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Apologies to anyone who has ever left comments on my blog; I have not deleted them! The free Haloscan service I’ve used since I started this blog shutdown a few days ago, and there was no obvious way to export/import the old comments.

Just announced on Soma’s blog:

Today, we are making available the Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 to all MSDN subscribers.  The RC will be made available to the world on Wednesday, February 10th. The RC includes a go-live license for people who want to deploy in their production environment.

If you haven’t seen it already, SSW are running a nationwide TFS and SharePoint 2010 event that lands in Perth Weds, March 3rd.

Session 1 (9am – 1pm): Team Foundation Server 2010

Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) for Successful Project Management

Visual Studio 2010 Team System – An Overview. Visual Studio 2010 Testing with Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 – the life of a bug

Session 2 (2pm – 6pm): SharePoint 2010

What’s new in SharePoint 2010

Something About Mary (SharePoint and Office 2010)

The cost of this 1 day only event is 190 for both. You can book a place at the above link.

Both sessions will be presented by Adam Cogan, who is the Chief Architect at SSW and one of only 3 Microsoft Regional Directors in Australia. I have seen Adam present several times and his delivery is always very good.

C# 4.0 in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

I’d normally put a disclosure at the end of a post, but as I was one of the reviewers for this book, and Joe Albahari gave me a copy, I felt I should mention this up-front.

That said, it doesn’t alter my opinion: if you program in C#, you owe it to yourself to have a copy of this book to hand. It will improve your understanding of C# and the .NET framework; it will improve the code you write and I suspect it will pay for itself the first time you pick it up.

This just released fourth edition is expanded upon the previous, and at slightly over 1000 pages I’m not sure how much longer the ‘nutshell’ tag will be appropriate! (Not the fault of the authors, more the evolution of C# into a mature language with many features). It includes coverage of new topics such as parallel programming, code contracts, dynamic programming, security, and COM interoperability. In all, there are 26 chapters covering the basics right through to the more advanced topics of threading and parallel programming. There is a comprehensive section on LINQ, including examples that work with both LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework.

The code examples and explanations are concise, extremely clear and easy to understand. The code examples from Chapters 2 – 4, 6, 8 – 10 and 24 are freely available as part of LINQPad, a very useful tool written by author Joe Albahari (and downloadable from http://www.linqpad.net/ )

I’m a fan of the format O’Reilly use in their books, and in particular it seems like it could have almost been created with this book’s authors in mind, as it complements their lucid writing style and aids the flow of the text . Very few books could proclaim on the front cover that they are “The Definitive Reference” and it actually be true. This book does and is. But it’s not just a reference. It will benefit newcomers and seasoned developers alike.

The only slightly disappointing thing is the Index. Joe informed me that he knew about this; it seems something went awry during the publishing process, and a less than stellar index was included. Let’s hope that future reprints have an updated index. There is of course a searchable electronic version available. Update: Joe has informed me that the index was updated.

It would be pointless to go into any more detail, as I would no doubt be unable to the book the justice it deserves. A full contents list is available at the O’Reilly link above. I was honoured when Joe Albahari asked if I would be one of the reviewers, and I was humbled by the credentials of the other reviewers. Many thanks to Joe and Ben for writing such a useful book.

Cake Wrecks what more can I say!

Having been recently shaped down to 72kbps on my Cable broadband (only 2 more days of pain!), I’ve just discovered that Amazon’s web pages have become so large, that despite several attempts, I am unable to open a book entry on their site without the page timing out. Presumably this is because no one in the US has dial-up speed internet access anymore. I had noticed a significant pause previously when accessing at full cable speeds, but a few seconds delay seemed acceptable.

Does this mean Amazon is losing sales to dial-up customers?

RedGate have released SQL Search, a SSMS plug-in, which gives users the ability to search their database schemas to instantly locate any term in stored procedures, functions, views and more. It’s currently free.

• Find fragments of SQL text within stored procedures, functions, views and more, such as finding all occurrences of ‘SELECT *’ in views and stored procedures.
• Quickly navigate to objects wherever they happen to be on your servers
• Find all references to an object

The talk lineup for December’s DevJam community event of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 3rd Dec), is as follows:

• Piers Williams:  Windows 7 Touch
• Jeremy Thake:  SharePoint 2010 toolbox in VS2010, resistance is futile!
• Paul Cooper:  T4 templates in Visual Studio
• Rhys Campbell:  AOP with Unity
• Jake Ginnivan:  Introduction to VSTO Outlook Add-ins
• Ying Low:  Caliburn
• Adrian McGrath:  Windows 7 Virtualisation
• Mike Minutillo:  .NET on RAILS

DATE: Thursday, Dec 3rd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

There will be pizza and refreshments provided and a few door prizes including either a “VS Professional with Premium Subscription” Or “VS Team Suite” courtesy of Microsoft.

During a lunch time conversation with a colleague (Thanks Hadley!), it was mentioned that most PC setups are not utilising their hard disk speed potential due to being configured as IDE instead of AHCI. I’ve previously tried to get this working under Windows XP but it required a re-install and went into the too-hard basket.

The good news is, if you are running Windows 7 (or Vista, but let’s hope it’s the former!), ACHI is supported out of the box and you do not need to re-install.

You might be thinking that this doesn’t apply to you if you have a shiny new SSD? It does!  Back in August this year, I blogged about the Windows 7 performance score and how I was a little disappointed with the disk performance as it was the ‘slowest’ component in my new system.

How to Activate AHCI

These instructions are for expert users and are at your own risk. [If you installed Windows 7 with your motherboard BIOS set to use AHCI rather than IDE, then Congratulations! there is nothing to do.]

Otherwise, there are two things you need to do to activate AHCI.

1. You must Activate AHCI in Windows First

• Close all open programs.
• Open regedit and navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
• Double-click on the ‘Start’ value to edit it. The value will most likely be “3″. Change that value to “0″ (zero).
• Close regedit, and reboot your PC.

2. Activate AHCI in your Motherboard BIOS

• As your PC boots up, enter your BIOS setup.
• Go to the hard disk configuration. Find the setting that says SATA Setting or configuration (varies by motherboard).
• Select AHCI from the drop-down options. Once it’s set to AHCI, save and exit, and continuing booting Windows.
• Windows will install the necessary drivers and then prompt you to reboot.
• Re-boot and you are done!

If you don’t activate it in Windows first, you will get a blue screen upon loading Windows. If that happens, go into your BIOS and set SATA mode back to IDE, then boot Windows, and follow the steps as described above.

Please Note: this won’t work if you are already using RAID as your SATA setting, unless your motherboard has a second dedicated RAID controller like mine (many do).

Here is the re-run Windows Experience index:

And you know what? It’s not just faster by the benchmark score; it is noticeably faster accessing the disk as well!

The SharePoint 2010 (Beta) Developer Center is up and running with a host of new training modules. You can also find documentation on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK, the SharePoint Professional Developer Evaluation Guide, and access to SharePoint 2010 community pages.

The Windows SharePoint Services Resources look useful.