HDC 2006 is "In the Books"

The 2006 Heartland Developers Conference has officially come to a close.  It was two days of a lot of technical sessions, food, prizes, games, socializing, and more.  Although I don't know the official attendee count (yet) it was somewhere around 600 which is pretty good considering this was only the 3rd year for the conference.  Philip and Joe did a great job putting this together (no surprise there :-).  This was the first year I attended HDC and rumor has it that HDC '07 will be in Omaha as well so I look forward to attending again next year - I'm sure it will be even better!

I also had the pleasure of giving a presentation of Team Build at the end of the first day and had a pretty good turn out.  I think the presentation went pretty well considering it was during the 5:00-6:30pm time slot at the end of the first day.  If anyone is interested in the slides used for the presentation, you can get them here.  I had the opportunity to answer a lot of questions during the presentation as well as at the end of the presentation.  This was the first time I had ever presented at developers conference and it was a great experience.  I hope I get a chance to do it again.

There were a lot of great topics covered throughout the two-day conference but some of the highlights for me would have to include the talks on LINQ and Custom Windows Workflow Activities as well as my own presentation on Team Build :-)  I had attended talks on LINQ and Windows Workflow at this year's TechEd in Boston and it's nice to see how well the technology has progressed.

Visual Studio Team Edition for DB Pros

Visual Studio Team Edition for DB Pros CTP6 is now available. Check out Cameron's post for the full details. Here is an excerpt of what's new since CTP5:

• Full SQL Server 2000 & 2005 object support
• Extended Properties Support
• Inline constraint support
• Pre and Post script deployment population during Import Script
• Team Build Support
• Import Schema Wizard ( also integrated with the New Project Wizard )
• The ability to synchronize your project from a database ( selective import essentially, based on differences. We heard your feedback! )
• Refactoring is allowed in files that are in a warning state
• Overall stability and performance
• Fixed many customer reported problems
• Support for 3 and 4 part name resolution when referenced database is present on design instance
• No longer install SQL Express ( you'll notice the download is a LOT smaller! ). You can pick your own SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition or SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition instance on the local box
• Display detailed Schema Object properties in the property window for selected objects in the Schema View
• Separation of user target database settings through the user project file

Having support for Team Build should be a definite plus when it comes to versioning a database with an application release. I look forward to playing around with that feature.

TFS FAQ

While bouncing 'round the 'Net this morning I came across the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server FAQ.

I'm sure this page has been around for a while but I thought it was definitely worth reading so I thought I'd pass it along. It's definitely a good "first stop" when you have a question about TFS.

Heartland Developers Conference

It's official - I'll be presenting on Team Foundation Server's Team Build features at the up coming 2006 Heartland Developers Conference.  This will be the first time I've attended the HDC (it's only in its 3rd year) and I'm looking forward to it.

I'll post a link to the presentation materials as the event date approaches.

If anyone out there is attending the HDC this year I'd be interested in hearing from you.