made this event happen you all are the reason that working here is so much fun!

Anyone up for a geek diner in Honolulu? I happen to be going to Honolulu to give a talk on Windows Mobile development to the Hawaii Telecommunications Association conference. The local .NET users group will not be meeting while I am there so we are getting together for a geek dinner on October 10th at 6pm at Compadres Bar & Grill if you can go please go to upcoming and let us know you are coming. There are only 40 seats available.. It's simple, RSVP yes, show up, eat, drink, pay for your stuff, meet awesome people, have great conversations and a great time!

I hope to see all the local geeks there!

While at a resent team offsite Anand Iyer said it was legal to make a left on red at a one-way and while I took my drivers education along time ago and in a different state I thought for sure there had been a big stick about this... Alas I was wrong and Anand found the answer on the DMZ site Laws and Rules of the Road - TURNS.

OK I work for Microsoft but I don't work at Microsoft because it's a great place to work... Wait what did he just say? That is correct I don't work for Microsoft because it's a great place to work... It is a great place to work but like any place there are frustrations and issues but what keeps me going is one simple reason! The value proposition of the software Microsoft makes. The problem we (Microsoft) as a company has is that we use way too many ways to try to describe this but finally we have a resource that lays this out for developers quite well.

Check out the Why learn about .NET you will find some of the arguments about why developers should consider .NET for their next project and it lays out some good resources for them get started with.

We just now need more resources that talk about how and why rest of out products save time and money. For a start you can go to the Compare site on Microsoft.com.

Are you going to the Central Coast Code Camp on September 22nd & 23rd and coming from San Diego or LA? Well I am and I have decide to take the train up. It's a long ride but can be fun.

On 9/21/2007 I will be taking the Amtrak:

Pacific Surfliner #763 from Oceanside (7:02 am) to Los Angeles - Union Station (8:50)
Coast Starlight #14 from Los Angeles - Union Station (10:15 am) to San Luis Obispo (3:30 pm)

I will be hanging out in the Sightseer car (the big glass bubble).

And on 9/24/2007 I will be taking the Amtrak:

Pacific Surfliner #774 from San Luis Obispo (6:45 am) to Oceanside (2:13 pm)

I just found out that Microsoft has just opened the beta of the Sky Drive service on Live.com. For free you get 500meg of storage, you can install an ActiveX component so you can drag and drop files. I love having some storage that I can access easily, while this service dose not have an API to it I hope we will get that soon.

By the way if you are looking for more space, a better client and better integration for a backup solution check out Elephantdrive they have a cool client that will keep files and\or folders that you specify backed up.

My good buddy Stephen Rose was the guest on the latest RunAs Radio show... well worth the time to tine in!

Last night I go to present to the San Diego Small Business Server User Group on PowerShell and IIS7. I had a great time, the group is extremely diverse group. We had a scheduling conflict with the San Diego SharePoint Users Group and I had to ask the SBS group to use a smaller room in the San Diego office and they were great about it, we had about 20 people packed in to the room and no complaints.

The slides I used are here as a pdf file. I am looking forward to doing more with this group.

all the links in the slides are below:
For PowerShell

Newsgroup:  Microsoft.Public.Windows.PowerShell
Channel 9 tag:  http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Monad
Team blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell/
Marc van Orsouw’s blog:  http://ThePowerShellGuy
Wiki:  http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.WindowsPowerShellWiki
Script Center:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
O’Reilly book – Monad:  Introducing the MSH Command Shell and Language
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/msh/
Manning Press book by Bruce Payette: PowerShell in Action
http://manning.com/powershell/
Sapien Press book by Don Jones: PowerShell
http://www.sapienpress.com/
PowerShellAnalyzer tool
http://www.karlprosser.com/coder/?cat=8

For II7

Web site: http://www.iis.net
GoLive: http://www.iis.net/goLive
Developers: http://www.iis.net/developer

I was on a hunt for what Longhorn will bring and found this document titled Changes in Functionality from Windows Server 2003 with SP1 to Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" you can get it for your offline or online pleasure.

While I am mostly interested in PowerShell and IIS7 on Longhorn you can see from all the changes that there has been a huge investment in this release. I can even see me moving to Longhorn as my desktop OS soon.

Well I did it I got pewitt.org off webhost4life.com and now have it hosted at godaddy.com my buddy Tim heuer uses them and recommended then quite strongly. It was a bit of a bad day on Wednesday when I was going through all t