Tonight I will get to talk to a class at San Diego State University about how to use Visual Studio to complete a class assignment.

I will do a in class demonstration but I will also show a lot of the free tanning resources Microsoft has for learning the toolset. I hope others can find this information useful.

First Free software!

There are a set of products Microsoft offers for free that will allow students, and hobbyists program on the windows platform. They can be found at the Visual Studio Express home page. There you can download two different types of Visual Studio, one for doing web development and four different ones for doing Windows development. You can also download SQL Server Express.

For the work in this class students will need one of the Windows Development Express products and SQL Server Express. I also suggest that they get the SQL Server Management Studio Express and the Northwind and Pubs sample database.

Now we have an environment to learn with... How about some lessons?

MSDN Virtual Labs

Some of my favorite things that are available are the MSDN Virtual Labs the Virtual Labs are way cool in that you don't need to install any of the above software locally. You will need to have JavaScript enabled, IE6.0 or higher and the Virtual Server VRMC Advanced Control but that is a small price to pay for free hands on training. I was shocked to see that we have not updated all of the labs to Visual Studio 2005 but you and still learn the basics in 2003 and there are labs what is new for Visual Studio 2005.

Learn Visual Studio

The Learn Visual Studio site on MSDN lists other resources available, these include Learning Plans, E-Learning, Classroom Training, Available Books and Exams.

The Learning Plans are quite cool, you identify what type of development you want to learn and Microsoft will show you resources and let you build a custom learning plan.

More Resources

MSDN
MSDN Flash
Future Versions of Visual Studio
CodeZone
San Diego .NET Developer Group
San Diego .NET User Group

Scott Guthrie has posted details of the changes coming to Atlas!

"Atlas" 1.0 Naming and Roadmap

I am sitting in the jury lounge in the San Diego Vista court house hopping not to get on a jury (ok I would not mind it but I need to get back to work after taking two weeks off). While I am waiting for them to get there act together and let me know if I will be put on a jury panel I was checking out the MSDN Virtual Labs site again and I just keep saying WOW! if you have never check it out go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs/ where you will find labs on all types of topics. The best part is that they are 100% hosted labs you don't need to do any install (other then the ActiveX for terminal server).

Some great events are planned for SoCal... 

.NET Masters Series event Saturday, August 19, 2006

Link to So Cal .Net Tech Summit Saturday, September 23

More .NET love can then I can stand! What a great community we have in SoCal!

MSDN has created a wiki site that will allow anyone to post along side of the normal MSDN content. Way cool I hope this takes off, I know I will start submitting code there.

I know wikis can be a bit of a challenge to edit but I think they have done a good job of making as easy as it can be.

http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com

tags: wiki, msdn

I found this picture on flickr...

tags: OCCON06, OCCON2006, Portland

I found this picture on flickr...

tags: OCCON06, OCCON2006, Portland

Here at OSCON they have opened OSCAMP a open space that people can post a topic for a time and anyone who is interested can show up. They have even let people who are not attending the conference to come in and participate. Me and some other people from Microsoft thought we should contribute to this and we posted this as our topic:

Yep it reads (originally) "Why We Suck: Come chat w/Microsoft 7 Tell Us" Tim/Woody@MSFT

We were assailed as soon as we posted this, this is when the topic was "modified" to read "Why Unwitting Agents Suck: Come Chat w/Microsoft" by a guy who we later found out was Jair who refused to identify himself being the ultimate wimp, in my opinion if you make comments anonymously then your comments are not worth making. Yes there is a place and time for anonymity but when someone is threatening to get you fired (yes that is what he did) then you need to take a stand.

Over all at the time today it was a good conversion and I got to see some points of view that I had not considered. I thank all the people who came and wanted to have a good two-sided dialogue.

tags: OSCON, OSCON2006, OSCON+2006, OSCAMP, OSCAMP2006, OSCAMP+2006, Jair

There is going to be a online guided hands-on webcast titled "Creating Managed Applications for Windows Mobile 5.0 Powered Devices"

For more information see the MSDN event site for the event MSDN Webcast: Guided Hands-On: Creating Managed Applications for Windows Mobile 5.0 Powered Devices (Level 200).

This is the first time I have seen this type of training offering offered and am quite interested to see how it is received so please let me know if you attend it.

Yesterday Tim, Jason did a killer road trip from Portland to Seattle so we could attend a meeting of Developer Evangelists from around the world. I always enjoy these types of meetings, there is very few opportunities for me to interact with others that do this job and to say the least it tends to be a "interesting" time.

After the meeting we went to the Microsoft main campus so we could do some downloading (the remote office have crappy connections to the redmond domain). While we were there we found this...

TalkingRain Lemon - Lime Windows Vista water

OK I am going to be a bit inappropriate here...

Jason Mauer took this picture of me pointing to a massive pile of beans as I was saying what to I care I am in Portland and my wife is back home so... beans beans :)

Yesterday I attended the Portland Code Camp all I can say is wow! It was great. I got to do a presentation on the Compact Framework.

There were a whopping 5 people in the room but we had a good walk through my pubsDemo project and we looked at the OrientationAwareControl from the p&p Mobile Client Software Factory. I had an extensive slide deck that I said I would post here but instead I will just list the three URLs that were in it. Before I list them I did want to thank any of you who attended.

• pubsDemo site
• MSDN Mobile Client Software Factory Site
• GotDotNet patterns and practices Mobile Client Software Factory

Pictures:

Water Fountain	Geek Band
The Headliner Band Mars Retrieval Unit	Fun Sprinkler Issues