Sara Ford has posted Visual Studio Tip of the Day #382 as the final tip in her popular 17 month series. From its introduction to yesterday's graceful exit, Sara has brought Visual Studio into sharp focus for a vast number of developers. Each post begins with a personable "Did you know..." and no matter how much I thought I knew about Visual Studio, often, no, I didn't know that.

Did you know... that the popular tips series was a labor of love (translation: not what she gets paid for), a gift to the developer community?

Mining her blog, Sara brought these golden nuggets out in book form this fall,  Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity (Microsoft Press, 2008).

And did you know... that all of the author's proceeds from the book go to help send Hurricane Katrina survivors to college?

Now Sara will be turning her attention to other ways to engage with the community, including her day job on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website. I cannot wait to see what's next.

We stand on the sandy shore and wave a fond farewell to the Visual Studio Tip of the Day series as it slips over the horizon. Adieu!

So long, and thanks for the all the tips!

I wasn't able to attend last weekend's WhereCampPDX, an unconference on all things geographical. I find the current Stuart v1.0's inability to be in two places at the same time to be overly restrictive. I'll have to work on a time-travel upgrade or cloning technology or something.

That meant that I missed real-life Pac Man on the streets of Portland. What a concept! It turns out that some grad students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications program started the idea with Pac Manhattan, running through the streets around Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Each real-life player (Pac Man and the ghosts) is paired with a controller back in a game room, and players and controllers are in constant contact via cell phone communicating location and status.

WhereCampPDX transported the game to Portland's Park Blocks. Now you can watch the video of Jason Mauer in interview and in action as the Pac Man. Wild, man!

Get your party self down to Party with Palermo on Sunday night before PDC08. Join your affable host, Jeffrey Palermo, for great company and conversation, free food and drink, swag and more from 7:00 to 10:00 PM at Casey's Irish Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. The price of admission is one business card.

Don't throw an exception! RSVP so that Jeff knows you're coming.

Seattle Code Camp v4.0 is coming up on the weekend of November 15–16, 2008 at the prestigious DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Register now and make your plans to be there.

Code Camps are community-driven events, un-conferences really, with everything that's good about a conference (like great content) and none of the bad (like costing money). Code Camp is free, it happens on weekends, there's no marketing fluff or sponsor agenda to push. Its all about coders talking to coders about writing code. And it is absolutely not limited to Microsoft technology. Recent code camps have been picking up a broad range of topics — basically if it involves code then it's "game on." Contribute to the community by submitting a session today.

Code Camp is a great opportunity to sample tools and technologies that you might not be exposed to in your day job, or to dive deep on a topic with someone who knows where you are coming from. Code Camp is also one of the best opportunities to get started with talking tech in public. It's a warm, friendly crowd of people who share your passion about coding.

I'll be giving a Whirlwind Tour of C# 2.0 and 3.0, looking at all the features introduced since C# 1.0 that change the way you program. It's a fast-paced Lessig-style talk, whipping through 300 slides (okay, some of them only have one word on them : ) and a demo in an hour plus change. I may present another topic as well, but I thought I'd wait and give other people a turn to sign up as well.

My friend and fellow Microsoft MVP, Roman Kiss, has published an article on CodeProject this month describing the design and implementation of a WCF extension for exporting WSDL documentation (<wsdl:documentation>) and XSD annotation (<xs:annotation>) elements in your contract.

Roman is the author of some three dozen other articles on CodeProject, including the popular Null Transport for WCF which describes a custom in-process transport for WCF. If you are deep in WCF and don't know Roman's excellent work, take some time to acquaint yourself with his wealth of knowledge.

The Data Dude, a.k.a. Gert Drapers, Architect and Development Manager for Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, has a pair of posts on his blog discussing the recent announcement that VSTS Database Edition is merged into VSTS Development Edition, effective 1 October 2008. Two SKUs are now one. Here are the Dude's posts.

• Team Developer + Team Data = Team Developer!
• More Team Developer + Data Edition Merge Information

The posts include links to the announcement and an FAQ page, as well as some good discussion.

I consider this to be excellent news! Thanks to the VSTS team for making this change!

I'll be giving a presentation on "Whirlwind Tour of C# 2.0 and 3.0 — The New Programming Model" at the South Sound .NET User Group in Olympia, Washington on at 7:00 PM, Thursday, 9 October 2008. The user group meeting is at the Olympia Center, 222 Columbia St NW in Olympia. The meeting is free and open to the public.

This talk is Lawrence Lessig-style romp that is guaranteed to inform and entertain. Here's the abstract.

