Updated 17 June 2008: Cliff in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division quickly identified the problem. See Yes, we have Visual Studio in WF tutorials for the full story. I was buried yesterday or I would have posted the update sooner!

I had a notion to see what the WF training materials on MSDN were like. Straight away I hit upon a conundrum.

Does anyone out there have a clue why the Windows Workflow Foundation tutorials on MSDN Library studiously avoids use of Visual Studio?

The first tutorial, creating a sequential workflow, Exercise 1, Task 1 has you creating a .csproj file and pasting in a few dozen lines of XML without explanation of why we're going down this path. What's wrong with VS2008's File | New | Project?

Then it has you cut-and-paste over 200 lines of code into a .cs file for a Windows Form application, most of it in InitializeComponent which I am guessing was generated in the VS designer. That's wacky.

Sure, it is a time saver, and purely ancillary to the WF topic, but this is not how I start building applications. And nary a word of why.

What gives?

I've been a fan of Edward Tufte since I first pulled his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information down off the shelf at Powell's Books and peered inside. Tufte has been termed by The New York Times "the Leonardo da Vinci of data," and four beautiful and powerful books have won 40 awards. A professor emeritus at Yale, he taught statistical evidence, information design, and interface design.

Tufte presents a one-day course "Presenting Data and Information" in a number of cities throughout the world each year. Not only is his topic fascinating, and his content the very best, but his masterful presentation and delivery are spellbinding. I am fortunate to have taken his class twice: the second time I got even more out of it than the first. He is that good.

Tufte is presenting his class in Portland at the Portland Art Museum on Wednesday, July 16, 2008. Register early, his classes often fill up quickly

Other cities on his speaking schedule this year include Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

The day-long course includes all four of Tufte's books, and the class's overall structure guides you through some of the major topics in each book. That's makes the $380 fee a great value and worthwhile investment.

Expand your mind. Change how you think about, design, and present information.

Pat Helland is an architect at Microsoft. He has worked on a lot of deep technology, including the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC). The late, legendary Jim Gray was his mentor. He wrote the reasonably popular article Metropolis, "a metaphor for the evolution of information technology into the world of service-oriented architectures," which appeared in Microsoft's Architecture Journal 2 (April 2004). A while back he left Microsoft and went to work at Amazon, and now he is back at Microsoft.

One of his recent talks is The Irresistible Forces Meet the Moveable Objects (1:15:37) recorded at TechEd EMEA in November 2007. The thesis of this talk: "the way technology is going, we will be changing the way we build our applications." He describes several forces that are or will be driving our future, and then looks at where they are driving it, namely a world of moveable objects where there is no one true record.

Some of this technology is here today. Eye-opening technology, like buying a datacenter in a shipping container. Current and future vendors include Sun, Dell, Google, Rackable, and others. A key concept is that you never open the container: if one or ten or a hundred servers fail, you just leave them in place and continue operations.

Helland sure gives you one helluva lot to think about here.

My brother is looking to hire someone with a pilot's license (need not be current) and general purpose database and computer skills. He works at a large aerospace company in Seattle. Interested? Click the E-mail link and let me know.

Whoops!  Here's a photo of the display in the elevator at my hotel at TechEd 2008. You know, the hotel across from the convention center filled with hundreds of developers and Microsoft employees. I guess it is running (or not) on Windows.

I couldn't figure out how to click the Send Error Report button. For all I know, it is still there waiting for input.

My friend Patrick Cauldwell will be talking on The Code Is The Easy Part on June 12, 2008 at 7 PM at OGI in Portland. His talk addresses of continuous integration in theory and practice. The talk is free and open to the public, please register at the above link.

The Code Is The Easy Part
Patrick Cauldwell
Sponsored by Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN)
OGI School of Science and Engineering, Wilson Clark Center
6:00 PM networking and pizza, 7:00 PM seminar

Patrick is also the recent author of Code Leader: Using People, Tools, and Processes to Build Successful Software on Wrox Press. To get a sense of where the book goes, read Patrick's post This I believe... the developer edition. Scott Hanselman wrote the forward to Code Leader and blogged some comments on the book.

