The Mark Mydland tour stopped in Cincinnati last night.  CINNUG hosted a Special Event for Mark to give his presentation.  It was great!  Mark covers some of the new features of the VSTS Test Edition as well as some new tools making their way out of Microsoft Research.  Mark has a lot of good stories and is definately one of those managers who likes to tell it how it is. 

One of the thing that came out last night was that they are working on getting MSTest as a stand alone entity that isn't tightly coupled to Visual Studio.  By doing so they will be opening up a API to allow MSTest to hook into the VS testing framework and that same API will be usable by other testing frameworks.  They've already been in discussions with the guys from xUnit and mbUnit.  Sweet!

Mark continues his tour today down in Louisville, and then on to the great state of Tennesse.  Check out the rest of his schedule on Jennifer Marsman's blog.

From all accounts the Mark Mydland Tour of the Hearthland district is going great!  Tonight the stop is here in Cincinnati at MAX Technical Training.  Come on by as CINNUG is hosting Mark as one of their Special Events.  The fun starts around 6:00 PM and pizza will be served about 7:15 or so.

More Information about Mark and what he'll be talking about can be found at the CINNUG website.

I was doing some research this week around the publishing wizard for ASP.NET and stumbled across a MSDN Library article that made mention of something I head never heard of before: the App_offline.htm file.  Apparently, this is a feature introduced in .NET 2.0 where if you simply create a file named App_offline.htm  and place that in the root of your ASP.NET application then all requests to the application will be immediately redirected to this page.  This provides a nice, easy, clean way to let end users know you are updating your site, or making changes. 

I'd just never heard of this before.  ScottGu mentioned it several times on his blog (here's a post from 2006 on the subject - I point out this particular post because it indicates you must send back more than 512 bytes of data otherwise IE6 will show a "friendly error" instead of the contents of the App_offline.htm file since the server also doesn't return a 200 HTTP status code).  Here's a quote from his blog:

"The way app_offline.htm works is that you place this file in the root of the application.  When ASP.NET sees it, it will shut-down the app-domain for the application (and not restart it for requests) and instead send back the contents of the app_offline.htm file in response to all new dynamic requests for the application.  When you are done updating the site, just delete the file and it will come back online."

That's just an awesome feature.  While you could probably pull off the same thing on your own with a little effort, it's very cool that this is just baked right into the platform.  Very, very cool.

So, be honest, was I the only one who hadn't heard about this yet? 

About a week before I left for PDC my XBox 360 gave me the 3 flashing red lights of death.  While the console itself was out of warranty this particular problem they will still fix for free.  While annoyed I'd have to wait 2-3 weeks to beat Darth Vader in "The Force Unleashed" I was able to quickly use the online support request form to have them send me shipping materials to ship the XBox in for repair. 

As luck would have it the repair took less than a week (not surprising since they just sent me a refurbished replacement) and the console made it back home while I was out at PDC.  When I got home I hooked up the console and finished dealing out a cold plate of revenge on the Sith Lord.  While gaming was back to normal (well, almost...from time to time there seem to be stutters in the game that I don't recall having before...) I needed to re-establish the link between the XBox and my 2005 Media Center PC.

When I ran through the setup application on the PC I got the following error:

"There is a problem with the installation of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005"

It went on to say I should uninstall the Media Center Update and then reinstall.  <sarcasm>Nice of it to tell me WHICH update it was referring to </sarcasm>.  A quick Google search later and I was looking at the following KB article on Microsoft support: "Error message when you try to install a program for the XBox 360 Media Center Extender in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Service Pack 3: "There is a problem with the installation of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005"" (KB 954622).  That definitely looked like what I was experiencing.

The KB article indicates that the issue is that when XP SP3 was installed a specific registry setting was removed.  The XBox 360 extender setup application was looking for that setting.  It then gives three options to correct the issue:

1. Install a specific update referenced by another KB article.

2. Temporarily Uninstall SP3

3. Manually add the registry setting.

You've got to be kidding me!?  Temporarily uninstall a service pack?!  How long would that take?  What else would that screw up? 

I ended up adding the registry setting, which worked like a charm and took less than 3 seconds since they even provided you the text to add the key directly from the Run command.  Seriously, why was temporarily removing the SP even an option?  It makes me wonder if the update that is option 1 simply is an installer that adds the registry key.

The folks on the CodeMash staff have posted the session list for the upcoming conference over on their Google Groups site.  It looks like a hell of a lineup!  Congrats to all the speakers who were selected.  From all accounts there was much deliberation over the selected sessions as they had over 300 submissions.

They've also extended the Early Bird pricing for the conference to Nov. 29th.  Until then it's $135 for the two day conference.  The day before the real conference starts there  is a precompiler event.  This is something you register for separately and has several great options on spending your day.

