Tomorrow, we are launching a new user group dedicated to the application life cycle with Team System and Team Foundation Server in Montreal.

Etienne Tremblay and Claude Remillard, both Team System MVPs, will run the group.  They will also present on the inaugural meeting.

More info at www.guvsm.net

Survol de Visual Studio Team System et Roadmap

If you're a student and want a legal copy of Office 2007 Ultimate, you can get one for $60US or $65 CAD but you must hurry, this Microsoft offer ends in 2 days!

US:  http://www.theultimatesteal.com
Canada: http://www.theultimatesteal.ca/

Others countries: Spain, France, Italy, UK, Australia, Mexico, Taiwan and Correa.

There have been conflicting reports about SQL Server injection attacks and a possible new IIS vulnerability.

• This is not related to a new IIS or SQL or ASP.NET vulnerability
• A bot is scanning the Web trying SQL Server injections
• Of course, it is finding a lot of poorly designed non secured pages

Get the facts and learn about injection attacks:
http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2008/04/25/sql-injection-attacks-on-iis-web-servers.aspx

If you're living in Toronto and don't attend DevTeach, I'm gonna beat you up and force you to code in Clipper for the rest of your life.  Seriously, DevTeach has one of the greatest speakers lineup of all the .NET conferences.

Honestly, where can you hear, see, talk to, describe your problems (IT/Dev related or not) and have a beer with these guys/gals?

And that's only half of them!!!

Need more reasons?

Keynote by Scott Hanselman, Microsoft
Scott Hanselman is one of the most prolific, renowned and respected blogger (http://www.hanselman.com) and podcaster (http://www.hanselminutes.com) about technologies. Scott is a hands-on thinker, a renowned speaker and writer. He has written a few books, most recently with Bill Evjen and Devin Rader on Professional ASP.NET. In July 2007, he joined Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager in the Developer Division. In his new role he'll continue to explore and explain a broad portfolio of technologies, both inside and outside Microsoft. He aims to spread the good word about developing software, most often on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6+ years and before that he was a Principal Consultant at STEP Technology for nearly 7 years.
http://www.devteach.com/keynote.aspx

Silverlight 2.0 workshop
For the first time an independent conference is having a workshop on Building Business Applications with Silverlight 2.0.  Join Rod Paddock and Jim Duffy as they give you a head start down the road to developing business-oriented Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with Microsoft Silverlight 2.0. In case you just crawled out from under a rock, Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in positioned to revolutionize the way next generation Rich Internet Applications are developed. Microsoft’s commitment to providing an extensive platform for developers and designers to collaborate on creating the next generation of RIAs is very clear and its name is Silverlight 2.0. In this intensive, full-day workshop, Rod and Jim will share their insight and experience building business applications with Silverlight 2.0 including a review of some of the Internet’s more visible Silverlight web applications. This workshop is happening on Friday May 16 at the Hilton Toronto.
http://www.devteach.com/PostConference.aspx#PreSP

Bonus session: .NET Rock host a panel May 14th at 18:00
This year the bonus session (Wednesday May 14 at 18:00) will be a panel of speakers debating the Future of .NET. Where is .NET going? How will new development influence .NET and be influenced by .NET? Join Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks as they moderate a discussion on the future directions of .NET. The panellists include individuals who have strong visions of the future of software development and the role that .NET can play in that future. Attend this session and bring your questions to get some insight into the potential future of .NET! This bonus session is free for everyone. Panelists are: Ted Neward,Oren Eini ,Scott Bellware
http://www.devteach.com/BonusSession.aspx

Party with Palermo, DevTeach Toronto Edition
Jeffrey Palermo (MVP) is hosting Monday May 12th in Toronto is acclaimed "Party with Palermo". This is the official social event  kicking off DevTeach Toronto. The event is not just for the attendees of Toronto it’s  a free event for everyone. It’s a unique chance for the attendees, speakers and locals  to meet and talk with a free beer.   The event will be held at the Menage club  location and you need to RSVP to attend. Get all the details at this link:
http://www.partywithpalermo.com/

Make sure that DevTeach comes back to Toronto.  Register right now for this year's conference.

Pictures from the MVP Summit 2008 (some from Laurent Duveau).

Link to the full album:

MVP Summit 2008

Most notables (click for larger pictures)...

