Update#2 (12/10/2007): A couple modifications for the contest rules and prizes for the upcoming InstallFests in Milwaukee, Chicago and Indianapolis.

1. There *MUST* be a minimum of (30) separate individual donations to the Toys for Tots donation challenge for the drawing for an Xbox to take place. Cash donations on-site at http://toysfortots.org counts.
2. Who would’ve thunk that Xbox Elites would’ve been sold out everywhere. In lieu of the chances of not finding an Xbox Elite in time for your drawing, we will have an Xbox 360 Premium (w/gift receipt) + $100 gift card for the winner of the Toys for Tots donation challenge. This way, you can keep the premium and use the gift card to get additional games or exchange the premium and gift card for an elite if you come across one.

Update: Donate a toy for our toy drive contest and have a chance at winning an Xbox 360 Elite + games!

For those of you attending the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 InstallFests in Milwaukee, Chicago and Indianapolis, I thought I’d point you to a few resources to make your party experience an enjoyable one as well as a winning one.

Party Prep

If you pre-registered for your respective event, you will receive a Visual Studio 2008 Professional install disk. This disc is a 90-day trial. However, on the back of the disc sleeve there is a code that you will use to register for your free, fully-licensed copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional. DO NOT THROW THE DISC SLEEVE AWAY UNTIL YOU REGISTER. The fully-packaged-product (FPP) will be shipped to you in mid-January. You will not need to re-install Visual Studio when you receive your FPP. Apparently, you just pop the new disc in and this will unlock your trial copy.

If you come to the InstallFest with your machine, and install Visual Studio on the spot, you will receive an extra special gift. We will have helpers on hand to work through any issues you may have.

Which leads me to…

If you have any of the CTP’s or Betas of Visual Studio 2008 installed on the machine you plan to install the release bits, please visit MSDN’s article on Uninstalling Previous Versions of Visual Studio 2008 properly prepare your machine and set yourself for an enjoyable install experience. You will also want to make sure you have all the critical Windows Updates installed. Brennan Stehling has provided some tips/tricks to help better prepare you as well.

Contests and Prizes

We will have a number of prizes available throughout the night. Whether it’s a simple raffle or a trivia contest, you can assure that everyone will have an opportunity to walk home with something special. However, I am announcing a couple of extra special opportunities for you to walk home with some outstanding prizes!

Toys for Tots Donation – in the spirit of the holiday, we will be collecting toys for Toys for Tots. Bring a toy and have a chance at winning an outstanding prize (TBD) Xbox 360 Elite + games! Please make sure that all toy donations are new, unwrapped toys. This allows the Toys for Tots program staff to determine that the gift is safe for distribution and to identify the appropriate age and gender for each gift.

Demo Contest - we will be holding “open mic” demo sessions throughout the night. These will be 5-15 minute demo slots for you to show off your favorite feature of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. At the end of the night, we will vote on the best demo and award that person a Zune. Whether you come prepared with something or discover something new during the installfest that you’d like to share, I invite you to participate in the demo contest.

Blog/Flickr Contest – for the bloggers in attendance at the installfest, I challenge you to blog about the event. If you blog about the event during the festivities, you will receive an additional ticket for the raffle prizes. Also, for everyone who blogs about the event within (3) days of the event, you will be entered into a drawing for a Zune. (One entry per person)

If your’re not a blogger, what better time to start than now. You can easily set up a blog at places like Windows Live Spaces, GeeksWithBlogs.net, and weblogs.asp.net.

If you don’t want to blog, but have a digital camera that you’re not afraid to use, post your pictures from the event to Flickr for a chance to win. Everyone who posts to Flickr will be included in the blog contest. If you posts your pictures during the evening, you will also receive an additional raffle ticket. You will also have (3) days after the event to get your pictures posted to be included in the drawing for a Zune. The Blog/Flickr contest is one in the same. Everyone will be included in the same pool for their respective events. We’ll have (1) Blog/Flickr winner each from Milwaukee, Chicago and Indianapolis.

I will give you instructions at the installfest on how to enter your posts into the contest.

Favorite Feature Blog Contest – For those of you unfortunate folks not able to attend any of the installfests, you will have a chance to win as well. Write a blog post on your favorite Visual Studio 2008 and/or .NET 3.5 feature and have it posted by 12PM CST on December 17, 2007 to be entered into a special drawing for a Zune. Unfortunately, this contest is only open to those of you in the Midwest (IL, IN, WI) developer communities. Multiple posts equals multiple entries in the drawing. Enter the drawing by leaving a comment on this blog entry here. In the comment, give the title of your post and a link to it. With the comment, others will be able to discover your favorite feature.

This is turning out to be a great way to celebrate the holidays. So many chances for you to win! If you have any questions or comments, add your comment to this blog entry.

Happy Holidays and we’ll see you at the Visual Studio Install Fest!

Technorati Tags: installfest,vsfavoritefeature,vs08,visual studio,visual studio 2008,community,developer,user group

Today I received word that PDC’08 is go for October 27 – 30, 2008 in Los Angeles. Details are minimal at this point, so be sure to keep an eye on http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008.

Did you ever have one of those days were it seemed as though nothing wanted to work right? All you wanted to do was log in to your corporate network and maybe fill out a few expense reports. However, in your attempt to do so, you come across an error you’ve never seen before, “…Please install the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol…”. Huh? So I do a little digging to try and find out why this elusive PPTP creature has decided to elude me this day. I mean after all, it’s been there, ready and willing the thousand other times I called upon it’s magical duties. Why, on this day, would it decide to evade me at such an important time as me needing to get my expenses paid?!?

