Some VS WoW (Using Visual Studio 2008 to code LUA for World of Warcraft)

InfoWorld - World of Warcraft, meet Visual Studio

"...

Scott Guthrie, general manager of the developer division, gave a wide-ranging keynote at Microsoft's DevConnections conference at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas.

But he seemed to especially capture the audience's attention with the WarCraft demo, which coincided with Microsoft's announcement that it would let partners use Visual Studio and its accompanying software development kit to target platforms besides its own.

WarCraft, a popular online role-playing game, uses a programming language called LUA. The Microsoft presentation showed a developer using the familiar Visual Studio environment to code in LUA and create some extensions for the game.

"Not only does Visual Studio give you line-of-business productivity, but you can also triple-kill your opponents," Guthrie joked after an onscreen character coldly dealt death to a trio of hapless game characters.

The WarCraft add-on will be hosted as an open-source project on CodePlex, Guthrie said.

..."

Nice...

Data Dude (aka "Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals") and TeamBuild

CoDe Magazine - The Data Dude Meets Team Build

"Integrate the data tier developer into the core development life cycle and process.” That is one of the main objectives of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, also known under its project name “Data Dude.” Bringing the data tier developer into Visual Studio is the first step in enabling closer integration between the application and data tier developer. Having both environments leverage the same Team Foundation Build (Team Build) system enables daily and automatic integration of changes into the build process, enforcing closer integration and shorter feedback cycles between the two originally disjoint disciplines.

...

Now you know how to integrate Database Projects into a Team Build environment. You could achieve more things by extending the approach described above. For example, you could automatically deploy the database schema as part of the build process by adding the SqlDeployTask to the post-build events, or you could integrate database unit testing and data generation into the test execution part of Team Build."

Interesting. I'd like to start using Data Dude and we're moving to TeamBuild for all our projects, so good timing on this article (12 pages printed)...

(via bharry's WebLog - Good Article on DBPro & Team Build)

New Sysinternals Utility Released- ADInsight

Sysinternals Site Discussion - New Tool: AD Insight v1.0 and Various Updates

"ADInsight v1.0: Introducing ADInsight, an LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) real-time monitoring tool aimed at troubleshooting Active Directory client applications. Use it’s detailed tracing of Active Directory client-server communications to solve Windows authentication, Exchange, DNS, and other problems.

PsExec v1.90: This version of PsExec, a command-line tool for executing programs locally and remotely, significantly improves handling of arguments passed to the specified application by not modifying spacing or quotation marks. It also fixes a number of minor bugs, including ones related to running programs in alternate terminal server sessions.

Process Explorer v11.04: ...

ADExplorer v1.01: ...

DebugView v4.72: ...

Process Monitor v1.26: ...

BgInfo v4.12: ..."

This is like an official "Microsoft Release Month" isn't it? (My favorite kind of month...  ;)

Humor: Being a "Meeting Day" today this made me laugh...

Office Offline - Time flies

Windows Live Writer v1 (aka Version 2008, 12.0.1366.1026) Released

InsertableContentSource - New Windows Live Writer Version

"A little earlier than scheduled (that schedule being tonight), we [Liveside] and mess.be have discovered that the new set of programs are available for download. ...

I spent ages jumping through hoops though trying to get the new programs to install, but it kept installing the older versions. I followed the support article but to no avail, in the end, I reset my router, and bingo, got the new programs. So if you keep getting the old programs, try resetting your internet connection.

..."

LiveSide - News blog - Final Windows Live Wave 2 applications available for download

"Looks like nothing can stay quiet for long - a new installer featuring the final Windows Live Wave 2 programs is available for download thanks to Microsoft's early preparations. While not much has changed in the applications themselves since the last beta releases, its just nice to be running the final versions.

You can grab the new Windows Live installer here: http://g.live.com/1rewlive/en/WLInstaller.exe 

..."

Yeah!

Upgrading from B2 to RTW went very smoothly on a XP machine. I'll be updating my Vista machine later this week (but I except it to be smooth too).

If you've not tried Windows Live Writer now's the time...

DockPanel 2.2 Released

DockPanel Suite - File Release Notes and Changelog

"The docking library for .Net Windows Forms development which mimics Visual Studio .Net."

