Aaron Woodman of Microsoft shows Engadget the first branded Windows Phone 7 Series device, a pre-production prototype from LG with a slider QWERTY keyboard. The short article includes a handful of photos, a video clip, and some analysis of what you’re looking at. It’s a quick first look, meant to entice and inspire. Five megapixel camera with flash. Mission accomplished. When can I get one?

This week I was honored by being named a Microsoft Regional Director. Break out the champagne, strike up the band, queue the fireworks! Woohoo! I am extremely excited to be joining this incredible group of people, and it is going to be a thrill to get to know my fellow Regional Directors.

Of course that news doesn’t mean much if you’re not familiar with the Regional Director (RD) program. The RD program is composed of 120 people worldwide, compared to the Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program which has some 4,100 awardees. While MVPs are recognized for their expertise in a product or technology, the RDs advocate for solutions that span the Microsoft stack, so they must be experts in a number of complementary topics. They are typically CTOs, chief architects, principal consultants or primaries in a business or ISV. Quoting the Microsoft Regional Directors website:

Regional Directors are members of an elite, worldwide group of technology thought-leaders known for their national and international speaking tours, their authorship of books, articles and blogs, and their business acumen. Regional Directors are well-versed on the totality of the software industry. They are recognized for their achievements in communicating the benefits of emerging technologies.

Portland’s last Regional Director was my friend and former colleague, Scott Hanselman, who had to step down from the program when he joined Microsoft in mid 2007. Those are some pretty big footsteps to be following. I am definitely looking forward to helping people and companies succeed and thrive on the Microsoft platform.

If you haven’t heard, the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) is available to the general public. And there was much rejoicing, particularly for much needed performance improvements over the Beta 2. However, if you are working with other prerelease technologies, do not assume that those Betas and Community Technology Previews (CTPs) that you’ve been using with the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 are going to work with the Visual Studio 2010 RC!

Two specific examples that I know of where this caveat for early adopters applies are the Silverlight 4.0 Beta and the SQL Server Modeling Services November 2009 CTP.  Given that, I’d exercise care around upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 RC if you’re working with other prerelease bits such as Entity Framework, Data Services, and so on.

Why is this so? Different product teams are on different release schedules. Visual Studio 2010 has a public release date, and they can’t wait for other teams to get their bits working on the VS2010 RC before getting it out into people’s hands. That doesn’t really help serve anyone’s purpose.

What do I do? Since you cannot install VS2010 Beta 2 and VS2010 RC side-by-side, your options are limited. If you need to work with these other prerelease bits, stay on VS2010 Beta 2 until a new prerelease (or release, wouldn’t that be nice?) becomes available. If you need both the VS2010 RC and other prerelease bits, you are looking at two different systems. Depending on your situation, it might make sense for you if one or both of those systems was a virtual system.

For more details regarding the Silverlight 4.0 Beta bits, see Tim Heuer’s recent blog post.

Ben Sandofsky is a mobile engineer on Twitter. He has published a four-minute video called Twitter Code Swarm that is really quite intriguing. It took a few viewings of this video before I started to appreciate what’s going on, so let me share.

Straight off, with everything that’s going on and all the detail, you have to view it full screen. And turn on the sound, he’s selected a lively and dramatic score, Undercurrent, by cellist Jami Sieber from her 1994 release Lush Mechanique.

As explained in the introduction and the information posted on Vimeo, the video chronicles development of key Twitter codelines from 4/2006 to 1/2010: the main Ruby application, Flock, the streaming API, and a mobile site.

The round disc icons represent developers and the particles represent source files being created or changed. When another developer changes a file, the particle zooms from the previous committer to an orbit around the new developer’s icon. I am guessing that the size of the particle is related to the size of the file or the size of the changeset that was committed. It seems that come time after the commit, if there is no further commit the particle fades out, but my reading of that might be off.

In the upper left corner is a legend which explains, for instance, that HTML/CSS is blue, tests are green, Ruby is red (nice choice there), Scala is yellow, and so on. In the picture above, the developer slightly higher than the center of the frame is working a lot with tests at that moment. Often the Ruby files don’t seem to get all of the way to their intended target before they change course, headed for another developer; at times the swarm seem constant. Once in a while there is a Ruby file that seems to just oscillate in the space between developers for a period of time, suggesting a lot of collaboration or a particular resource that has a high degree of contention.

The date ticks off in the lower right corner, and in the lower left corner is a rolling timeline of the volume of commits of different types of files. Periods of frenetic particle movement have a corresponding high volume of commits. Notice the big drop off in all activity in December 2007 through January 2008. Perhaps that was a time for retrospection or maybe a well-deserved holiday. Then the pace really picks up and goes through some rather distinct phase shifts. After one or two viewings, you may find it interesting to read some of Twitter’s history on Wikipedia and look for connections with the development.

Thanks for this visual feast, Ben. What can they tell various stakeholders about development of applications? And how do we make our own code swarm videos?

My life extends in interesting ways beyond software and technology. Honestly! One of those ways is playing mandolin. Mostly I’ve jammed with friends every now and then. And then last summer I went to River of the West Mandolin Camp out in the Columbia River Gorge, a stone’s throw east of Portland. It was a transformative experience that changed my playing and how I think about learning and playing.

Brian Oberlin, the guy who puts it all together, just announced the second annual River of the West Mandolin Camp, June 10-13, 2010. Instructors include Brian Oberlin (he’s really good), Don Steirnberg (used to play in Jethro Burns’s band and he taught at the camp last year), and Radim Zenkl (one of the hottest mandolin players in the world). I am really excited!

Watch the promo video and visit the website for more information.

Steve Lange describes the new Visual Studio 2010 products and pricing in a post on his blog. Most notably, gone are the role-based Visual Studio Team System SKUs that we’ve had since the 2005 release. In their place we have Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium and Ultimate editions, plus a Test Professional edition.

To be clear, the capabilities and functionality you’ve come to know in Team System are still there, and, indeed, considerably enhanced. But clearly, buying the products based on your role in software development didn’t pan out the way Microsoft expected. We saw the an indication of that when they released the “Data Dude” edition of Team System, and then backtracked to combine the Database and Developer editions.

On the backend, Team Foundation Server is still there. And Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition is a free version aimed at education, hobbyists, and other entry-level audiences.

I have been using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 since November 2009, and I’ve been happy with most aspects aside from performance. It is, after all, still a Beta release. That status notwithstanding, it does have a “Go Live” license so you can put your solutions into production if you are comfortable with the facts of life working with prerelease software development tools.

For more details about the product line, visit the Visual Studio 2010 product page. Oh, and tell them Visual Stuart sent you.

Holy cow, I won the Windows Server 2008 R2 Haiku contest! See my earlier post for details about my haiku and the contest. A huge thank you to all my friends who voted, you made it happen! Woohoo!

The prize is a sweet home entertainment system, and, yes, we’re going to have to plan several movie nights to invite you all over. Stay tuned. But first we’ve got to figure out where we’re going to put it. This is going to take some major rearranging! Nice problem to have to deal with!

(Note to self: winning a contest is not necessarily conducive to meeting today’s deadline. Sending out for extra midnight oil to burn later tonight.)