I checked into my network settings in Vista and Vista tells me that I’m not connected to a network. Hmmm… that’s odd, because I actually am. See… I’m able to get email, browse the net, read blogs and everything else requiring a connection to that great cloud in the tubes. The only thing I can’t do is log in to the VPN network. The most important task at hand at this particular time.

After some time with the internal Microsoft help desk, and stumping them on this particular issue, I decided to revert back to a full system restore image that I created a few weeks back when I was blessed with my new Dell M1330 laptop. Now, I’ve used this image once already when VS2008 shipped and I wanted to revert back to a clean state on my machine and install the bits. (I was thinking!) Worked like a champ.

However, on this day of all days, the System Restore system application was reporting that “oh no, sir. I know nothing of this image, it seems to be corrupted.” Ugh. I finally make an executive decision and reformat the box and re-install everything from scratch. Not that big of a deal as I haven’t had too much on this machine as it’s fairly new, but still a pain. (As a side note for those needing to install Vista on a Dell M1330, be sure to load the Intel Storage driver as the first step in your Vista install process. Otherwise, you’ll get a nasty uncontrollable Blue Screen/Reboot sequence the first time you boot up your box.)

Ok… problem solved. On to the next issue of the day…

While at the Microsoft campus in Las Colinas last week, I picked up the Xbox Wireless Adapter from the company store. When I got home, I slapped that bad boy onto a 2nd Xbox that I have stashed in the bedroom. Downloadable movies here I come. I have some Microsoft points on my gamertag, BogeyD, and I wanted to use them to download some movies. The only way to do this is to get my gamertag onto this particular Xbox.

Now anyone with a sense about them would’ve gone downstairs and grabbed the memory unit (MU) that has all of my precious gamertag info stored on it and brought it upstairs, plugged it into the 2nd Xbox and been off to the races. But no… I don’t have any sense. I was teased with the “Recover your gamertag” option on the main screen when booting up an Xbox with no gamertag. I selected this option thinking I could just do another “Recover” on the main Xbox. Wrong!

I was able to bring the gamertag down to Xbox #2, but pulling it down to #1 posed a problem. I kept getting an error saying that “the xbox signup service is unavailable”. After 4 hours of dealing with this message, I called Xbox support (I hate calling any support. And this is the 2nd time this day). I will say that Xbox support was very gracious and helpful. Unfortunately, they were stumped by my little problem. We determined that my gamertag might be corrupt and that someone on the Xbox Live team would’ve have to look into it.

As it turns out, the next day I was able to recover my gamer tag, but to my horror…my Bioshock game save was missing! Not only was Bioshock missing, but ALL OF MY GAME SAVES WERE GONE!!! You’ve got to kidding me. How many countless hours were spent getting to 50%, 60%, 75% game completion with the thought of someday finishing the game. Now, I’m back to 0% for all of my games. It kind of makes you want to shelve your games and start fresh.

From what I come to find out later is when you recover your gamertag, there is an option that all game saves will be deleted. Apparently, I missed it and didn’t uncheck this particular *highly important* option. Yay, me.

Xbox folk, if you’re listening, please provide an option to store game saves in the cloud. I’d gladly pay for this privilege.

So…yes… this was the day that everything went south on me.

There’s always tomorrow.

Today we pushed out the fourth episode of The Thirsty Developer, in which Larry was able to take time from the Indy TechFest and have a chat with SharePoint MVP, Rob Bogue, about SharePoint in the enterprise.

The Thirsty Developer isn’t even a month old yet and I can already tell you this is the most fun I’ve had since joining Microsoft. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. If you had an opportunity to sit in with us during one of our banter recordings, you’d see why. Some days we nail it and others (let’s call it the other 97%) we struggle. But not in a disappointing way, but in a “oh man, we’d better stop or I’m going to wet myself from laughing so hard” sort of way.

We’re smoothing out the rough edges, and there sure is plenty. One of the struggles we’re having is that we feel that we sound too scripted in our banter. The irony is that there’s not one thing that is prepared in producing theses podcasts whatsoever. Maybe that’s the issue. :)

What we’ve come to find out is if you stick a microphone in our face and hit the record button, we become blabbering baffoons. It’s interesting that, in our jobs, we can mic ourselves to talk in a room of 50 or 1000 people and not have an issue. But once you hit that magic record button and knowing full well that many people will be able to play this back for some time to come, you tend to … well … become a blabbering baffooon. You tend not to talk how you normally would in everyday conversations. And that, my dear readers, is what we’re trying to do with The Thirsty Developer. It’s to capture the conversations we have will all of the great people we meet in this job and share those conversations with you. Now, Larry and I just need to learn how to have a normal conversation with one another while we have a microphone in front of our face and that magical record light is illuminated.

I challenge you to subscribe to the podcast feed. Listen to a few shows, and let us know what you like/don’t like about the format, the subject matter, or even the hosts! The only way we can get any better is if you tell us what you’re willing to spend your precious time listening to. I mean this little experiment of ours is now feeling a little more official as we are now in both the Zune Marketplace podcast directory as well as iTunes.

Another struggle is The Thirsty Developer website. Larry and I aren’t the CSS slingers we once were. I’ll put the call out here to anyone who’d like to help us with a little site design on http://ThirstyDeveloper.com. If you’re a student needing a little experience or someone new to web design looking for a challenge or even a seasoned pro looking to pass the time, we’d welcome anyone willing to give some PhizzPop to the Thirsty Developer web presence.

We’re working through these stumbles, but we’re having a blast doing it. What I can tell you is that Larry and I will have one hell of a blooper reel someday!