The French Canadian version of DotNet Rocks is BlaBla dotNet. Recently Mario Cardinal prowled the halls at DevTeach asking speakers and other well known folks to give ONE good reason for switching to VS 2005. Just one! What a challenge! The answers he collected are in English, so even though the Eric-and-Mario banter around the quotes is in French, you can understand the show even if you're monolingual. In the banter, you can hear people's names, book titles, occasional familiar words, and delightful phrases like “Superstars de monde de développement” or “bloggeuse très prolifique” (that one for Julie Lerman and I just adore bloggeuse and will try to use it whenever I can) and various stuff you probably need at least grade school French for but that I can just follow, and then someone speaks in English about VS 2005 cool features.

When Mario cornered me, he told me a big surprise for him was the lack of duplicates. Mostly we all picked very different features, so by listening to us all you get a real sense of the treats that are waiting for you. You might also spend some time thinking about describing an elephant if you only get to touch one small part of it

Kate

Actually a whole bunch of them are, at www.groktalk.net, but mine in particular is at

http://www.groktalk.net/blog/KateGregoryPresentingWhyCIsntCEnough.aspx

My favourite part happens after the camera is off and we go to credits.

You can stream these, download them to watch at your leisure, or bring them down in the background with BITS using a tool like DrizzleCast. Full instructions are at the main URL. We've set each talk up as a blog entry so that you can comment and ask questions: you'll lower my workload if you comment there rather than here.

Kate

The C++ team has released an update for Beta 2 of Visual C++ 2005. This isn't a feature patch, it's an improvement to the information gathering that they use to tweak the final release, based on how all of us actually use the beta.

This patch updates the C++ IDE language service DLL (vcpkg.dll) to provide proper upload of usage data for the Customer Experience program. Applying this update is very important in ensuring that the Visual C++ team gets accurate data about the usage of the different product features. The Visual C++ team would appreciate you taking the time to apply this patch. This patch ensures that the Visual C++ team gets the most accurate information available to help provide a high quality product at RTM.

While we wait for my Groktalk to appear (editing is really hard and timeconsuming and Scott is a hero) I have been getting a few requests for “the seven things C++ has that C#” doesn't.

• Can generate native code and work with native types from other libraries
• C++ interop – the fastest and easiest
• Templates and generics
• Deterministic destruction
  • my absolute favourite, I must say
• Optimized MSIL
• PGO for native and managed code
• .NET Linking (from within the IDE)
  

I will try to do individual blogs on these when I can. In the meantime, you can peruse the deck and remember, it's for a ten minute talk: Why Cpp.ppt (94 KB).

Kate

In my second Tech Ed talk I touched very briefly on the classes, templates, and macros that make it easy to integrate MFC and WinForms in C++ applications that target the runtime. If you want proof of Microsoft's continuiing committment to MFC, head for the new MFC whitepaper on MSDN. I quote:

.NET integration enables MFC applications to leverage the power and productivity of the .NET platform as a natural extension of MFC. The reliability and security enhancements in MFC make for a more productive development process with fewer end-user issues, and existing MFC applications can take advantage of these enhancements with little more than a simple recompile in many cases.

I'll give links to more details as soon as I can.

Kate

Have you ever read the hotel soap story? It's always presented as true, but of course it's not. I've found an American version (featuring Dial and Camay) and a British one (featuring Imperial Leather). The thing just makes me laugh out loud even after all the times I've read it. Well anyway here at the Peabody (Tech Ed Speaker hotel) I am starting to have a similar, but more delicious, problem. Each evening they come around to do a turn-down service, to get you ready for bed. If I am out, they come in and do it, and leave two chocolates on the pillow. Very nice. If I am in, they knock on the door and say “turndown!” and I come to the door and say “thanks, I'm fine, really.” And then, you see, they say the dreaded words “but wouldn't you like a chocolate or two?”. “Oh yes, that would be nice, thankyou!”. The first time this happened, they gave me three. The next night, four. It keeps going up, I have no idea why. Last night, SEVEN! Tonight I think it was TEN!

I am actually eating a few of these chocolates but not at a sufficient pace. I leave tomorrow: I have, after eight nights in this hotel, twenty nine squares of chocolate still piled by my lamp, a little like the soaps of our supposed true story above.

There are worse problems to have.

Kate

The Groktalks are finished! Now comes the editing... so Scott Stanfield needs to rest up a little... and at Tech Ed, you take your rest where you can get it.

