The Boston Code Camp 9 is over and done with. It was a great two day event and kudos to Chris, Chris and all the presenters that put their time and effort into making this an excellent happening!

Here are the two presentations from the session that I did:

If you're interested in playing around and testing VSTS 2008 and TFS 2008, but don't want to waste too much time getting the software installed? Good news! The trial Virtual PC images have been updated! Download your play area right here.

The image will not expire until December 31st 2008.

"This virtual machine is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP2. It contains a full installation of Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Build 2008, Team Explorer 2008, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and all necessary prerequisites. In addition, it has been updated with Office 2007 SP1, current Windows Updates as of March 25, 2008, and the December Release of the TFS Power Tools. Team Foundation Server is installed in workgroup authentication mode and thus does not require a domain controller. "

The Bangor Area .NET Developers are meeting tonight at the Hampton Inn, Bangor (directions).

Converting VB6 Apps to .NET – Eric Burdo

You feel stuck in VB6 land...there is all this .NET stuff people are talking about.  You know you want to get there, but what does it take?  Eric will show you!  Come learn how to make the jump from VB6 to .NET and find out some of the pros and cons to converting your older apps.

Plus there's a random drawing for your own wireless desktop (keyboard and mouse), among other cool door prizes!

If you haven't done so already: Register For This Gig.

Today is a good day for a laugh... I love this one.

Chris just posted the schedule for Boston Code Camp 9!

Go to: http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2008/03/28/code-camp-9-the-schedule.aspx.

See you next week!

I've blogged before about the availability of design specs on the next version of Visual Studio Team System. Well, another group of Rosario specs have been recently published on the Rosario Specs website:

·         TFS Bug Submission Portal

·         Send Mail from TFS

·         Work Item Tracking Linking

If you feel like participating visit the spec discussion forum.

Since I was looking at books today anyway I thought I'd research what is available C# 3.0, I haven't read any of these yet, but check them out:

A friend of mine asked me about what book I'd recommend for learning Windows Communication Foundation.

I've read 'Learning WCF' from Michele Leroux Bustamante and think it's great and I still use it as reference material.

The Boston Code Camp 9 "I Came, I Saw, I Coded" will be held on April 5th and 6th at Microsoft New England District: 201 Jones Rd, 6th Floor, Waltham MA USA.

There are over 50 sessions planned (http://www.thedevcommunity.org/Events/PresentationList.aspx?id=6) and I will be presenting on two topics:

Building a State Machine Workflow
Workflow Foundation offers 2 types of workflows, sequential and state machine. This presentation walks through the process of building an application using a State Machine workflow, including state design, state transitions, data exchange services and handling external events.

Building applications with logic
This session presents a view on how datasets and business logic can be organized to build a working application.
Use basic architectural patterns to enable team development and improve maintainability of your sources.

Hope to see you there!

The 22nd of April the Maine Developer Network is organizing a Geek Lunch. We'll be meeting at the State of Maine offices in Augusta to listen to Chris Bowen present on LINQ & Language Improvements in C# 3.0/VB 9.

Pizza will be provided and attendance is free and open for everyone!

More info and RSVP here.

My article for the Software Developer Network Magazine has been printed in the magazine. If you don't receive the magazine you can read the article here.

Slowly but surely more website are starting to support CardSpace. I’ve recently blogged about using Cardspace in conjunction with an OpenID from MyOpenID.com to log on to http://dev.aol.com/. Just the other day I discovered that that my hosting provider has started a beta program allowing me to sign on to my website’s control panel using CardSpace. Never one to shy away from a beta program I gave it a swirl.

After logging in to the website using my regular username/password I proceeded to my account page. Here a new button has been added ‘Bind card to account’, after clicking the button the CardSpace cardselector on my Vista machine opened up and I was allowed to select a card. Press OK and all was good. Time for a little test. Log out of the website. Then go back to the logon page and now instead of using my username/password I can use my CardSpace card to logon. And sure enough it worked!

Next came the real test. Since I also have DiscountASP hosting the website for our user group (Maine Developer Network) I tried to logon to this account using my CardSpace card. While doing so I discovered that this did not work. I could not bind the same card to two different accounts. I had to dive in a little deeper, but soon discovered this not to be a limitation of CardSpace, but rather, the website does not support multiple accounts to one card.
The way to solve this would be to implement an account selector which would become available after logging using the CardSpace card. The same would be true if DiscountASP would support OpenID. Then one ID would have to be attached to multiple accounts.

Moral of the story: We’re a long way away from the ‘one ID to rule them all’. There is more to it than replacing your username/password validation with an OpenID or CardSpace control. You will have to reconsider the relationship between user accounts and your customer.

Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 is offering a DataGrid out of the box. Kathy Kam has a a great sample app showing off all the controls in Silverlight and providing you with a view of the underlying XAML.

Haven't installed Silverlight 2.0 yet? It'll install automatically, but you will have to restart the browser (at least, I had to).

The next version of Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server is codenamed "Rosario". No formal release date has been made public yet, but if you want to see and participate in upcoming features, then check out the spec-share page on MSDN: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb936702.aspx.

Just a quick reminder to all who haven't RSVP-ed yet: the Maine Developer Network user group meeting this Friday is still on.

The weather forecast for Friday looks good. So hope to see you all there!

Topic
An introduction to Unit Test, Test-Driven Development and Mock Objects As software development projects grow over the course of months and years, it can be increasingly difficult to manage quality and consistency. With the help of Visual Studio 2005, Test-Driven Development (TDD) can be used with very little effort to insure constant, high-quality code is written during the lifetime of your projects. In addition, you'll see how to create and use mock objects to logically separate development efforts on different tiers of your application to prevent blocking issues.

Speaker
Speaker will be Russ Nemhauser.
Russ Nemhauser is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and a Microsoft Certified Professional, and has served as an Architect, Developer, Team Leader, and Project Manager over the past several years. His projects have included enterprise applications, online commerce sites, and corporate intranets for Wall Street, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Seagram, and others. Russ actively participates in the development community, speaking at several conferences and user groups each year. He also writes for several technical magazines and industry web sites.

On Friday the 28th of March 2008 the Software Developer Network in the Netherlands will host the 'Expedition 2008' Software Developer Event.

Below is an overview of the sessions. For more information and registration go to: http://www.sdn.nl/Default.aspx?tabid=280

Sessions

On Gert 'data dude' Drapers blog there is the announcement for Power Tools for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition.

Features include:

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is now available as a download on Microsoft MSDN Subscription Downloads.

For the release notes, see http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/4/2/5429cde5-32d4-4e55-bf9a-553111438d86/relnotes.htm.

For an overview of significant changes and improvements, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=107921.

For a list of the hotfixes and security updates included in SP1, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=107922.

I was writing some code today to map online drive and files to a local objecttree. So I created a custom file and directory object and a directory holds subdirectories and files.

Something like this:

public class File
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class Directory
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public List<Directory> SubDirectories { get; set; }
    public List<File> Files { get; set; }
}

Now I wanted to have a method which tells me how many files are in a folder, including all the subfolders. This is essentially a recursive select of the number of files per directory and then the sum of the files.

So I implemented a LINQ statement:

public int GetNumberOfFiles()
{
    int total = ( from dir in SubDirectories
                  select dir.Files.Count ).Sum();
    return total;
}

Now this will only get the sum of the number of files in the directories immediately below the current. Let's add a little recursion:

public int GetNumberOfFiles()
{
    int total = ( from dir in SubDirectories
                  select dir.Files.Count + dir.GetNumberOfFiles() ).Sum();
    return total;
}

Pretty nifty!