@ScottCate: Scott Cate: Technology

DNSMadeEasy.com Minor Outage–Keeps me as a customer

Scott Cate — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:12:00 GMT

I’ve recently been considering GoDaddy.com as a DNS provider. I have 150+ domains registered at GoDaddy.com, and they offer a nice software panel for DNS entries. I’ve been using DNSMadeEasy for a very long time, on the recommendation of Tim Heuer, way back in the day. I didn’t use GoDaddy from the start, because I wanted to separate my domain registrar from the DNS provider. But I’ve been using, and happy with everything else GoDaddy for a number of years, and I’ve never had any GoDaddy or DNS issues. I pay about $150-$200 a year to DnsMadeEasy.com for all the DNS hosting they do for my domains. I know they have new pricing, but I’m grandfathered in because I’ve had my account for so long.

Anyway, I’m not moving my DNS hosting to GoDaddy. Here’s why. Today, out of the blue, I get an email (copied below) that basically says, our perfect record is now lightly tarnished. What a cool email. To my knowledge, my accounts were not affected, and if they were, none of our customers called, so I don’t think we were affected by the outage. All-in-all the fix took them 6 hours to complete. WOW. These guys are genius smart, all they do is DNS. And if it took them 6 hours, I’m a little afraid of what would happen if a DDoS attack of this scale were to be aimed their competitors, or worse, my Registrar, or other service providers. So for $200 (or less) a year, I’m happy to have the expertise of DNSMadeEasy.com on my side.

And, to boot, they’re offering a refund on all accounts, not even just accounts that can prove they were affected.

Well DNSMadeEasy.com – today you saved a customer, with this service, and you didn’t even know it.

Good things happen to good companies, who do “the right thing”!

If you’re looking for DNS Hosting – I highly recommend DNSMadeEasy.com

Dear DNS Made Easy Client,

On August 07, 2010 DNS Made Easy was the target of a large multi Gb/s attack against all of our name servers. The attack started at 8:00 UTC and was fully mitigated by 14:00 UTC. During this time period there were regional outages from some or all of our name servers. Regional outages means that certain regions of the world were not able to resolve your DNS and other regions of the world were resolving normally. When all name servers were not reachable a DNS query would have been lost, when some name servers were not reachable then DNS performance would have been slower than normal but still operational.
The regional downtime was in very small periods but it still did affect the overall resolution for all of our client's DNS. It is for this reason that we are explaining the situation in full to all of our clients now.

1) How long were the DNS outages?
In some regions there were no issues, in other regions outages lasted a few minutes, while in other regions there were sporadic (up and down) outages for a couple of hours. In Europe for instance there was never any downtime. In Asia downtime continued longer than other regions. In United States the west coast was hit much harder and experienced issues longer than the central and east coast.

2) Many clients have asked us if in fact there was downtime since they did not notice issues.
Many clients did not notice any DNS downtime. In fact many clients would not have noticed this issue if we had not sent this email. But we feel disclosure of this issue is something that we owe our client base. If you want to see if there is a significant loss of DNS queries you can quickly compare your daily queries from this Saturday to last Saturday in the DNS Made Easy control panel. Overall query statistics comparing this Saturday's query load (minus attack traffic) to recent Saturdays' query loads shows that our servers properly responded to a query total this Saturday within a 2% difference from recent Saturdays.

3) Where did the attack come from?
We believe that the DDoS came from a botnet attack originating from Asia. Most attack traffic originated in or transited through China. The source IPs appear to be mostly spoofed but the vast majority are assigned by APNIC to Chinese Networks and Chinese ISPs. Traffic levels reported to us by our bandwidth providers regarding their connections through which this traffic entered their networks also points to origins in Asia.

