In case you hadn't heard, earlier this week (October 19th at the SharePoint Conference) we announced several things related to Visual Studio. Among them we announced Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (download it here), Beta 2 "go live" guidance, changes to the product lineup – including the "Ultimate Offer" – and even a screencast to help you download and install Visual Studio 2010. We also unveiled a new look:  | + |  | Okay, so it's all new… How do I learn about it?
To make your ramp on Visual Studio 2010 as easy as possible, we've also made a training kit available for the .NET Framework v4 and Visual Studio 2010. The kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. The resources in the kit are designed to help you learn how to utilize Visual Studio 2010 as well as show you a variety of framework technologies including: - C# 4.0
- Visual Basic 10
- F#
- Parallel Extensions
- Windows Communication Foundation
- Windows Workflow
- Windows Presentation Foundation
- ASP.NET 4
- Windows 7
- Entity Framework
- ADO.NET Data Services
- Managed Extensibility Framework
- Visual Studio Team System
One important thing: this training kit *only* works with Beta 2 of the .NET Framework v4 and Visual Studio 2010. If you have Beta 1 or another interim build, you will need to move to Beta 2 to take advantage of the labs and demos in this kit. So, what are you waiting for? Download Beta 2, kick the tires, and see what all the hubbub is about.
More coming on this soon, but for now a quick summary… Our team delivering the best of The New Efficiency Launch in cities across the central US. We'll be starting with Winona, MN and Madison, WI this week followed by another nine cities in November and December. Here's the full list of cities we're visiting the next several weeks. - Winona, MN on 10/23/2009
- Madison, WI on 10/24/2009
- Des Moines, IA on 11/11/2009
- Indianapolis, IN on 11/12/2009
- Louisville, KY on 12/2/2009
- Omaha, NE on 12/3/2009
- Mason, OH on 12/3/2009
- Columbus, OH on 12/8/2009
- Austin, TX on 12/8/2009
- Tulsa, OK on 12/9/2009
- Franklin, TN on 12/10/2009
Visit my event page for more details. And, again, expect another blog post "soon" describing the event, sessions and… wait for it… prizes (we'll have a Dell netbook, Zune HD and more).
In follow-up to my post from yesterday, one of my colleagues, Keith Combs, encoded the TechNet portion of the Nashville event with Silverlight streaming. Here it is for your viewing pleasure.
We've largely completed our Real World Azure events, delivering 32 events, 64 sessions and sharing information and insights with 868 architects, developers and IT professionals across the central US. We have two outstanding events, our Minneapolis TechNet and MSDN events on October 27, 2009. If you don't live in Minneapolis and you weren't able to attend one of your local events, not to worry! We recorded our Nashville events and made them available for you on-demand: Listen to our on-demand events and let me know what you think. Drop me an email at brimoore at microsoft dot com and share your feedback. And… as a little teaser… with the wrap-up of our Real World Azure event series, we're looking at our next event series: the Highlights of The New Efficiency Launch, visiting 11 cities across the central US, and – changing it up a bit – those cities will be ones we don't often have a chance to cover (hello, Tulsa and Omaha!). We're also looking into getting swank prizes, so stay tuned to my blog for updates in the next several days. Technorati Tags: Windows Azure
Peers of mine are launching a new monthly webcast for both infrastructure and software architects. Dubbed the Architect Innovation Café, these folks will be publishing new 90-minute webcasts each month starting in October and running through June 2010. These webcasts will focus on the latest industry trends and technologies and how those technologies can align with your business needs. First Up – An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3, October 27, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST
Kicking the series off will be a webcast featuring Tim Heuer, a program manager on the Microsoft Silverlight team. For those new to the term, Silverlight is a web technology aimed at delivering rich internet experiences to users. Before his current role, Tim was a developer evangelist serving the Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana and Utah areas aiming to strengthen and support communities and software developers in these geographies. His presentation, An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3, will step back from a detailed implementation of the technology and instead take a broader look at Silverlight from the architect’s perspective. Tim will discuss the types of applications where Silverlight makes sense and some scenarios where Silverlight may not be the appropriate technology. He will also delve into some of the architectural decisions you must consider when writing applications for this platform and where some of the tradeoffs may lie. Next Up – Deploying Windows 7 from an Infrastructure Architect’s Perspective, October 28, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST
Following Tim is Doug Klokow, a member of Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) for the past 9 years focused on client desktop deployment scenarios. He is part of the Virtual Deployment Practice, focused on driving early customer deployment on Microsoft client technologies and he also supports Microsoft’s Desktop Virtualization capabilities and service offerings. His presentation, Deploying Windows 7 from an Infrastructure Architect’s Perspective, will discuss five key areas centered on deploying Windows 7: - Developing business justification – Evaluate the capabilities provided by Windows 7 and develop a plan for how to realize business value from these solutions
- Where are you today – Explore the differences of preparing for Windows 7 based on your current desktop operating system
- Application readiness – Explore the tools and resources available to gain insight into your readiness to deploy Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8, and/or Office 2007/2010
- Deployment readiness – Explore the tools and resources available to create a design and deployment solution for your enterprise
- Training your employees – Discuss available resources for training your IT Staff and End Users
PDC 2009 is just a bit shy of two months from now and plans are hopping. In the next few days we'll be making several additional session announcements, adding even more variety to the wide range of topics currently listed on the PDC 2009 site. Topics span all the major product and development areas, from Azure, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Velocity, and Silverlight to the Managed Extensibility Framework, Unified Communications, Identity, Powershell, BizTalk, and Dublin. With workshops on November 16 (the day before the big event kicks off), keynotes kicking off the event, and numerous sessions running from November 17 through November 19, the Los Angeles Convention Center will be the center of news, information, and technical goodness later this fall. But the important thing to note from this blog post is that the discount – $300 off the regular conference fee – only lasts another thirteen days from today, expiring October 13, 2009. If you can't swing the full event, there are one-day passes available and even passes for the big room. Check out the registration page for more information.
