After a great time in Los Angeles last week for PDC2008, I returned to Redmond this week to re-deliver my talk "Architecture Without Big-Design-Up-Front" for the patterns & practices Summit this morning.

I've been doing my demos for this talk using the new Visual Studio 2010 CTP and have it running on by under-the-desk machine (more power than my laptop). But since the Summit is in a different building than my demo machine, I wanted to reach into it from my laptop using the Hyper-V Management Console from Windows Vista.

After getting my machine up to SP1 (one of my prereqs had failed) I was able to install it. But for some reason, I couldn't get it to connect. I could connect with Remote Desktop, but I couldn't connect with the Hyper-V Console.

After a bit of digging, I found a WONDEFUL set of posts by John Howard, a PM from the Hyper-V team. In there he shows you all the security and firewall connections you should check if you have issues connecting to the Hyper-V server.

• Part 1 - The Server-side Stuff
• Part 2 - The Client-side Stuff
• Part 3 - Server-side with Server Core
• Part 4 - In a Domain-joined Environment
• Part 5 - Weirder Domain-joined Stuff

It turns out that all of my settings from Part 1 were correct, but one setting in Part 2 was wrong (WHY??). I didn't need Parts 3-5, but I'm including them here for completeness.

Thanks John! You saved my ass.

PS. Now that PDC is behind me, I'm planning a bunch of blog content to share all that great stuff with the rest of you. Stay tuned!

I don't know how I get myself into these things, but it looks like I'm hitting three conferences in three weeks, only two weeks after moving my family into a new house.

Foolish? Hell yeah. Fun? You bet!

I'm very fortunate this year to be one of the folks representing Visual Studio Team System Architecture Edition at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. PDC is always a special conference, because this is where we get to tell you what we've got coming up for developers. What is the next cool thing? Only one way to find out and that is come to PDC.

My talk at PDC is called "Architecture Without Big Design Up Front". It is a mix of agile development, architecture tooling, a little process, a real world problem to solve with real code (so made up samples here) and hopefully some fun.

The week after PDC I fly up to Redmond to kill two birds with one stone: my monthly visit to my team in Building 25 on campus and a stop off at the P&P Summit to talk again. I always  love the P&P Summit as a speaking gig. The audience is small, but not too small. The talks can be very interactive and you always get to talk about interesting things.

The following week, I'll be in Barcelona Spain for Tech Ed EMEA. I'll be repeating my PDC talk there for people who couldn't make it to LA, and I'll also be doing my classic "Agile Talk on Agility". (Thanks again to Brian Button from whom I stole this talk years ago). My wonderful, amazing wife Emily is coming along on this one (she never lets me go on trips like this solo), and it just happens to coincide with our 8th Anniversary, so we're going to do a little vacation while we're there.

Hopefully I'll bump into some of you on the road this tour. Please if you see me walking the hallways or in the hotel lobby or at one of the many social events, feel free to walk up and introduce yourself.

See you there!

Somehow this slipped past me, but a couple of weeks ago a webcast that I did with local Architect Evangelist Joe Shirey posted up on Channel9.

Here’s the official description:

ARCast.TV - Peter Provost on what’s coming for Architects in Visual Studio Team System

The upcoming version of Visual Studio Team System (code named Rosario) has a number of new features and functions for Architects.  Senior Program Manager of Visual Studio Team System for Architects Edition, Peter Provost, sits down with Joe Shirey to discuss what investments Microsoft has made into the product and how it will potentially improve the lives of Architects.

In addition to that, a number of other great webcasts have been going up by my team mates and other VSTS folks. We’ve created a special section on Channel9 for all of this great content at http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/ so please go check it out!

Thanks to Heath Stewart for sending in some nice updates to the vim syntax file for PowerShell.

Changes in v2.7:

1. Added begin, process, and end keywords for script blocks
2. Make foreach and where highlight when used as foreach-object and where-object

The new version is up and available here: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1327

The list of keyboard shortcuts for Remote Desktop used to be one click away in the System menu. Then it moved to the Help system. On my newest version, I can’t find them at all.