4) How large of an attack was this?
This attack hit levels that were so high that our Tier1 upstreams were suffering latency and network issues for other clients at many of their locations due to this attack. This caused some of our Tier1 bandwidth providers to use their last resort response of null routing traffic to some of our IPs from some networks to prevent major service degradation to their core networks. Measuring the exact size of this attack is rather difficult. However, discussions with our Tier1 bandwidth providers during the attack led to an estimate of 50 Gb/s in size. This was based on reports of multiple 10Gb/s lines being saturated at multiple different providers in different geographic regions.
During our after-action discussions internally and with our providers after the attack was mitigated we analyzed all information available to us through monitoring systems and traffic reports and we revised our estimate of the attack size to be fluctuating between 20Gb/s and 40Gb/s during the attack. We will never know the true size of this attack as we actively moved traffic around to different locations throughout the attack and IPs were temporarily null routed into and through various networks, and some traffic was blocked from provider to provider in response to the attack. We do know that due to the service implication to the Tier1 providers, networking teams from China Netcom, China Telecom, Level3, GlobalCrossing, Tiscali, and Arbinet were involved to stop the attacks. Level3 and Arbinet both played special heroic roles in facilitating that the correct people were involved from all networks to make sure that the attack was stopped as quickly as possible.

5) How was this attack stopped?
Fighting attacks of this magnitude is very complex and a full answer involves much information that we do not want these criminals to know. What we can say is that that we used a combination of routing techniques, DDoS mitigation tools, customized firewalls, and high level inter-provider negotiations.
China Netcom and China Telecom had to null route the name servers from their networks in order for the attack to not impact other traffic they had going to the United States.

6) Will an SLA credit be issued?
Yes it will be. With thousands paying companies we obviously do not want every organization to submit an SLA form. Even though not all clients noticed the attack, we plan on issuing an SLA to every single paying DNS account.
You will be receiving an email about the SLA credit to your account in the next few days.

7) Does this affect your 100% uptime history?
Yes, any service outage would result in loss of uptime. We had a history leading uptime of over 8 years of 100% uptime. With a calculated two hour outage (which is probably longer than we were actually down for anyone) this DDOS attack put our overall uptime history at a calculated 99.9999%. This is still an excellent uptime history.

8) What would it take to get your 100% uptime history back?
That is mathematically impossible. But we can work on increasing our 99.9999% uptime history and we will work hard on building another run of more than 8 years of 100% uptime. We are confident that we can do it and we look forward to the challenge.

9) Would another DNS provider have been able to stop this attack?
We are sure that our competitors will claim that the answer is yes. In fact we have been called by several of our competitors with very amusing phone calls during and after the attack asking us to update our website to say that we no longer have a 100% uptime history (which we have started and will complete soon). This was a very large attack, so we do not believe that other DNS services could have stopped it either. If any of our customers are considering leaving our services based on this issue, then we would recommend highly that you request a detailed report for how any new potential DNS provider would deal with an attack of this magnitude. Please note that this was our first issue of downtime over our 8+ years of providing enterprise managed DNS services.

10) What is the next step?
At this time all DNS resolution is functioning as intended from all of our global locations.
In our 8+ year history, we have had numerous attacks against our services. Historically we have been able to mitigate these attacks without any service degradation. One thing we have always taken away from every attack is a deeper understanding of what we need to do to make our network and services stronger and more reliable.
This DDoS attack against us was different from others in that the size was massive enough that our standard mitigation strategies were not sufficient to prevent several network nodes from being flooded. We now have a deeper understanding of what happened during the attack and have started planning network upgrades and mitigation strategies to help fight these criminals in the future. It is, and always has been, our commitment to make the DNS Made Easy network the strongest and most reliable DNS network in the world.

