So Rick LaPlante has had a good summer, that's good to hear - my summer has been one great big uncetainty void, what with not having a permanent place to live, starting a new job, having the baby learning and growing at an ever increasing pace... not that any of these things are bad (though I'll be glad when I move into my new place in a couple weeks), just uncertain.  So, I started this blog entry to poke at Rick for telling us about his summer and then dropping the big news if we managed to get through the first half of his entry, and here I am, having now done the same thing.

SO, the big news from Rick:

I’m excited to say that today we signed off on the the last few issues and started the release process for the next Community Technology Preview.  You should be able to get the bits off of MSDN later this week.  ...  This will be a big CTP because it will include the Team Foundation server installation (which I know many of you are very anxiously awaiting).  It will also be based on the Whidbey Beta 1 bits so you will finally have a matched set of Beta 1 compilers/editors/frameworks, and the Team System all in 1 place.  Because it’s based on the Beta 1 bits, the official title of the release will be “Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 refresh with the Team System”.

Sweet.  Having just spent the last week driving the effort to use NAnt, NUnit, FxCop, and NCover all wrapped up nicely by CruiseControl.Net to create a fully automated, continuously integrated build environment - it should be interesting to see how VS Team System will match up to the ease of VS.Net integration (ok, duh, MS'll win this one), ease of server setup (CruiseControl.Net was much easier to set up than I was prepared for - I'll be blogging my findings once I'm done), and most crucially, ease of developer acceptance - once the NiftyNewToy aura has worn off, how much (or how little) of a PITA will it be for a developer to use VSTS?  Right now with my CC.Net setup, all a developer *has* to do is check something in - the tests, reporting, and redistribution of binaries and documentation is all automated.  Of course, the developer *should* run tests before he checks something in - but we all know that doesn't mean it'll happen 100% of the time.

- G

Bob Beauchemin was experimenting with .Net UDTs, and their query results in SSMS when he came upon an interesting bugfeature.  If you create a .Net UDT, deploy it to SQL Server, use it as a column in a table, insert a row into that table, and do a “select *” on that table, you get an error:

An error occurred while executing batch. Error message is: File or assembly name 'MyNewType, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=17177e16a4b86577', or one of its dependencies, was not found.

This is because SSMS is just another client for SQL, and as such, uses ADO.Net to query it... which means that the custom UDT you deployed to the server must also be deployed to the machine you're using SSMS from in order to properly disply the value.  Yuck.

In the comments, Angel Saenz-Badillos, an ADO.Net guy from MS, mentions that he doesn't like this behavior, and wants feedback to determine how best to go about this issue.  So, jump on over to either Bob's entry and leave comments, or shoot them stright to Angel himself.  I personally would prefer that in order to get a value back, you have to define a ToString method; how about you?

- G

So I haven't posted anything since the middle of April - my bad.  No, it wasn't the botched Security Summit that chased me away, just a number of things teaming up to eliminate all fre time from my life.

As a result, my baby is now 5 months old, my car is still making scary noises, and I've got a new job working for a top-tier investment bank in my hometown, New York City. :)

Just a comment on the new Visual Studio Express offerings: they look great, but what's the deal with this picture?

The C# girl seems happy, the C++ guy looks like he's trying to hit on the C# girl, but the VB guy... let's call him, I dunno... Mort.  Could they have possibly hade him look more frustrated and confused?  Was this on purpose?  I'm amused, but if I was a VB-only guy, I'd probably be pissed.

More later... really.

- G