Today I was trying to remember the shortcut for screenshot in RDP and couldn’t find it. A quick internet search later, the answer was found. Crazy how sometimes the community support content is better and more discoverable that product help sytems.

MinyWhite.com – Keyboard Shortcuts to Use with Remote Desktop

(I’ve copied the image over here so I don’t lose it. That is nicely done. Thanks MintyWhite!)

I’ve been eagerly waiting to share this with all of you, but since the press release hit the wire this morning, we can now let the cat out of the bag.

This morning we announced that we have joined the Object Management Group (OMG). The OMG is the group that owns a number of standards, including UML and BPMN.

As we announced at Tech Ed this past spring, Visual Studio Team System code-name “Rosario” Architecture Edition (aka Team Arch), will be shipping UML designers in the box. The opportunity to participate and engage with the standards setting body for UML is very exiting for all of us.

I’ve long been a fan of Keith Brown’s Password Minder program for keeping all my passwords and other sensitive information safe.

Imagine my frustration then when last week I couldn’t find it to download onto my new ly repaved laptop. Yeah, I had a backup copy, but I like to get newer versions of things when I repave to keep these things up to date.

It seemed that Pluralsight’s web presence had been completely redone (good) but the Tools page was done (bad).

Today after checking back to see any updates, I found a post by Keith with a new link:

http://mercury.pluralsight.com/tools.aspx

Whew! It isn’t dead. :)

Time for another release announcement:

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 11, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Visual Studio 2008 SP1. These releases come just nine months after the release of the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, and include a substantial number of updates based directly on customer feedback. The service packs continue to address the needs of the developer community by making it even easier to develop applications for the latest platforms, with new features such as the .NET Framework Client Profile for faster deployment of Windows-based applications, multiple enhancements to ASP.NET, and unparalleled support for database application development through the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and integration with SQL Server 2008.

“Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 had an extremely positive impact on our ability to develop a Web-based application that our customer, Misys Healthcare Systems, could use to manage patients’ records — in fact, it helped us boost development speed by 60 percent,” said Galen Murdock, president and CEO at Veracity Solutions Inc. “The Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX improvements and new capabilities such as ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services meant we didn’t have to worry about any of the underlying plumbing and could simply focus on building a highly responsive and interactive experience for users.”

UPDATE: Here are links to all the downloads:

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions with Service Pack 1 (Bootstrappers)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123679

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions with Service Pack 1 (iso)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123680

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Bootstrapper)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122094

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122095

Visual Studio  Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=124829

.NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=124150

More great news and more great shipping product! Today SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing. Here’s today’s press release:

Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008: Customers and partners worldwide confirm mission-critical applications, enterprise-class data warehousing support.

For more information, see the SQL Server 2008 site.

Congrats to the SQL Server team!

My former team has released a new guide that is getting rave reviews from people called “Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF”.

Some juicy quotes from reviewers:

• “ I am new to WCF programming….The guide is very good, very useful and definitely saving us time.  It has become the central document from which we are developing. ”
• “…. you really did a great job!  I think that every WCF developer should keep your book as day by day reference…”
• “Very cool and extremely useful…. I can’t say enough good things about this … it’s an amazing work. ….”
• “Awesome, phreaking, colossal… the content is unique – there is no match of it…Very timely just as WCF becomes mainstream with my customers. … It is serious booster with real world projects…”

Download the Guide

• Guide Download: http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide

Contents at a Glance

• Part I - Security Fundamentals for Web Services gives you a quick overview of fundamental security concepts as they relate to services, service-oriented design, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA.)
• Part II - WCF Security Fundamentals gives you a firm foundation in key WCF security concepts, with special attention on authentication, authorization, and secure communication, as well as WCF binding configurations.
• Part III - Intranet Application Scenarios shows you a set of end-to-end Intranet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture designs with a focus on authentication, authorization, and communication from a WCF perspective for your intranet.
• Part IV - Internet Application Scenarios shows a set of end-to-end Internet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture design for the Internet.
• Guidelines, Practices, How Tos, Q&A show self-contained nuggets of information that present both developers and architects digestible pieces of specific guidance. Often code is included to illustrate important concepts and answer specific questions.

I can’t seem to find a link to a hardcopy source, but the PDF is free!