With the TechEd 2008 Developers conference next week, Microsoft has announced the agenda for PDC 2008 including sessions and unsessions (don't ask questions, just go there.) PDC 2008 happens October 27-30, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. There is an early-bird registration discount of $200 until August 15, off of the full conference price of $2,395 USD.

Start making plans now.

Microsoft DreamSpark is a program for students at accredited colleges and universities in 11 countries to get free copies of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Microsoft Expression Studio, Windows Server 2003 and the XNA Game Studio.

Get started with DreamSpark today and spark your own dream.

DreamSpark is hosted on Channel 8, Microsoft's site specifically for students. It is a sister to Channel 9 and Channel 10. There are some great resources, as well as serious fun to be had on these websites.

Here is a blog from a US student who is studying in Chengdu, China, the provincial capital city near the epicenter of the massive earthquake on May 12. He's in an exchange program between the University of Washington and Sichuan University. His first-hand accounts of what is happening there add an interesting perspective that complements what we hear in the news.

He has also helped create China Earthquake Aid (CEA) at chinaearthquakeaid.org for collecting donations to deliver aid to the communities most affected by the disaster. They are working through the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students, and the University of Washington Combined Fund Drive. Visit their website to find out how you can help.

This weekend I was one of the judges at the Oregon Game Project Challenge 1.0 (OGPC). This state-wide competition had teams of high school students presenting games they had created using GameMaker around this year's theme of energy. The competition was held at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, and sponsored by the TechStart Education Foundation in affiliation with the Oregon University System.

The range of work we saw was amazing, and some of it was simply astounding. The competition was arranged in five categories — programming, user experience, presentation, research and development, and teamwork — with trophies awarded to the top two teams in each category, plus first- and second-prize champion awards. The first-place champion award winner was PHRED (Philomath High Robotics Engineering Division) which scored very well across the categories. As their team name belies, they also competed in the Oregon regional FIRST Robotics Competition. They took home two awards from that competition, and a flier announcing the OGPC 1.0 competition. Way to go, Philomath!

The judges were divided into panels, with different panels judging the technical and presentation categories. With 21 teams attending (there were a few no-shows), each panel saw about one-third of the teams. After judging the teams, all of the judges gathered to deliberate. The challenge here, as head judge Chris Brooks put it, was to try to bring some objectivity into a highly subjective process. It was hard to level-set the judging, and absolutely fascinating listening to what the judges had to say about the teams they saw. We made some difficult decisions, and I was really satisfied with the final results.

Great job to all of the teams who took part, and to everyone who made OGPC 1.0 come together in a few short months. I am looking forward to seeing next year's competition.

Here's a little C# quiz for your brain bones. What will happen when the following code is executed? Explain why.

Do not compile the code, just use your gray matter.

This came up during a conversation last week. I wouldn't want to bet on everyone getting the correct answer, and purely on that basis alone this should probably not be a recommended practice. It's still a gem of a thought problem.

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They have created a monster!

Here's an error page from Technorati that tickled my funny bone. Looks like a server is unavailable.

And, yes, the page title really is "Technorati is borked right now!" On page refresh, they seem to have unborked the great Technorati, and all is once again well with the world.

</FunnyPages>

If your TechEd 2008 plans include arriving the day before the conference, then there's a party with your name on it.

For the TechEd Developers 2008 conference, get down with Party With Palermo: TechEd 2008 Developers Edition on Monday, 2 June 2008. This is the pre-conference party that started it all, hosted by affable MVP Jeffrey Palermo. Visit the website and submit your name so they know you are coming. I'll be there.

For the TechEd IT Professionals 2008 conference, say hello to Party with the Pros: The IT Pro Party on Monday, 9 June 2008. Your sponsoring host is Doug Spindler of Pacific IT Pros, and independent nonprofit association. Visit the website and request a Golden Ticket if you want to get in.

Both parties will be held at the fabulous Glo Lounge, just blocks away from the conference venue.

And if you are with a corporation or organization that wants to be seen, there are sponsorship opportunities available for both of these high-profile, high-visibility shin-digs.