Random .NET Ramblings

If you are going to the PDC in LA this year or just if you are going to be in town the day before and want to lean Windows 7 Kernel and architectural improvements, new shell integration points and a bunch more (sensors, location, multitouch, graphics libraries ho my) then you should no need to signup for the Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp! Yes a FREE pre-PDC workshop that will start on Nov 16th 10am through 5:45pm with a lunch break. All you need to do is register for PDC and select "pre-conference workshop only" as your registration type and when you get to the workshop selection page of the registration form, you'll be able to pick the Windows 7 bootcamp as a free item. (yes I said free again) w00t!

Yes we have another spark program at Microsoft but this one is quite different so for review we have had BizSpark for software startups and DreamSpark for students. WebsiteSpark is for small web developers and design companies\shops and yes there is free developer and designer tools and free training resources but the BIG deal with this program is that we are building a tool that will let participating shops get found and get business leads! Yes Microsoft will help find WebsiteSpark participants work! If you are interested in the program you can signup at the WebsiteSpark site or let me know you are interested and I can send you an invitation.

Also check out scottgu talk about the program on Channel9 Scott Guthrie: Introducing WebsiteSpark and Web Platform Installer, Web App Gallery RTM.

If you have ever wanted to see where a  Microsoft team blogs check out this list of blogs by products groups BlogMS - Official Microsoft Team Blogs : Official Microsoft Team Blogs / Microsoft Blogs thanks to whoever runs this blog because as strange as it seams there is no inclusive list of MS blogs.

As is often the case I start to write a bog entry only to find there are many great resource on the web already about what I was going to write about. This time I found the three great resources.

• From MSDN Magazine: Introducing Libraries
• From Code MSDN: Windows 7 Libraries: Developer Resources
• From the Windows Blog:
  • Windows 7 Libraries .NET Sample Library ? an Overview
  • Understanding Windows 7 Libraries

I had the pleasure of once again being a guest on the "Java with John" show on computeroutlook.com. John had several emails from his audience from the last time I was on there talking about Windows 7. While we were doing the show, I got the idea that a lot of what we were talking about would be just a little more than abstract for a radio show... So I offered to make some videos that showed off the features we talked about. I have the videos for Libraries and the Problem Steps Recorder completed today and I will get the videos for Windows Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop Access finished soon.

Windows 7 Libraries

Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder

For more information about Libraries see the Libraries topic of the Windows 7 Features site and for more information about the Problem Steps Recorder see the ?How do I use Problem Steps Recorder? topic in the Windows 7 site. There is some information that developers will need to know about Libraries but that will have to be a different post.

I have migrated my blog from dasblog to BlogEngine.NET and wow was that easy. I found several blog entries from others about doing it and I just fallowed along. I did hit a small snag in the blogML importing in to blogengine.net and I had to tweak a line in the BlogImporter class where the post.DateModified was set there was some code that was breaking so I just set it to import.PostDate and bam all my old posts were in. I want back in the current branch and this fix was already posed but it?s not correct in the 1.5 final code.

So the big question why did I move to new blog software? Well dasblog is great I have been running to for years but the themes implementation is just not that easy to work with and I can?t create pages off my blog. So how did I decide on BlogEngine.NET? to be honest I cam close to going to Wordpress as part of my new job is to know the PHP on Windows experience but I just could not do it. The coding paradigms in BlogEngine.NET are just too familiar (I know I was chicken).

So with the new blog comes a new theme, I will hopefully be getting some more images for the top header soon and I want to be a more up-to-date head shot here as well.

Let me know what you think!

This is just in time to save my bacon SQL Azure Migration Wizard I have had access to the Azure SQL cluster for a while but I just did not want to face the task of converting my local SQL databases to work in Azure. I have yet to use this tool but I will play with it in the next few days and post about how it works out.

Microsoft (ok David Treadwell) announced in the blog post Important Updates to Live Services that we will be making Live Framework CTP, Contacts Control (JavaScript) and CTP Tools/ASP.NET Controls unavailable. I hate this because it takes the developer Live Mesh offline but it shows that some development is going on the Mesh concept and at PDC we will learn more about what the Live team is up to. I don’t think this will impact the public Live Mesh but you should get any data you care about out of it just incase.