I found out that I should be speaking at the DevConnections show this fall.  The show is being held in Las Vegas again, November 5–8th.  I apologize to anybody that had hoped to see me present last month in Orlando at the spring show – I was unfortunately out of the country due to circumstances beyond my control (but which ...

As part of my automated build and test process, I wanted to be able to confirm that my third party components were the proper version and, more importantly, that they were fully licensed.  For some components, I can create a new instance of the control or component and test its IsLicensed property.  For others, the assembly itself is ...

Plasma is an ASP.NET in-memory web server emulator that can be used for ASP.NET unit testing or automation.  Its initial codebase was written by Microsoft and its current incarnation is a community project licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License.  I’ve been working on the project with several others and have just put the ...

Got back home last night from DevConnections in Las Vegas.  It was a very good show this year in terms of content, products being launched, and numbers of attendees and exhibitors.  I think I had more people in my sessions than usual, too, and they all went well (i.e. the demos worked, nobody threw tomatoes at me). The keynote on Monday ...

I only mentioned the Made In Express Contest a few minutes ago and now I see there is a contest for Microsoft Atlas, their new AJAX / Web 2.0 framework. You have a chance to win an XBOX 360 premium and Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones! What is it? This contest is all about creating awesome Mash-up applications using “Atlas” technology. Nothing ...

ASP.NET now supports something called Web Deployment Projects, which are an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 that is currently still in beta.  You can download the installer from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wdp/ I recently took them for a spin with a site of mine.  The key benefit I was after was the ...

Every now and then some high profile personality, perhaps one who once had close ties to Microsoft, about how .NET is really a total failure.  How it's clear that it isn't going anywhere.  That, as proof of these assertions, Microsoft cannot even manage to use it for its own products, so why should we?  Personally I think these ...

I had to buy a new box to install Team Foundation Server -- apparently it just won't work on my old Dell Inspiron laptop from around 2001 (P3, 866Mhz).  Seems it requires at least a P4 2.2GHz.  The complete system requirements can be found in the latest Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Installation Guide.  I also found this TFS ...

I gave a presentation on Visual Studio Team System last night to about 30 students at Wayne State University in Detroit.  I don’t think it was one of my better presentations, for a number of reasons, which I’ll lament here and attempt to improve in the future. First off, this was an earlier presentation than most of the INETA ...

I've recently been learning more about code snippets in VS 2005, and I've found some nice resources online.  Basically, if you haven't done anything with Code Snippets, they are a simple, extensible way for you to perform a relatively complex task within the IDE with just a few keystrokes.  For example, let's say you want to write a ...