October 2008 Entries
A must have presentation aid for any technical presentation, additionally good if you have a hard time seeing area’s of the screen and it is free. Get it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx
I just started a new virtual user group, Developer Round Table. Check out our inaugural meeting Friday Oct 31 at 2:00 PST. All the details at http://www.developerroundtable.com, see you there.
Microsoft just changed the licensing for the Developer Team Edition for MSDN. If you have the Developer SKU you are now also licensed to use the Database Team Edition. (If you don’t know what SKU you have go to MSDN and check).
Why does this matter to me? The Database edition has many cool features but my favorite are “Schema Compare” and “Data Compare”. These allow you to do a comparison between two databases and see what the differences are (both structure and content). After you do the install you will see a new menu at the top of VS.NET...
Microsoft has a free tool called the ALM Advisor. As you know ALM or application lifecycle management is “the process of delivering software as a continuously repeating cycle of inter-related steps: definition, design, development, testing, deployment and management” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_management). What the tool does is ask you a bunch of questions about how things are done currently. It then assess the maturity of your ALM process, and make recommendations on steps to make the process more mature. The good thing from what I have seen is that it breaks the process down into steps that can be more easily phased in...