Sea of red

The Montreal MVPs

And their jerseys

Going to the Summit in style

ScottGu

SteveB wearing the Canadian jersey during his keynote thanks to Barry Gervin

The French MVPs had to wear what?  Looks like they weren't happy about it 

However, we had so much fun with them

more info at www.guvsm.net

Prochaine assemblée

Mardi 29 avril 2008

Meeting inaugural du groupe d’intérêt Team System

Survol de Visual Studio Team System et Roadmap
Conférenciers: Claude Remillard, MVP Team System et Étienne Tremblay, MVP Team System

Étienne Tremblay est un architecte sénior chez EDS Canada avec plus de 15 ans d'expérience en développement d'applications d'entreprises. Il a travaillé dans les industries minières et manufacturières et récemment, la gestion de configuration et outillage de développement. Il a développé un système pour surveiller la qualité dans la fabrication de voitures, un système de gestion de réclamations, un système d’opération et de surveillance de mines et un système de gestion de d'itinéraires en utilisant des modèles d'application n tiers. Tout au long de ces années il est devenu un expert en matière d'outillage de cycle de vie de développement de logiciels et a été l'un des architectes de la solution corporative Visual Studio Team System chez EDS. Cette initiative l’a amené à voyager autour du monde pour donner de la formation adaptée aux développeurs .NET d'EDS. Il a été un conférencier lors de plusieurs conférences internationales en 2005, 2006 et 2007 sur Visual Studio. Il a aussi donné une conférence virtuelle pour MSDN sur « comment adopté Visual Studio Team System ». Il représente EDS sur le Conseil Consultatif de Microsoft pour Team System. Il a été attribué le statut de MVP Team System en 2006 et 2007 et a été choisi comme juge pour la compétition internationale de Design de Logiciel de l’Imagine Cup 2007 en Corée du Sud.

M. Rémillard est co-fondateur et président de la firme InCycle et a obtenu le statut de MVP Team System en 2007. Au cours de ces dernières années, M. Rémillard présente régulièrement a diverses tribunes au sujet des meilleures pratiques en gestion du cycle de vie des applications, tout autant pour le compte d’InCycle que celui de Microsoft. Précédemment, il a occupé divers postes de direction dans le secteur du développement logiciel. Il a notamment été président d’Acceleron, une société de développement de logiciels qui a mis au point et commercialisé une solution de gestion des dépenses pour laquelle près d’un demi-million de licences ont été vendues dans le monde.

Learning WCF

Author: Michele Leroux Bustamante
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN-10: 0596101627
ISBN-13: 978-0596101626
Retail Price: $44.99 US, $58.99 CDN
Publication Date: May 2007
Softcover: 582 pages
Online information: Table of contents, source code
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101626/
Book URL: http://www.thatindigogirl.com/

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It unifies various technologies previously available like Web Services and .NET Remoting into a single programming model and let you build Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications.

“Learning WCF” is a book targeted at experienced .NET developers wanting to learn WCF from scratch. In the first chapters, the author explains what services are and the whole idea behind SOA. She then guides you thru the WCF path learning about contracts, bindings, hosting, concurrency, reliability and security. You’ll find plenty of code examples and each one is explained in details. To help you apply the WCF concepts, each chapter has a lab that you can just read or experiment with by downloading the source code. The approach in these labs is a “step by step” one and often, the author guides you thru one path then backtracks and explains you a different way to accomplish the same thing. This is very useful to get a good understanding of the technology.

Even thought the title has the word “learning” in it, the book will get plenty of mileage serving as a reference book in the future and don’t think that it’s a “light” book; most of the concepts explained are advanced ones. I often had to reread complete sections not because they were poorly written but because of the vast amount of information provided.

WCF is vast and learning it is not a simple task but thanks to Michele Leroux Bustamante’s “Learning WCF”, this process is a lot simpler. High praises for “Learning WCF”.

If you're planning to attend the Patterns & Practices Quebec City Summit but haven't registered yet, do it right away!  I just heard from Joel Quimper that the Summit is almost sold out, less then a dozen seats are still available.

http://www.pnpsummit.com/queb2008.aspx

I was trying to explain quickly what Code Access Security is to someone when I found this blog entry from Emmet Gray:
http://home.hot.rr.com/graye/Articles/CodeAccessSecurity.htm

In a nutshell, he explains why your code won't run if run from a network share and what are CAS, mscorcfg.msc and caspol.exe.  It's a great 5 minutes CAS primer.

If you created reports using Visual Studio 2008 and Crystal Reports 2008 Basic (the one included with VS) and you want to deploy your app on a server, you'll also need to deploy the CR runtime.  Your first reaction might be to go to the Business Objects Website and download the CR 2008 runtime.

http://support.businessobjects.com/downloads/runtime.asp#08

Well, that's the wrong runtime.  That one is for the "full" version of CR 2008 (version 12).  The CR included with VS 2008 is the basic one (version 10.5).

So where do I get the basic (10.5) runtime?  It's right on your machine:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\CrystalReports10_5

Ray Ozzie hinted it at his Mix08 keynote. 

