Summer News Items
High school football practice has started, the wife is buying school supplies, Microsoft employees are on vacation all over - which means, summer is almost gone. However, just because we're in the summer doldrums, Microsoft is not slowing down. In this post, I want to point out a few things that have caught my attention lately.
First, I want to send THANKS to the Memphis PMI Chapter for hosting me and listening to my talk on Microsoft's approach to ALM. They had an audience of 80, and the group was lively. I'll add in a few links below based on the talk that I gave on Tuesday night.
Consider some interesting items from the summer:
- SQL 2008 released this week
- VS2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 due out soon. Better check out the additions to .NET 3.5 as they are numerous.
- Microsoft "Mojave" O/S first looks
- IE8 Beta2 comes out this month. Accelerators and Web Slices are cool!
- "Velocity", for those who have ASP.NET web farms
- Live Mesh Tech Preview. This is just cool, and keep an eye on the additions.
- New SharePoint UG starting in Memphis, SEPT 9th, 4PM, New Horizons, Click to register
- You've heard of Surface, but what about Sphere (see the video)?
- Just ran across this site, Expression Community site
- Microsoft joins the APACHE organization (really, no joke)
- PDC event happens in late OCT, and will have some big announcements. Just check out the session list.
Visual Studio Team System Resources:
- Home Site
- About VSTS
- VSTS Virtual Labs
- Wikipedia site
- TeamSystemRocks, a community site
- How Do I Videos for Visual Studio Team Suite 2008
- How Do I Videos for Team Foundation Server
And here's a new thing that I just learned - not sure how I missed it. Did you know that if you press Windows key and the "1" key, the first application on the Quick Launch will fire. Pressing Windows+2 makes the second Quick Launch app fire, etc., etc. So, for me, Windows+1 fires up VS, Windows+2 starts IE8, etc. I haven't tried this on earlier O/S's, plus I'm only running Windows Vista.
