Lots of webcasts

The VSTS has lots of webcasts, register for the ones in the future and you can watch the already recorded sessions.

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnvsts2005.mspx

MSDN Webcast: Unit Testing with Visual Studio Team System (Level 200)
Monday, November 13, 2006
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

Join us as we examine some of the advanced unit-testing capabilities in Visual Studio Team System such as data binding, host adapters, and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server./>

MSDN Webcast: Overview of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers (Level 200)
Friday, December 1, 2006

11:00 A.M.–12:00 P.M. Pacific Time


Learn about the major feature sets of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers and how they integrate into the development life cycle.

These guys have a webcast every day, check out their interactive calendar

http://www.microsoft.com/events/webcasts/calendar/monthview.aspx

SOA >> EXPOSE / COMPOSE / CONSUME

Service Oriented Architecture , Web 2.0 are the latest buzz words in the industry today.

There is an excellent PPT on Thom Robbins blog which explains the same and relates it to the Dot Net Framework.

Expose: Make use of Dot net framework code webservices or make use of Biz talk to expose services.

Compose: Use Share point server 2007 & Biz talk server 2006 & MS Office Visio 2007 to compose the services.

Consume: Use Share point server 2007 / MS office / Office performance point server to consume the webservices.

I was recently playing with share point and was amazed to see that the infopath forms collect the data and the desitnation can be an outlook folder or an email.

Please download the SOA ppt from this link,

http://www.thomscontent.com/posts/soa/realworldsoa.zip

Also look at the future roadmap for Microsoft.

Info Path 2007 - cool features and video

Infopath helps a developer to easily build forms applications within minutes and collect all the information and either link it to an outlook folder or in to Excel services or to xml destination. Infopath forms also work easily to integrate in to share point server.

The Infopath team blog is http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/

There is an excellent video about Eric Richards and the info path team from microsoft.

Some cool features:
1) Infopath forms can be filled on the web, no need to have info path clients installed
2) Infopath forms work even on Firefox (not just IE)
3) Infopath forms can work offline, that is your form data is available offline you can save and fill your forms offline and submit it when you connect to internet,
4) You can fill forms in outlook
5) Round trips to database is avoided, client fills form and once data is consolidated is saved to server.
6) Totally based on xml and xpath
7) Infopath design tools are now available inside VS2005 IDE and you can drag and drop and code

Blog of Eric Richards - http://www.ericri.com/et/blog/

Video URL:
Scobleizer the channel 9 Video guy, meets the infopath development team in microsoft and shows the preview features in this 30 minute cool video.
mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msnse/0510/25766/new_infopath_team_2005_MBR.wmv