Cave Markings 

I have a SanDisk cruzer thumb drive and I love it... except for one thing.  Whenever it is plugged into a new PC, it autoruns and installs an application called U3 without asking.

Fortunately, Rick Borup pointed me to the U3 uninstall tool.  You have to confirm you want the tool multiple times, but when they let you download the tool, it works as advertised.

I flew into Phoenix Thursday, and lost most of the day to travel + jet lag.  I did get to hang out with Craig Boyd and Bo Durban briefly.  Bo and I made a trip to the airport to pick up Dave Bernard.  Bo rented a sweet Shelby Mustang convertible for the week, so it was a fun trip.

Friday morning I was up at 5:00 am.  Traveling west makes me feel super human.   I wanted to be certain that I had everything ready for my afternoon pre-conference session on test-driven development (TDD).  My concern was that I might not have enough material to fill four hours.  As it turned out, I could have filled an extra hour or two! 

Apparently my preparation payed off for attendees.  I got lots of positive feedback on the session.  Steve Bodnar has a very flattering review here.  I really enjoyed making the audience tell me what to type.  I let them set the requirements, then reason about how best to tackle the problem using TDD.  I had blast, and I'll probably continue to do talks on agile methodologies. 

At the speakers meeting, I was surprised to hear that I would be giving a keynote address with Craig Boyd!  I've never shied away from an opportunity to get in front of a crowd, but I thought that I might hear of this before the day of the event!  Craig and I spent the next hour getting our ideas together, and talking ourselves into a frenzy.  We are both totally stoked about the project we are working on.

Our project is called VFP Studio.  We are using the Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell to build an IDE for building Visual FoxPro projects inside Visual Studio.  We have plans to include reg-free COM for enabling click-once deployment of Visual FoxPro applications.  We are working on a VFP project type, so that we can add a new or existing VFP project to a Visual Studio solution.  We keep coming up with exciting possibilities for this project, and we will be announcing more soon.

While the other two keynote demos were definitely more mature than ours, I'm very excited that we were able to take this opportunity to announce what we are working on. By announcing the project last night, we were able to reach the most people who would use VFP Studio in one room.  Ken Levy, former Visual FoxPro PM and current community program manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team, was present at the keynote, and helped clarify what Craig and I were doing for curious attendees during the reception.  I can't wait to see what we have to share at next year's Southwest Fox conference.

My conference photo album is here.

++Alan

I've been combing through the Visual Studio 2008 SDK looking for cool stuff to highlight at DevLink.  There's plenty to show off in the SDK, but I'm smitten by the Iron Python Integration sample.  This is an example of total language integration. 

It's nice to see all the ideas about VS Packages demonstrated in one place.  I learn best by taking working things apart.  This is a great resource to pick apart.  Because it is such an extensive sample, including such features as project integration, language service, the documentation is particularly helpful as a map.

Every sample in the SDK has an excellent summary in the SDK browser which points in the right direction before you even open the code and start reading comments.  Here's an example from the IronPythonProject sample:

PythonProject.cs

Contains three classes related to the IronPython Project: the package, the project factory, and the project node.

Automation.cs

Contains a number of classes that enables automation of the IronPython project and py files in the Iron Python Project. Especially the project object enables the CodeModel

ConfigurationPropertyPages.cs

Contains a defintion for the build property page in the Project Designer.

EditorFactory.cs

Contains a definition for the editor factory that creates