I have a couple of custom-written apps that allow teams to track current progress on a projector using TFS.  I just found a community project on CodePlex that looks like a promising replacement, Scrum Sprint Monitor.

Scrum Sprint Monitor provides the Agile team with hands-off, always up-to-date status of the current Sprint, both at the individual and team level. It is designed to run either on a large LCD screen located in a public area, or as a desktop application.

Looks like a great product!  If you try it, let me know what you think.

While BlogEngine.net(BE) has a nice feed import/export mechanism, I wanted complete control on my .Text blog data was pulled into BE.  Additionally, I wanted to be able to redirect my old .Text permalinks to the new guid driven BE permalinks.  This required that I add the integer post and category IDs from .Text into the BE database.  In order to accomplish all this, I wrote some TSQL to do the conversion.  Here it is:

.Text to BlogEngine.net SQL Script

Yes it’s true! Microsoft released VS2008 today. Scott informs me that Microsoft will be doing a launch party for the .NET User Group on Dec. 11th. Sign up here.

I'm very excited to hear that VS2008 will be released at the end of this month sometime! Brad Abrams posted a great diagram of what's included in .NET 3.5.

I just discovered that Google has a fairly impressive .NET client library to interface with their services. Looks like you can talk to Blogger, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Code Search, Picasa and YouTube just to name a few. I'd love to be able to talk to Analytics, but I'm not sure if I can.

Channel 9 has a great behind-the-scenes look at some of the people and hardware involved with MS multi-touch. I can't help thinking of Tom Cruise in Minority Report when I watch stuff like this:

Got more comment spam last night! Even with Captcha turned on! (Thanks casey) Time to try something a little different.

That would be Charlie Calvert's Community Convergence. A great list of links related to C#, LINQ, F#, PFX, etc.

Channel 9 has an interesting video that gives an overview of the .NET PFX framework. PFX is a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, scheduling, and coordination on parallel hardware. Cool stuff!

I presented last night at the Wisconsin .NET Users Group on an "Introduction to Grid Computing." Overall it went well but Alchemi, the open source grid framework I was using, crashed during the demos. :( I had the audience participate in the grid and we had a 25GHz grid with about 16 nodes. It would appear from examining the log file this morning and doing some reading, that my use of the Alchemi Console is what caused the crash. It would have been cool to see some of the demos run on a 25GHz grid...oh well maybe next time!
For those of you that are interested, the PDF of my presentation is here. The grid demos are included in the Alchemi download and the ExcelGrid Demo is here. If you plan to use the ExcelGrid demo, you should note that I could not get the calc.exe to work correctly and wrote my own. If you are interested in this, send me an email.