Managed World

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Technical Evangelism and enjoyed my first role here at Microsoft doing evangelism around Windows Server 2008. But now that I've transitioned back into evangelism of .NET technologies, I feel like I'm "home again."

Before joining Microsoft, I was very passionate about design, pragmatic programming, unit testing, etc. Essentially, all those tools and processes you see actively coined with the term "ALT.NET" now. Even though the term wasn't coined yet, I consider myself a long-time ALT.NET-er.

With my first role here at MS though, I took a deeper dive into native technologies and more lower-level development. It was a lot of fun (as I love understanding the internals of systems and how operating systems work). I guess I didn't realize how much I missed my fellow pragmatic .NET developers until I was away from them. Cheesy, I know. But true.

So, with all that said, I have one thing to say in closing: it's good to be back home!

I decided that today was the day to do some long-overdue spring cleaning here on Managed World.

As noted in my previous post, I have transferred over my feeds to FeedBurner. As part of this action, I have also added some FeedFlare to my posts. So you should now see links to email, digg, etc. in each post.

I also replaced the category list on the website with a tag cloud, just because I can :P. Before doing that though, I went through and cleaned up all my categories (a work still in progress in some ways).

I also converted over to using the SyntaxHighlighting Live Writer plug-in.

Now the blog should be back in pristine shape (well, as close as you can get with as crazy as I am). With this fresh start, I can tell you that I'm ready to get cranking to build this blog into da' shizznit.

I don't know why I didn't do this sooner. I have switched over my feed on this blog over to feedburner. You can find the new feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ManagedWorld. However, your reader should automatically make this switch as DasBlog will redirect via 301 to permanently redirect to the new feed.

Now that I'm preparing to be blogging a heck of a lot more in the near future, I figured it was about time to upgrade the version of DasBlog I was running on this site. I had been at DasBlog 1.7, which was practically the first version I rolled out this website with in the first place, so it was an idea opportunity to grab the latest DasBlog 2.1 release.

Yes, I'm a slacker blogger-citizen, I know. This upgrade was long overdue.

But here I am, running the latest DasBlog and I'm quite content and ready to call it a night. I took this opportunity as well to change themes because I was getting tired of the old look-and-feel.

The upgrade wasn't without its SNAFUs (most of them mine, I hate to admit :P). But the helpdesk at WebHost4Life was able to help me figure out the last issue I was running into when I deployed the new code live. So here we are.

Now to get started on those blog posts on Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework and the Managed Extensibility Framework, among other things.

The first four labs in a series of Windows Server 2008 Application Compatibility labs have been released on MSDN. You can find them as follows:

- MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Access Rights, Impersonation

- MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Impact of Code Signing

- MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Installer Detection

- MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Session 0 Isolation

There will be more labs in the coming weeks. Stay tuned and enjoy!

Hello, everybody, I have released the first version of a rudimentary managed wrapper around Transactional NTFS to Code Gallery on MSDN: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/txfmanaged.

The wrapper in its current form is very basic but should give developers a good idea on how simple it is to use Transactional NTFS from managed code. Feel free to go grab it, play around with it (there are some sample screencasts using the wrapper on the Developer Meet Server Show), and feel free to use it any way you wish.

Enjoy!