Just a public thanks to Daren May of EMC for the fantastic presentation on Software Factories yesterday.  I thought Daren covered a lot of ground in a very short time but was able to convey why software factories are valuable and how to get started using them.  He also made me wish I had a British accent so I could sound more intelligent.  I will be posting his presentation here later today.

A couple of links of interest from the session.

• You should visit the Microsoft Patterns and Practices site if you are interested in adopting one of the Software Factories built by Microsoft or if you want to create your own factory.  You might also poke around and see some of the other guidance and application building blocks produced by Patterns and Practices while you are browsing their site. 
• If you want to play with the Live Mapping functionality you should try out the Interactive SDK.  The GeoRSS feeds that I used during the session were found on MIT's site.
• WebGuide is the "Slingbox" functionality for Windows Media Center/Vista Ultimate/Vista Home Premium/Windows Home Server that I showed.
• I also showed how to use Expression Media Encoder with the publishing add-in to publish my content directly to Silverlight Streaming and put on my blog using the iframe method.  The video on my blog was encoded with Windows Media Encoder using the screen capture functionality (note that you have to install the 32 bit version to get the screen capture functionality if you are using a 64 bit operating system). 
• Finally, I recommended you take a look at Windows Home Server.  Might be a nice gift for your spouse this holiday season.

Again, thanks to all that made it out yesterday for the session.

UPDATE:

• The Webguide website mentioned above was down the last couple of days - it appears to be up now.
• Daren passed along his materials from the presentation, the following links will take you to:
  • SmartClientDevelopmentSolution1.zip – this is the SCSF solution which has the tree in the left hand nav
  • EMC.Guidance.Data.zip – contains the guidance package that builds the enum from the database
  • EMC.Bugz.Server.zip – a Repository project and web service application that surfaces the bugs and projects for the bugz app
  • MSDNDemo.zip – the guidance package I created during the demo that includes the customized wizard.
  • Software Factories.zip – the presentation (with the fixed link)