2011: Miscrosoft Software Developer's Conferences

Currently my company is looking for any good Microsoft developer's conferences coming up in 2011.  We would preferably like to find a BizTalk developer's conference but anything that comes close to that would be nice too.  Anything like .NET or C# would be good.  Does anyone have any recommendations for anything good coming up in 2011?

BizTalk 2009 Version Control

It seems that with as many intricacies that are included in the software combination of BizTalk 2009, Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2010 there would be a more straightforward way of version control for applications.  If there is, we certainly haven't found it yet.  With our Java systems we are used to the source code itself being version controlled i.e. 'DEV APPNAME 09-13-2010 1.0.1' being included in each version of the application that gets changed.  The closest thing we have found in TFS to do this is by using labels.  With labels we can give the label any name we want and include any files we would like.  However, with labels in TFS there is nothing stopping users from deleting or editing labels.  Also, the process of finding what labels exist in a solution or what labeled version of a file you have locally is also not user-friendly.  This hardly seems like the ideal solution.

Essentially what we would like to do is to have the version number incremented each time something is checked in or similar.  We would also like to increment the assembly versions but we had trouble with references when we tried to do this manually.  If there is another way to increment the assembly version without breaking references I would love to hear about it.  Please feel free to leave your thoughts, questions and comments.

Sold my ThinkPad...kept my Mac

I graduated from Drake University this spring and as a typical college graduate I received my share of presents.  The biggest by far was the gift from my parents who offered to pay for half of a MacBook Pro.  I was thrilled!  Going through four years of business school where using a Macintosh didn’t make much sense, I was ecstatic to finally get a chance to do "normal" people things on my computer that didn't require a PC.  Now, this isn't my first Mac and it probably won't be my last either.  I first entered the Mac world my sophomore year in college when I bought an iMac with OS X Tiger.  Then two MacBooks and three MacBook Pros later, I was without a Mac through my senior year in college.  I guess you could call me a bit indecisive when it comes to my personal preference between PC and Mac.  I always waffled back and forth between owning a PC or a Mac and sometimes both; both most recently.  That is until I listed my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 on eBay and made the decision to work solely on the Macintosh platform. 

Since I have made the switch to only using a Mac I haven’t run into any problems or times when I found myself wishing for my PC back.  I have found that when I need to use a PC for anything, usually work, that my handy little Citrix plug-in alongside my remote desktop for Mac by Microsoft does the trick.  I can easily remote into my work machine from anywhere and make a quick programming change or check email, etc.  It is just like I am sitting in front of my machine at work, minus the 22” wide-screen monitor!  With the ability to remote into my work environment I haven’t even found a need to use Boot Camp to dual-boot.

If you are living in a PC world and want to make the switch to Mac at home I highly recommend that you do.  I have had nothing but good experiences from my Macintosh exploits and I am just scratching the surface.  If you have PC/Mac related stories, please share and feel free to comment.  Thanks for reading!

Making the switch: HDD to SSD Follow-up

So, I have been testing an 80GB Intel solid state drive on both my MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad and I can't say I am impressed with the results.  I don't have any benchmarks or fancy graphs to show you the performance differences.  But I can tell you from an above-average user's point of view, there is very little noticeable difference.  The SSD does cause both machines to boot up a little faster, but nothing that would make it worth making the switch.  I would say to anybody looking to upgrade their HDD to something faster either bump up to 7,200 if you're not already there or try one of Seagate's 10,000 RPM drives.  You'll get a lot more storage capacity for your money and you will be happier in the long run.  I wouldn't have even bothered with a SSD but I got one from Intel for 50% for being a employee at Best Buy at the time.  Feel free to leave comments and questions! 

New Car

So, it was my 23rd birthday today and I have been wanting to get a new car for sometime now.  I really wanted a BMW and I was searching around and found the perfect car.  It was listed at 21,900 but they reduced the price to 18,900 so I jumped on it.  It's a 2006 BMW 325i with 41,000 miles on it.  I love it and couldn't be happier with it.  I especially like the butt warmers in the seats and the beeping that alerts me to when I am about to hit something when backing up.  I will try to post pics of it later.  It is getting late right now so I had better get to bed.  I have to be at work tomorrow at 8:00!!!