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I've recently accepted an offer to join the great team at Microsoft Canada in the role of Developer Advisor! This new position will be a great challenge and a lot of fun as far as I can tell. I'll be bringing in my experience as a former Microsoft MVP and user group leader in the role, and I'm looking forward getting deeply involved with the developer community in Canada!
Update: Noah Coad has posted about my new position here.
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In case you were wondering, I'm still alive and posting (although not as prolifically as my good friend Noah). I've been up to a few cool things - here is a status update:
Professional Team Foundation Server: I got word that my first book Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System is a great success (we sold a higher than average number of copies at TechEd 2006 and our sales rank on Amazon is pretty darn good). Mickey Gousset and I are hard at work writing Professional Team Foundation Server, the follow up book. The first book is very comprehensive and provides good information about the features end to end. The follow up book is more scenario based. We tried to stuff as much pragmatic information into this follow up book - if you are asking questions on how to use Team System in a real world context, this book is for you. If I get permission from the publisher, I'll try to post the table of contents. In the meantime, check out the Amazon.com details page right here.
Team System Courseware: Brian Harry blogged about some Team System courseware that is being developed. I am directly involved in developing the official 300 level content. Microsoft has a very interesting way of categorizing levels of content as it relates to Team System. 200 Level means that you will get a working level of knowledge of Team System - how to checkin code, create basic build types, and so forth. 300 Level content deals with topics such as migration, advanced administration, customization and extensibility. 400 Level content is over the top extensibility - you are creating APIs and adding functionality to Team System that wasn't there before.
Speaking: I've been speaking quite a bit in the last few months. Last month, I did a Western Canada speaking tour on behalf of the MSDN Speakers Bureau. I had a blast and got a chance to meet a lot of great people. I'll go deeper in detail in a separate blog posting. The topic of most of the talks was Atlas. At TechEd, I led a Birds of a Feather on the topic of "Switching to Team System". The BOF went off without a hitch and was well received (as far as I can tell).
Work: As of December 2005, I joined ObjectSharp Consulting. I'm lucky to be surrounded by a brilliant bunch of folks such as Barry Gervin, Bruce Johnson, John Lam, and Dave Lloyd - the collective brainpower in that one company is awe inspiring. I've been involved in many Team System deployments that have been both enjoyable and technically challenging.
Personal: Two months ago, my wife and I made the tough decision to move in an apartment in Toronto. The fun part (and I use the term "fun" loosely) is unpacking the fifty or so bins filled with papers, electronics, and so forth. The struggle is ongoing and getting more "fun" by the minute. Thank goodness for CSI episodes on DVD (thanks Matt). I also attended the Molson Indy - check out these photos I took posted on Flickr.
Now consider yourself up to date...for now. :)
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I installed the Guidance Automation Toolkit, The Guidance Automation Extensions and the NUnit Converter to do some testing. When it was time to uninstall the application, I got the following error: "The File Mvp.Xml, Version=2.0.2158.1055 cannot be found". The order in which I installed the application was as follows:
(1) Guidance Automation Extensions
(2) Guidance Automation Toolkit
(3) NUnit Converter
When it came time to uninstall the application, I did the reverse order and got the error when trying to uninstall the Guidance Automation Toolkit. After playing around a bit, I figured out the problem. NUnit Converter removes some of the .dlls that are required for the removal of the Guidance Automation Toolkit! I had to repair the Guidance Automation Toolkit install (because it aborted mid-way), and re-installed the NUnit Converter. The following is the correct uninstall order:
(1) Guidance Automation Toolkit
(2) NUnit Converter
(3) Guidance Automation Extensions
I thought I would post about this because the uninstall order isn't intuitive, and there may be others experiencing the same problems.