So you tried to register for your local launch only to find out you've been waitlisted. Or you live in a city that doesn't have a launch. Although my team and I are working on a plan to visit a few more cities with a "best of" series of events, you still want to see the full blown launch and you can't get in. Then I have some good news to share: we're hosting a virtual launch event! And this post is going live just in time, the virtual launch is tomorrow, September 29, 2009! This national virtual launch will feature the same content as the local launch events, showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Forefront. There will be topics for developer, IT professionals and insightful information for the broad consumer as well. Join us for the virtual launch event, and you will also be able to join a televised panel discussion live from the San Francisco launch event, which will feature our CEO, Steve Ballmer, as he and other top technology leaders debate the role of IT during this economic reset. Visit the The New Efficiency event site and register to attend this streamed launch event. And stay tuned to my event site for upcoming news about our regional "best of" events.
PDC 2009 is coming – in case you weren't aware (unlikely, right?) – to Los Angeles November 17-19, with workshops on November 16. Be there for the latest and greatest news from the Microsoft product groups as well as external experts. There will be hundreds of sessions and dozens of great speakers, like Scott Hanselman, Cameron Skinner, Juval Lowy, Don Box, as well as keynotes from Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Scott Guthrie, to name a few. I won't be going this year, but I am sending five folks from my team (Brian Prince, Jennifer Marsman, Dave Bost, Mike Benkovich, and Chris Koenig) to mix and mingle with attendees and folks from their local communities, learn what they can, and bring back the highlights to share with said communities. And, yes, I am a touch jealous of my own team – I would really like to be there as well. Check out the PDC 2009 site and register. It'll be a great event with loads of great information and insights.
Windows Azure is Microsoft's new cloud computing services platform. Hosting in Microsoft data centers around the world, Windows Azure provides hosting capabilities, developer services (for .NET, PHP and other environments), and data storage services that can be scaled dynamically to adapt to changing scalability needs. And that is pretty close to the official definition. But what _is_ Windows Azure…? My team and I seek to answer that question with our Real World Road Show event series. Our team has already run ten events in August across five cities, one IT professional and one developer event per city. We have 24 more events planned, starting back up the week of September 14, spanning 12 cities. I've listed our schedule on my events page, plus a couple of additional Live Meeting-based Firestarter events hosted by peers across the US. But let me tell you a bit more about our events. Real World Azure Road Show
Come spend a day with us to explore Windows Azure™ – Microsoft’s platform for building and deploying cloud based applications – from a real world point of view! During this event, we’ll review critical lessons Microsoft IT has learned migrating internal line-of-business applications to Windows Azure™. What is Windows Azure™? When should I use it? How does it apply to my job? Whether you’re an IT Professional, Developer or Architect, we’ll address your top of mind questions about cloud computing.  TechNet Presents Real World Infrastructure
These sessions focus on the architecture decisions and infrastructure impacts Azure represents. They start at 8:30am and run until noon. In this session, we will discuss:
- Azure architecture from the IT professional’s point of view
- Why an IT operations team would want to pursue Azure as an extension to the data center
- Configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications
- The Azure roles (web, web service and worker)
- Azure storage options
- Azure security and identity options
- How Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premises applications
- How operations teams can manage and monitor Azure-based applications
 MSDN Presents Real World Development
These sessions focus on the architecture tradeoffs and development techniques. They start at 1pm and run until 5pm. In this session, we will discuss:
- Cloud computing architectures in general and the Azure architecture in particular
- Several aspects of Azure from the developer’s and architect’s perspective
- Azure roles (web, web service and worker)
- Azure storage options
- Azure security and identity options
- How Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premise applications
- Configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications
- How development teams can optimize their applications for better management and monitoring
Our events also feature a real world case study by Microsoft IT as well as Microsoft customers. These case studies illustrate real world decisions and tradeoffs made by Microsoft IT and our customers, covering several things you should know as you consider cloud computing in general and Windows Azure in specific.
It's been quite a while since I last posted to my blog – July 10th to be exact. I've had a couple of good reasons, such as Microsoft's year-end review period (I have 12 to write), finalizing our FY10 business plans (we have events to plan, including a couple of product launches, community events to support and some online strategies to develop; my blog loosely falls under our online plans… other than the fact I've probably lost all my subscribers in the past nearly two months), and some much-needed vacation (10 days!). Shortly after getting back from vacation I went to devLink 2009 in Nashville, TN. When I got back home it was time to celebrate my 16th wedding anniversary. (Trust me, I'll tie this back to Bing. Be patient.) As my wife and I were planning our evening (flowers, some shopping, dinner, and a movie), we decided to go to see Julie and Julia. (See: clever cooking reference.) I used Bing to search for movie times, and Bing delivered, making my life easy. Not only did it return the top results (every bit as accurate as other search popular engines), it's "deep search" feature returned movie times for theaters in my area (all I needed to do was configure my location). 
Bing was so efficient I didn't even have to follow the results. We saw the times of all the theaters within a roughly 30 minute drive, made our decision, and left for dinner. Cooking with Bing… Give it a try. Click the image to see the Julie and Julia results in your area – just be sure to configure your location first if needed. Bing does IP reverse-lookup, but that usually maps back to your ISP's home location.
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