11) Can I pay more for a higher level of service with DNS Made Easy?
We believe that we provide more service per dollar than any competitor in the DNS industry. This is why we have the best ROI in the industry. We do not do this by cutting networking cost. As many of you aware DNS Made Easy feels we can cut costs by eliminating a lot of the sales (including commissions), presales, and unnecessary marketing expenditures.
Everyone at DNS Made Easy feels that our network is as strong as or stronger than any competitor in the United States and Europe and you can verify this with speed tests and our highest industry uptime. As all DNS Made Easy customers know, as our customer base grows, so does our network. This is how we can continually keep adding to our network and always remain a fraction of the price of our competition.
You will hear more from our network team as we plan on adding additional precautions to keep everything running smoothly during attacks in the future.
One thing that I want to say is that we sincerely apologize that this happened to your DNS service. We understand that hundreds of thousands of domains rely on our DNS services each day to keep their businesses running smoothly. This is not something that we treat lightly and this is not something that we are going to just let slip away. We have already started to plan on building a network to focus on preventing attacks like this from causing any service disruption in the future.
Everyone here at DNS Made Easy would like to thank you for your continued loyalty and kind words during this time. We can easily say the DNS Made Easy customers are the best in the business.

Question, comments, concerns?
Please let us know. I personally will be answering as many tickets and questions as possible in the following weeks. Our full DNS Made Easy staff is dedicated to answering your questions and easing any concerns that you have.

Regards,
-Steven Job
President and Founder of DNS Made Easy

Something New at VSLive?

Scott Cate — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:29:13 GMT

VSLive is coming the first week of August, 2010, and I’ll be speaking at the event, talking about Visual studio. Use and abuse it to the best of your ability. My talks over the last few years have been around productivity, and this one follows suit. Plain and simple: Use Visual Studio better. That’s my goal for the talk.

Those that know me, know I’m pretty connected, right? I have a lot of friends that both work for Microsoft and that hate everything about Microsoft, so I get information from both sides. I have NDA’s signed with lots of companies, and I know lots of stuff I can’t talk about.

But this has me intrigued, because I know that something is coming, but I don’t know what it is.

A New Product?
A New Add-In for VS?
New Pricing?
New Device(s)?
New TFS or ALM _______ ?
New Licensing
New ...

I’m not sure what it us, but I hear people talking that some sort of announcement (Twitterfeed: #VSLive Redmond) is coming. Since it’s a Visual Studio conference, I have to assume that it has something in or around Visual Studio.

I have no idea – but I kind of like the excitement!

Hopefully I’ll see you in Redmond!

AZGroups May 10 2010 Day of Net

Scott Cate — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:50:00 GMT

WOW. Another event behind us. What a speaker line up this year huh?

Scott Guthrie
Scott Guthrie
Scott Hanselman
Jeffrey Palermo
Tim Heuer
Scott Guthrie

Why is ScottGu listed 3 times? Because he gave us 4 hours of content. Amazing that he’s got so much energy, coding talent, stage presence, and community concern to still donate this much of his time. I can’t say how grateful we are as a community that ScottGu continues to agrees to come to our event.

We also have to take a moment and say thank you to the Sponsors. Without their financial support, this event is not possible. The bottom line is the event takes money and it has to come from somewhere. Either it comes from the attendees or sponsors (or a hybrid of some sorts, like VIP seats). So THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! to all the Sponsors. I hope it was as enjoyable for you as it was for all the attendees, and I hope to see your name on the list again for the next event :)

Looking back at the reviews I asked people to fill out, all-in-all the day was a success. We did have some logistical problems with parking, eating fast enough, handing out prizes, etc. We also had 100% positive notes across the board for the Speakers. Some didn’t understand the professional level talk on MVC2 because it was out of their comfort zone. They either said “I’m not suing MVC2” or “I’m not advanced enough to follows the MVC2 tricks” but many many evals came back positive of the talk as well. At the end of the day, I’m happy with the content. Something for everyone, something targeted at the beginners, and something targeting at the MVC professionals.

We have Photos

You may know our own community member Richard Kimbrough. He’s the guy we always as to take pictures, and he does an amazing job. We’ve uploaded them to Flickr, which you can browse around and tag yourself, or watch the Slide Show. If you have photos, please feel free to upload them to your favorite hosting site and tag them #AZGroups so we can find them. Or if you like, zip them up and use http://TransferBigFiles.com to send them to me. I’ll upload them as part of the official set.

