Scott Guthrie just published a blog entry where he is laying down a roadmap for the .NET Web products:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/29/net-web-product-roadmap-asp-net-silverlight-iis7.aspx

Highlights:
A set of Beta enhancements to ASP.NET 3.5 will be made availble next week.
Silverlight 1.1 will ship with more stuff then originaly planned so it's renamed to 2.0.
A new deployment process for Web apps running in IIS 7 will be announced shorthly.

Guess who's from Vermont?  Julie Lerman of course!

I'm in Vancouver for the DevTeach conference and I'll be talking about some of the features of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE with a focus on the built-in tools.

www.devteach.com

(gosh, it's not raining at the moment!)

If you're in a hurry to upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2008, you might want to first read this blog entry by Brian Harry:
http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/22/2008-installation-questions.aspx

Registration is now open for Mix08...
http://www.visitmix.com

And...

www.devteach.com

DevTeach will stop in Vancouver for the first time next week.  If you're living in the BC/Alberta region, don't miss this fantastic conference.  Here are a few reasons to attend:

High ratio of speakers/attendees.  This means that you'll have time to talk with your favorite speakers about your favorite topics/problems/issues.

In your backward.  This means lower cost for your company to send you to a conference.

Keynote by Ken Levy.  Ken is the community program manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team  for VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility).

Top notch expert speakers from Microsoft and from the industry.  See the complete list here:
http://www.devteach.com/Speaker.aspx

119 sessions on 7 simultaneous tracks in 3 days.  This means that for each timeslot, you have to choose between 7 topics!
http://www.devteach.com/Schedule.aspx

Pre-con and post-con workshops.

Attendee party with...free beer!
http://www.partywithpalermo.com/List

Carl and Richard from ".NET Rocks" will be there.

The conference will take place at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre.

The conference provides wireless Internet access so you can stay in touch with the office.

C'mon Vancouver!  Register now!

Qixing posted this info on the MSDN Canada UX Connection blog:

Five hours of free Silverlight 1.0 training is now available on Lynda.com. Arturo Toledo, a program manager at Microsoft who leads a lot of Silverlight and Expression training effort, has more background information on the training here. Besides the Silverlight training, you can also find Expression Blend, Design, and Web training on Lynda.com for free.

http://blogs.msdn.com/canux/archive/2007/11/20/silverlight-training-on-lynda-com.aspx

The .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 is now available for download.
x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=79bc3b77-e02c-4ad3-aacf-a7633f706ba5&DisplayLang=en
x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=029196ed-04eb-471e-8a99-3c61d19a4c5a&DisplayLang=en

Same for the SP1 for the .NET Framework 3.0:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec2ca85d-b255-4425-9e65-1e88a0bdb72a&DisplayLang=en

Note that when you install the .NET Framework 3.5, these service packs are required and are automatically installed.  They are available as separate downloads for those not yet ready to deploy the .NET Framework 3.5.

An update to my previous post regarding failed installations of Visual Studio 2008 RTM when a Beta or RC version was previously installed....

ScottGu posted a complete list of products to uninstall before launching the VS 2008 RTM setup:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/20/steps-to-uninstall-vs-2008-beta2-before-installing-the-vs-2008-final-release.aspx

Visual Studio 2005 has no "out of the box" support for SQL Server 2008.  Microsoft has made available an update in the form of a CTP that allow VS 2005 to connect to a SQL Server 2008 CTP5 server.

This CTP resolves a problem that when you try to open a database connection to SQL Server 2008 by using Visual Studio 2005 design tools, you may receive the following error message:
“This server version is not supported. Only servers up to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 are supported.”
This CTP addresses this issue, and enables the following Visual Studio functionality for SQL Server 2008 CTP5 :

• Server Explorer successfully connects to SQL Server 2008, and database objects such as stored procedures and table data can be viewed and edited. Note that table schemas still cannot be viewed or edited in this release.
  
• SQL CLR projects that target SQL Server 2008 CTP5 can be created and deployed to the server.
  
• T-SQL and SQL CLR debugging are now enabled for SQL Server 2008 CTP5.
• Data binding features in Client and Web Projects are enabled.
  