The name: Live Mesh
https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/Welcome.aspx

What it is:
http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/04/22/279.aspx

Ray Ozzie introducing it on Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=399578

The architecture:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=399577

Hands on demo on Channel 10:
http://www.on10.net/blogs/nic/Hands-on-with-Live-Mesh/

Must now read, watch, try and formulate an opinion 

If you like TheRegion.com, home of the Microsoft Regional Directors, you'll love this Vista Gadget created by Adi Saric.

Download it here:
http://gallery.live.com/LiveItemDetail.aspx?li=d73ec145-95a0-4f62-b8a4-be0c8ac4f21e

While waiting for Enterprise Library 4, you might want to use Entlib 3.1 with Visual Studio 2008.  All the blocks will work but the VS integration will not.  Does that mean you're stuck editing the config file by hand?  Not at all, all you need is add a few registry entries by downloading a .REG file from CodePlex.

http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=entlibcontrib&ReleaseId=11669

The steps are:

1. Install EntLib 3.1
2. Run the .REG file
3. From the VS command prompt, run devenv /setup

Voilà!

With his own VS 2008 hockey puck and Hockey Canada jersey, ScottGu is now an official honorary Canadian!

I finally made it to Seattle.  Why do I say finally?  Well, we were flying American Airlines, you know, the airline that grounded all its MD-80 last week and guess what?  6 MVPs from Montreal were flying on MD-80s Sunday morning flights!  So it's not until Saturday that we had a confirmation from AA that our flights were not cancelled.

Upon arrival, we were looking for a way to get to our downtown hotels when I noticed a couple of stretched limos.  I asked our much the ride was and it would have been the same price as riding a shuttle so guess what?  The Montreal MVPs arrived to their hotels in grand style:

Laurent Duveau, Dominic Sevigny and Etienne Tremblay

Me, Eric Moreau and Mario Cardinal

I was trying to return a WCF custom FaultException and just couldn’t figure out how to read the custom info I was sending from the client when I found this blog entry from Jean-Paul Smit:
http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/jpsmit/archive/2007/03/21/wcf-fault-contracts.aspx

My comprehension of the whole process was OK, I was just missing one key element and the light came thru when I read this line:

• in ex.Detail you can find your custom fault contract

Funny how a single line of text in a short blog entry can help you a lot sometimes 

Some of the experts at the Launch 2008 Montreal Technical Readiness 2008: Bertrand, Laurent Duveau, Etienne Tremblay and Mario Cardinal.

Very very crowded!

BTW, I forgot to credit Jean-Luc David for the picture in my previous post.  Thanks JL!  Check his pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jldavid

Some of the experts at the Launch 2008 Montreal Technical Readiness 2008 ATE Booth:

Interesting numbers on Microsoft Certified Professionals Worldwide:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/certified.mspx

In my previous post (LINQ to SQL in multi layered + service apps), I mentioned how LINQ to SQL can be used in WCF apps but how to you deal with concurrency checking?  One way is to use a Timestamp column in your tables.  This is a binary type so how will WCF deal with that?

LINQ to SQL maps the SQL Timestamp type to the System.Data.Linq.Binary type.  If you add a DataMember attribute to a System.Data.Linq.Binary field, it will work.  WCF will not choke on that.  So what does the client sees?  Something like this: Service1.Binary.

This whole thing may leads to a few problems:

1. Binary stuff is not very interoperable
2. Service1.Binary != System.Data.Linq.Binary

One solution is to convert the info from Binary to String.  Andrew Siemer posted a couple of extension methods that allow you to do just that.  Check it out:
http://geekswithblogs.net/AndrewSiemer/archive/2008/02/11/converting-a-system.data.linq.binary-or-timestamp-to-a-string-and-back.aspx

Simple and easy and you can convert the data right into your LINQ to SQL queries.

In my previous post, one reader commented that the proposed LINQ query would be utterly slow so I did a quick unscientific showdown.

In the left corner: the query returning complex objects from anonymous types:
var q = from o in ctx.Orders
        where o.CustomerID == id
        select new { Detail = o.Order_Details, CustomerID = o.CustomerID, OrderDate = o.OrderDate, OrderID = o.OrderID, ShippedDate = o.ShippedDate, ShipCity = o.ShipCity };

In the right corner: the query returning complex objects from POCOs:
var q = from o in ctx.Orders
where o.CustomerID == id
select new TransportObjects.Northwind.Order {
Detail = o.Order_Details.Select(item => new  TransportObjects.Northwind.OrderDetail {
ProductID = item.ProductID 
}).ToArray(),
CustomerID = o.CustomerID, OrderDate = o.OrderDate, OrderID = o.OrderID, ShippedDate = o.ShippedDate, ShipCity = o.ShipCity};

The weapons: 50,000 orders each having 10 order details rows meaning 500,000 objects.

The result: it's a tie!