We have NextSlide.com Video

I was contacted about 3 months ago from NextSlide.com. They are a local .net shop that has a product for sharing presentations. They offered to do some volunteer work on our behalf, and I’m not sure they new what they were getting into :) They have been VERY VERY helpful and quite frankly we could not have this content online if it were not for them. Now that we have a content service provider to build and host the content, we need a way to record it. Very special thanks to two people for making that happen. First, Josh Vorves ran our Video Mixing board which let the audience see close ups of the speaker, and the computer screen, and the picture in picture effects for the DevExpress.com demo (Mark Miller coding with a Guitar, say what ???? wait for it, it’ll be online later), and Josh also did a ton of behind the scenes work to help with the video and audio recordings. And Lorin Thwaits came through for us with all the camera gear. Lorin spent many hours of prep before the event, as well as the entire day running the cameras, and checking on the audio/video recordings. Out community friend Matt Birmingham also stepped up last minute as a volunteer to run one of the audience cameras. Thank you Matt. At the end of the day, what you’re about to see online was only possible because of these 4 volunteer team members.

NextSlide.com (Their whole company)
Lorin Thwaits
Josh Vorves
Matt Birmingham

We did have one video/audio/technical casualty during the day where Mr. Jeffrey Palermo’s video was lost. We kind of knew going into this event that the entire “video online afterwards” project was going to be difficult to get perfect. To be honest, I’m ecstatic that we have all of the content that we do have, but I sincerely regret to announce that the MVC2 tips/tricks talk could not be posted online. We have portions of it, but at this point we’ve decided that it’s not enough to salvage the talk. After that downer – if you’re interested, there is a guy on Palermo’s team that did a very similar talk that is to be posted for the May 2010 Meeting on Community for MVC.net and Jeffrey Palermo has his slides posted here.

Head on over to the AZGroups channel on NextSlide.com to see all the talks. And know that I’ll be using NextSlide.com for my events in the future as well.

http://azgroups.nextslide.com/

Guthrie on VS 2010

Open Guthrie on VS 2010 on NextSlide

Guthrie on ASP.NET 4

Open Guthrie on ASP.NET 4 on NextSlide

OData with Scott Hanselman

Open OData with Scott Hanselman on NextSlide

ScottGu Unplugged Q&A

Open ScottGu Unplugged Q&A on NextSlide

Preparing for Microsoft TechEd New Orleans 2010

Scott Cate — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:59:00 GMT

I’m grateful to have been selected as a speaker to this years Microsoft TechEd North America. I know there are 1000’s of qualified speakers and I’m honored to have had high enough scores in TechEd’s past to be invited back. That said – planning is well under way to make the best talk possible. My talk is titled “Visual Studio Tips and Tricks” and I’m co-presenting with the famous Dustin Campbell. My goal is to cover as much new material as possible. New tricks that I have not shown in past Tip/Trick talks. This is hard because there are so many VERY COOL new parts of Visual Studio 2010. Some of them deserve a lot of time, and others are 2 second “remember this keyboard shortcut” tricks.

If you’re a following of @VSTricks then you know I’m video/screen cast happy on my blog. It’s not for everyone, but to me, it’s the best learning tool. Again, I know this isn’t the best for everyone, but FOR ME, it’s the quickest, best media for me to use to get my message across. i have decided to pre-record all of my TechEd Tip/Tricks and put them online shortly before my presentation. The reason is simple. I don’t want the attendees to have to try and take notes during this “Fire Hose” style Tips/Tricks presentation. I’ll take the notes for you, right here on ScottCate.com – the whole talk will be posted in nice, easy to watch, small 5-10 minute video segments.