This CTP does not support the following features for SQL Server 2008 Nov CTP:

• Creating and editing table schemas in Table Designer or Database Diagrams. The table designer feature in SQL Server Management Studio 2008 can be used to edit table schemas in SQL Server 2008 CTP5.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e1109aef-1aa2-408d-aa0f-9df094f993bf&displaylang=en

The Visual Studio 2008 Training has been updated for the RTM release.  What's in there?  More the 30 PowerPoint decks, some demo scripts and some labs to learn the cool new VS 2008 + Framework 3.5 stuff.

You can download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8bdaa836-0bba-4393-94db-6c3c4a0c98a1&DisplayLang=en

Beside the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft has made available to download the latest CTP of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (November 2007).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3bf4c5ca-b905-4ebc-8901-1d4c1d1da884&displaylang=en

I recently bought a new Toshiba laptop and proceeded with a complete reinstallation of Vista Ultimate.  Everything was fine except that the Realtek driver for the network Adapter (RTL8101) was crashing all the time and was blue screening Vista!  Doh!!!
I uninstalled the Toshiba supplied driver and let Vista install its own to no good.  I still had blue screens at random times.

I went on the Realtek Website and downloaded their latest driver (awaiting certification) and since then, no more blue screens.

I had Visual Studio 2008 Team RC installed on my laptop and I wanted to install the RTM version so I uninstalled the RC and launched the RTM setup but the setup would fail.  After a little digging and reading ScottGu's blog, I figured out that the Visual Studio setup install numerous products by launching separate installations.  So when you actually uninstall VS, you're not uninstalling everything that was actually installed.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-3-5-released.aspx

People often ask me for suggestions on how best to upgrade from previous betas of Visual Studio 2008.  In general I'd recommend uninstalling the Beta2 bits explicitly.  As part of this you should uninstall Visual Studio 2008 Beta2, .NET Framework Beta2, as well as the Visual Studio Web Authoring Component (these are all separate installs and need to be uninstalled separately).  I then usually recommend rebooting the machine after uninstalling just to make sure everything is clean before you kick off the new install.  You can then install the final release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 on the machine.

Looking at the Programs and Features entries, I uninstalled these products in this specific order, then went to install VS 2008 RTM without a glitch.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 - ENU
Microsoft Document Explorer 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 .NET Framework Tools
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 SDK Reference Assemblies and IntelliSense
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 Tools
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 Design Tools ENU
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 ENU
Microsoft Device Emulator version 3.0 - ENU
Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

James Lapalme: Langage dédié (Domain-Specific Languages ou DSL)

Nous discutons avec James Lapalme de l'importance des langages dédiés (Domain-Specific Languages) pour le futur des programmeurs. Un langage dédié est créé pour résoudre certains problèmes spécifiques dans un domaine particulier, et n'a en principe pas vocation à résoudre des problèmes en dehors de ce contexte. En comparaison, on crée des langages généralistes tel que C# ou Visual Basic pour résoudre des problèmes dans beaucoup de domaines.

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Code Camp Montréal: Les utilitaires pour le développement .NET

Cette émission est un enregistrement "live" que Mario Cardinal et Guy Barrette ont réalisé le 27 octobre 2007 lors du Code Camp Montréal. Notre avons demander aux conférenciers du Code Camp quels sont les utilitaires pour le développement .NET dont ils ne peuvent plus se passer.

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Well, the title says it all 

All the products might not show up right now in MSDN Subscriptions Downloads.  Just use the "Top Subscriber Downloads" links on MSDN Downloads.

Be sure to turn off your pop-up blockers like the one in IE7.  I was trying to figure out why the download links wouldn't work.  These links use the Akamai download manager and youmust enable (temporarily) pop-ups.

Microaoft announced to day that they will split TechEd US 2008 in two: TechEd Developers and TechEd IT.  They did that in Europe a couple of years ago because they couldn't find venues large enough to accomodate so many attendees.  Space is no proble in US conference centers but I think it's a smart decision to split it anyway.

More info here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched