Omar Villarreal's Blog

Entity Framework Virtual Brown Bag Series

omarv — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:34:49 GMT

Hosted by the Dallas .NET Users Group, the first of a series 30-minute of Entity Framework Webcasts will take place Friday July 17th, at 12:15 PM Central Time. Use the following link to register:

http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=139637

Dallas/Fort Worth Technical Community Leaders

omarv — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:32:17 GMT

Recent events directly related to the Dallas Tech Fest led me to discover that there is not one place to find out about all the developer communities in the Dallas Fort Worth area, that prompted me to create this post, which I intend to update as I get additional information.

Dallas .NET Users Group
D. Omar Villarreal
http://TeamSystemRocks.com/blogs/omarv

Dallas Visual Studio Team System Users Group
D. Omar Villarreal
http://TeamSystemRocks.com/blogs/omarv

Dallas ColdFusion Users Group
Dave Shuck
www.daveshuck.com
www.twitter.com/dshuck
www.facebook.com/dshuck

Java MUG (Metroplex Users Group)
Erik Weiburst
http://erik.weibust.net
http://twitter.com/erikweibust
http://facebook.com/erikweibust

…and in case I get behind on emails and do not update this post right away when I receive changes for it :-), you can always find up-to-date information about .NET related technologies’ user groups at http://ugss.codezone.com.

Error 1330 Installing Visual Studio 2010

omarv — Wed, 20 May 2009 07:10:00 GMT

This is apparently a known issue and I seem to remember I saw this issue a long time ago. I was installing VSTS 2010 Beta 1 on a VPC (yes, VPC, not Hyper-V) and I mounted the VSTS image (.iso) file on the Virtual PC for it to appear as if the actual disc was inserted, then as you can see on the screenshot below, I got Error 1330 a couple of minutes into the installation.

The solution was to not install directly from the disc. I opened the contents of the .iso file using WIndows Explorer in the VPC and copied all the files to a local folder, then I ran setup.exe from that folder on C: and it worked just fine. This seems to be a know issue though: http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2007/12/14/how-to-workaround-error-1330-during-visual-studio-2008-installation.aspx

Visual Studio 2010 Forums available on MSDN

omarv — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:42:29 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 was made available to MSDN subscribers to download yesterday and will be available to the non-subscribers (general public) tomorrow. There are many cool new features in the different team editions of Visual Studio. If you are looking at the tools and have any questions (or answers) be sure to visit the Visual Studio 2010 forums on MSDN, you should get answers to your questions very quickly there:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/vstsprerelease

TFS 2010 Beta 1 Installation Bug

omarv — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:32:40 GMT

There is a bug in the TFS 2010 Beta 1 installation, it is described in section 1.3.4 of the Readme file but since a lot of us go read that file after installation is complete I figured the more blog posts exist about the issue the more people will know about it and avoid it. But I will not get into details or reinvent the wheel, the information is in the Readme and in this post from Buck Hodges: http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2009/05/18/tfs-2010-beta-1-don-t-run-initial-configuration-from-the-administration-console-mmc.aspx

I just finished downloading the VSTS 2010 Beta 1 install bits, now…

omarv — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:24:53 GMT

… off to create a new VPC for it and prepare to do some demos at the Dallas VSTS UG this Wednesday evening:

http://www.DallasVsts.com

http://dallasvstsug.ning.com

A big THANK YOU!!

omarv — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:40:37 GMT

I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to my participation in the Bike MS event, a 2-day/150-mile fundraising bicycle ride, I want to thank those who made me aware of the event, those who have contributed with my fundraising for the National MS Society, and John Burns for being my training partner and for waiting for me at the training rides and the day of the event; as well as all volunteers and sponsors for making it all possible.

Here is an update for everyone:

The second day of the event was cancelled for everyone's safety based on the weather forecast, but I pedaled for 83.33 miles (according to my bike's computer) on day 1 and it really was the most rewarding and unforgettable journey that I have experienced. I did get about 15 minutes of pouring rain right before and right after the Finish Line and it felt great. Team Notion took off at about 7:30 AM, Chris and Trent finished before it started raining, at about 1:30 PM (they cheated, they did not stop for lunch) John got there at about 2:05 and I got there at 2:15 PM. That made me feel really good, my expectations were that I was not going to see the finish line until 3:30 or 4:00 PM. The longest I had been on my bike for was 52 miles. a week before the event and had been pushing my limits that day so I prepared myself mentally all week to not feel bad about getting on one of the sag wagons when I got tired. But riding along all those awesome people, passing a few of them and then seeing them pass me again a few minutes later (over and over) was very motivating. Feeling strong and with energy at some of the rest stops was very motivating and fulfilling as well, I skipped some of the rest stops. Today, I feel very good, after sleeping 11.5 hours I am sure I could have gone for day 2, I will find out next time. This year there were a total of 3,102 riders registered.

Here is a picture John and I got taken at the last rest stop (mile 71 I think), it was sponsored by Frito Lay:

Again, I want to thank everyone who has made a donation to my ride, I have not yet met my goal so please feel free to help me out with your donation to the National MS Society [ it is tax deductible! :-) ], at the time of this writing I only need $140 Dollars to meet my goal.

