As of today Pex 2010 is available as a download on the MSDN Subscriber downloads website. Although the build number remains 0.90.50303.0, moving the bits from the Microsoft Research web site to the MSDN Subscriber downloads is a huge shift for the Pex project.

Today I was to cleaning up my development workstation. I am running Windows XP Pro x64 and I wanted to uninstall Visual Studio .NET Professional 2003 as I haven’t used it and never will again. I was very surprised to see this dialog when I clicked on the Change/Remove button in the Add or Remove Programs Control Panel applet:

Googling around for a solution it seems that I am not the only one with this problem, and so far there are no real solution beside people performing clean installations of Windows, which I find a bit a drastic solution to the problem…

The Power Tools for Team Foundation Server 2010 Release Candidate are available for download. Download the power tools here.

Available power tools:

• Process Template Editor
• TFS Best Practices Analyzer
• Check-in Policy Pack
• Work Item Templates
• Alert Editor
• Windows Shell Extensions
• PowerShell Support
• TFPT Command Line
• Team Members

Yes, WCF is PHAT! But I am having these days where I take a step back, look at the, clear my mind and for a fraction of a second stop being the geek that I really am and ask myself the question: “do I really need WCF for this project?”

WCF is a fantastic framework, but IMHO a lot of projects don’t need it and are over-architected. I am pretty sure that you got a couple of projects like that yourself, no seriously, be objective, admit it, c’mon, stop thinking like a geek who wants to marry WCF solely for its coolness factor. :-)

Nevertheless, WCF is phat! By the way, did you know that soon you can buy the 3rd Edition of the book Programming WCF Services by Juwal Löwy?

IMHO Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management is a l33t product. At this point in time, there is no word on the pricing but I going through the Visual Studio 2010 Licensing White Paper I don’t think that it will be cheap, furthermore I am also a bit  afraid that in a lot of companies it will be a bit hard to sell because of company politics as it is possible that your company is already using for example VMware vCenter Lab Manager and they might not be willing to just throw that away (yet).

David Baliles, the Enterprise Tools Strategist @ Microsoft posted on his MSDN blog a whole bunch of Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management videos which are worth checking out.

Click here for the videos.

Does he really know what he is talking about?

This makes we wonder whether or not he has ever used TFS Source Code Control at all or is he comparing the full blown TFS package to Subversion?

Source

I took the time to upgrade to BlogEngine.NET 1.6. The upgrade went flawless.

• If you see that however that there are some issues = care
• If you have a link that refers to my blog that is broken now = care
• If your stupid SPAM comment bots no longer work = care

CLR via C#, 2nd Edition is an excellent book and I can’t wait to get my hands on this 3rd Edition.

Read more

I have been using Snagit for capturing screens for many many years and it is IMHO the best screen capturing tool for Windows out there. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is a beta version available for Mac!

http://www.techsmith.com/snagitmac/

I found an interesting paper on the Microsoft downloads web site with a detailed summary of the Microsoft Silverlight Release history. You can download and read it from here.

Here is a brief summary:

• Build 3.0.40818.0 Released September 1, 2009
• Build 3.0.40723.0 Released July 27, 2009
• Build 3.0.40624.00 Released July 9, 2009
• Build 2.0.40115.00 Released February 18, 2009
• Build 2.0.31005.00 Released October 14, 2008
• Build 1.0.30715.00 Released July 23, 2008
• Build 1.0.30401.00 Released April 4, 2008
• Build 1.0.30109.00 Released Jan. 15, 2008
• Build 1.0.21115.00 Released Nov. 20, 2007
• Build 1.0.20816.00 Released Sept. 4, 2007