Anyone who doubted that 40 ten-minute talks could knock an attendee over need only have visited our booth this afternoon as we wrapped up. What a treat to see and hear so many of them, and what a lot of work to film them all! The Groktalk crew all deserve a big round of applause: Patrick Hynds ran the schedule, Scott Golightly tracked the times and kept the speakers on task, Scott Stanfield was camera and direction (and heart and soul,) and J. Michael Palermo did everything else technical that needed to be done. Today I made sure speakers were ready when their time rolled around. Tons of other RDs came to the booth for moral support, occasional technical support, and to hear some really good presentations, ten minutes at a time.

Let me tell you, speaking for ten minutes is HARD. Speaking all day, for eight or nine hours, is tiring, but not that hard: if one demo blows up and you need to either do it over or abandon the rest of it, there's plenty of ways to speed up or slow down other parts of the day. An hour is reallly pretty nice: if you speak too long on one thing you can make up for it later, if you forget something when you're on slide 11 you can always find a way to weave it in to slide 12 or even 22. But in ten minutes, there's just nowhere to hide. I am so impressed that we were able to do this, and really glad we filmed them. Watch for links as we get things edited and uploaded.

Kate

We're putting in a lot of time at the RD Cabana booth recording these groktalks. This is such a great idea! Top notch speakers who normally do hour, half day, or all day sessions instead tackling one concept in just ten minutes. I haven't been able to watch them all, but I can't wait till they're uploaded to the groktalk site. In the meantime you can find some pictures we've taken while filming, our schedule, and a map to where we are.

Take a look!

Kate

One more entry on this very busy day: the VSTO team announced today that VSTO will be (has been, but it's still in beta) expanded to include support for creating Outlook add-ins with managed code. There's a 5-page description on MSDN already.

This is making a cool tool, VSTO, even cooler. If you haven't noticed VSTO yet, it's time that you did. My Office 2003 category is pretty much all VSTO posts, versions 2003 and 2005.

Kate

Here's the link to the ebay auction featuring over 20 Tech Ed speakers, almost all RDs. It ends June 16th. Get your hour of consulting time and help the tsunami victims at the same time. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, wander back in time through this blog to January: we did an auction then and raised $10,000 for immediate relief. This time it's about recovery and our help is still sorely needed.

Whose time might you get?

• Don Box (USA) Microsoft, Inc.
• Jesper Johansson (USA) Microsoct, Inc.
• Richard Campbell (Canada) Campbell and Associates.
• Scott Hanselman (USA) Corillian, Inc.
• Kimberly Tripp (USA) SQLSkills.com
• Michele Leroux Bustamante (USA/Canada) iDesign, LLC
• Kate Gregory (Canada) Gregory Consulting
• Juval Lowy (USA) iDesign, LLC
• Stephen Forte (USA) Corzen, Inc
• Clemens Vasters (Germany) Newtelligence AG
• Andrew Brust (USA) Citigate-Hudson, Inc.
• Carl Franklin (USA) Franklins.net
• Ingo Rammer (Austria) Thinktecture
• Christian Weyer (Germany) Thinktecture
• Joel Semeniuk (Canada) Imaginets
• Rockford Lhotka (USA) Magenic Technologies
• Patrick Hynds (USA) Critical Sites
• Tim Landgrave (USA) Crowe, Inc.
• Tim Huckaby (USA) Interknowlogy, Inc.
• Jackie Goldstein (Israel) Renaissance
• John Goodyear (USA) Aspsoft
• Richard Hundhausen (USA) Accentient, Inc
• Paul Sheriff (USA) PDSA, Inc

Not a dud in the bunch! Please help if you can by bidding right away: the more bids are in the system the higher the minimum bid.

Kate

My Tech Ed talk today was about what's new in C++ other than the language. I promised some links to whitepapers and resources. Here they are:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/floapoint.asp - Eric Fleegal's whitepaper on floating point optimization.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/securitychecks.asp - My whitepaper on GS and RTC in Visual C++ 2003, which you can use as a starting point. Try the samples with 2005. The code samples come with the C++ toolkit - there's a link in the whitepaper to download it.

Thanks for coming to the talk!

Kate

Day Zero was Regional Director side meetings, lots of marvelous presentations from a variety of product teams and special guests. I also took care of registering, did my technical rehearsal for Monday's talk, and generally had a wonderful time.

Day One was my first talk, and it went very well. Here's the empty room before the audience showed up:

I also got to experience the RD Cabana. This is a happening place full of smart people and couches:

 We're getting ready to start filming our GrokTalks tomorrow. You need to check these out: stop by and watch us film, or get them off groktalk.net as we upload them. Here's our fearless technical director:

If you're here, stop by and say Hi! We're just off the main path through Hall A.

Kate