Yep, both queries returned the results in about 2 seconds using SQL Server Express 2005 locally (no layers, no WCF etc)

Must read:

http://janvandenbeld.blogspot.com/2008/04/hypocrisy.html

In my previous post about using LINQ to SQL in multi layered apps, I mentioned that this query was not optimal because I would need to build the POCOs from the objects returned by LINQ.  This would mean that objects would be created twice. 

var q = from o in ctx.Orders
        where o.CustomerID == id
        select new { Detail = o.Order_Details, CustomerID = o.CustomerID, OrderDate = o.OrderDate, OrderID = o.OrderID, ShippedDate = o.ShippedDate, ShipCity = o.ShipCity };

Not ideal so I asked if anyone had an idea on how to do that.  Stefan Sedich suggested this query:

var q = from o in ctx.Orders
where o.CustomerID == id
select new TransportObjects.Northwind.Order {

Detail = o.Order_Details.Select(item => new  TransportObjects.Northwind.OrderDetail {
ProductID = item.ProductID 
}).ToArray(),

CustomerID = o.CustomerID,
OrderDate = o.OrderDate,
OrderID = o.OrderID,
ShippedDate = o.ShippedDate,
ShipCity = o.ShipCity};

Cool!  The query returns the Order complex object with the Detail property filled from orders Details.

Thanks a lot Stefan!

Enterprise Library 4.0 March 2008 CTP was released yesterday.

http://www.codeplex.com/entlib

My good friend Mario Cardinal just got one article published on MSDN.  It's called The Hidden Roles of Software Architects.  Check it out:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc431351.aspx

Team Suite Vnext will be FREE (but ad supported)

At Mix08 in Las Vegas, I had the chance (!) to be invited to a special meeting.  The invite was for only 12 people and it was to demonstrate a revolutionary new Visual Studio feature.  We gathered with Scott Guthrie in a private room at the Aquaknox restaurant at the Venetian hotel where we were treated with exquisite seafood that would have a bad taste later on.

So what is that revolutionary new Visual Studio feature?  Well, Microsoft plans to offer the next Visual Studio Version for free.  Yeah, Visual Studio Express is already free you might say but I’m talking about the Team Suite here!  Yep, Microsoft plans to offer the $10K product for free!!!  So watch the catch?  Isn’t that some good news?  Well, Microsoft has some large teams dedicated to the development tools and they need to generate revenues to pay for those salaries so the Visual Studio VNext will be free but add supported.  You might say that’s it’s a good deal because you get a $10K product for free by watching a few non obstructive ads well here the catch: the ads are obstructive.  How obstructive?  Check this out.
First of all, the advert system code name is called Barracuda.  It is already included in the August CTP of Visual Studio Team Suite code name Rosario.  You may have downloaded that version and found nothing special; this is because it is not activated by default.  To activate it, Microsoft has created something clever: you need to input a special set of buttons from an Xbox 360 game controller!

So you need to connect an Xbox 360 controller to an USB port (the wireless one will also work) on the machine running Rosario and you need to input the button sequence in this precise order:
At the same time: press the Left trigger + Right trigger + Left thumbstick UP + Right thumbstick DOWN
While the above are pressed, press the D-pad in this order: Up, Left, Up, Down, Up, Right
If you entered the correct sequence, the controller will vibrate and this dialog will pop-up inviting you to restart Visual Studio.

After restarting Visual Studio, create a class library project and take a look at the code.  Yep that’s an ad placed directly on top of your code and no way to turn it off!

Now shut down Visual Studio, unplug your network cable so you don’t have any Internet access and restart Visual Studio.  You’ll be prompted by this dialog:

Yes, an Internet connection will be required to use that free ad supported Visual Studio.  If you dismiss this dialog, Visual Studio just closes.  That’s it!  Impossible to use it on the train or at a client without being connected to their network.  How convenient!

Now the shocking part (yes there are more shocking news!): when the application is compiled and deployed, the add system doesn’t go away because it’s built in the .NET Framework 4.0. When your users will start your app, they will be presented with an ad!

Microsoft has not completed the Web start-up ad yet but the plan is to whenever a new session starts, the start-up ad will be presented in a DHTML window over your actual application in the browser.  Shocking?  Wait, there’s more!
The ad system is connected with ADO.NET so ads are inserted right into the data you’re displaying.  The plan is to have one ad being displayed at all time in grids. 

Oh BTW, your users will also have to be connected to the Internet or your app will simply not run!

I don’t know about you but that whole ad supported Visual Studio thing smells fishy.  I don’t like it at all and I’d rather pay for Visual Studio then get it for free and annoy my users.  Before posting this info, I contacted Scott Guthrie for voicing my concerns.  This is what he had to say:  April Fools!!!!