Team System for Developers Event in Dallas this Friday

omarv — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:04:11 GMT

This Friday I will be speaking at the monthly Dallas DevCares at the Infomart in Dallas. DevCares is a free half-day event that takes place the last Friday of every month. You can register for this month’s event here.

Session Summary:

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 is an integrated application lifecycle management (ALM) product family with the tools and processes that help development teams (developers, testers, project managers, release managers…) work more effectively together. Whether it is a brand new application or an existing application that is in maintenance mode, having a sound ALM process and a good set of tools in place can increase a team’s productivity and reduce friction between team members. In this session we will look at the Team System tools and features that can help developers go home at 5:00 PM while still delivering high quality code on time. We will also glance at some of the tools and projects that the developer community has released to complement the work that Microsoft has done with the Team System family of products as well as the two features that I find most exciting in the upcoming release of Team System with Visual Studio 2010.

TFS Administration Tool is Getting Some Love

omarv — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:19:47 GMT

A few Team System MVP’s have agreed to contribute to this CodePlex project and bring it back to life. The subject was brought up in a conversation at the MVP Summit last week and action is being taken to produce a new release of the tool. Bug fixes are being prioritized high but they are looking at everything that is in the backlog and yes, the votes of the backlog items are being considered when deciding what to fix. So if you have anything that you would like to see in an upcoming release of the tool make sure there is an entry for it in the project’s Issue Tracker tab and have your friends vote for it. For more information visit the project’s home page: http://tfsadmin.codeplex.com/

My blog is coming with me to the Summit. Is yours coming with you?

omarv — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:36:14 GMT

This is just a little experiment of mine. I want to see how many people snap my barcode in one day during the MVP Summit. An MS Tag made it to one of my T-Shirts about an hour ago with a little help from Avery and an iron. I really like these barcodes, my phone’s tag reader was able to “catch” it even from the picture below. I hope this technology gets widely adopted.

Announcing Saturday Hands-on Events in Dallas

omarv — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:44:32 GMT

Insipred by J. Sawyers’s .Net Dojo (http://blog.microsoft-j.net/2008/07/22/NETDojoASPNETMVC.aspx and http://blog.microsoft-j.net/2009/02/16/NETDojoSilverlight.aspx) I am trying to put a very similar event in Dallas but with a little bit of a spin, attendees will have an opportunity to do more than just canned labs if they so desire, having the support of the instructor and any attendees that can spare the time and attention to help (and learn while they help) their peers.

It will be on a Saturday from 9AM to 4PM (or so). Most likely the first technology we will target is Silverlight and we will continue with other like WCF, WF, WPF and anything else you decide you want to learn.

I am promoting this through the Dallas .NET Users Group. If you are interested in participating either as an expert or a student, please email me at president, then the at symbol and the ddnug.net and I will keep you posted.

MDC Dallas Pictures

omarv — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:39:02 GMT

Thanks to Giovanni Gallucci for taking and posting the pictures: http://flickr.com/photos/theagencyblog/sets/72157612975579499/

Trying out MS Tag

omarv — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:16:00 GMT

I hope it takes off. I really want a way to use my phone to scan items barcodes (in today's lingo).

Woohoo!! It worked! The above tag points to my TSRocks blog. I just scanned it with my phone after I pasted it in this article using Live Writer and my mobile IE went to my blog. Check out MS Tag.

VSTS 2010 VPC info from my Dallas MSDN Developers Conference (MDC) talk on VSTS2010

omarv — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:56:33 GMT

Several people were asking me at the end of my session how they could start evaluating VSTS 2010 and I promised to post the information here, so here it is...

I created a couple of tinyurl.com links for the people that wanted to write it down while they were there:

http://tinyurl.com/MDCVsts2010VPC (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=en)

- and -

http://tinyurl.com/MDCVsts2010VPC2 (http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2008/10/27/visual-studio-2010-ctp-vpc-dealing-with-activation-messages.aspx)

Those links refer to the VPC download and a blog post from Brian Keller about dealing with software activation messages you will get while running the VPC. But in addition to reading that blog post you should also read Grant Holiday's post because of the VPC also expires: http://blogs.msdn.com/granth/archive/2008/12/10/visual-studio-2010-ctp-vpc-will-expire-jan-1-2009.aspx and you will need to disable the time synchronization setting.

Also, there were a few people in my talk had not seen visual-studio consistently before so I figured I would have a link to some upcoming webcasts that you can look at to get familiar with the functionality of visual studio team system:

https://www.clicktoattend.com/search.aspx?partner=search&range=Next%206%20Months&partnerid=5245&partnername=Notion%20Solutions,%20Inc.&seminar=1&webcast=1

Dallas VSTS UG Meeting on 1/21/09: VSTS 2010 Features Part 2 - Chris Tullier

omarv — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:13:29 GMT

Join us next Wednesday evening, January 21 @ 18:00, for a presentation by Chris Tullier. Chris will be going over the new features coming in VSTS 2010 with an emphasis on the architecture, developer, and reporting capabilities. If you weren't able to make it to PDC this year and you have yet to check out the presentation videos on Channel 9 you will want to be at this meeting!

Dallas VSTS Users Group. RSVP for the meeting here.