Continental to Join Star Alliance

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Continental announced a couple of months ago that they will not merge with United, but now they are announcing that they will leave the SkyTeam alliance and joining the Star alliance! They are talking about a "customer friendly transition", but this pretty much means the end of the domestic code sharing with Delta/Northwest and the beginning of code sharing with United.

Million Miler Program

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imageI’ve been using a “preview” version of the Continental web site in the last week, testing some new features that will be released to the public web site in the middle of the month. The most noticeable thing you will see when these changes are made public, is that Continental is tracking now your lifetime miles - your lifetime EQM (Elite Qualification Miles) to be more precise. The lifetime calculation will include all EQMs earned since the introduction of the OnePass program and this will allow you to maintain an “Elite” status for life even if you fly less in the future:

  • Million Miler: Earn at least one million lifetime flight miles and your Elite status will never fall below our Silver Elite level.
  • Two Million Miler: Earn at least two million lifetime flight miles and your Elite status will never fall below our Gold Elite level.
  • Four Million Miler: The highest honor. Earn at least four million flight miles and you will always be a Platinum Elite.

Another thing you will be able to do is to subscribe to RSS feeds of news & offers, specials etc. and book hotels in your local language.

Tech-Ed 2008: Day 4

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Last day of Tech-Ed 2008! I didn’t have too much time today since I had to catch an early flight to New York. In the morning I went to “Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite Windows Presentation Foundation”. This session was led by Glenn Block and Brian Noyes and it covered the best practices and code provided by the patterns & practices group to develop a composite smart client application using WPF.

After this session I decided to end the day with another hands-on-lab. I did the “Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario”: Team Development and Team Test”. This is a great lab that lets you walk through the life-cycle and play different roles (developer and QA) through the next version of VSTS. As a developer, you get to configure a build that is generated for QA and then as a QA engineer you get to use Microsoft’s codename “Camano” which is the manual test tool that QA uses to walk through a manual test and also record it, so when a bug is reported a WMV of the reproduction and the steps to reproduce are attached to the work item. After reporting the bug, you switch roles back to the developer to review the reported bug, fix the code in the source control, fix the unit test code to verify the fix and redeploy to QA for verification. This process is pretty smooth, although you can see that “Camano” is not complete yet as some features are still not working (like jumping to a specific step in the movie).

That is it! See you in Tech-Ed 2009 in Los Angeles, California! Wave

Tech-Ed 2008: Day 3

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The day before the last day of Tech-Ed is always the best day, as this is always the attendee party day! Day 3 is always a little slower. You can see people are already tired and the booth that has the most "traffic" is the MSDN area where they have the bean bags and people just sleep there all day Yawn.

Here is what I was able to cover today:

  • Making Your Test Lab Obsolete with Team Test and Virtualization - Mike Azocar covered in this session how you can take advantage of the virtualization technology and management tools along with VSTS in order to automate your test lab and make sure that testers spend their time testing and not setting up test environments. One of the cool things that the tester can do when opening a bug in TFS is save and attach to that "work item" the state of his test virtual machine, this way the developer can just restore that image and see what happened there, troubleshoot, debug the code and even test a fix.
  • Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation - This was an "instructor-led lab" that was directed by Enrique Lima. The purpose of this lab was to understand the programming model using in WCF and then build, configure and host a WCF service as well as consume. The best thing about this lab was that after writing the application it also covered the tools provided by Microsoft to trace and troubleshoot the messages sent and received over WCF.
  • Building Rich Internet Applications with ASP.NET AJAX and Web Client Software Factory 2.0 - Glenn Block covered in this session the Web Client Software Factory (WCFS) and the new AJAX capabilities avaialble in version 2.0 of this great software factory that is provided by Microsoft's Patterns & Practices group. Using this you can very quickly build a Rich Internet Application.
  • Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 SP1 Graphics Deep Dive - This was a an "Interactive Theater" session led by David Teitlebaum. This type of session are much more technical than the breakout sessions. They go much deeper and are more technical and interactive. David covered in detail the improvements done in WPF 3.5 SP1 and demonstrated the differences in the graphics rendering, the affect on the CPU and how everything is implemented internally. Great talk!

image After the sessions we headed to the attendee party @ Universal Studios. There was plenty of food and alcohol all over to celebrate the end of Tech-Ed and most of the rides were open. The first one we went to was The Simpsons Ride which just opened. It is a great simulator ride and very funny if you like the Simpsons. The other one was Men In Black which is older but still fun. There wasn't more time left for other rides since we had to eat and drink a little bit Winking

Gang Signs - Geek Style

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There is "West Side", there is "East Side" and now there is "Geek Side" Laughing I got this image today and I thought it is very appropriate especially during this Tech-Ed week where I spend my time with 6,000 other developers. Enjoy!

