During the TechEd preconference session "Architecture Boot Camp for Building Connected Systems" by Beat Schwegler and Arvindra Sehmi, Beat demonstrated GAT. Although it still has some very rough edges, it also looks very promising.

The new version of MBSA is finally available. Go get it here.

The German .NET community's July event, the ASP.NET 2.0 Community Boot Camp aka CBC05 is now fully booked! It feels absolutely great that we (speakers are almost exclusively MVPs) were able to organize a five day training event on ASP.NET 2.0 by the community for the community. See you in Bad Ischl in July!

Finally, everything for my (German) TechTalk Tools zur erfolgreichen Softwareentwicklung mit .NET is online on the TechTalk site: slides, demo and links document.

The Ajax.NET library has been open-sourced by Michael Schwarz. You can now download the most current bits here. What I didn't see so far though is the source code for the library... nor the license.

Just registered for PDC05. I will be in LA Sun-Sun, and attending the black belt security preconference session on Monday, which I consider a must - especially given that Michael Howard is one of the presenters.

If you are wondering why there's so little activity on this blog recently: I'm still touring Germany with my Techtalk. The last three legs are next week, and then I am almost on the plane to Amsterdam for TechEd Europe...

After quite some struggle, I got the mono::live CD to boot & actually work in Virtual PC. The first step to sucess is to create a new VPC image, and capture the ISO of mono::live for startup of your VPC image:

This thing will now ask you a couple of questions, such as country, keyboard layout, and screen resolution you would like to use:

Now for the stumbling block - mono::live (or Ubuntu, the underlying distribution, to be more precise) detects the graphics card emulated by VPC, however, uses the 24BPP mode with the VPC-emulated card only supporting 16BPP. Looks weird at first and had me stumped too. But I got help on GotMono.com (actual post, interesting snippet provided here for reference):

As far as I am aware, the easiest way to handle this is to just allow the machine to boot up all the way, and then when you can see the fuzzy background image (i.e., the stretched Mono logo) so that it looks like booting is complete, hit CTRL+ALT+F3 to bring up a command prompt.
 
Then type (or rather, cut and paste), this command, all on one line:
 
Code:
sudo sed 's/DefaultDepth\t24/DefaultDepth\t16/g' /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /tmp/xorg.conf && sudo cp /tmp/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf && sudo killall Xorg

to restart the X server at a color depth Virtual PC can handle.

Because pasting didn't work the way I wanted it to, I ended up typing this stuff using US keyboard settings on a German keyboard (don't ask). Anyways: this did the trick! Now I can start exploring mono::live without having to reboot my machine.

This Thursday afternoon I attended the rerun of the VSTO session (Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office System - quite a mouthfull, I'll stick with VSTO) in the Smart Client track (my main track was VSTE - Visual Studio Team Edition). Wow! The 2003 version didn't impress me at all when I saw it back then. But 2005 really rocks. Catherine Heller (Technical Evangelist) did a nice demo in Excel. The way the document is design- and programmable, access to the action pane and rolling your own smart tags is almost too easy. Forget about VBA, serious Office development is now on the horizon.

VSTO 2005 Blog

VSTO 2005 Beta Page

What's New in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

Details on Brian Goldfarb's blog. Read the announcement / Go there

This white paper explains the differences between Virtual PC and Virtual Server and discusses the scenarios in which it is appropriate to use one or the other. Download