Want to go to PDC but not sure you can afford it? How would this work for you: a trip to PDC including flights, hotel, and conference admission?

That's the grand prize in the INETA Component Code Challenge. Write an app (web, client, whatever) that uses at least two different components (a grid and a chart? a PDF creator and a calendar? a report and a spreadsheet? You decide.) from the sponsors.

Try it! And maybe see you in LA!

Kate

Here's another tip from Habib on debugging. If you have a particular screen you want to bring up, and it takes a lot of clicking and selecting to bring it up, why not just set a breakpoint and then bring it up by constructing and calling it with the immediate window?

Habib's video features a WPF application, and the constructor takes no parameters, but you could use this for Windows Forms and you could pass through whatever parameters you needed to. A very handy tip - any language, any kind of client application.

It's been a while since I did a series of posts on debugging tips:

• Tracepoints
• Tracepoints - not just C++
• Conditional breakpoints
• One more breakpoint tip - hit count
• (insert a two year gap)
• Copying breakpoints between machines

So here is not so much a tip as an announcement. You see , it's no coincidence that my examples for conditional breakpoints were numbers (some index into a structure is greater than 346, or Xid is 1234.) Until now, you couldn't really use strings in conditional breakpoint expressions. But the cool news is that, starting with Visual Studio 2010, you can!

You can't just call arbitrary functions including your own foo(whatever), but you can call a pretty impressive list of variants on strlen and strcmp. The details on are Habib Heydarian's blog. Just one more reason to want Visual Studio 2010!

Kate

Finally, XP2Win7 is released! I've been watching this one for a long time. It's designed to show off both Windows 7 features and development good practices. The same binaries behave differently on XP and on 7 - on 7 it lights up and shows 7 features like the taskbar or libraries support, as well as Vista features that never got the attention they deserve like Restart and Recovery.

The application itself is a photo viewer and that makes it a natural fit for hooking into libraries, search and organize, and the preview system. It has an intuitive jump list on the taskbar:

It also uses the new Sensor support, Aero glass effects, trigger-started services for backing up images when a USB key is inserted, MMC and Powershell integration, the new Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and so much more. This will be your roadmap to Windows 7 development. Of course all the code is available, as well as a simple MSI if you'd just like to play with the application a bit and understand what Windows 7 has to offer.

Get your copy and start learning and exploring!

Kate

A whole pile of really smart people, many of whom I am lucky enough to call my friends, have contributed to a new eBook on development topics. Check these titles:

• Working with Brownfield Code by Donald Belcham (Microsoft MVP)
• Beyond C# and VB by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)
• Remaining Valuable to Employers featuring Barry Gervin, Billy Hollis, Bruce Johnson, Scott Howlett, Adam Cogan, and Jonathan Zuck
• All I Wanted Was My Data by Barry Gervin (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
• Efficiency Upgrade by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
• Getting Started with Continuous Integration by Sondre Bjellås (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
• On Strike at the Software Factory by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)
• C# Features You Should Be Using by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)
• Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets by Brian Noyes (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
• Is Silverlight 2 Ready for Business Applications? by Jonas Follesø (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
• Innovate with Silverlight 2 by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)
• Real World WPF: Rich UI + HD by Gill Cleeren (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
• Hidden Talents by Peter Jones
• Creating Useful Installers with Custom Actions by Christian Jacob
• Banking with XML by Peter Jones
• Sending Email by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

Also, it has comics in it. Really. And if you prefer a printed copy, you can order one (black and white or colour) at a nominal cost. And these aren't little blog posts, they're decent length articles. All told the PDF is 132 pages. Each article conveys, on top of the technical information you'd expect, a glimpse into the personality and style of the author. A highly recommended download and read.

Update: This whole recommending thing works even better when you include a link: http://devshaped.com/book. Slow brain day today, I guess.

Kate

Remember that post by Aaron Margolis I linked to about launching a non elevated app from an elevated one? I mentioned that he'd left the managed version of his code as an exercise for the reader. Well Sasha Goldshtein has taken up that challenge and written the managed code. Not only that, he's added it to his UAC Helpers project on CodePlex, a collection of code that helps you work with UAC. Nice!

Kate

We have a long running Agile project underway. Every month or so we deliver a new release, then work with the customer to decide what will be in the next release. Unlike many Agile shops, this isn't our only project - we have other small software development projects, mentoring work, and so on that take up about two thirds of the team's time, leaving one third for this project. What's more, we do this as a little fixed bid project every month, and both my bottom line and the customer are happy with the cost of each release. The key to that, of course, is accurate estimation of the effort in each iteration.

In some ways we have it easy now. The client has working code, and each month all we need to estimate are the changes and additions to that code. But how would it be if we were starting from nothing and planning to build a whole big system over the course of a year or so, for someone who wanted a fixed cost up front and a reasonably complete list of features to be delivered for that cost? Stephen Forte gave a talk recently on just that topic. Plenty of good ideas and a fun listen.

Kate

I do a lot of work in VB, though I am a C++ MVP not a VB one. This year at the MVP Summit many of the VB MVPs did short interviews with Beth Massi about how they got started and what they do in VB. Get to know some of these folks a little better. I spotted Julie Lerman, Rob Windsor, Ken Getz, Deborah Kurata, Daron Yondem, Jackie Goldstein, and even a thirteen year old! It's a mix of video interviews and text ones, and a very small time committment.

Kate