Maarten van Stam - Soft As In Software :-)

Today I received the book that I bought at Amazon last week written by Mary Jo Foley on "How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era". The main title of the book is Microsoft 2.0.

While I was buying the book I decided to buy two more books, VSTO and Office development related, from Amazons 'used & new' service. Three great books for only a small amount of Euro's. Half of the price did go to shipping the books but compared to Dutch pricing still very cheap. I love the US $/Euro € conversion rate!

I once had the privilege to be contacted by Mary Jo to provide some comments on one of the VSTO versions to be released. VSTO is now completely integrated into Visual Studio but at that time it was a 'standalone' product. The questionaire I received wasn't a small one, she wanted to know everything there is to know about that product.

The message you hear a lot when that happens is the warning:
"Be careful with what you say if you are talking to Mary Jo, she will quote you and never think something you say is off the record!"

I don't know what to expect from the book, but I'm sure it will be fun to read. I'll get back to you on this whenever I finish reading the book.

First discussions are starting to hit the world about the just released Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and .NET Fx 3.5 SP1 Beta.

What happened is that instead of just fixing things in the Service Pack, Microsoft decided to add a whole lot of new features and whistle and bells into these SPs. So what happens if you develop applications and start using these new features provided to you in SP1? Up to now there was no need to check for an installed service pack as the SP bits are supposed to be backwards compatible.

In my opinion it would be a better decision if they just decided to move the version over to 3.6. New features is a new version if you just ask me. Question remains of course if a bugfix is also a new feature.

It was originally planned for last friday, but to hold back the pressure for the support team to enjoy Whitsun and Mother's Day, it was rescheduled to today.

The Service Pack 1 beta (remember its still the beta!) for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 is officially announced at Somasegar's Weblog

You can find the downloads over here:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta

and

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service pack 1 Beta

For me the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is an important release as just after Visual Studio 2008 going RTM I hit and filed a bug where it appeared that cached data in document customizations corrupted in scenarios working with protected documents. I worked out a script to repro this and the VSTO team worked real hard to get this out of the way. The fix is now available in this release:

This is fixed issue number four and the complete list of VSTO related fixes is available in this document:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949258/

Besides fixing VS it also requires you to make some code changes to get it all to work. I will get back on that in one of my next blog items. 

The VS2008 SP1 beta release notes and a pointer to the document above are available in this document:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945140/

Happy testing!

It came to my attention when checking my agenda and the TechEd website. I noticed the dates changed for TechEd EMEA 2008. The weeks are still the same however the order was changed. The IT Professionals week was planned for the second week, just after the Developers week.

For 2008 however they moved the Developers to the second week making the new schedule:

03-07 November 2008 - TechEd EMEA 2008 - IT Professionals
10-14 November 2008 - TechEd EMEA 2008 - Developers

A couple of months ago I attended the Office Developer Conference 2008, a conference completely dedicated to developing Office applications. The conference used to be an 'on invitation only' conference but this year the conference was open for public for the first time.

It happened to be a hard working event as I was sick, hot, cold and had a fever that week. But I managed to keep going and talk to my US buddies and had a great time talking to the product group guys from Microsoft discussing the technical details of the product. Learned a lot.

Somehow these events provide more information if you just walk up to the developer of the tool and start discussing the features, what you use, what you don't use and what you would like to see changed. In my experience the guys at Microsoft are very eager to learn what is out there in the real world. Learn from scenarios that you have in place. So don't hesitate to share your thoughts with them (I think a good place to do that if you are not able to attend events such as the ODC2008 would be the Microsoft Connect site where you can give feedback and file bugs.)

Bill Gates did one of the Keynote speaks at the ODC2008 and Channel 9 was able to put Bill in front of the camera to talk about Office and where he thinks Office will go in the future. Twelve minutes of conversation on Office and I'm, again, surprised how close Bill is to the product. You would expect from him a high level executive view but he appears to know the facts and discussing the details on Office is still possible as the video shows you...

Check it out:
Bill Gates: Backstage at the Office Developer Conference 2008