I am on tour with Adam Gallant from MSDN Canada this month. We've been giving out our blog addresses at the events so I need to get some fresh content up on this blog (that being said, I am a proponent of the line of thinking that individual blogs are labours of love and periods of inactivity are inevitable and tolerable - sometimes you just don't have the time or gumption to blog).
The tour is a combined MSDN / TechNet event hitting 5 Canadian cities. Barnaby Jeans does a morning TechNet session on SQL Server 2005. In the afternoon I join Adam to talk about Windows Forms 2.0 and Visual Studio Team System. It's been a lot of fun and we are showing some cool stuff. If you are building Windows apps, the new components like ToolStrip, MenuStrip, SplitContainer, and WebBrowser are very slick. It is a heck of a lot easier to build a professional looking apps without serious extra effort and no third party components.
The Team System content is also pretty great stuff. I get to do a testing scenario that includes having Visual Studio autogenerate unit tests, creating a work item bug from a failed unit test, creating a Web test that validates that meta tags are included in the HTML, and finally wrapping those tests in a load test. If you are like me and have previously been trying to do these types of tests with NUnit, ACT (or the older Web Stress Tool), and custom text parsers, you are in for a pleasant surprise. I can't speak to some of the higher end automated testing tools but I don't think you can find a story as good as Team System's for what will ultimately be a pretty reasonable price.
Adam and I do all of our coding live - we don't copy-and-paste pre-written code and a lot of what we show starts with File | New Project. I think that format makes things a lot more interesting and we can adapt to what the audience wants to see!
Next week we are in Vancouver on Tuesday (June 14) and then wrapping up in Montreal on Thursday (June 16). Registration is full for both events but you can register for the waiting list online. If you are on the waiting list you should definitely show up because there are usually a few empty seats even though the event is declared full. Hope to see you there!