The only thing the attendee should think is “Wow that’s cool, I didn’t know that” and then look at the power point slide and see a blog url.

The risk: Everyone will just watch the video blog, and no one will attend my TechEd session. Yeah Right! In my wildest dreams I could get that kind of traffic.

The Upside: No note taking, and a wider audience. Not ScottGu or ScottHa wider, but a little larger none-the-less. So in the coming weeks, watch for TechEd specific Video Blog Posts.

Here are the categories that we’ll be covering Tips/Tricks in (no particular order)

Intellisence
The VS Start Page
3rd Party Add-On’s (In the box)
Code Editor Tricks (code faster / better)
Multi Mon Tricks
Outlining
Navigation
Temp Projects
New Projects
Coding Faster (maybe this belongs up with editor tricks??)
Code Snippets
Debugging
Diagrams
Extending VS
Something super secret NDA can’t tell you yet (Part 1)
Something super secret NDA can’t tell you yet (Part 2)

AZGroups.org Postcard Idea

Scott Cate — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:12:00 GMT

VistaPrint.com is a place that prints very cheap (free sometimes) business cards and post cards. I’ve used them in the past for my user group business cards. The printing is free, but you have to pay fro shipping, and they usually have a VistaPrint Logo on them. For community stuff, it’s great.

I received an email this morning about a free post card offer, and I thought I would put together a post card that promotes the AZGroups.org calendar. This calendar is meant to be a simple calendar of Technical User Group events. The best part about this calendar is that it’s a simple Google Calendar, and we can assign Write Privileges to anyone. So if you’re a user group leader, you can log in your self, and add your own event(s) to the calendar. But I’m not sure all the User Group leaders around town know about the calendar. So this postcard is targeting User Group leaders, and my goal is to enable 5-10 people to help me distribute them to Tech Community members around the state.

So in typical community fashion, before I order them – I would like to ask your opinion. Please leave comments. I’m sure that these could be better. This is my rough draft. What do you think?

Pulling EasySearchASP.NET Off the Market

Scott Cate — Tue, 11 May 2010 22:28:31 GMT

We’ve been talking about this for a while, and today is the magical day. EasySearchASP.net will no longer be a product sold by myKB.com, Inc. While the product still has a support life, and there are still (minute) sales, it is no longer financially prudent to keep the product on the market. We’re not investing any more dev resources into the product, and every day the product is more and more dated.

There are several competing options that are nice, and even public free options with Bing and Google that can do most of the tricks EasySearchASP.net had to offer. To be clear, we’re still supporting EasySearch – just no longer selling it.

If you already have a license, please sleep well at night knowing that bug fixes, and support are still available.

Please contact me directly, if you have questions about EasySearchASP.net.

11 May 2010
-- sc

Trip Report: Scottsdale Arizona Event Conference Planning

Scott Cate — Tue, 11 May 2010 21:38:00 GMT

Monday May 10th, 2010 represents my largest and best event to-date, that I have ever hosted. For the last seven years, I’ve grown a technical audience around Microsoft programming / developers in the Phoenix area. Some travel from California, New Mexico, and other parts of Arizona, but for the most part the crowd is local.

In years past, this all day event has been as small as 300 folks, and as large as 500, and I’ve tried been to venues around the valley some better than others.

This year I had 850 reservations for the free event (lunch included). So let me post this question to you? Where can you put 850 people for an entire day (8-5), have room for parking (free parking no less), feed them, AND (yes capital AND) have a single room/theater large enough to let them hear your speaker?

In the major Phoenix/Scottsdale metropolitan area – there is only one place. Of course I’m exaggerating here, there are many places, but only one that I will use going forward.

Scottsdale Resort and Conference Center

Just the name “Resort and Conference Center” is magic. That’s what they do. They’re a big resort that specializes in Conferences. With the planning that I did with the resort staff before the meeting, I got to walk the property and see all of the rooms available. All the rooms, including the sleeping rooms/casitas/suites/pools/meeting rooms. Our VIP presenters that flew in from out of town stayed in the Presidential and Casita Suites.

