CodeCampSA 2010 Day 1

Today was day one of CodeCampSA 2010. It’s been really enjoyable and I think the talks I saw today are probably some of the best I’ve seen in Adelaide.

It’s been quite a community atmosphere, with some good discussion and interaction between speakers and audience. What has pleased me the most is the technical depth that the talks have taken. This is a ‘developer’ conference after all, so it is great to have some meaty presentations that give you something to chew on 😀

My personal highlights are probably the talks by James Chapman-Smith (Lambdas, Monads, LINQ & the Reactive Extensions) and Omar Besiso (Entity Framework 4.0: A Guide on using POCO Self Tracking Entities). James in particular has inspired me to take a closer look at Func<>, Action<> and how LINQ can be used in more places than you would think.

Even my own talk seemed to go well, which is pleasing (having to restart my SQL instance not withstanding!)

My only quibbles lie not with the event, but the facilities. I can’t believe in the year 2010 that UniSA can’t get an electrician in to fit more power outlets in their lecture theatres - 4 outlets for the entire theatre is ridiculous. The data projector in our room was also pretty disappointing – very washed out and hard to read (even from the front row, and yes we did try to adjust it without success). I feel sorry for the students who have to put up with this all the time.

But I’m not going to let that diminish my enthusiasm. Now I just have to wait to see what the speakers on Sunday’s agenda can produce!

Going to Tech-Ed as a Technical Learning Guide

I received news yesterday that I’ve been selected to be a Technical Learning Guide (TLG) for the Hands-on-Labs and Instructor-Led Labs at TechEd Australia 2010 Conference on the Gold Coast in late August (I was eligible for this because [I’m now an MCT]/2010/04/head-of-class.html)).

Rob suggested that I apply, and I’m glad I took his advice! As a TLG I will be asked to do one or more of the following activities:

• assist attendees with the self-paced hands-on-labs.
• assist attendees while they performing an instructor-led lab.
• present an instructor-led lab.

I’m really looking forward to this, and just in case you didn’t make the connection about the picture – they’re Girl Guide biscuits 😀

Upgraded TFS 2010 from RC to RTM

For some reason I’d overlooked the fact that the instance of Team Foundation Server I was running on my Hyper-V server was still the release candidate instead of the RTM version. Upgrading turns out to be relatively painless. I followed Johan’s suggestions. To backup the data-tier I fired up sqlcmd and ran the following:

BACKUP DATABASE Tfs_Configuration TO DISK = ‘Tfs_Configuration.bak’

GO

BACKUP DATABASE Tfs_DefaultCollection TO DISK = ‘Tfs_DefaultCollection.bak’

GO

I uninstalled just the TFS component, then ran setup.exe off of the RTM and after allowing the setup to proceed, chose the ‘upgrade’ option. It’s nice to see that they ask you to confirm that you have done a backup before the upgrade can continue. Coincidentally, like Johan I also had a problem with a TFS workspace being in use – though I believe this was because I changed the TFS Build process to run as a user account (previously it was using SYSTEM). I used a variation on the same command he used (different possibly because my servers are just in a workgroup rather than a domain).

tf workspace /delete “1_1_TFS;NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM” /login:tfsserver\username,password

Note that the TF.EXE command comes with the TFS client bits – I ran it from the machine I run Visual Studio 2010 on as my TFS server just has the server stuff.