Skip to main content

Heartland Influencer Summit

Friday, I braved the early morning tumultuous weather in Columbus to travel to Detroit for a meeting with our Microsoft Heartland District's leaders Jeff Blankenburg (Developer Evangelist) and Josh Holmes (Architect Evangelist). Thanks again for the invitation, guys.

The topic of the day focused on how Microsoft can best help the developer community. Most of the 20 or so attendees were affiliated with the local user groups in the district. Hey, at least they [Microsoft] are asking. Microsoft may not always get it right but I've been pleased at the creation of roles such as Developer and Architect Evangelist. This alone really bridges the gap between Microsoft and the community. Now Microsoft just needs to increase the budget for these road warriors. [hint, hint]

As a thank you for attending the meeting, Jeff handed out USB Rocket Launchers. Somehow, he scored them from Micro Center for around $10. Nice work, Jeff, they're $35 on Think Geek! Anyway, my 3-year-old couldn't be more enamored with this toy. I hooked it up to the laptop in the kitchen and he has already mastered it! This kid loses interest approximately every 36 seconds but he played with this launcher for over an hour the first night. Good times.

Comments

Jeff Blankenburg said…
Jeff,

I'm glad you're enjoying the rocket launcher. To be correct, they were $30 at MicroCenter. If I said $10, I apologize.

It was a very productive meeting, and I hope to have more of those in the future.

Thanks for coming!
Monday, December 10, 2007 8:59:00 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TFS Reports Out of Date

You may have noticed it takes a while for Team Foundation Server (TFS) reports to reflect changes you've made to work items or builds. Let me guess...about an hour, right? Out of the box, TFS is set to refresh the data warehouse from its transactional store every 60 minutes. How do I change the frequency of the data warehouse refresh? Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service on your TFS application tier server within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the ChangeSetting option Enter RunIntervalSeconds for the settingId and the desired number of seconds for newValue (300 for 5 minutes...5*60) Select Invoke How do I force a data warehouse refresh? Two methods here: either via the above web service or using SQL Server Management Studio. Via the web service: Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the Run option Click Invo...
6 comments
Read more

Certified or Certifiable?

As a senior technology professional, I interview a lot of candidates. I also maintain solid relationships with other folks in the community. Frequently, the topic of certifications arises: A good investment? Valuable? A clear measurement of skill? Consensus appears to draw the line related to one's seniority. If you're (for example) just out of school and looking for an instant creditability boost, by all means pursue a certification. Likely, this credential will assist you in overcoming the "junior" tag and likely land you more interviews and client roles. (Note: I'm going to use the terms senior and junior here...no offense to either. Can't think of a better one word description. I was a junior once too.) In stark contrast, the value of certifications drops off the table around the 2-3 year mark. Some in my circles even perceive certifications as a negative for the senior professional. They think, "If this guy is so solid, why is he wasting valuable...
5 comments
Read more

Rollback a Ooops in TFS with TFPT Rollback

Rhut roe, Raggie. You just checked in a merge operation affecting 100's of files in TFS against the wrong branch. Ooops. Well, you can simply roll it back, right? Select the folder in Source Control Explorer and...hey, where's the Rollback? Rollback isn't supported in TFS natively. However, it is supported within the Power Tools leveraging the command-line TFPT.exe utility. It's fairly straightforward to revert back to a previous version--with one caveot. First, download and install the Team Foundation Power Tools 2008 on your workstation. Before proceeding, let's create a workspace dedicated to the rollback. To "true up" the workspace, the rollback operation will peform a Get Latest for every file in your current workspace. This can consume hours (and many GB) with a broad workspace mapping. To work around this, I create a temporary workspace targeted at just the area of source I need to roll back. So let's drill down on our scenario... I'm worki...
10 comments
Read more