Note about the sleeping rooms and suites. If you’re going to book the presidential suites (there are 3 of them) request either the second or the third floor. Not that the first floor presidential is bad, but it does have it’s draw backs. It’s right by an entrance door, which can be a little noisy, and the hallway for that door is used on the 2nd and 3rd floors to make the room bigger, and the entrance nicer. And of course, it’ll be a little quieter.

A note about the Casitas. There may be more than one group of casitas, but we stayed in the 10,15,20,25 group of casita rooms. If you’re VIP guests are bringing kids – book them in the Casitas – not the presidential. I made this mistake, by putting a family in the presidential+side room. So they effectively had two rooms, connecting, but the casita would have been a much nicer fit. Casita 10 has a full kitchen. Complete with ice maker, and a full size refrigerator. It also has two pull out beds from the couches, and a bunch of flat screen TV’s. To do it over again (which I will be in 2010 Q4 and 2011 Q2) I would reposition my guests, so that the business traveler would be in the Presidential and the families would be in the Casitas. Word of caution for families with young children – the Casita doors (ours at least) opens to a semi-private wading pool that is 4ft deep.

Back to the meeting side of things.

Audio Visual. Ask for Ben. As far as I can tell, he runs the audio video show at Scottsdale Resort and Conference Center (SRCC), and we couldn’t stump him. They have so many event and conferences, and so much equipment that we never had a request they couldn’t immediately answer. If you book events, then you know what it’s like to have an on site AV department. This isn’t just an onsite AV department though, it’s the best AV department I’ve ever worked with. Imagine having a Best Buy on site for your meeting, so that anything and everything you could need for the day, was just right there at your disposal. That’s what I felt like. Need an extra VGA cable? Just ask right? Any conference center could do that. Need a 50’ VGA cable? You’re 50/50 here on who would have it. Need 10 of those 50 foot cables? Very few conference AV departments could come through – Ben at SRCC had no problem. This was just a tiny example. We had live cameras at the stage, and the audience, 3 projectors, flying screens, lots of mics/lavs/handhelds/podiums (with not a single feedback issue) and all kids of stuff. It’s a very difficult event technically to pull off, and SRCC AV came through. You know the best event happens when no one complains about AV. The screen is too far, too small, not bright enough. Very few attendees will brag about good AV – so the best compliment you can have is if/when no one complains – and that was out event. Ben – if you ever read this. Special Thanks to you and your team.

Parking. They have a 2 story parking garage, and offer both valet, and self parking. This was more than enough parking for our attendees.

Catering. In the morning we had coffee stations and water. But no food. The coffee was constantly refreshed and was never out. Complete win. For lunch we had a BBQ style chicken, hamburger, hot dogs, vegi-burgers, salad(s), condiment station, and soda/water bottle stations. Everyone loved the lunch. This again is where you can run into trouble with a large event. You have to have good food. Good food is expensive, especially for this size crowd every dollar * 850 adds up quickly. On the tables we had water/candy stations for every 3 people. No that big-o-deal for the morning, but I was pleasantly surprised to see it refreshed twice for the day.

Banquets. Tables and Seating. The comfortable chairs we had fro this event, were amazing. I call them 8-Hour chairs. They’re captains chairs with arm rests, soft seating, adjustable swivel chars. For this reason alone – I recommend you use Scottsdale Resort and Conference Planning.

Sales Team. I worked with Kate M. and Marianna R. for my Sales and Meeting managers. (480)991-9000 I highly recommend you call and work with SRCC for your meeting/conference. And if you call them – please tell them Scott Cate with AZGroups recommended you! These two ladies were the keys to my successful event. They are both proactive to ask the right questions and foresee both failure and success. They know what’s going to work, and what isn’t. And if I disagree or push back – they are able to talk about it and come up with whatever is going to work best. I’m excited to start my next event planning with SRCC.

