10-4 Episode 1: Working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC

The Discussion

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  Music was cool for about 5 seconds, then, I just wanted to turn it off!

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  Please don't play intro music for the whole thing.
  

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  Thanks for the feedback Lawman and Chad - we had conflicting feedback on this one but this is something we'll revisit for future episodes. Metallica is going to be disappointed, though; they had signed on to do an exclusive album. I'll try to let them down gently.

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  As best I can tell, it is still the case that VPC does not work on Windows Vista Home Premium.  That point should be called out any time that instructions are given that depend on VPC.  The other reality about this CTP is that very little of the .net4 technology is in it yet.  If you are interested in TFS or specifically in Visual Studio, it may be worth the effort.  But I would not have bothered with the large effort of downloading it if I had realized how little was in it.

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  Lars Ulrich is in my office right now, in tears. First the fallout with Warner Bros and now us.

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  Another vote for no intro music.  It's especially annoying if you already have background music from another source.

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  dnjake - while it's true that Microsoft does not support Virtual PC on Vista Home Premium (or Home Basic), I have definitely talked to several users who have used it successfully on those platforms. You will get a message that says you're running on an operating system that's not supported, but you should be able to click past that and use it without any trouble.
  
  You're right that not all of the functionality is there yet. Much more will be available in the next pre-release.
  
  Brian

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  Another great show by Brian (and Jason Olson, Drew Robbins and Jonathan Carter)! Love it (music's a bit much, but the premise and content is fantastic).
  
  Thank you for your great contributions to C9!!!
  
  
  C

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  Brian,
  
  Nice post, very informative.  I wish that Microsoft had a download manager in their browser for this type of thing.  I'm sure it's been requested by a lot of people.
  
  The music was awesome keep it.  It helped to move the topic on, great transition points, I'm going to download the CTP and check it out.
  
  Question, why are screen casts encoded as "WMV (High)" around 50MB, and the other videos on Channel9 encoded at the same rate range from 500MB to 1GB?
  
  Thanks for the intro!
  Chris
  

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  Thanks, Chris!
  
  So that's 1 for the music... and 4 against. I will see if we can strike a balance. Maybe music during the transitions but not during the times that there's voiceover? We'll see what we can do and try to find a way of pleasing everybody.
  
  You've asked an excellent question about the file sizes. Basically, the way that Channel 9 (and 8, 10, Edge, etc.) accepts videos for upload from guys like me is through a program called MagicFolder that the EvNet team (Sampy, Duncan, Erik, et al.) built and maintain. MagicFolder, until recently, used to require all "Videos" to be encoded using a 2500kbps profile. Unfortunately while that profile worked well for live action footage, it doesn't work very well for screen captures. Hence for screen captures, they allowed you to upload whatever video format you want and tag it as a "Screencast" - but the tradeoff was that it wouldn't be converted into Zune, MP4, MP3, WMA, etc. It wouldn't be converted into those formats because the process they used to produce those formats required a known input - hence the 2500kbps profile.
  
  But a couple of weeks ago, EvNet adopted Expression Encoder for their encoding pipeline which is much more flexible with the file input. Hence I can now get the best of both worlds; I can encode my screencasts using a profile which is really designed to display screencasts in a high-quality but efficient (file size) format, and MagicFolder will still convert the file to the other file formats (Zune, MP4, MP3, WMA, etc.).  It's a really awesome option and I applaud the EvNet guys for enabling this feature!
  
  Now what I suspect is that the files you're seeing which are 500MB to 1GB in range are still encoded at the old 2500kbps setting. One of the great things about Channel 9 is that we allow people from all over the company to produce and upload content. One of the downsides, however, is that not everybody is an expert at choosing the right encoding profile to match their content type and tune that balance of quality vs. file size. I have been doing this for several years now, and every time I shoot a new format it's still a learning curve to get it right. Hopefully over time we can educate more content creators on how to best shoot and encode their content. You can always feel free to post comments on their videos and tell them to buy me lunch, and in return I'll help them up their game.
  
  Thanks for watching, and for commenting!
  
