Whoa, Nelly. Seven days of CeBIT are really tough. Each evening, my legs felt like wooden beams, and my feet seemed to grow out of my shoes. Regardless of that, it was fun. The Good The crew (way too many to name them all) Lots of interesting conversations on VSTS, software construction, version control with TFS, getting started with .NET, WPF, SOA, … The developer cinema concept Windows Home Server Mel's Diner… yummy The Bad Not getting an Evangelist shirt—C'mon, show some love for architects Not having actual demo PCs at our booth Not having any of the Express Editions available on CD The Ugly The VSTS Application Designer failing to show the Web Service details pane during my recorded VSTS talk, and me missing the fact that while demoing the synchronization between code and Application Designer, I forgot to add a [WebMethod] attribute to my method definition

IT March Madness, also known as CeBIT, begins on Thursday this week. I'll be giving a half-hour presentation on Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server, talking to customers, and be available to whatever customer question gets routed to me . You can find more details and the MSDN presentation schedule here. And don't miss our daily MSDN Q&A where you can ask the experts on pretty much any development topic that you're itching to deal with.

MSDN TV is gone, but the German Developer Strategy & Group strikes back with a new developer news show recorded at the MTC Munich! Watch Microsoft Developer News Februar 2007 I wonder whether Carmen Herrmann checked with Erica Wiechers before agreeing to host the show PS: If there seems to appear a faint sound of an espresso machine grinding coffee during the recording, that might have been yours truly… PPS: Of course it's all in German.

C'mon, are you kidding me? MSDN Solve still has free copies of Visual Studio 2005 Standard (including six months of free ASP.NET web hosting) to give away. Get 'em before Octobe 15th!

One of the many things that have kept me busy during my first months at Microsoft was producing content for MSDN Solve. It is a new section on the German MSDN portal that aims to provide solutions (read “how do I?” as opposed to “why do I?”) for developers trying to get their feet wet with .NET development. After much discussion and thinking, the team decided to produce a format called “CodeClips”. That's pretty much like a recorded 20 minute web cast that focuses on a showing how to handle a very specific .NET development task. And watching CodeClips pays off: You can get a Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition for free! Get the details here. Note that German language skills are mandatory. One of the goals of MSDN Solve is to provide interesting content for Java and PHP developers interested in ASP.NET. Thus, the team asked me to cover the Java part. Alas, providing content that appeals to every Java web developer is incredibly difficult. Unlike ASP.NET or PHP, there's really no such thing as Java web development. There is Java web development using JSF. There is Java web development using Struts. There is Java web development using Spring Web MVC. There is Java web development using Tapestry. The list goes on, and on, and on. The lowest common demoninator is not even JSP, it's Servlets. That's why I tried to show how to implement typical web application components like a compression filter or the Synchronizer Token pattern in ASP.NET, because these are canonical Java web development examples without any bias for a particular framework. I'm going to blog more about my CodeClips during the next couple of days.   If you have any questions or feedback reagrding my CodeClips, feel free to contact me via msdnsolve@joergjooss.de. The guy who runs the show is Daniel Walzenbach, and he blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/walzenbach/.