Eugene Fabian

Following the world wide Visual Studio 2010 launch (12th April), we had the honor to receive Dave Mendlen to share how to improve software development lifecycle using Visual Studio 2010 with the 30’ish audience – our selected customers and partners. Just so you know, Dave Mendlen is the Senior Director of Developer Marketing and also a keynote speaker at Visual Studio 2010 launch event held at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Dave was kind enough to detour to Singapore after his KL keynote session just to be with us for mere 24 hours before heading back home. Dave Mendlen started his career in Microsoft as the lead product planner on .NET and Visual Studio. Prior to his current role, he also served as the speech writer for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He was previously the Director of Web Services & also Director of Windows Product Management. He kicked off the lively session by sharing what happy development teams have in common and unhappy teams are unique on its own, just like how Leo Tolstoy describes happy and unhappy families in Anna Karenina. As most of you would agree, resulting in tight schedule and little budget due to underestimating the project scope, not being able to reproduce the weird bugs which testers have reported, and mismatch design and implementation, etc. can sure make everyone in the team unhappy in one way or another. I learned from his sharing that we have added a lot of new features in Visual Studio 2010 to address these pain points which we encounter day-to-day. Dave helped the audience understand how the architecture designers can help ensure that the implementation conforms to the intended design, how Team Foundation Server dashboard provides clear visibility of the project at a glance, how Test Manager 2010 eliminate “no-repro” bugs in his hour-long interactive conversation. Here, you can find the slides used in his presentation. [slideshare id=3799990&doc=visualstudio2010alm-100421033913-phpapp01] Dave also passionately shared how the engineering and marketing teams had worked together to come up with the best ever release of Visual Studio and also the bold and brilliant move made in changing the product name as well as simplifying the product SKUs. Will you believe we used Visual Studio 2010 to develop Visual Studio 2010? Dave shared the statistics, database size, work item counts, and source code files, etc., of our internal Team Foundation Server, which is used by DevDiv - “Developer Division in Microsoft”. This surprised the audience, especially on how we “dogfood” our products to ensure that they are ready for the customers. He wrapped up the session talking about our ALM partners who build extensions for both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server ...

Thank you everybody for attending our MSDN Mix-It-Up and TechNet Event on Mar 25. For everybody who wants the slides here they are: For MSDN Mix It Up slides here. For TechNet Event slides here Keep posted on our future events here. Subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter or Facebook!

Learn more about Windows Phone 7 development! We’ve been seeing a lot of interest with Windows Phone 7 and people want to know how you can develop on it. We got two community events that you wouldn’t want to miss if you want to learn more about Windows Phone 7 development. SGDOTNET April User Group Meeting Windows Phone 7 Development Chris Ismael, Developer Evangelist April 16, 2010 2000hrs – 2100hrs The new Windows Phone is coming! Learn how you can get started with Windows Phone 7 app development using Silverlight. This session is targeted for developers who would like to learn how they can start building apps or games for the phone, touching on some phone-specific features, using free versions of Visual Studio 2010 and Blend 4. There will also be a post-session discussion on Marketplace. Register at http://www.sgdotnet.org/News/Pages/201004Newsletter.aspx ...

Silverlight MVP Michael Sync created a step by step tutorial on how to install the multi-touch simulator for Windows Phone 7. Michael Sync is one of the founders of the Singapore Silverlight User Group. Check out his complete post here: http://michaelsync.net/2010/04/06/step-by-step-tutorial-installing-multi-touch-simulator-for-silverlight-phone-7

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/9824912[/vimeo] Created by passionate people who loves innovation, Project Nimbus is an initiative that hopes to solve innovators’ problem of finding data sets and services by offering a central place for authoritative and reliable data and services access from government and commercial entities in Singapore. From their website: http://projectnimbus.org Our goal: To unite the voices of Singapore Innovators and identify data sets and services we as Innovators want To work with content owner and government entities for the appropriate release of these data sets and services to Singapore Innovators To ultimately help innovators focus on innovation (instead of the silly stuff that burdens us all today) We have been working with the Project Nimbus guys and they have been churning out a lot of things! If you want to know how you can innovate faster and focus on creating awesome mashups be sure to check out their website! ...

Spanning a week of activities, the Microsoft Cloud Week will get you up to speed with the Windows Azure Platform. Things to look out for. Mon, April 12 - Microsoft Hosting Day (0900-1630) Mon, April 12 - SCS Cloud Computing and Virtualization SIG (1800-2000) Tue - Wed, April 14-15 - Metro Windows Azure Deep Dive Workshop (registration closed early though) And the main event: Tue, April 13 MSDN Presents: Windows Azure Platform Speakers, David Chappell of Chappell & Associates and Chris Auld of Intergen Ltd will be present to deliver their own insights into the world of Windows Azure. Today, over twenty million businesses and a billion people use Microsoft’s cloud services. The Windows Azure Platform is a key component within the Microsoft cloud, and we are happy to announce that it is now commercially available in Singapore. Windows Azure offers a flexible, familiar environment designed to create applications and services for the cloud. With Windows Azure, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows. We invite you to come to this event, and discover your potential with Windows Azure. ...

Last night at MIX10 held at Las Vegas Microsoft announced its developer story for the Windows Phone 7 Series. If you didn’t catch the keynote last night you can watch it MIX10 Keynote A quick summary: Silverlight 4 is now on RC. Final build will be out next month Silverlight on 60% of all internet connected devices Expression Blend 4 preview out. Free upgrade to Expression 3 owners. Windows Phone 7 uses Silverlight and XNA. Uses the same Silverlight you know on the web. Uses Visual Studio 2010 with free tools. Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone XNA for Windows Phone Same XNA platform for PC, Phone and Xbox Tonight will be another big night full of releases. Hope to see you there! Chris was our man on the street reporting live from Vegas. ...

The Photo 360 Challenge Kick Off was just held last Saturday at the Microsoft Office. If you don’t know what the Photo 360 Challenge is take a look at the Photo 360 Challenge Contest Page. The day was filled with technology and fun. Everybody got to try out the Microsoft Surface and Xbox 360. It’s quite interesting to see young kids and their dads playing with the Surface games, creating music, looking at DNA and all other things. The event started with some magic 3d eye contest. Until now I still don’t know how they saw those images. ...