Random .NET Ramblings

@ritzy is not going to like this post but?

After the ASP.NET User Group the other night I went and had dinner with Mark Rosenberg and Tim McCarthy and I asked Tim if he was planning on attending PDC. The surprising answer I got was ?No why would I? I can get so much content online that I don?t need to take the time or spend the money to go to conferences any more.? (ok that is not an exact quite but it was close) he also pointed out that all the content from PDC will be available on line soon after a given session is done. Well now we have yet more ways to learn on line with The Channel 9 Learning Center from the site:

The Channel 9 Learning Center is the destination for free technical training on emerging Microsoft products and technologies. The Learning Center consists of a set of courses with each course including a set of videos, hands-on labs, and source code samples to get you up-to-speed quickly.

So if you are in to the bleeding edge stuff here is where you can get information about what Microsoft is up to.

Last night I was able to present to the San Diego ASP.NET Users Group about Visual Studio 2010 and after some difficulties in downloading the Beta 2 the day before I was able to show the latest Beta.

On the cool factor I think the editor Zoom was a hit and many of the new debug features were also a big hit. If you were there let me know what your best feature you saw was. There was just not enough time to go through everything, I did not get to show some of the cool demos around ASP.NET and site deployment. I have posted my slides to SildeShare and embedded to below but for more information checkout The 10-4 Show on Channel9 and the VS 2010 / .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit.

Your crazy! Please please please stop it? it hurts for me to say that but it?s true. I have a long history with Visual Source Safe starting with it when it was a One Tree Software product and it rocked but we must recall this was 1992 or so when I started using it. Now it is so easy to get much better source control software there is little excuse for still using VSS.

And now we have announced a great alternative to VSS it?s TFS (Team Foundation Server). Yes I am hiding under my desk right now as I expect every one is about to throw something at me but let me explain. In TFS 2010 the team has made some big strides in how easy it is to setup and maintain. For full details you should read Brian Harry blog post on the subject TFS 2010 for SourceSafe Users the rest of his blog is pretty good as well ;).

Just in time for my presentation to the San Diego ASP.NET group tomorrow we have released the second beta to MSDN subscribers today and everyone can get it on the 21st.

Go get it! Visual Studio Beta 2 Page 

Microsoft Security Essentials was released a few days ago, it will help protect consumers against viruses, spyware and other malicious software. This comes from the work we have done with Forefront product family for corporate users so it?s quite robust. I had my father running the beta for quite some time now and he enjoyed the experience.

It?s about time we did this but I know we are going to have some major push back from other antivirus venders. The major players have a lot of other features to there products so they will still have customer demand and we have talked about this for some time so they would have had to be asleep at the wheal if they did not know this was coming.

Let me know what you think I would suggest uninstalling what ever antivirus product you have and then install Microsoft Security Essentials.