Drewby

Our team just launched a new video podcast called 10-4 that will cover the new features in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Episode 1: Downloading and Using the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP

For this first episode of 10-4, we’ll look at how to download and use the Virtual PC image of the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP. We’ll give you tips on how to download this massive (7GB+ compressed) VPC, show you how to get past some pesky expiration issues, and get you started with the CTP walkthroughs. Lastly we’ll cover where to get assistance and provide your feedback about this release.

In future episodes we’ll dive more deeply into the technical underpinnings of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, but for this first episode we wanted to make sure everybody could get the CTP and follow along at home.

If you have ideas for the show or topics that you want covered, please let us know! We’ll be releasing one episode a week. You can provide your feedback in the comments of the show or email us at 10-4 at microsoft.com.

The last several weeks have been a lot of fun. My team at Microsoft was busy supporting the announcements for Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 that happened at PDC and TechEd EMEA.

Jason Olson delivered a tremendous series of videos on Channel9 focused on Visual Studio 2010 that followed an earlier, very successful series for Visual Studio Team System produced by Brian Keller. Between the two themed weeks, the videos have 1.2 million views!

We finally have some time to breathe and think about what comes next. And I took this chance to follow-up on a conversation I had with Jeff Julian at PDC. He convinced me to get back to blogging on GeeksWithBlogs.net and I’m glad to be part of this community.

Another community I’m looking forward to visiting again is the wonderful CodeMash community in Sandusky, Ohio. Their next event is in January and I’ll be presenting two sessions. The speaker list looks really awesome, not two mention three tremendous keynoters.

Here’s my two sessions:

Modern Web Applications with .NET- To be honest, I’m not even sure what that means. The submission page for sessions had a really small character limit for title and this is what I came up with after 4-5 tries. Basically, we’ll be talking about what is coming in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 for web developers.

Managed Extensibility Framework – This is one is a little more straight forward.  In this session, I’ll introduce the audience to the Managed Extensibility Framework coming in the .NET Framework 4.0. We’ll look at how its used to extend Visual Studio 2010 and how it can be leveraged in your own applications.

Also, I’m setting up 14 computers while I’m there to allow attendees to go through the hands-on-labs in our Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit and get some experience with the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.

Log Parser is a tool available from Microsoft that allows you to run SQL queries against log files and send the information to a SQL Database or other file formats. In this article I describe the capabilities of Log Parser and how you can use it as a set of COM interfaces from your application.