  Brian Keller

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  Hi Brian, 

  
  

  Thanks for taking the time to make this video and blog everything we need, making it easy to just get on with it.

  
  

  Great video. 

  
  

  As a note, personally I diddn't mind the music. 

  
  

  Thanks again. 

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  Show helpful, music very distracting.... pls remove next time!
  
  ta

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  What's wrong with 'evangelists'? Yeah, it's a weird job title, but Channel 9 is brought to you by so-called evangelists... We're very sensitive so be nice.
  C

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  I like the music, and it's tuned out after a while anyway...
  
  But, maybe some more interesting transition music?
  
  
  
  BTW, drewby, are you this Drew? Taken at VSLive (2002?) w/ Mike Amundsen's crew?
  
  

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  Hmm. I'm really not sure who that is. Sorry, Minh.
  
  (note to self, no more public photo's at tech events) 

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  nice shot sir!

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  Thanks for taking the time to elaborate, Mexilus. But the term "evangelist" used to describe our profession has been around for a very long time and is used by several companies across the industry, not just Microsoft. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_evangelist. In fact, the beloved Guy Kawasaki was an evangelist for Apple.
  
  It's true that the title is unfortunately confused from time to time with that of religious evangelists. But you can say the same thing about several titles. For example, do you think that the Secretary of State is the person responsible for scheduling meetings and taking notes for the President? Is somebody with a "doctorate" in literary studies somebody you would go to if you broke your leg? Is the captain of a football team responsible for driving the boat?
  
  Many words and titles have multiple meanings. "Evangelist" is one of those words. Unless the tech industry decides collectively to redefine the genre, I suspect we'll have technical evangelists as long as we have companies who produce and sell technology.

• 

  It should be noted (not that it's really that important) that when we started C9 nobody on the 9 team carried the title Evangelist. Bryn and I were SDEs, Jeff was a PM, Lenn was a Director and Scoble was a...
  
  Let's be clear: Technical Evangelism is NOT Marketing. I think that's made pretty clear in the content that we deliver on C9... I actually think it's an intriguing title, but I do understand how it can rub some people the wrong way.
  
  Fun topic, however.
  C

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  WOW!!!

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  1.) I think the music is cool. For a short video it is good, but if you have a 30 minute video then it could be annoying after some time if you are often going back and forward.
  
  2.) When working with Virtual PC you should also show the user how to change the Alt Gr key. For users of the USA this is not really important, but all others will not be able to use Visual Studio. I have a german keyboard layout and without the Alt Gr key i cant type { , [, \ or @. So any array initalisation, array access in C++ or C#, paths etc. can not be used.
  I dont know how many languages are affected, but in French, Spanish and Italian it is the same.
  

• 

  Here is the config mod, again, it goes after the </mouse> tag..  
     <components>
      <host_time_sync>
       <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
      </host_time_sync>
     </components>
  
  What were the passwords?

  
  

  1Setuptfs

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  definitely remove music - other than that, great content.

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  Thanks, Andrgin - actually I don't know how to change the Alt Gr key. Can you please elaborate? Feel free to point us to a URL if this is already documented somewhere. Since I live in the US and travel with my laptop when I leave the country I haven't had to work around this for myself, but I'm very interested in learning more.
  
  Brian

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  Thanks, Josh!

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  Hi, Brian!
  
  I can't wait for continuation . When the next video comes out?
  

• 

  Please drop the music it's really really annoying.

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  Thanks, maxt3r! Our goal is to publish a new episode every Wednesday.

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  1.) Start Virtual PC, but do not start a Virtual Machine
  2.) Go To File=>Options
  3.) Click on Keyboard
  4.) Click on the text box with the host key
  5.) Type in a new key
  
  For the German layout I think the right Windows key should be best, because you do not need it.
  
  You can find the different keyboard layouts here (works only with Internet Explorer): http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx
  

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  The "background" music was so bad I could not stand listening to your presentation. Will try to figure it out from the blog posts.

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  Awesome, thanks for taking the time to detail that andrgin - I learn something new every day.