 

 

The cool DockPanel Suite project has rev'ed to 2.2 addressing bugs, etc...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
DockPanel 2.0 Released
Dock Panel Suite - Public Domain VS Like Docking Component Written in C#

Visual Studio 2008 RTM's This Month (November)

Ravings of a Developer TS - It's Official, Visual Studio 2008 Releases This Month!!

"Now I can actually answer that question "Yeah, but when will it ship?" with 100% confidence!

"Today, during the keynote address at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp., announced that Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007." See the article here.

..."

ROCK ON!

I'm moving my personal development to VS2008 as soon as it RTW's. And I'll be moving my work team not far behind...

(via ScottIsAFool, InsertableContentSource)

Microsoft Sync Framework CTP1 Released

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Sync Framework CTP1

"... Microsoft Sync Framework is a comprehensive synchronization platform that enables collaboration and offline scenarios for applications, services and devices. Developers can build sync ecosystems that integrate any application, any type of data, using any protocol over any network.

The Microsoft Sync Framework provides a platform for taking web services and databases offline. In addition, it provides optimized P2P sync of any type of file including contacts, music, videos, images and settings. The extensible framework includes built-in support for synchronizing relational databases, NTFS/FAT file systems, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS/ATOM, devices and web services.

Highlights

• Add sync support to new and existing applications, services, and devices
• Enable collaboration and offline capabilities for any application
• Roam and share information from any data store, over any protocol, and over any network configuration
• Leverage sync capabilities exposed in Microsoft technologies to create sync ecosystems
• Extend the architecture to support custom data types including files

..."

Microsoft Downloads - Introduction to the Microsoft Sync Framework

"Throughout this document we will discuss the Microsoft Sync Framework which enables developers to create offline and collaboration scenarios for applications, services and devices.

...

The Microsoft Sync Framework includes all of the things required to integrate applications into an offline or collaboration based network, using the pre-created providers or writing new custom providers. This article outline some key concepts regarding synchronization providers, which will help you to understand how to create a provider.

..."

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET v2.0 CTP1

"The download package contains the SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 and Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET v2.0 CTP1

..."

Microsoft Downloads - Introducing Microsoft Sync Framework: Sync Services for File Systems Whitepaper

"Dive into the details of this new reusable Sync Services for Files Systems component we call simply, the File System Provider, along with enabled scenarios and sample code for getting started.

...

Towards this goal, we have developed a reusable provider for synchronizing the contents of file system directories on PCs and removable media such as USB thumb drives. In this article, I’ll cover the details of this new reusable Sync Services for Files Systems component we call simply, the File System Provider, along with enabled scenarios and sample code for getting started.

..."

Interesting... Added to my mental watch list.

You can never have too many .Net Posters... .Net 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster

Microsoft Downloads - .NET Framework 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster

"... A PDF of the .NET Framework 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster ..."

A 36" x 28" .Net Framework 3.5 color poster for your cube...

TFSBuildLab 1.0 Released

Buck Hodges - TFSBuildLab 1.0 for TFS 2005

"...

TfsBuildLab v1.0 is out there !!!

Finally we are feature complete as we intended it to be from the start (download it from here) ...

What's new in version 1.0?

Service
* Automatic rescheduling when adding new scheduled trigger.
* A report for displaying statistics from the triggers and retention policies.
* Support for overriding build script parameters both for CI and queued builds.
* Support for only deleting the build drops.
* Support for configuring retention policies based on build quality.
* Performance improvements by introducing caching

Admin Client
* Added feedback when delteing multiple builds.
* Support for forcing recaching on the server.
* Support for overriding build script parameters on queued builds.
* Support for overriding build script parameters on triggers.
* Added range paramters when listing log entries to limit the result data.

Checkin Policies
* Removed the need for TfsBuildLab when using the restricted paths policy.

Build Task
* New custom build task to use overloaded parameters (LoadOverriddenProperty)

..."

We're starting to get serious now about using TeamBuild in my team, so this may come in handy in the near future...

As I build out the team I am working us away as fast as I can from an "F5 Build Process". When you have a one person "team" it's one thing, but when the plan is for a 5+ members it's a whole 'nother ball of wax... TFS is already hosting the work items and source, it might as well do the building as well.  ;)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
TFSBuildLab - Automated Builds for VS2005 TFS

Making the world safe for .NET SQLCommand, SQL Scripts and the "Go" Statement

.NET Playground - SQL Server GO statements

"Why don't go statements work within a SQL script I run from my .net program?

