Microsoft has officially announced the launch date for Visual Studio 2010 and also released the Beta 2 version to MSDN subscribers with Go Live licenses in place. There has been quite a few changes we will look at over the next few days.

I have not updated my blog for over a week, however the lack of updates where do to moving the domain and all my other hosting solutions to a new provider in the United States. Because of a few new requirements in my development projects I needed to use provider that support Windows Server 2008 and IIS7, as well as Framework 3.5 SP1 and Asp.net Mvc.

I have been feeling lost in my career choice for a while. I have always considered development and code as an artform, something that requires a very important ingredient to be successful. In the last few weeks this particular point became more prominent, and I have finally found the missing ingredient. I have found what is missing in my career, and I am surprised about where it is leading me.

I struggled for a while to find a way to remove the WebPart entries orphaned by the deactivation and rectraction process in SharePoint, and found a neat way to this using the SPFeatureReceiver. After some testing I posted an article about it in the SharePoint section.

Eben De Wit is running the quarterly DevChat event in KZN on the 13th of November 2008 at the Riverside Hotel in Durban.

During Tech-Ed I was interviewed by Ruari Plint about South African Communities, in particular on what it means to be a community lead and also on what challenges communities face. The video has been posted on the Tech-Ed Online website.

I follow RSS feeds religiously and also at times do research on some of the work or problems I encounter. Often I get asked where I get my info so I decided to post some of the links I found recently that are truly informative and helps with various problems, or just great information to know about.

Microsoft has released new versions of two awesome development tools. FxCop allows for code analysis to be done on already compiled .Net assemblies while StyleCop analysis your code during development with full Visual Studio integration.

Jeff Atwood has opened up the private beta for StackOverflow.com and I am extremely impressed by what they achieved. The new site is developed in ASP.Net Mvc with a host of features in the beta which makes the site extremely easy to use. The content is also proving to be valuable and accurate.

The MVP's and community leads took over Microsoft in JHB to host the first every interoperability day, an event where Linux and Microsoft technologies come together and proof that there is no borders when it comes to technology.

With the help of some collegues I was able to build my first SharePoint WebPart and created an article outlining the process.

An introduction into SubVersion and CruiseControl.Net to provide a simple and free source control and continues integration solution for developers on to go.

Along with Ajax comes the Ajax Control Toolkit, a brilliant free tool providing prebuilt controls to use in website adding some awesome client side functionality. This is the future of .Net web development.

A detailed look at ASP.Net AJAX and how it can be used to improve web development experiences as well as provide users with an awesome visiting experience.

Overview of the Microsoft DevDays 2007 event held at Sun Coast Conference Centre. Information regarding Visual Studio, ASP.Net AJAX and Silverlight was provided by the speakers.

RDL is part of Microsoft SQL Reporting Services but it is also available for normal reporting without needing the full back-end services support. Some links are provided to brilliant RDL resources.

"Commenting is a royal pain in the posterior" - "Comments are for weenies" - "I can understand my code quite well, thank you very much" - "Good code speaks for itself" - "No time for that, got to get that code out of the door". None of these is a good reason for not commenting source code properly. We will look at these arguments, discuss them and take a look at good commenting practice and its benefits.