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  Sorry Tom, I didn't hear a word you said - let me turn down this background music... hold on a sec...
  
  Don't worry - we've received plenty of feedback on the music. It's funny because a few people like it but the majority seem to dislike it. Jason Olson is working on this week's 10-4 episode and is taking that feedback into account. Hopefully you'll like the next one better, and if not please continue to tell us how we can make 'em better for you each week. We aim to please!

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  At this site, we do not have Silverlight installed and are not allowed to install it.  Would it be too much trouble to make the video available to run in media player?

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  Mouseover "Downloads" in the post above. We make several formats available.

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  This is a very good video. I had some problems with VPCs in the past, where I could not get the right password or a freshly downloaded image is expired. Great walkthrough.
  
  Music was distracting . May be you could have music during transitions or just for the introduction for several seconds. Or may be lower and raise volmue depending on whether the voice is present or not.
  
  Now if I could stop Vista from crashing every hour or so, it would be nice, otherwise I'll have to use XP which works perfectly fine.

• 

  Microsoft should release a VM for VMWare or Parallels, i use a mac succeffully with VM's and also vmware on windows vista virtual pc is to slow to use for serious development and also so limited, hi have tried to convert to vmware without success
  

• 

  bummer
  But conversion from VM to VPC works fine. Try taking a snapshot of the system running under VPC using VMWare as if you are converting physical machine into VMWare.  VMWare is free and takes snapshots of physical machines.
  http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
  
  http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/get.html
  
  
  Also here is a link where you can download a software which converts VM to VPC in case you need it.
  http://vmtoolkit.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2006/11/20/vmdk-to-vhd-converter-available.aspx
  
  

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  Totally - keep it as intro music by all accounts, but it eventually became all I could hear... very distracting. The content is interesting enough to not need music in the background.
  

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  Interesting =)

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  I have download the files, but got the following error while unzipping ....
  
  Extracting VisualStudio2010CTP.vhd
  Packed data CRC failed in VisualStudio2010CTP.vhd
  Extracting from VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part02.rar
  
  I have downloaded the following files:
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part01.exe   716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part02.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part03.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part04.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part05.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part06.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part07.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part08.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part09.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part10.rar    716,807 KB
  VisualStudio2010CTP_11PartsTotal.part11.rar    292,893 KB
  

• 

  Lostasif -
  Did you use the download manager? This error is pretty straightforward, it means you have a corrupt download.
  Brian

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  Guys, don't take it badly, but BitTorrent is not only to download DVDRips...download managers are so 1990's...please next time package it in a format coherent with the 21st century and I might just download it. 
  
  thanks.
  
  ps: of course I still downloaded it, cause I'm a geek and I need my dose of new .NET framwork every two years, but really, it's a pain... I just uninstalled the downloader...reminded me too much of the old times. 
  
  

• 

  I have noticed MS is making more of there content as video/poscasts-I do not think this is a good trend.
  Even though this one was well organized, I would like to see these things transcribed to some sort of document.
  Then it would be searchable. Also, I can read/skim something like this in about 30 secs and pick out the important parts and determining if it requires a closer read..
  With these videos, we have to watch the whole thing  to find out if we enve need to spend time with it.

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  Every single point covered in this video is also available via the blog articles linked from the body of the video post.
  
  Brian

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  Brian, 
    Awesome video and links for making use of the VPC image.
  
    Question: what software do you use to do your screen recording - I was really impressed with the quality!
  
    - Jack

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  Thanks, Jack! I use Camtasia for most of my stuff these days. Running v5.0 but hoping I can buy a license for v6.0 soon.

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  IF you turn the volume down as low as possible where you still can hear Brian talk, the music is less distracting

   

• 

  Hello Brian,

  Very usefull post and nice music ... but it seems to be a problem with the VS 2010 CTP download.

   

  I followed your steps but the download manager is not able to download any fille and it reports: "File not found on the server"

   

  Could you please help me sort this out?

   

  Thanks in advance!

   

  Regards,

  Claudiu Matache

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  Seriously, Please don't play music the entire video. Atleast keep the music volume down. Pelase.