I find that in the process of learning about something, I often dig through a lot of places before I come up with what I’m looking for.

In the case of Visual Studio 2005 Team System (aka “Burton”), I wanted to know a lot more about the features that MS was building into VS for teams, including much more flexible source code control integration, web site functionality and stress testing, static code analysis like FxCop and perf. analysis built right into the build system and stats recording as part of the normal workflow for project management reporting.

In the process of gathering these details, here are the places I went:

• Official Visual Studio 2005 Team System home page
• VSTS screenshots from the MS Developer Tools Roadmap
• VSTS demonstration videos
• VSTS FAQ, including the ever favorite “Where do I get it?”
• Korby Parnell’s announcement as a member of the VSTS team
• Official Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 VSTS Announcement

Here are some things that tickled my fancy:

• Data binding to drive web site testing. I want the same thing for stand-along client testing
• The real-time stats and drill-down for ongoing web site stress testing
• Building static code analysis right into the build process so that I can fix those issues along with my compiler issues
• The idea of collecting project stats as part of what the developer is doing in VS and using those to roll-up conprehensive stats for the whole team
• Seeing our own internal tools, like PREfast, made available to our customers and integrated so nicely into VS

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Greg Schecter, one of the designers of the new support for 3D in Avalon available in the Longhorn WinHEC build, provides a nice overview and some other links to Avalon 3D resources:

• Greg Schechter’s Introducing 3D in Avalon and 2D/3D Integration
• Basic 3D in the Longhorn SDK
• Joe Beda’s WinHEC report, including a screenshot of an Avalon 3D sample

3D support in Avalon is not meant to build Doom 3, but it does shine especially brightly in two places: 1) you can do 3D in a declarative way in XAML, just like the rest of Avalon and 2) as Greg describes, the integration of 2D and 3D in Avalon is nice and clean the way it isn’t in most current 3D APIs. I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the 3D support in my own apps, which isn’t something I ever considered before with DirectX. Thanks, guys!

Here. The one where I learn that DevelopMentor was my own personal speed reading course.

I got an email asking to serve as a reference for a guy I'd never heard of today. Just so you know, especially in a down economy, employers check references. Also, it's a good idea to ask a reference between adding them to your resume so they don't have to respond, "Roy? I don't know anyone named Roy..." : )

Here. The one where the idea of intranet services being exposed as web services gets me hot.

Here.

The Avalon team has posted their WinHEC slides:

Greg Schecter: Avalon Graphics Stack Overview [682 KB]

Joe Beda: Avalon Graphics - 2D, 3D, Imaging and Composition [284 KB]

Kerry Hammil: Graphics on the Windows Desktop [496 KB]

David Brown: Avalon Text [1.05 MB]

[via Adam Kinney]

Ian blathers on about the power for vector graphics for a while then hits you with this link demonstrating the power of vector graphics. Wow. Some of those pictures are amazing.