Steve’s Development Tools Newsletter – January 2011

Visual Studio 2010I receive a lot of email each week from you asking very specific, and valuable questions.  It’s my hope that a newsletter like this will help me communicate important announcements, tips/tricks, and other items to help you and your team ultimately be more successful!  Whenever I post a new newsletter, I will send email notifications to those of you who would like to be contacted.  If you don’t want to receive email notifications, just let me know!

Announcements

First of all, Happy New Year!  I hope everyone enjoyed there holidays, and that the chaos of work allowed you to do so!

We have a new member on our team!  Michael Palermo (https://www.palermo4.com/) is our newest Developer Evangelist based in Phoenix.  I encourage you to say hello the next time you see him at a local event.

When you get a chance, check out Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta.  It includes all sorts of cool stuff like Unit Testing against .NET 3.5, SharePoint, IIS Express, etc.

There’s a new book out covering the Build engine in 2010.  Take a look on Amazon here.

Have you confused yourself when trying to customize a build in TFS 2010?  The new TFS Build Activities reference on MSDN should help!

Events & Training

There are still seats available for the remaining Build & Brew events around the West!  Contact me if you’d like an invitation!  Remaining venues/dates are:

Date

City Venue
1/20 San Diego, CA Karl Strauss Brewing
1/27 Portland, OR MacTarnahan’s Taproom
1/31 Bellevue, WA Rock Bottom Brewery
2/8 Los Angeles, CA MSFT Office/Bonaventure Brewery
2/9 Costa Mesa, CA Karl Strauss Brewing
3/3 Sunnyvale, CA Firehouse Grill & Brewery
3/10 San Francisco, CA Thirsty Bear Brewing

The Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta is back for V3.0 on Saturday, March 5th!  Check out the website and register to go – oh, and it’s FREE!

This month’s Denver VS UG’s meeting features our own Ricardo Villalobos presenting, “Designing, Building, and Deploying Windows Azure Applications using Visual Studio 2010".  Don’t miss it!

Final Thoughts

December was a little slower due to the holidays, so there’s not as much to report in this current installment of the newsletter.  Send me your questions and ideas for February’s!