Day 1 went fairly smoothly at TechEd.  A few of the sessions were jammed so had to be repeated at the end of the day - JB's SQL session in particular.

The food is excellent, the venue is ok and doesn't seem to packed.  A couple of the rooms - particularly at the Crown Plaza could do with some more oxygen - especially after lunch!  I noticed a few nodding heads at one session (including my own).

Keynote

Ross Peat (MS MD NZ) introduced the day and did the usual speel.  He did announce a new incubator sponsorship for 100 small companies of $NZ 3.5M. 

Ian McDonald and friends did a quick overview of new stuff coming soon - SQL05, VS05 yada yada.

The best thing about the keynote?  It was short.  Only 1 hour.  I much prefer this format - no glitz or glam, just the facts.

Sessions

I had planned to attend a lot of Architecture sessions and I did the first one on Team System with Michael Leworthy on internals and configuration.  Michael certainly knows his stuff - as you would hope - and the session gave me a bit more confidence to fiddle with methodology schemas.  There will be a new tool available at RTM to make this easier but at the moment it's notepad.

Michael was also using a later release of VSTS than Beta 2.  Some of the new stuff may be in the the last CTP (June/July?) which I'm note yet using.  I particularly like the new Team Build output page.  This is a big improvement over Beta 2.

I also went to the start of the second TFS session presented by Prashant Sridaran but left after 10 minutes.  It was an overview of VSTS which I have seen a million times already - bad choice.

I then attended a session on Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) with Ari Bixhorn.  Ari is a great speaker and is always very popular.  Indigo is something I know I will use but I've been avoiding it as much as possible as I know it will be a big distraction.  However, a couple of my colleagues also attended this session and are very keen to do something with it so it looks like I'll probably make the leap and risk a few more bleeding edge wounds.  For my next project...

I also did a session on ASP.Net Themes, Master Pages etc.  I've seen some of this before but the demos were excellent and glued the whole thing together very well.

People

The best part of TechEd is always all the interesting people you meet.  So far I've bumped into (shamless name dropping in no particular order) Alex James, Dave Dunstan, Brent Clark, Greg Low, Adam Cogan, Rod Drury (and yes, I tried the Segway), Nic Wise, Chris Auld, Kirk Jackson, Kurt Mudford, Lukas Svoboda... um, probably lots of others I can't recall right now.

Tuesday is party day so I'll try and pace myself, but don't expect a great post afterwards.

 

I've been trying to use different tools to post to this blog.  Others have reccommended BlogJet, which I have tried on 2 machines at work (and get Access Violations or proxy problems) and my notebook.

It works fine from my notebook but I really want to be able to post images and BlogJet uses FTP to do this.  Problem is, it always tries to create the directory and can't.  It won't seem to use an existing directory.

Has anyone else got this working with dasBlog or can reccommend something else that works?  I don't mind paying (unusual for me!)

I've upgraded to dasBlog 1.8.  Wasn't too painful and it seems to be working well enough.  Not exactly sure what has changed yet but it hasn't fixed one small bug I have.  When I click Add Entry, I always get an error on the first click and it always works the second time.

I've been very slack with my posting lately but hopefully that will all change next week.  I'm off to Auckland tommorow for TechEd on Monday and I hope to be able to post details of the sessions I'm attending as often as possible - or at least a summary at the end of each day.

I don't have to earn my keep this year  so I'll be doing as many sessions as I can handle.  I've picked mostly Architecture sessions but also a few developer sessions.  I'm particularly interested in Team System (surprise surprise!), SQL 05 and Indigo.

If you happen to be attending too then make sure you pop into the MSDN Connection Lounge and say hi.  I'll be there as often as I can, along with fellow NZ .Netters such as Kurt, Kirk, Chris, Nic and others.

I don't like politicians.  Especially at election time. My normal approach is that, within reason, it makes f-all difference who is in power so vote as irrationally/emotionally as you like - you get screwed either way. 

However, after looking www.taxcuts.co.nz, I figure I'd be $10k a year better off with National than Labour.

Flip-flop-Don is not such a bad chap really - he's just a little indecisive.  But aren't we all?

I'm using the new ToolStrip and ToolStripContainer in our VS05 application and it looks hot!  However, I've had a lot of trouble getting the toolstips to behave and stay where I want them in design mode.

This morning I discovered that using the Document Outline works really well for moving stuff around on your winforms.  Now it all looks sweet.

A word of warning.  In VS 05, if you REMOVE a project from a solution, it actually get's deleted from disk and Team System Source Control.  Thank [insert your devine being here] for Undo Pending Changes!

The NZ .Net User Groups have launched a competition for the Blog of the Year.  See details here:  http://www.dot.net.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=78.  But, you can't vote for me - that would be dodgy - as I'm counting the votes!

Update: Voting is going pretty well - there was close to 400 votes last night, but only 150 unique votes - hitting the vote link 77 times in a row is sort of obivous!

This is one of those Friday afternoon problems.

In my 2005 Winforms client I have a nice fancy splash screen that displays the current version - 3.0.0.0 (yes, this is the 3rd version but the 1st .Net version) - which it retrieves from Application.ProductVersion.  Under the covers, ProductVersion is actually just AssemblyFileVersion from assemblyinfo.vb/cs.

Now, I wanted to have this auto increment the build number.  In VS03, you do something like this: [assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("3.0.0.*")] and the asterix is replaced with the next version on each build.  Well this didn't work.  All I got was "Version 3.0.0.*" in the splash screen.

Ok, fair enough, probably a beta issue or there is another way of doing it I'm not aware of.

HOWEVER, when I tried to exit the app, it crashed trying to save Properties.Settings.Default.  It said there was an invalid character in the file path.  Of course, there was an hour between these two issues so it took me a few minutes but eventually I figured that the version number is used in the settings file name.  Removing the asterix solved this problem.

FYI

I don't want to burst anyones bubble here, but I think there's a lot of people under the impression that SQL 05 & VS 05 are going to be released on November 7th.  From everything I've seen announced, this is the LAUNCH date, not the RELEASE date - they could be quite seperate things.  At the very least, I wouldn't expect to see DVD's/CD's in your mail box before December. 

But then, I could be wrong... and it wouldn't be the first time.

I have a DataGridView where I allow users to type in cell values, but I only want upper case.  To do this, you need to capture the control as it's being created and assign a KeyPress handler.  E.g:

    private void MyGrid_EditingControlShowing(object sender, DataGridViewEditingControlShowingEventArgs e)
    {
      if (e.Control is DataGridViewTextBoxEditingControl)
      {
        e.Control.KeyPress += new KeyPressEventHandler(Control_KeyPress);
      }
    }

    void Control_KeyPress(object sender, KeyPressEventArgs e)
    {
      e.KeyChar = e.KeyChar.ToString().ToUpper()[0];
    }

Of course, you can extend this further to do all sort of things, but if your requirements are complex then it's probably advisable to create your own custom column.

I like IE7, it's clean and fast and seems pretty stable.  HOWEVER, Work Item Tracking in Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite does not like it.  It causes VS to crash.

Luckily it uninstalls nicely and restores IE 6 as it was, so no harm done.