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Google Maps 2.2.0 Released

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Google updated their mobile maps application for BlackBerry to version 2.2.0. The most noticeable difference is the "public transportation directions" feature. This allows you to get transit directions in more than 50 cities when you are trying to get from point A to point B - including fares. You can watch this video to see how it works:

From your BlackBerry browser go to: http://www.google.com/gmm/

Tech-Ed 2008: Day 2

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It was a little difficult to get up on day 2 after all the drinks yesterday Feeling beat up. I started the day with a great "instructor led lab". I have to say that both this type of labs and the hands-on-labs are the best things in Tech-Ed. This is where you actually get some experience and play with the new technologies you want to try. The lab I did was titled "Using the ASP.NET Silverlight control and Microsoft Silverlight tools". The goal of the lab was to create a piano application using Silverlight. I must say that it was extremely easy and clear and I finished it in about 15-20 minutes.

The next session I went to was titled "Building a line-of-business application using WPF". This session was delivered by Rob Relyea, who is an architect in the WPF team. Rob did a great job showing real life examples of different WPF applications that feed on real time data in order to visualize different types of information using WPF.

The day continued with an "ASP.NET Internals" session by Rob Howard. Rob did a great job digging into the execution engine of ASP.NET and explaining how things work behind the scenes, which events are triggered throughout the life-cycle of a single page and covered different tips and tricks to squeeze the most out of your application.

After this session I went to listen to "An introduction to Microsoft Silverlight controls framework" by Karen Corby. This was a very good session that covered the basics of Silverlight and every possible way there is to customize controls and create user controls: skinning, styling etc.

The last session of the day was "End-to-End Tracing with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and ADO.NET". This session was delivered by Bob Beauchemin. Bob is extremely knowledgeable about the internals of the SQL server and the different tools available to troubleshoot different problems. He covered the different ways available to trace the internals of both the clients making calls to SQL server and the SQL server itself using ETW. Follow his blog for examples and his whitepaper on the subject.

image We ended the day in the VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partner) party. VSIP hosts a small private party for the partners every year, and this year it was in SeaWorld. After some food and a few beers we entered the park and went straight to the Kraken. It is a great ride! Silly. The good news is that while walking in the park we realized that the park is owned by Anheuser-Busch, so they have a "hospitality area" where they let you try all their beers. The bad news is that the park is owned by Anheuser-Busch, so the beers that you can try are not all that great Tongue but when you get free alcohol you don't say no, so after another beer we ended the night at the Shamu Rocks show. Last time I saw the show it was back in '87. I don't know if it is because I was (much) younger back then but it seems to have been more exciting 21 years ago Winking.

Back in Business

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image I'm back blogging after a couple of weeks I've been gone. I got married on May 25th and with all the preparations, family and friends coming from all over I had to take some time off to take care of everything, but now I'm celebrating my honeymoon the best way possible (without my wife) in Tech Ed Big Grin.

It's great to be back in Tech Ed (although it is VERY hot in Orlando). Last time I attended Tech Ed was 3 years ago, also in Orlando. This is the first year that Microsoft splits the event to two different weeks. This week is for developers and next week is for IT. The day started with Bill Gate's last Tech Ed keynote. Honestly, I don't remember when was the last time that he showed up for Tech Ed, but I guess he is taking advantage of every possible event to speak before he leaves his full time job July 1st. This is the second "last keynote" I attended from Bill Gates this year. The first one was in CES earlier in January. In this keynote they showed the same exact movie they showed in CES (maybe a little different cut) where you see the Bill's last day in office. The rest of the keynote of course was different and focused on the four areas for developers today: presentation, business logic, data and services. I especially liked the demo delivered by Soma for the presentation track. The keynote also focused on the Robotics framework developed by Microsoft. This area is it's initial steps and it seems like Microsoft hopes that developers will use its tools to push it forward.

Since I didn't attend Tech Ed in 3 years, I decided to focus on the things that are offered by the .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5. The things that can be done today with WPF and WCF are pretty amazing. You can do things that took a long time a couple of years ago very simply and quickly. I attended a great session by David S. Platt that talked about "using WPF for good and not evil". He had a very good point: It is so simple to do things with WPF today that developers tend to "overuse" the capabilities and make the user experience worse by using things like animation, fading etc just because they are "cool". He used different examples of using the same features in a good way and in a bad way (evil) and what the user understands and gains from each case. Another great session I attended was delivered by Mads Torgersen. Mads, who is a program manager and a member of the C# language design team, covered the new features and changes in the 3rd version of C#. It was great to see the new features that are geared towards making the developers life easier when writing his code.

The most interesting booth (at least to me) was the BlackBerry booth. They had the BlackBerry Bold there and even after all the reviews I read and videos I saw, there's nothing like seeing it and playing with it in real life. This device is great and I can't wait for it to be released so I can upgrade from my 8800!

After the partners expo reception (and a few glasses of wine), I went to the GeekFest 2008 party that took place the the Howl at the Moon piano bar for a few more drinks and pizza. Day 1 was pretty good. Interesting content in the sessions, good hands-on-labs (did one so far) and a lot of alcohol. The rest of the week should be the same as there is a different party every day Party I'll keep on updating throughout the week.