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).

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.

Interactive TV in Windows Media Center

I happened to be switching between channels the other night and went to enable subtitles for a particular program (a feature of MCE in Windows 7 that I’ve grown to really appreciate).

I was surprised to see an extra menu appearing - “Interactive TV”. Wow, I wonder what it does? Nothing apparently but it is intriguing. I’m not sure if this is something new in MCE, or a new feature for the television transmission in my area.

A reply to my query on the Australian Media Centre forums suggests this is a new feature that some channels are now transmitting.