My Tech·Ed 2008 North America DVD set arrived in my mailbox this morning! I am like a kid in a candy shop. Because I got busy during the conference with co-chairing Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, side meetings, and some quality time in the architecture lounge with the Ask The Experts, I didn't get to all of the breakout sessions I had scheduled. And I was only at the Developers week: there were some IT Professionals sessions that sounded pretty interesting. Now I can explore 650 sessions from both Tech·Ed weeks from the comfort of my laptop. I am jazzed.

Handy tip: the Developers sessions are on discs 1 through 5, the IT Pro sessions are on discs 6 through 9. The labeling or insert could have made that clear. But don't worry, it's all there.

If you didn't attend Tech·Ed 2008 North America, you can will be able to purchase the DVD set from the Microsoft Event DVD Store. (Yeah, I just learned that such a thing existed. Nice to know.) The Tech·Ed 2008 set is listed as "coming soon." Since I just received my set in the mail, I assume that means really soon now.

There is also a good deal of content available at TechEd Online including the conference keynotes and Tech·Talks.

Next year Tech·Ed moves to Los Angeles, California, and it moves up a month: May 12-15, 2009 for Developers, and May 19-22, 2009 for IT Professionals.

I'm back from some much needed time off, and here's an interesting idea that was sitting in my inbox on my return.

Check out the .NET Developer Virtual Conference, October 28 - 30, 2008, online everywhere. The conference is a very reasonable $100 for three days of content, with more than 30 how-to sessions. Julie Yack is the conference chair, and she got the idea after being very impressed with a SQL virtual conference she attended.

The speaker roster includes Ani Babaian, Rob Bagby, Kathleen Dollard, Scott Golightly, Tim Heuer, Ben Hoelting, Tim Huckaby, Dr. Neil Roodyn, Chris Sutton, and David Yack. That's quite some line-up.

Julie also volunteers with INETA, so if you are a member of an INETA user group, ask your user group president to contact Julie for a special discount.

Graham Watson, senior marketing manager at Microsoft has announced that Culminis will be transitioning to a volunteer-based organization, similar to INETA. Culminis is the association of Microsoft IT Pro user groups, sister organization to INETA which is the association of .NET user groups. I have been working with Culminis members for the last several years co-chairing the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd conferences.

As I understand it, Culminis has been receiving funding for staff as well as programs from Microsoft. On the other hand INETA's funding covers programs and minimal paid staff who support volunteers. Graham takes care to point out that Microsoft values user groups highly, and that there are pros and cons to each funding model. That said, Microsoft and Culminis will be working together to move their organization closer to the INETA model. My very best wishes to the Culminis crew through the upcoming transition period.

"The core services will be available to the new volunteer Culminis community and INETA as well as other associations such as PASS," writes Graham. "We think this is particularly advantageous to the community as a whole, as it ensures that Microsoft support is available to all User Groups and not just IT Pro groups."

Got a comment? Graham is really interested in your feedback.

Last week I gave a Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) presentation at the Portland Area .NET Users Group (PADNUG). I figured it's summer, a couple of days ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, I should be prepared to have six people in attendance. But, in truth, it was around to 30. Not bad considering the competition. And it was great group for breaking in my new WF talk with several excellent questions and comments from the audience. And there was general beer drinking and WF merriment at Gustav's afterwards.

A PDF of the slides is available for you to download and enjoy.

Increase and decrease font size from the keyboard. I got tied up in traffic on the way to the talk, which discombobulated me slightly, and I forgot to bump up the font sizes in Visual Studio the way I always do. Thankfully, someone called the small fonts to my attention. As if on queue, Rich Claussen talked me through Sara Ford's Visual Studio Tip #242: "Did you know… You can bind macros to keyboard shortcuts (or how to quickly increase / decrease your text editor font size)?" That totally rocks. Thanks, Rich. Thanks, Sara.

Change font and size of IntelliSense. While I was looking that tip, I ran across an equally awesome tip for presenters on Sara's blog, "How to change the font and font size for Intellisense: Statement Completion, Parameter Info, and Quick Tips." I can see this one will be really handy for presentations where I am using IntelliSense to discover and explore some kind of object model. Nice.

Our story so far... Michael Eaton started it and tagged Sarah Dutkiewicz who in turn tagged Jeff Blankenburg and he turned around and tagged Josh Holms who did the tag thing to Larry Clarkin who so totally tagged Dan Rigby who put the tag on Chad Campbell who played his tagster card on Pete Brown who taggerized Shawn Wildermuth and he tagulated Julie Lerman who tagified Camey Combs and she tagged me. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

How old were you when you first started programming? I was 12 years old and access to computers were damn hard to come by in 1972. There was a PDP-8e in the basement of the math department building at Oregon State University where my father was earning his PhD. As children of a grad student, my brother and then I were allowed to use it. There was also a student-built 60-bit glass storage computer down there, much larger and far less useful as far as I could see.

How did you get started in programming? I played around with both of those computers for a few months, poking my way around some basic concepts of assembly language. Then I got a used copy of the textbook for Basic programming, and a small student account for the CDC-6600 in the new computer center.

What was your first language? I dinked aroudn with the PDP-8e assembly language, but didn't master it, so that doesn't count. That means good old Basic was my first language. Dad finished his PhD and we moved to Bellevue, Washington. After some searching around, my brother and I got a Xerox educational grant for a study group of junior- and senior-high school students to buy Fortran textbooks and some time on Xerox Sigma 9s to hone our skills. Hey, man, don't horde all the Hollerith constants, okay?