This is simply because "go" isn't SQL. It's only able to be interpreted by management studio, so when you run it from your application, it's going to throw you errors saying it's invalid SQL (and rightfully so).

...

But there is a simple way around this.

The first thing you need to do is do a replace-all in your Sql Script. Open your script up and replace "go" with "go--runtoline". Make sure you have 'match whole word' on, otherwise you'll mess up a heap of stuff. When you run the script it should run exactly the same as before you did the replace.

Next thing is in your code, you want to split up the script into a set of sub routines as such:

..."

Now that's a cool idea...

This keeps the original SQL Script in a form that can be executed from Query Analyzer/SQL Management Studio, as well as via .Net SQLCommand.

I think I like this approach in that it seems to give more control over the process...
(Think a long script, filled with many different statements broken into Go blocks and then getting an error in the middle somewhere... )

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Execute T-SQL Scripts (with GO's) Programmatically with SMO (or DMO)
Call SQLCMD from .Net with Output Capture

Humor: Be careful how you blog...

Learning About Electronic Data Discovery? RenewData has a free book for ya...

RenewData - Request your copy of "eDiscovery for Dummies"

"RenewData’s eDiscovery for Dummies provides answers to key questions that come up during the e-discovery process, such as:

• What are the basic principles and terminology of e-discovery?
• What should happen in a meet and confer session?
• What should you preserve and when should you start?
• How do you get your hands on the data?
• What are the fastest and easiest ways to review data?
• How do you produce the data to the other side?
• Are there any additional e-discovery resources

..."

Requested. Now I just need to wait the 2-4 weeks for it to be mailed to me...

(via EDD Update - "EDD for Dummies" Book (RenewData))

If you API it, they will come... (Hints about a "Full" API coming for Windows Live Messenger)

LiveSide - News blog - Messenger 9, GTalk integration, Messenger API, new client for Mac OS X - news unveiled at Georgia Tech presentation (whew)

"...

So just to review, according to what Hollingsworth reported that Jenks said:

• New API coming for Messenger, hopefully including "full support for everything the full messenger client uses"
• API Tech Preview to be released at Mix08, Beta 1 API ready with Messenger 9 final
• Messenger 9 ships in late 08 or early 09
• MS is trying to work out a way for WLM users to chat with AIM/GTalk/ICQ: basic internal version of GTalk working now
• Brand new version of Messenger for Mac OS X coming - "really cool and awesome", MSN Messenger for Mac will not be updated
• Xbox Live, now using Messenger 7, will be upgraded to 8.5 or possibly 9

..."

I've been feeling lately that one a way for a software company to succeed, to get their cool service or nifty product used and embedded into our lives, is to provide an API. A full and complete API.

I'm thinking that any Web 2.0 thing should (must?) have a API. Nearly any software product or service should also have an API or SDK... (Yeah, I know... "Great thinking Mr. Obvious..."  lol  )

For example, SkyDrive, folders.live.com. I can think of a ton of cool things I'd like to do with that, only if there were a supported SDK or API. But there's not, so I'm just not drawn to using it much (and it's a pretty darn cool service too... I'm keeping my fingers crossed that one will come...).

Look, there are probably more of us devsumers (development skilled consumers) than there are developers in your company (so you would hope anyway ;). If you build a cool service, we'll build on it, and take it places you never thought of. Just look at where mash-ups have taken us. That's what we LOVE doing, building cool stuff. If you make it easier for us to build cool stuff, then we will! We'll use your product/service/API and will build the cool stuff.

Let's take Windows Liver Writer as an example. Its API has allowed us to extend it in ways Microsoft may have never thought of. Some of the plugins are just too cool and make it easier, fill in its gaps, more convenient and just plain better. If it didn't have its API? I doubt I'd be using it... But as it is today, you would have to pry WLW from my cold dead fingers before I give it up.

Real lock-in (err...um... I mean... dedicated product loyalty and mutual beneficial dependency.... yeah... that...) happens when the developers get a hold of your API and build the uber-cool stuff on top of it. That's when your product/service/framework/platform/API becomes indispensable...

Your front end, user interface, etc should be built on this API. Not grafting on an API after the fact (better than nothing, but that's still icky). Building on your own API means you'll be dogfooding from day one, it will be tested and secure (hopefully) and you won't be able to be accused of using insider knowledge, secret calls and hidden methods.

 

API it (and build a cool product of service on top of it to show it off) and the developers will come...