Author: Mark

The Windows Vista team officially launched their new blog yesterday at 5:30 PM CST:

http://windowsvistablog.com/

I'm thrilled to mention that Telligent partnered with the Windows Vista Team to launch this blog on Community Server. It's great to see Jim Allchin post too — hopefully we'll see more of him there!

A special congratulations to 3 new Community Server MVPs:

• Dave Stokes (tomcat_uk)
• Russ Goldin (rgoldin)
• Thomas Freudenberg (Thomas Freudenberg)

Thank you for the time you spend learning and sharing your experiences with the Community Server platform!

Scott Guthrie will be here in Dallas on November 2nd speaking at the North Dallas .NET User Group!

If you've never had the opportunity to attend a talk that Scott has given you're really missing out. Scott is not only a dynamic and authoritative speaker, but is also now the General Manager for the .NET Platform. Scott's presentations are always very technical, interactive, insightful and entertaining — don't miss out!

As Eric mentioned here CodeSmith 4.0 has gone into public beta.

A little about CodeSmith 4.0:

Saves you time
CodeSmith was built with a singular goal in mind: give developers a tool that saves them time. Using CodeSmith you can automate the repetitive tasks that slow down application development. You author templates and CodeSmith automates them for you.

Easy to use
CodeSmith is a template based code generation tool. Writing and using CodeSmith Templates is easy. CodeSmith templates have many similarities with another popular technology: ASP.NET. In fact, if you are familiar with programming ASP.NET, CodeSmith will be immediately familiar too.

CodeSmith Projects (new in v4.0)
This feature makes automating your code generation process really easy and consistent whether you are working from inside of Visual Studio 2005, MSBuild, Windows Explorer, a command line / batch file, or CodeSmith itself.

ActiveSnippets (new in v4.0)
Code snippets are pieces of reusable code. Unlike the static code snippet functionality that comes with Visual Studio, ActiveSnippets are dynamic and can be driven by template logic and complex metadata.

New Templates (new in v4.0)
The .netTiers templates provide developers with a way to quickly create data access layer and business logic code all based on Microsoft’s recommended Patterns & Practices. Additionally .netTiers generated code uses Microsoft’s own Enterprise Application Blocks and is the easiest way to ensure your software conforms with Microsoft’s recommendations.

As mentioned here we decided to not spend any money on marketing for the ASP Connections conference. Instead, we're just going to give away a total of $5,000 in cash prizes at the booth (actually they are VISA cards loaded with various dollar amounts). So if you are going to Las Vegas for the conference make sure and stop by the booth so we can scan your badge and enter you to win!

We're looking for a few rock stars who want to bid on a couple of small projects that we'd like to fund before the end of 2007. All the projects require executing an NDA with Telligent, but all will be very, very exciting opportunities to push some technology boundaries.

Specifically we are looking for individuals with the following skills (in order):

1. JavaScript
2. AJAX/Atlas
3. ASP.NET 2.0
4. SQL Server

Update — Thanks everyone. I've gotten WAY more emails about this than expected so I'm going to close this for comments for now 🙂

Yes, it's official! The first Telligent Professional Developer Conference. No, not really but a few of us are getting together — Jayson Knight posts about it here.

The date is September 22nd – 25th in Dallas, TX USA and there are about 10 people (that we know of) coming in town. It's most likely going to be a chance for the Telligent team and some of our MVPs to get together and meet in person.

If you want to stop by, please let us know first (rhoward@telligent.com).

Gleaned from the Community Server daily news — did you know we had a daily blog? — something for everyone using Live Writer.

• RJ Rudley provides a step-by-step on configuring Writer for Community Server
• Scott Watermasysk posts about creating Community Server Tags on-the-fly via a Live Writer Plugin 

If you are in San Diego be sure and check out Ken's Cardspace presentation September 26th! Rumor has it he has some Community Server t-shirts to give away.

So we were talking through promotions and advertising for the CodeSmith booth at Dev Connections in November. We had some really witty ideas for magazine ads (I'll refrain from telling you just how creative we got). But the more we thought about it, why not just give out cash? It is Vegas (yeah, baby!) right? …and what do you need most in Vegas??? Cash 🙂

We haven't decided exactly how we're going to give it away yet, but we're going to give away a total of $5,000 over the course of the conference. Here is the key though: you must be present to win. You knew there was a catch right! We'll have times scheduled where we'll announce the winners, but it will definitely be during exhibit hall hours. More details to come…

So stop by the CodeSmith Tools booth at Dev Connections. You'll have the chance to learn more about a really great productivity tool for writing software and you'll also have the chance to win some money!