The Moth

Eisai Ellada? Panemorfa, I will be there too on Monday 31st March delivering a presentation on the developers track so please go register for the Greek 2008 Launch. Stop by and pes ena Geia. By the way, my parousiasi will also be in Greeklish :-)

Are you in Israel? Great, I will be there too from 4th to 9th April delivering a couple of presentations for Tech Ed Israel 2008. Stop by and say hello (but please do it in English as I know zero words in Hebrew :-). To get a glimpse into some of the sessions there (including mine), stay tuned on Guy's blog (who is my counterpart in Israel). His writing sometimes appears right-to-left, but I am sure that is a CSS issue he is working on ;-)

The largest in-person activity that our team does every single year in the UK is the MSDN Roadshow. A full day of 5 sessions (well, 4 this year plus separate Intro and Q&A slots). Past experience indicates it sells out very quickly so to view the agenda, dates and to register NOW, choose from the following cinemas:
Cardiff, or London, or Manchester, or Glasgow, or Newcastle.

Is it possible that two great, week-long, independent, international developer conferences are running at the same time in London? It turns out that the answer is "YES" and someone thought it would be a good idea if I presented at both. If you are going to DevWeek or QCon London, make sure you come to my sessions to win some t-shirts!

Join me, MikeT and MikeO as the "developer folk" in Microsoft UK DPE.

'DPE' stands for "Developer & Platform Group" (the 'E' is silent :-).

Job Description here.

One of the hidden gems of .NET Framework v3.5 is the Managed AddIn Framework (MAF) that I've touched on before on these 3 short blog posts: AddIn.dll, Windows.Presentation.dll, VSTO dependency on it.

It is not the easiest of technologies to get your head around without some guidance, so I hope you find useful this introductory quickstart 18-minute screencast (part 1). If you are then hungry for more and in particular on how the MAF delivers on version resiliency, then watch my second 18-minute screencast (part 2). You can get all 3 states by downloading this ZIP file of all Visual Studio projects.

Back in May 2007 I posted (Client Application Services) some links that completely describe this new VS2008 and Fx 3.5 feature. If you missed it back then, then please revisit the post to read about it.

If you prefer watching an 18' video that fully gets you started, I have exactly that for you on channel9: Client Application Services with VS2008. The final code that I created is in these two projects.

At my last blog post I shared some links, video and code for Sync Services. I mentioned how it is the first step/part of the larger upcoming Sync Framework. In the latest Flash newsletter from earlier this week, we have a great first look at the Sync Framework describing "participants" and "providers". For the non-Flash subscribers, scroll down on this page to read the 500 words.

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 we also get v1.0 of ADO.NET Synchronization Services that allows you to build Occasionally Connected Applications by allowing synchronization of remote data with a local cache of the data. Sync Services is the first part of the larger framework still in development: Microsoft Sync Framework (MSF). MSF was part of the announcements at Tech Ed Europe 2007. The first CTP of the Sync Framework is available and it includes a pre-release of v2.0 of Sync Services for ADO.NET. Stay tuned on the Sync Framework blog (which includes links to other relevant blogs down the side). I also believe there will be an update near the SQL Server 2008 release, but I am not sure. There is a very useful FAQ on Sync Services on Steve's blog.

To be clear, here I am still talking about v1 of Sync Services, which ships with VS2008 RTM. If you do not have VS2008, you can still get Sync Services by downloading SQL Compact Edition v3.5 (which is what holds the local cache). Included in the download are the 3 assemblies that complete the picture. So you may be thinking: "if I can get it as a standalone download, why use VS2008 and not stick with VS2005?". The answer is that there is a very smart Configure Data Synchronization dialog wizard as part of VS2008 that generates tons of code and also performs other actions that IMO are too tedious for easily using VS2005 with Sync Services. To invoke the wizard in a new VS2008 project (v2.0 or v3.0 or v3.5) right click on the project node and add new item and choose the "Local Data Cache" item template – then just follow your nose (or the documentation and numerous links above ;-))

If you want a quick intro then put 15 minutes aside to watch my screencast introducing the ADO.NET Sync Services. The Visual Studio project that I create in the video can be downloaded here.

On an internal MVP newsgroup (yes I am still monitoring those) someone complained about the removal of the "search" explorer menu option from Windows Vista SP1 (available now to msdn and technet subscribers) and someone else came to the rescue. Susan Bradley captured the background and solution on her blog.