What was the first real program you wrote? The first program that I got paid for, if that makes it real, was in college. I wrote a pretty large simulation of the effects of Saturn's moons on its rings for a physics professor. That was in C.

What languages have you used since you started programming? Basic, Fortran, C, Pascal, C++, Forth, IA (x86) assembler, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and XSLT. I've experimented with a dozen others, stuff like Cω, Haskell, and F#.

What was your first professional programming gig? I took a year off from college in 1979 and landed a job with a small time-sharing firm, doing custom programming as well as operating a few PDP-11/70s. I remember working on several small projects, one of them was tracking oil well shareholders and productions. Another was running statistics on horse races.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming? Absolutely yes. Without a moment's hesitation.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? Cultivate a passion for learning. Everything in software development changes all the time. If you don't love learning new stuff all the time, you are in for a rough ride.

What's the most fun you've ever had... programming? Gosh, that is a tough one. Once I wrote a call-graph profiler for a language that didn't have one, and used it to analyze and boost performance about eight-fold. The combination of writing the tool and applying it was totally cool.

Who are you calling out?  Friends, please forgive me: Scott Hanselman, Sam Gentile, Adam Kinney, Jesus Rodriguez, and Pat Helland.

The long-anticipated Subversion release 1.5 is now available. Subversion is an open source version control system available on a wide range platforms. It was written as the compelling replacement for CVS. Release 1.5 introduces several features, including support for basic merge tracking suitable for many common scenarios, as well as changelists.

At Corillian-now-part-of-CheckFree-now-part-of-Fiserv, we've been using Subversion for nearly three years. It took people some time to adjust to optimistic concurrency, it meets most of our source control needs. We'll probably wait a few months until we're in a better place in our development cycle before upgrading, unless a team member finds something we simply cannot afford to live without.

Many developers here use the TortoiseSVN client, which should have a Subversion 1.5 compatible release shortly. Support and training for Subversion 1.5 is available from CollabNet.

Congrats to all the Subversion contributors, I know it's been a long haul getting this one out.

Matt Hinze draws attention to a little-known (translation: new to me) item in Appendix B of the TortoiseSVN documentation, Create a shortcut to a repository. In short:

Create a new shortcut and set the target to:

TortoiseProc.exe /command:repobrowser /path:"repositoryURL" /notempfile

Replace repositoryURL with the path in the desired repository. Thanks to Travis Illig for passing this along.

This week Microsoft named my employer, Fiserv, as winner of the Global ISV Line of Business Partner of the Year for 2008. According to Microsoft's press release, the awards "honor Microsoft Registered, Microsoft Certified and Microsoft Gold Certified partners that delivered exemplary solutions for their customers during the past year."

Allison L. Watson, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft said, "The Partner of the Year Awards recognize the incredible innovation and value that Microsoft partners are delivering to our customers. The winners and finalists [...] have helped raise the standard for delivery of customer solutions and support. It is a privilege to recognize their work in designing and deploying exemplary customer solutions built on Microsoft technologies."

Fiserv's press release observes that our company is the only financial services partner to win this award. President and CEO, Jeffrey Yabuki, stated "We are honored to have been chosen by Microsoft as the first financial services partner to receive this global award. t is our mission to deliver differentiated technology solutions which help our clients achieve best-in-class results. We will continue to find innovative ways to extend our partnership with Microsoft to deliver value to Fiserv's clients today, and into the future."

Examples cited of these solutions led off with "Fiserv's next generation of the Voyager online banking product from Corillian, [which] leverages Web 2.0 features, including Microsoft .NET 3.5 ASP.NET, and enables banks to offer a differentiated and improved user experience to grow their online customer base and improve customer satisfaction." In case you lost your scorecard, Corillian was acquired by CheckFree in June 2007, and they, in turn, were acquired by Fiserv in December 2007.

Thanks to everyone at Fiserv and Microsoft who helped make this award possible!

Winners and finalists will be honored at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, July 7 - 10, 2008. (Houston in July?) The guest speaker at the conference is 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of Garmeen Bank, banker to the poor.

Cliff Simpkins in CSD, replied very promptly to my post over the weekend asking why there was no Visual Studio in the WF tutorials.

It turns out that the tutorials I was looking at were old versions from the original .NET Framework SDK. The SDK clearly doesn't include Visual Studio, hence no mention of Visual Studio. That makes sense.

For whatever reason, the tutorial links that are on the Windows Workflow Foundation Tutorials page in the MSDN Library link to the old, SDK-only versions of the tutorials. MSDN is working on getting those updated to link to the modern versions of the tutorials. That might take a week or so if there are other priority things in the MSDN queue.

In the meantime, you can get to all of the modern versions of the WF tutorials by navigating the tutorials using the tree view on the left. I think you want to use this exclusively until MSDN fixes all the links.

The modern versions of the tutorials guide you through using either Visual Studio or a POTE (plain old text editor). Sweetness.

You can tell if you are looking at an old SDK-only version of a tutorial because the tree view on the left will be severely truncated and not show the page you are viewing, and the navigation controls at the top of the right page will only show "MSDN | MSDN Library" instead of several additional levels.

Additional resources

Cliff also pointed me to some other WF resources to share. First stop is the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Developer Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow (score bonus points for the cool URL.)

Next up, HelpDesk v1.0 is a sample web app that demonstrates WF on TryIt Channel9.

Finally, there is a nascent collection of Windows Workflow Foundation articles and overviews on MSDN. Good stuff there, and I expect more over time as Microsoft continues investing in WF.

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.