Drew Robbins, fresh off his announcement that he's on his way to a new role in Redmond, has just announced his replacement.  Congratulations to Jeff Blankenburg, the new Microsoft Heartland Developer Evangelist.  Jeff and I go way back as classmates at BGSU, touring the country with the BGSU Men's Chorus.  I'm sure Jeff will rock the house in his new role!

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Heartland Developer Evangelist: Jeff Blankenburg

The new Developer Evangelist for the Heartland District is Jeff Blankenburg. This is an exciting announcement for many reasons. The Developer Evangelist (DE) position is an important role for the professional developer community. The DE is a driver and/or supporter of the many developer events that occur in the district such as Code Camps, Day of .NETs, User Groups, Product Launches, etc.

The DE is also the primary connection to Microsoft for many developers in the community. This is where those developers bring their feedback, requests, ideas, etc. The DE will hunt down the right resources and get them the support they need. As you look around each district in the US, you can see the impact that having a great DE can have on the developer community.

It is exciting to have someone as capable as Jeff in this role. Jeff brings the right combination of technical capability, attitude and passion to the role. Not only does he know how to develop software, but he also comes with a design background - a combination that is really needed in this new Microsoft world of Silverlight and Expression. It says a lot that all of the candidates for this role were flagged as Microsoft hires (ie. we'll find another role for them), but Jeff stood out because of this unique combination and some phenomenal ideas on how to bring this community to the next level.

Once you add a Team Foundation Server to your server list in Team Explorer, you'll be prompted for user credentials. There may come a time when you need to change this – perhaps you're verifying a VPC image that another user will eventually use, or perhaps you are (gasp!) using someone else's login while you wait for yours to be created. Either way, the solution is painfully simple, and has nothing to do with VSTS. Since web services are used to communicate between the client and server, user credentials are cached just like any other web site credentials. These can be maintained via the User Accounts control panel by choosing the "Manage my network passwords" under Related Tasks. This brings up the Stored User Names and Passwords dialog – just remove the TFS machine from the list, and you will be prompted for new credentials the next time you try to connect.

Looks like there are some nice features in this edition of the TFS Power Tool – a process template editor integrated with the Visual Studio IDE, a handful of check-in policies, a build task that simplifies the running of unit tests, and a few GUI enhancements to some of the TFPT commands. But the best surprise of all...my personal favorite the Annotate command, is now integrated into the Source Control Explorer, making all those "Who the heck coded this?" moments oh so fulfilling!

Check it out!

http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2007/02/20/1731907.aspx

It's been on my list for ages now - Disaster Recovery for my home system.  I can't even begin to tell you how much pain would be headed my way if all of my (wife's) digital photos suddenly turned up missing.  Well, one morning this week I was given a very unpleasant surprise - my Outlook PST was gone.  Not corrupt...not moved...GONE...vanished.  It occurred to me that I had to actually log in - normally I stay logged in and unlock.  Somehow my system got rebooted, so later in the evening it was time for some investigation - off to the event logs.

The Windows Installer initiated a system restart to complete or continue the configuration of 'Microsoft Office Outlook 2003'.

Hmmm.  Windows Update did me in, I'll bet.  A search of my drives for *.pst files did not find the file.  Interestingly, my wife's PST was untouched, so I can only imagine there was a problem during the reboot due to my account having an instance of Outlook running. Anyway, water under the bridge - I had to come to grips with reality and realize there's probably no way I'm recovering that file.  It wasn't a total travesty, though - each year I archive off all the emails in my PST into a new PST for that year.  So had this happened about three days later, I probably would have only lost a handful of messages.  Why I don't just set up AutoArchive is beyond me, but I digress.  As I implied earlier, I don't have a backup routine in place, so if my system gets fried, adios old emails (among other things).  Thankfully just my current PST was missing.  So at this point, my losses were limited to just 2006 emails.  Well...maybe not...

Let me explain my personal email setup.  I have a very simple email address through NetIdentity - eric @ matz . com.  I like having web access to my email when I'm away, but also prefer to have it POP'd into Outlook when I get home.  I'm not a big fan of NetIdentity's webmail interface, so I opted to have my mail routed through GMail - it's free, tons of storage, the web interface is great, and I can POP my mail into Outlook or my Smartphone with no strings attached.  Another feature of GMail is archiving - every message is archived in the All Mail folder, so if I need access to a message that's already been downloaded into my PST at home, I can get to it when I'm on the road.

Hey, wait!  Let me check.  Yes!  The "All Mail" went back to October of 2005, so I hadn't lost my emails completely.  Now...how can I get these from GMail?  No way was I going to site there forwarding everything to myself that looked important.  I did that once...back in college...from a telnet session...it SUCKED.  I tried moving a message back to the Inbox - would it download via POP?  No dice.  I then combed through the GMail POP settings.  "Hello...what's this?"

I turned that on, and Outlook lit up like the Griswold house.  Every message I'd ever received through GMail began streaming into my Inbox.  They came down in batches about 75 megs each.  I didn't time things, I just went away and came back to it today.  After all was said and done, I had every message from 2006 back on my PC.  I'll leave the sorting for a rainy day.  At least I can still archive them in my standard, albeit archaic/inefficient/manual process.

Now THIS...is a first for me...

//TODO: Back up my friggin' files.

Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2003 yesterday.  I'm glad they're committed to improving that product as is still being heavily used, but I have to wonder what took so long.  The good news is, we shouldn't have to wait until 2008 for a VS 2005 Service Pack.

If you're still using VS2003, vou can download the Service Pack here and the Release Notes here.  I'd love to tell you what some of the highlights are, but the link to view what has been fixed appears to be broken at the moment.  I'll bring to light two key points from the Release Notes - 1) the installer is rather unresponsive at first, so be patient, and 2) have the original install media/ISO/network share handy as you may be prompted for it.

This marks my second attempt at blogging...let's see if I'm more dilligent than I was with the first.  I thought I'd try out the new Windows Live Writer and start up a blog on Windows Live Spaces.  Most of my colleagues and coworkers use Windows Live Messenger, and I like the integration that offers, so here goes...