From its beginning, Microsoft has been working to change how we write and think about code. Many C# developers today continue to use only the original C# 1.0 features, frequently unaware of the features introduced in C# 2.0 and 3.0, or unsure about how or when to use them. This fast-paced session examines every new feature of C# which changes the way we write code. The effect of this whirlwind tour is to appreciate the evolution of a modern programming language, understanding where we came from and how and why we got here. The tour culminates with the dramatic introduction of a new declarative, data manipulation feature, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), but there's a lot to see along the way. Fasten your seatbelts and don't blink: we're going for a wild ride!

This is going to be my third time presenting to the South Sound .NET User Group, and I am looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.

Anyone interested in grabbing a bite before the meeting? Leave me a comment.

Heck, yeah: I am going to PDC2008. I've been getting psyched about this conference for a number of months now, but I had to coordinate with wife, life, and the job scene. It is truly amazing how much you can do with WS-Coordination. Now all is coordinated: LA here I come.

The keynotes. Okay, I have to get this one little thing off my chest. I have immense respect for Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie. But I have seen him deliver keynote addresses three times (twice live, once by webcast) and I have yet to be inspired. Sure, it is hard to compete with the explosive dynamism of, say, Steve "Developers! Developers!!" Ballmer, and I firmly believe everyone needs to find his or her authentic and individual style. But Ray — uh, you are reading my blog, aren't you, Ray? — my recommendation is you work at connecting, I mean really connecting at a visceral level, with the developers at the PDC. Make it relevant. Make us care. Make us scream and shout. Make it a cathartic experience, with the young folk passing out in the aisles. Don't go overboard, but aim high.

There are three other keynote addressers in the line up. Rick Rashid, Senior VP of Microsoft Research, is in the plum position of telling us about cool and groovy things coming down the pike from the Research Labs. I enjoyed his similar talk at PDC03, so I am waiting to see what Rick has to show us another five years along the technology arc.

Then there is the dynamic duo of Don Box and Chris Anderson, each of them Batman to the other's Boy Wonder. It would be hard for me to hide my admiration for these two big brains. Both of them think big, make it real for the developers, and can go deep without making your head explode. Expect the Chris and Don Show to deliver the goods on the main attraction: The Oslo Story.

Open your mind with Open Space. I have chaired the Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at a number Microsoft conferences. There is always a lot of work leading up to and at the conference. It's incredibly rewarding work, both exhilarating and exhausting. We obsess over how to keep the BoFs fresh, exciting, and compelling. From my personal vantage point, I am absolutely delighted to see Microsoft experimenting with new forms for attendee interaction.

The Open Space concept has been around since 1985, and it's been enjoying a rapidly expanding mindshare in the last few years. Microsoft held Open Space sessions at MIX08 and the 2008 MVP Summit. Building on those experiences, PDC2008 will feature Open Space sessions each day of the conference as part of the UnSessions. Think of them as a more spontaneous form of BoF sessions, and you'll be on the right track.

Sessions, sessions, sessions. The list of announced sessions continues to grow, featuring some very interesting topics. Oslo, Cloud Services, Mesh, Zermatt, Rosario, F#, .NET 4.0, Windows 7... it is all so exciting it will be hard to pick and choose which breakout sessions to go to.

Are you going to PDC2008? If so, see you in October.

The Architecture Journal devotes the latest issue (Journal 16, July 2008) to Identity and Access, a topic near and dear to my heart. You can read the issue online, download it as a zipped PDF, or view it and all issues offline in the Architecture Journal Reader. This issue has a lot to offer, so dig right in.

I want to call out two personal highlights. First is an article on federated identity patterns by fellow Connected Systems MVP Jesus Rodriguez and his colleague Joe Klug. Jesus and Joe are Chief Architect and CTO, respectively, at Tellago.

Second is an article on claims and identity for on-premise and cloud solutions by Vittorio Bertocci. Vittorio's article serves as a nice background for Zermatt, which is the project codename for a Microsoft .NET framework for writing claims-aware applications that Vittorio announced in July.

On the lighter side, the issue includes a profile of Kim Cameron, Identity Architect in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division. Kim is the author of the Laws of Identity which can be found on his blog, identityblog.com.

This issue also introduces Diego Dagum as the new editor of The Architecture Journal, who takes the baton from Simon Guest (the only person at Microsoft who can logon as 'guest').

Diego is calling for papers on Green Computing for a future Journal issue, abstracts due by 10 September 2009. If you've got something to contribute, let him know.