Doctor Deploys Blog

During the most intense coding sessions (the kind where you code for 72 hours minus 8 for sleep) I often pick up a new artist who’s music becomes the theme song for that project. A couple years ago, I was in intense coding mode whipping out the solution used to distribute Windows Vista electronically and was introduced to the Black Eyed Peas. Up to that point, I was not a fan of their work but when I heard the songs collectively it really grew on me. I picked up all their albums (4 at the time) and played it on continuous loop for the whole long weekend.

Recently, a friend of mine mentioned the Black Eyed Peas and Oprah were the target of a flash mob. She said the Black Eyed Peas performed on the Oprah show live in downtown Chicago. In the crowd were a bunch of people that had choreographed dance moves. I’m a bit fuzzy how many people in the crowd knew the dance moves and how many didn’t but the result is pretty amazing.

When you watch the video pay particular attention how it affects the Black Eyed Peas. As the crowd gets into it the whole show lifts off. I expect anyone that has presented to a group of people before knows that feeling that when your audience really gets into the content. Keep that in mind next time you are watching a live event, you and the people standing next to you may be able to make it even better.

I also find a couple other interesting links. First, here is a video of dance practice in a warehouse. Second, this is another view of the dance from high above the whole scene.

Original post by Rob Mensching

A while ago I started talking about culture around the WiX toolset. I started (and ended) with turtles all the way down which was an early part of the WiX culture. A more recent addition to our culture (added in the last year or so) are the videos.

Each week I try to bring some video that is funny or interesting or relevant to some topic we discussed. Some weeks I don’t have anything but more often than not I do. Most of the times, the members attending that night find the video appropriately funny or interesting. Sometimes I’m the only one laughing.

For some reason, it took a night (tonight) when I am not attending the WiX Working Group meeting (due to conflicting engagement) to think about posting the weekly video here. So tonight I’m posting the video I showed first.

The music caught my attention first. I also thought the visuals were very cool, particularly the floating videos. Finally, the dude has some serious moves. A very cool commercial indeed.

The other version is similarly cool. Next week, I’ll have something new.

Original post by Rob Mensching

Never before today had I considered adding support for emoticons to my blog engine but this blog post almost screams for it. You should read the title as "WiX v3.5 hearts VS2010 Beta 2". Yep, our friends in Visual Studio delivered fix after fix in Votive to ensure that the WiX toolset now supports Visual Studio 2010 Beta2.

Candy is a Program Manager on Visual Studio who was also instrumental in our WiX v3.0 releases (in case you didn’t remember). She sent this status around internally today that I thought should get a lot more publicity:

Visual Studio 2010 Beta shipped on 10/21. With the team’s hard work and agility, we were able to release the WiX support on VS2010 Beta 2 today! Here are some highlights for this release:

• Extension Manager Integration – Now you can download and install WiX directly from within the VS IDE by launching Extension Manager
• Major performance improvement during project building – No more IDE freezing during build
• Automatic upgrade from VS2008 to VS2010 – no more manual editing of wixproj files to change the tools version
• Improved IDE experience including drag/drop of nodes, copy/paste of items, and project references
• Added Visual Studio 2010 Express products detection in the WiX VS Extension – New in Beta
• Over 40 + bug fixes

I’m extremely happy to see the "No more IDE freezing during build" feature but there is a bug fix that I’m actually happier to have fixed. The WiX toolset can now run on and read .NET Framework 4.0 assemblies. That was a late bug Jordan and Mohamed (both Visual Studio Developers in Test) caught and Svet (Visual Studio Developer Lead) got the fix in last night.

So, the Votive half of WiX v3.5 is going well. Now, I just need to get the other half of WiX v3.5, Burn, caught up. In the meantime, check out the latest WiX toolset build on Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

Original post by Rob Mensching