This weekend, Sept. 30 – Oct. 1st, I’ll be in then land of Beer, Cheese and Sausage (a cardiologist’s dream) to attend my first BarCamp – BarCamp Milwaukee. Althought it sounds like an barfly’s dream vacation it’s actually a gathering of technical and creative people to discuss topics and share in ideas that are interesting to them. It’s my first BarCamp and I’m not quite sure what to expect. Especially since these types of events typically pull in people from outside of Microsoft-land. But that’s exactly why I want to go. I want to see what’s beyond the “Vista” – the horizon if you will. I consider myself a technologist and I’m always interested in talking with people about cool technology. I happen to believe Microsoft has some cool technology and that’s exactly why I’m in the job that I am – becauseit’s my job to talk about Microsoft’s cool technology.

Anyhow, the idea behind BarCamp is to bring these people together and to figure out the agenda once you get there. I will be attending with one of my fellow evangelists, Krishna Kumar, were we plan to have sessions from XNA Game Studio Express to .NET Development to “Microsoft: How can we suck less?”. The last session is kind of tongue in cheek but I’m highly interested in learning from others how Microsoft can improve. What do you have against Microsoft? I really want to know. Some of the claims are on the money while others are clearly off the mark. I want to make sure I clear up those “off the mark” claims as best as I can.

I always thought BarCamps were purely focused on technology, but by the looks of some of the pre-planned session ideas, thesediscussions are all over the map. Here’s a sampling…

Videoblogging

Podcasting 101

Microformats

Democracy in Ancient Athens: Organization and Technology

Thermonuclear Fusion; a possible reactor design

Thinklets: Cognitive tools to improve thinking effectiveness

Ruby On Rails: Introduction

Online Photo Sharing in The Age of Folksonomies

This is a pretty eclectic mix but I can promise you that there will certainly be some discussion on the technology development side.

If you plan on coming out to BarCamp Milwaukee, be sure to look me up. I’d be more than happy to meet you.

Tag: barcampmilwaukee

My Bad…I thought when I moved to Community Server that I enabled comments once again. I was wrong. Now, they’re back – so comment away!

Today is my one-year anniversary as a Microsoft employee. Wow! Where the hell did that year go??? It’s been a blast. I’ve had the chance to work with some really great people and to experience many differnt things. This past year has been filled with many adventures and I look forwad to the adventures to come.

Here’s a recap of some of the events from the past year…

Coming Up For Air

Chicago: Visual Studio Launch

Vegas, Baby, Vegas

World Tour 2006

Microsoft Web Dev Summit – Day 1, Day 2, Wrap-up

In conjunction with the VS2005 SP1 Beta release, Microsoft is announcing the release of the Team Foundation Server SP1 Beta. The TFS team has learned quite a bit over the past several months as our customers are deploying TFS across the globe. With that knowledge, the TFS team has not only provided fixes in SP1 but new ehnacements as well. Brian Harry has posted an extensive list but I’ll paraphrase here…

• Version Control, WorkItem Tracking and Datawarehouse performance/scale improvements
  
  
• “Extranet Support” – the ability to access TFS without requiring VPN access.
  
  
• WIT Custom Control support – work item forms that host custom controls. This is cool!
  
  
• Support for Office 2007 product line (excluding SharePoint 2007) – now that Office 2007 is getting closer to ship date, the team has made the necessary ehancements to support TFS/Office integration.
  
  
• Extended merge detail history – providing additional details on merge operations to help track your changes more effectively.
  
  
• Ability to deploy the SQL Analysis Services Server outside of TFS server

The TFS team is doing a great job on continually adding features that will benefit our customers. A few of these enhancements have been determined from our internal dogfooding efforts whereothers have been generated by customer feedback. See… Microsoftreally does listen to it’s customers and it shows in efforts such as this.

Since releasing in November 2005, Visual Studio 2005 has taken some lumps on stability issues, some founded, others unfounded. Today, Microsoft hopes to eleveate those issues by announcing the release of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta. VS2005 SP1incorporate fixes that have been addressed since ship date and include the following types of fixes.

The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates released between Visual Studio 2005 Release to Market and the end of the Service Pack customer beta period.

Any fixes addressing security issues categorized by the Microsoft Security Response Center as “Critical”, “Important” or “Moderate”.

Fixes for product reliability and stability issues, including those reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center, and the crashes most frequently reported via Watson.

Fixes for common “eligible” functional issues reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center. “Eligible” functional issues are those that do not require breaking changes, architectural changes, or Design Change Request level feature work and that do not create unacceptable product quality risk and/or cost of implementation.

Fixes for the top customer and supportability issues as reported by Customer Support Services.

The beta period ends October 30, 2006. To sign up, be sure to fill out the nomination form.