Moving my blog to new location

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/leshka/

Vote Now for Imagine Cup People's Choice Award!

Imagine Cup started back in 2003 as a way to get students involved in the connection between people, information, and systems.

So what IS the Imagine Cup?

Simply put, it’s the world’s premier student technology competition. Beginning with local and regional competitions, Imagine Cup 2011 comes to an exciting finale at the Worldwide Finals held in New York City, United States from July 8-13,2011. . Overall, the idea is to show how technology can help solve the world’s toughest problems.

The theme of this year’s Imagine Cup is “Solving the world’s toughest problems with Technology” (e.g., poverty, energy conservation, environment, global health, etc.).

Two teams from Universities in the Heartland District have made it to the US finals for IMAGINE CUP. The teams are LIFECODE (Software Design) from Wayne State University, and MINTRUS (Game Design) from  University of Louisville.  Team LIFECODE and TEAM MINTRUS are made up of exceptional students, with brilliant ideas, and big hearts.

Part of the competition is public voting.   Each of you, your friends, your family, or others can vote for each team once per day.   LIFECODE and MINTRUS are currently in the bottom 3^rd for voting,  so let’s give them a boost and get them some more votes from the best district in the US.  Visit the below links to the team’s Facebook pages, and give them your Votes:    

   

Visit the IMAGINE CUP facebook page, learn about the projects and vote TEAM LIFECODE using the blue “vote” button next to their TEAMNAME and Picture.   Click this link.

 

Visit the IMAGINE CUP facebook page, learn about the projects and vote TEAM MINTRUS’ facebook page, using the blue “vote” button next to their TEAM NAME and Picture.   Click this link.

Codemash Talk: Demystifying Visual Studio 2010 Database Tools

If you are interested in the power point presentation from my CodeMash 2.0.1.1 talk on database tools you may find it here.

The earlier version with extended deck is located at COALMG:
http://www.coalmg.org/2010/09/september-meeting-follow-ups.html

DogFood III Conference –Nuts and Bolts of Visual Studio Scrum v 1.0 Process Template

The presentation deck that I used at  Third Annual DogFood Conference is available for download or viewing on my skydrive.
For additional information please check out following resources:

• Sharpen your Scrum Game with free Scrum Assessment
• Review Scrum by reading 21 page Scrum Guide available from scrum.org
• Learn more about Professional Scrum Developer Program
• Download Visual Studio Scrum v1.0 Process Template
• Interested in learning more about Scrum and Visual Studio 2010, consider taking one of the upcoming classes.
• Follow ScrumDotOrg for updates on the state of scrum.

Presenting at DogFood v3 Conference (#dogfoodcon) - Nuts and Bolts of Visual Studio Scrum v1.0 Template

Please join us for the 3rd Annual Dog Food Conference (http://www.dogfoodcon.com/dogfood/).  There will be speakers from MS Gold Certified Partners, MS MVPs, IT authors, community leads, and MS corporation subject matter experts and evangelists.  There will designated areas for hardware demos from  HP, Polycom, Dell and Windows Phone 7. Agenda and schedule for hardware demos at download agenda links.

When: November 4-5, 2010  8:10–4:30 PM
Where: Microsoft Office - 8800 Lyra Dr, Suite 400, Columbus, OH 43240
Who should attend: CIOs, IT Managers, IT Pros, developers, collaboration specialists, CISOs, business analysts, project managers

My Abstract:
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These tools represent some of the best opportunities for success and to experience a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft heavily invested in Scrum and is moving some internal product teams onto the approach.

This session is not about Scrum in depth, (for that please visit scrum.org) but rather, we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. We will cover in detail:

• How to successfully gather requirements
• How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum
• How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010
• The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010
• Tracking your progress
• The right way to use work items
• Leveraging built-in reporting and Project portals available on the SharePoint dashboard
• Reports targeted to the Product Owner / Project Manager

You will walk away knowing how to interpret and understand a project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to address many of the problems faced by teams using traditional approaches. It does

so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help management better support the software development processes.

10-4, Next Chapter in My Life

I have been doing consulting work at Quick Solutions since April 2004, during this time I had a privilege to work with some of the brightest people. There is no need for me to list all the talented people that are (or were) working at QSI. Quick does not need any introductions, everyone in Central Ohio knows about the company; we even have a joke that if you want to grow in your career you have to work at QSI at some point of your life. 

As time is a continuum of change; the change in my life is a new job opportunity at Cardinal Solutions. I am looking forward teaming up with Jeff Hunsaker, Visual Studio ALM MVP (my new boss) to deliver the goodness of VS\TFS 2010 and .NET4. Working with Jeff will give me an opportunity to take my consulting skills to the next level.

As Archimedes said long time ago: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth” <>, but seriously I am looking forward contributing to Cardinal Solutions practices, meeting new clients/opportunities, expanding people's awareness of Microsoft tools, .NET, and agile practices.

How appropriate that my true first (zero based) day at Cardinal will fall on 10-4 !

So I have join the club of people that have problems with using Cisco VPN Client

If you are starring at the screen and see a messages like: “Unable to establish VPN” or “The VPN client agent was unable to create the interrocess communication depot” you may be in luck.

Assuming that you have checked the oblivious like, correct username/password or right server connection you may be a victim of “Internet Connection Sharing”.

I have been running Window Server 2008 R2 for some time and love it because of the power of Hyper-V with regards to managing my virtual environments.  One thing that I have done is shared my Wireless Adapter with my virtual Adapter so I can get internet connectivity to my VMs while I am connected to WIFI.

Little that I knew that it would interfere with my ability to use Cisco VPN.  I even un-installed and try to re-install the client to be greeted by more errors:

At the end all I had to do is to disable “Internet Connection Sharing” and Cisco VPN started to work.

I hope it will save you some time.