What?!?! Moved the blog again???

Actually, I’ve decided to resume blogging at my old home over on http://SnowstormLife.com/blogs/bliz. So I’ll see you over there, OK?

Yeah – I’m back to using dasBlog as my blog engine, now appearing at http://www.jimblizzard.com/blog. Take a look there for the new stuff.

Expression Studio 3.0!!!

Earlier this week, Expression Studio 3.0 was released to manufacturing. From what I’ve seen, it is one sweet product. I’m going to find out for myself real soon now. Downloading the 60-day trial now.

One of the things I’m really jazzed about looking at is SketchFlow – a new prototyping tool that can take you from concept to production UI. (and a bunch of other stuff)

We’ll soon see. . .

Resources:

Expression Studio website

Report an issue

Expression Studio 3 release notes

Expression Studio forums

Stuck

Been traveling all week and ready to head home. Not knowing my full schedule when I booked my travel plans I played it safe & booked my flight home for Saturday. Last night I checked to see how much it would cost to change my flight to one late this afternoon. $200 just for the change fee, plus any difference in the fares. I didn’t even bother to ask what that would be.

Ah well. One more night in Atlanta then it’s home sweet home.

Your home for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0

Where should you start? I recommend the Visual Studio 2010 developer center at MSDN. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

From that page you can get to forums, additional product information, FAQs, samples, resources, etc.

I particularly like the feature overviews and walkthroughs that can be found from that page. Direct link is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd441784.aspx 

Lots of good stuff coming down the road!

What’s new with .NET Framework 4.0

Finally found some solid documentation on the MSDN site about  this. (It’s probably been sitting there for a while and I finally noticed it.)

Anyway, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409230(VS.100).aspx.

You’ll be glad you did.

So you want to be a programmer?

If you do, Jesse Liberty has some excellent advice for you on his blog. It’s never too late to get started. And yes, it can be done on your own. (With some help from books, online info and people, and lots of resolve.)

From his entry:

And that is what I’d suggest you do; learn a lot less than there is to learn; narrow the field. Start by getting opinions from people who seem to love their jobs and who actually code for a living. Note that none of us will be right, but you may be able to eliminate some areas that are clearly wrong. Then pick a narrow field and learn that and nothing else for the first year.

Jesse points out a few areas on which to focus, then describes a method of attack.

Quick hit: MSI installation inside VPC 2007 SP1

Ran into an issue this morning while I was trying to install the TFS Administration Tool downloaded from CodePlex. ““Please wait while the installer finishes determining your disk space requirements.”

I waited, then clicked the Retry button. Same thing. Repeat.

I thought it was an issue with the admin tool installer, but then I tried to install the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 release on the same VPC image. It gave me the same error message. (The VPC image contains Windows Server 2008. My host OS is Windows 7.)

I did a quick BING search for the error message. The second result led me to Hai’s blog (“You are making my point!”) entry http://www.hyperbina.com/tech/blog/?p=52

Here’s the example command line he uses:

D:\>msiexec.exe /package MyInstallationPackage.msi /qr

I like to see the dialog box messages, so I ran mine without the /qr switch, and both installations worked without a hitch.

Note: I also ran from an administrator command prompt.

Workaround found. Thanks Bing.

Quick hit: Team Foundation Server security

Just a quick note to myself about security in TFS 2010…

How to grant permissions to use Reporting Server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb630430.aspx (How to: Configure a Report Server for Local Administration on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008)

The Admin page: you’ll need to run IE as Administrator to set this up initially http://<computerName>/Reports<InstanceName>

Questions to ask:

• Does user have DB security rights? (SQL Management Studio)
• Does user have TFS user rights? (Team Foundation Administration Console / Application Tier node)
• Does user have SharePoint site user rights? http://<computerName>/sites/DefaultCollection -> People and Groups

Quick hit: Wireless network and Hyper-V

Ran across this helpful blog post by John Paul Cook as I was looking for a way to use my wireless network card with Hyper-V machines. http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2008/03/23/using-wireless-with-hyper-v.aspx

After creating the network bridge as described in John’s post, add that bridge to the VM’s settings in Server Manager as shown below:

Once you do that, when you start your Hyper-V VM you’ll be able to connect to the internet using your wireless network.

Within my VM, as shown below, 
- LAN Connection 5 is for the wireless network adapter.
- LAN Connection 4 is for the loopback adapter.
- LAN Connection 3 is for the wired network adapter (which is not plugged in).

And it works:

Quick hit – How MS builds the Visual Studio product line

Just ran across this, a blog post by Beth Massi of her Channel9 interview with the folks in the sausage factory.

Ever wonder how we build Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? I mean literally. You know, the build process that spits out a product at the other end?  Well I sure did and it’s not just hitting F5 people .

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2009/05/22/how-we-do-it-building-the-visual-studio-product-line-beth-massi-matt-gertz.aspx.

Enjoy.