Shandy's Blog

I make no apologies for duplicating posts from Mike McIntyre's .NET Journal excellent blog. The latest one is Free Books for VB Programmers at the Microsoft VBRun Web Site. Basically selected 2005 books are being made available in pdf format, a chapter at a time. The saving of the pdf files is disabled but you can print them off, or view them on-line of course.

I was particularly interested in Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers, and currently the Introduction and first 5 chapters are available for download but the promise is that additional chapters will be posted each week. I shall have a look through these chapters and post a short review on the contents.

I noticed this exciting post on Mike McIntyre's blog, Free Sql Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 eLearning Courses From Microsoft.You'll need to register a .NET passport to access the free courses. The offer finishes on 8th November 2005. When you activate a course you have access to it for 3 months.

You can view the course off-line but for that will need to install the eLearning Offline Player, which is a 4 Meg download.

I am currently downloading Course 2924: Building Data Components in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, which is a 5.25 Meg download. The download rate was slow (and I thought the download had stalled at one point). I'll have a look at the course and post a review in the next few days.

I'm on a roll today :) Finally sorted out the problem I have been having ever since the middle of April with my MSDN Universal subscription. For some reason I had been unable to access my account and the MSDN information center were unable to help me. They requested I rang the Partner Team. Needless to say I never got around to it, mainly because I was never in the apartment with enought spare time to call them. Anyway, today I sat down and worked logically through the issues I was having and solved it myself. It turned out that my .NET Passport was associated with my previous years' MSDN subscription and although the subscription had expired and I had been issued with a new subscription number I still had to delete my .NET passport from my old account and assign it to my new account. Easy when you know how :)

So at least I can access the product keys on my MSDN account now and so install all the software I need onto my tablet PC.

My wife Helen has bought an Epson Stylus C45 printer to help her on her CELTA course. This means I too have access to a printer now when I'm in the apartment, well whenever I can persaude Helen to move off the computer desk anyway ;-)

Seems to be a nice little printer. Quality so far is fine. Does colour and B&W and although a little slow at printing (compared with the lasers I use at work) it has a small footprint.

I am slowly getting my tablet PC up to speed with installations. I managed to get VB.Classic installed today along with Source Safe. That should help me get some more questions answered at vbCity. Having only just got back into VB.Classic after 18 months I was finding answering posts without VB.Classic installed on my computer was getting more and more difficult. Getting back into VB.Classic at work has inspired me to install it onto my personal tablet PC. Maybe I'll even dabble at writing a few applications in it again ;-)

I even went as far as installing SP6 for VB.Classic for the first time. (We still use SP5 at work).

Microsoft have finally announced the release date for the full release version of Visual Studio 2005 (We are currently at the Beta 2 stage). Full details are available from Paul Flessner: Notes from Microsoft® Tech•Ed 2005 but the short of it is the week starting November 7th 2005!

Thought I'd mention this nifty little application, My MSN Clock moves. Does yours ?  written by William Tay. It is an add-in for MSN Messenger that stores a personal message as your location and date/time in your current location.

I never did get around to properly blogging about the Microsoft MVP Asia Regional Summit. The week I took off to get to it meant I got so far behind with my work I lost the plot for the following 6 weeks.

However the event was very enjoyable and I can recommend attendance for any MVPs in the future. You get to meet a lot of interesting people, get access to some inside news on Microsoft, get to see some great presentations and also get to see something of Singapore!

Day One

This was mainly devoted to welcome speeches, generic overviews etc. The highlight was probably Shaun O'Driscoll's speech. Shaun is an excellent speaker and his presentation was clear, flowing and witty.

The afternoon session split the MVPs up into two groups, Developers & IT Pros. I attended the Developer track. The Tool Roadmap presentation by Nigel Burton was very good, although the Developer forum afterwards was less so.

In the evening we were taken to Singapore Zoo for an evening meal and a tour on a tram around the zoo.

Day Two

There were four tracks to choose from and I went to all four presentations in the Developer track. The Visual Studio 2005 Overview and Demonstration by Brian Keller, Visual Studio Tricks And Tips By James Lau and the Migrate Your Skills And Code to Visual Basic .NET by Sean Draine presentations were all excellent. The only disappointing one was New Features In CLR 2.0 (Widbey) by Bin Lu.

In the evening transport was provided around the shops at Orchard Road. I elected to spend the evening with my wife and we got some Sushi from a local Sushi Bar to eat.

Day Three

There were again four tracks to choose from and I attended Microsoft Real Time Collaboration - connecting people and information by Joe Poon and Presenting effectively with Powerpoint by Glen Millar from the Application track and Managing windows via WMI scripting by Chung-Wei Foong from the Windows Client track. Joe's presentation was OK, Glen's presentation was excellent and Chung-Wei's was poor.

In the evening transport was provided to a bar where beer and food was provided by Microsoft along with some entertainment by street entertainers and also some photographs on a projector from the last few days.

And Today, 6 weeks later

Today I got reembursed for my air fare today and the reimbursement from Microsoft was very generous, practically covering my entire air fare. A big thank you goes to Microsoft for setting up the event and for contributing towards the costs of getting there and the accommodation costs once there.

Axtools have released CodeSMART 2005 for VS.NET FixPack 3 for CodeSMART 2005 for VS.NET. Currently and rather confusingly CodeSMART 2005 for VS.NET is only available for VS 2003/2003 and not VS 2005. I was using CodeSMART 2005 for VS.NET until I moved to my new laptop and as yet I haven't got around to installing VS.NET 2002/2003.

Axtools have announced CodeSMART 2005 for VB6 FixPack 4. I have been using Codesmart 2005 for VB6 for a couple of months now after Axtools made it available for MVPs (although I had been using the 2001 version since winning that as a prize for being HOTM at vbCity).

I can throughly recommend CodeSMART 2005 as it is packed with useful features to make VB.Classic development much easier. Hopefully, I'll get around to writing a review some day soon.

I thought I'd post a follow up for my previous post on the MSDN Hard Drive Pilot Program. Although it was an excellent idea I had a lot of problems getting my hard drive to update to the latest versions. Finding and reporting the new versions of software was fine; it was just actually performing the update that failed. Despite reporting the problem to the development team they were unable to resolve my problem and in the end I abandoned using it and reverted back to using my MSDN DVDs.

I am sure that in the long run this will prove to be the way to go for MSDN. However, the system needs some more development before releasing it to the general public.

A bit late I know (it was announced way back on 25th April) but if you fancy yourself as a SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 or BizTalk developer why not have a think about entering the Connected Systems Competition. You have until August 31st to place your entry.

I now have Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 installed on my laptop. Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll have chance to have a good look at it and make a few posts on my observations. First signs are necouraging. The installation was seemless!

www.ftponline.com have a special report available, Get In-Depth Info on Indigo. You will have to register to access any of the 7 video clips taken from the VSLive! sessions.

I have just filled in this short survey at visual-expert.com