If you’re an attendee at one of my events, please get used to driving to SRCC, because we’ll be there again in the future :)

AZGroups User Group Cards Free from FreeBusinessCards.com

Scott Cate — Thu, 06 May 2010 01:13:00 GMT

Once every couple of years I remember FreeBusinessCards.com and order business cards. They print a VistaPrint.com advertisement on the back, but that is fine with me. I’m using the service, to print business cards for http://AZGroups.org. Expect to pay around $5 for shipping, and wait 2 or 3 weeks for your order, but hey, it can’t get any cheaper than that!

Oh, and FreeBusinessCards.com is the king of trying to upsell, so expect to say “No Thank You” about a dozen times before you can finally submit your order.

Here is the card that I just ordered.

Feedback on AZGroups Feedback Form

Scott Cate — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:42:00 GMT

Next Monday is the 7th Annual day of .net with Scott Guthrie. I’ve been doing this event for many years and this year (for the first time) I’ll be asking for a feedback / eval form to be turned in at the end of the day. In true community fashion, I would like to ask your feedback on my feedback form.

Please be constructive. I know that filling out forms seems silly on a one-by-one basis, but collectively the stats can really help, and I will personally read and evaluate each form, so it's a great way to give each person their own voice.

I’ve put hundreds of hours into getting this event off the ground, with the venue, sponsors, give-a-ways, etc. So to make it better next year, this is the form I’ve put together.

Am I missing anything? Should I add or remove anything? Please leave comments below.

Thank You!

VS2010 Launch Talk: What’s New?

Scott Cate — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:44:00 GMT

Here are my talking points for the Visual Studio Launch event today. I’m covering the “What’s New” talk. When I put this together, I didn’t want to just show a bunch of fancy new features that you may use someday. I really wanted to show Studio features that will make you more productive. Period. You should be able to leave the talk (or read this post) and start saving time instantly with your time in Visual Studio.

If you’re like me, you spend most of your time in Studio so every second counts. Each little tip/trick that you add to your bag of tricks is helpful, so in addition to just talking about some new keys/points/features of Studio 2010, I’ll also be throwing in several mini-production tips around keyboard shortcuts, debugging, and navigation.

As you know, the time on stage is limited and the key to being a good speaker is being able to roll with what’s happening with the audience. Agile Speaking :) So I may or may not be able to go over all of these, and there may be additional topics that come up that aren’t listed, but ... it’s my goal to stick as close as possible to this outline.

Multiple Monitor Support
Incremental Search, CTRL+i
Box Select, Multi Line Select, ALT+MouseSelect
Smart Tag from Keyboard, CTRL+.
New VS2010 Navigation, CTRL+,
Reference Highlights (Visual only)
Temporary Projects (Tools|Options|Projects|Save New)
Parallel Coding (Examples for .For and .ForEach)
Debugging (Conditional, Trace Points)
Intellitrace (Go back in time with the debugger)
Generate Usage (Class, Methods, Props, Fields, Types)
Find Usages, References, (F8)
Call Hierarchy
Sequence Diagrams
Assembly Dependency Diagram
Layer validation Diagram (Compiler v. Business Layers)

Based on time, I probably won’t get to do the last of these tips tricks, but I have them in my bag of tricks as filers. The idea here is to always make sure I have enough content prepared, but make sure the core concepts above are covered. So these additional tip/tricks may or may not make it into the 60 minutes.

Custom Search Results (Registry Hack, HKCU/Soft/MS/VS/10/Find )
Find Sibling Bracket/Parenthesis, CTRL+}
Navigation Forward and backward, CTRL+-
Clipboard Ring, CTRL+SHIFT+V
Find Box in Command Mode
Right Click or Context Menu Changes
Zoom The Editor from the CTRL+SHIFT+< and CTRL+SHIFT+>
Edit SLN and PROJ files inside Studio