Kate Gregory has probably forgotten more coding tricks than I have ever learned. That means that she likes her Visual Studio with meat and potatoes. With the new extensibility model in Visual Studio 2010,  Visual Studio can now be the primary source or protein in your IDE diet. In this episode Kate tells us how to add a little hot sauce using Visual Studio extensions.

Kate is in her fourth decade of being paid to program. Her firm, Gregory Consulting Limited, is based in rural Ontario and helps clients adopt new technologies and adjust to the changing business environment. Current work makes heavy use of .NET and Visual C++ along with SharePoint and both web and client development, especially for Windows 7. Managing, mentoring, technical writing, and technical speaking occupy much of her time, but she still writes code every week.

Kate is the author of over a dozen books and speaks at DevTeach, TechEd (USA, Europe, Africa), and TechDays, among others. Kate is a C++ MVP, a founding sponsor of the Toronto .NET Users Group, the founder of the East of Toronto .NET Users group, a member of the INETA speakers bureau, and a member of adjunct faculty at Trent University in Peterborough. Since January 2002 she has been Microsoft Regional Director for Toronto and since January 2004 she has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional designation for Visual C++. In June 2005 she won the Regional Director of the year award.

Show Links

• Kate’s Blog
• Kate’s Pluralsight course, Customizing and Extending Visual Studio 2010
• Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX)
• Visual Studio SDK
• Visual Studio Gallery
• The Code Gallery

  Listen Now! [34:20]

Steve Andrews is all about community and helps us understand what it really means to be a part of the technical developer meatspace. Steve has gone beyond the occasional Code Camp and has actually presented talks at 52 community events in one year. Also, Steve is the founder of Geek Give, an occasional community of geeks working with Habitat for Humanity to help make the world a better place. And Steve happens to be on the road at the moment, making his way across the U.S. and keeping us all posted at The Geek Road Trip. Bottom line: What a great visit and great story.

Bio: Steve Andrews is an independent consultant, INETA speaker, and Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM. He has been working in technology for over ten years focusing on custom application development and Application Lifecycle Management. Steve is also Microsoft and IBM certified and a community fanatic having led sessions at nearly 100 community events across North America. When he’s not developing software solutions or engaging with the community about software technology, Steve is a closet singer and songwriter and plays the guitar and keys. Occasionally, Steve even gets to sleep. Occasionally.

Steve’s Links:

• Geek Give
• Geek Road Trip
• Steve’s Blog

What’s all this OData talk? Find out in this episode with Matt Milner, who helps us understand this new way of publishing and consuming data on the web. Matt also tells us about a project he recently did for Pluralsight in which he published his first “real” OData feed.

Matt Milner

Matt is a member of the technical staff at Pluralsight, where he focuses on connected systems technologies (WCF, Windows WF, BizTalk, "Dublin" and the Azure Services Platform). Matt is also an independent consultant specializing in Microsoft .NET application design and development. As a writer Matt has contributed to several journals and magazines including MSDN Magazine where he currently authors the workflow content for the Foundations column. Matt regularly shares his love of technology by speaking at local, regional and international conferences such as Tech Ed. Microsoft has recognized Matt as an MVP for his community contributions around connected systems technology.

Show Links

• OData.org
• The Pluralsight OData Feed
• OData Q&A on MSDN
• Online OData Course
• @milnertweet – Matt on Twitter

In this episode, we take a look at Scrum by speaking with Ken Schwaber. In this open and frank conversation, Ken and I discuss several things including:

• The founding and future of Scrum.org
• Ken’s departure from the Scrum Alliance
• The Professional Scrum Developer program from Scrum.org and Microsoft
• Some explicit advice for Scrum teams
• The prevelance of ScrumBut implementations

Ken answers some very direct questions on criticisms of Scrum, the CSM program, and the future of the Scrum. This is a fantastic episode and includes an interview with a graduating class of Professional Scrum Developer Trainers.

Show Links

• The Scrum Guide
• About Scrum.org
• The Professional Scrum Developer Program
• Sam Guckenheimer and Ken Schwaber discuss the PSD program (video)
• Pluralsight’s Professional Scrum Developer course