During my blogging hiatus, we went live with an aggregating site for Microsoft Regional Directors around the world. The Region aggregates our blog postings, using a human editor to extract posts that are interesting and relevant to a wide audience. It also features upcoming speaking appearance and recent publications by RDs, as well as profiles and bios of us all arranged by geography and technical expertise. (Here's mine.)

Regional Directors are smart and technical, but we're also business focused. We do a lot of speaking and a lot of writing. If you know even one smart RD, let that be an endorsement for the rest of us. Check out the Region and discover some new experts to add to your "blogs I read" or "search hits I trust" list. I'm really proud to call these folks my colleagues.

Kate

It's time to get serious about planning my Tech Ed time next week. So far I have these immovable rocks, some of which I hope will be a don't-miss for you too:

• Precon 12 From Design to Deployment: Everything You Need to Know to Optimize Your Applications for Windows Vista Sunday all day.
• My breakout, DEV304 Microsoft Visual C++/CLI and Windows Vista: A Natural Fit. Monday at 3.
• Women in Technology Luncheon featuring Eileen Brown and a great panel. Wednesday at noon.
• Speaker Idol. Watch experienced speakers who have never spoken at Tech Ed compete for a slot at next year's conference! Heats Tuesday and Wednesday at the Virtual TechEd stage, finals Thursday. I'm judging, along with my pals (and fellow RDs) Carl Franklin, Stephen Forte, Michele Leroux Bustamente, and Joel Semeniuk. Richard Campbell will be leading us all and providing a grownup influence.

I will be spending time at the RD Booth too so if you miss me at one of my sessions, look for me there! I'm hoping to have a fantastic week meeting developers and talking about Vista, C++, and interop in my real world and in yours. I'm also hoping to stay INDOORS as much as I can. Here at home it's in the high 20s even low 30s (Celsius, in other words HOT) but the humidity is nice and low. I know that's not what I'll find once I get to Orlando.

Kate

Again a blogging pause. Just too darn much work and a fair amount of speaking too. I'll do some "what's upcoming" shortly, but first here are the materials from my talk at the Toronto .NET User Group this week. I helped to found this group five years ago and it was great to be back. I've been doing this Vista talk a lot lately (Code Camp, DevTeach, a webcast last week, and now in Toronto) and it seems like people keep wanting to hear it. It's hard to fit it in a single evening but yes, you can learn what you need to get your app working on Vista in just an hour or two.

The first demo - the one app that has a manifest for the whole thing. Play with the required level or take the manifest away (remove the post build step) to see virtualization. UACDemoSolution1.zip (68.65 KB)

The second demo - the partitioned app with an asInvoker manifest for the overall app and a requireAdministrator manifest for the privileged exe. Also shows how to put the shield on the button. UACDemoSolution2.zip (68.2 KB)

Some fun with the Vista look and the effort VistaBridge saves. CommonFileDialogSolution.zip (1.88 MB)

The deck. ItsVistaTime.zip (790.18 KB) Zipped because the four digit extension seems to be causing a problem. It's .pptx which means you need the viewer for it.

More in the days to come!

Kate

About six months ago, I posted a few UAC screen shots and compared the text on them, the icons (the four colour shield vs a shield with a big exclamation mark) and the colours of the area where the title appears. Now Raymond Chen summarizes those four colours for people who have trouble remembering them.

The more you understand what UAC is saying, the less frustrating you will find it.

Kate

Nikola Dudar has posted his talk and demos from the MVP Summit and SD West. If you would like to put the STL/CLR through its paces this is a great starting point.

Kate

Apparently your project hash table can get corrupted, and if this happens to you, during a build you will go to 100% CPU and Visual Studio will stop responding. Yuck! There's a hotfix if you need it.

Kate

Oh yes! I have been waiting for the marshaling library for ages! And I just pointed to a VC++ team post about the common controls changes for MFC. Here's the marshaling library in a nutshell:

Back and forth between all the different kinds of strings, various managed and unmanaged types, all the stuff about where things are allocated and how they are freed ... it's usually just 4 or 5 lines of code each time but it's gross and you have to look it up every time. Now these templates will take care of it for you. Beautiful! And on top of that, it's sometimes even faster than doing it yourself the old way!

And check this out, all those who are allergic to angle brackets:

Watch the whole video, of course. Go, Sarita!

Kate

Eileen Brown wants women who work in technology to answer a quick little survey about what that experience is like. I found some of the questions a bit hard to answer (I don't have a boss, for example) but I did my best. Now you try:

Here’s the link.  Please forward this to all the women you know and support 2 deserving charities...   http://tinyurl.com/22bbax

Kate

The Visual C++ team has an update for you about their Orcas plans around MFC and the Common Controls in Vista. There are a lot of new APIs in Vista compared to XP, but just as important there are new styles (like the style that makes a button a CommandLink) and messages (like the message to a button that tells it to draw itself with a security shield.) Right now to work with these new "thingies" (my technical term for them) you need to send Windows messages. In Orcas there will be design time support for all this and more. Even the new Common File Dialogs will be yours as if by magic.

Looking forward to it!

Kate