CodeMash was an awesome event in Jan. 2008.  I highly recommend going.  It costs less than the big conferences and is in the region.  It's a much easier sell to the boss, plus you can bring the family and let them hang out at the indoor water park while you're off "geeking out". 

In 2009 the conference will be held on Jan. 7th-9th with the precomiler event on the 6th.

The next ArcReady event in Cincinnati is open for registration.  This quarter the focus of the event will be on soft skills.  You can check out more about the sessions and get registered over at the ArcReady website.

I'll be guest speaking for the event on December 2nd in Mason and giving the session on "Organizational Dynamics".  Come on out!

CINNUG is hosting a special event on Monday, November 17th!  It's being hosted at MAX Technical Training starting at 6:00 PM.  If you have questions about testing and Visual Studio, this is an event you won't want to miss.

Check out the abstract below:

"The phrase “drive quality upstream” has been abused so badly by ALM software vendors that it has to be relegated to the platitude junk pile along with such all time favorites as “work smarter not harder,” “think outside the box,” and “synergistic leveraging of code reuse.”  Before we drive quality anywhere, we need to give quality a seat at the table. VSTS Rosario release will do this by automatically gathering critical information about the project and code and making that data available when, where and to whom it is needed. During this discussion we will examine how Rosario impacts quality across the application lifecycle by:

• Allowing testers to provide developers with details about what the code did instead of just providing the details about what the tester did.
• Allowing development leads and architects to visualize and understand their current code (not the code they wish they had, but the code they really have) so that they can minimize the impact of changes; and
• Allowing developers to understand the impact of their changes in terms of affected tests, concurrency and bounds checking. 

The Rosario release of VSTS will bring all project stakeholders together to allow richer information to be shared across every role to make software quality accessible and achievable.

Presented by Mark Mydland

Mark Mydland is a Group Manager for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers product at Microsoft.  In the past 12 years, Mark has worked as a developer and consultant across a wide variety of applications and industries.  Mark first joined Microsoft in 2001 working as a member of the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD).  During his time in that group, Mark was the development manager for a team focused on analytics for assessing the efficacy of natural language interpreters with a particular emphasis on driving authoring simplification and relevance quality for user assistance.  Based on this work, Mark filed numerous patents and coauthored a paper for the SIGIR journal.  In 2004, Mark left Microsoft to work as a Director of Development at Getty Images where he led a change in process from a traditional waterfall methodology to a scrum-based agile approach which brought the release frequency from 12-18 months down to 1 month.  Since Getty made extensive use of VSTS, it seemed a natural fit for Mark to join VSTS on his return to Microsoft in 2006.  Mark received his B.S. from West Point in 1991.  He has also held positions with USWeb/marchFirst and Andersen Consulting/Accenture. "

I'm out at PDC this week!  When I was out in 2005 I blogged quite a bit about the event each evening, but this year it turns out I know a lot of the people out here and it's hard to find time to blog between the sessions, parties and hanging out with friends.  I'll let people like Dan Rigsby give the low down on what's going on out here (he's got all the inside angles as a PDC Blogger). 

There are a lot of interesting things going on: Windows Azure, Oslo, etc.  It will be hard to keep up.

Yesterday, during the first day of PDC, a new website was launched: www.nplus1.org.  What is nPlus1?

"nPlus1.org is a site dedicated to helping Architects, aspiring Architects and Lead Developers learn, connect and contribute. On this site you’ll have access to great first party content written by some of the most skilled and experienced Architects working today. You’ll also have access to, and be able to contribute to a nexus of content from around the Internet aimed at keeping Architects up to date on all the new developments in their fields of interest."

We have five great articles up and there are more to come.  If you have ideas for the site, or you wish to write an article for us, please contact me and I can point you in the right direction to contact the author coordinator.

Please be patient with us as we plan on making improvements to the features and layout of the site over the next few months.  You can consider us in Beta. :)

If the answer is "working" then perhaps you missed the announcement that Microsoft is hosting both of its FREE quarterly events on that day: MSDN Unleashed and ArcReady.  Both events will be held at the Microsoft office in Mason.

ArcReady will start the day off with Brian Prince talking about how to architect the modern distributed application (think cloud computing and services).  This is from 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM.

MSDN Unleashed (previously known as DevCares) will be given by Bill Steele and will include topics on Introductory WPF, what's new in VS 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework 3.5.  MSDN Unleashed is from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

Here's a link to register:

Remember that these events are FREE and are hosted at the Microsoft office.  If you need to "sell" this to your boss to let you go then make sure they understand that the events are free and given by Microsoft representatives/employees.  This is technical knowledge from the source.