I left DevConnections for the Orlando airport and when I got there had another hour and a half before my flight, so headed to the Red Carpet Club. I walk in and as I go to sit down I see Dr. Neil. As I got closer to where he was sitting, there was Michele Leroux Bustamante and Mark Miller. A half hour later, in comes Tim Huckaby. So we're all here with our laptops open, chatting and dare I say - gossiping. If you call talking about how cute someone's baby is "gossip", then I guess that would be the case.

 

I've been in Orlando at DevConnections for the past few days. I've been a little under the weather which has made it a little rough around the edges for me, but I'm surviving. While it was a bit of a challenge to present a full day workshop with a nasty chestcold, this was nothign compared to Kathleen Dollard who gave a Workflow workshop in the room next door with bronchitis. She knew she was sick but didn't know how sick until I dragged her to a clinic that night and discovered she had a high temperature and bronchitis. Poor thing. She's surviving and did talks today and has more tomorrow.

I met a young programmer named Scott Pio at the attendee party tonight who has been writing some great blog posts about being at DevConnections  on http://spoiledtechie.com/ -- the experience as well as the sessions he has attended. It's so fun to meet young developers who are just so ready to burst with their excitement about technology. It's his first conference and I think the first time he's been somewhere where the term "geek" is actually a complement! Definitely check out his blog and especially his posts about DevConnections!

While it's very hard to leave Vermont when we are having incredible weather (70 - 80 degree days with blue and sunny skies!) I am on my way to Orlando, FL for DevConnections.

Once again, there is a full track dedicated to Data Access. I'll kick it off with a full day of Entity Framework tomorrow. Monday is Microsoft day and I'm thrilled that there will be talks by Mike Flasko from the Astoria team and from Danny Simmons and Colin Meek of the Entity Frameowrk team.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we'll have two more full days with topics like from LINQ to SQL, Synch Services, ADO.NET Perfomance, Entity Framework, Data Sets and more. And top noch presenters like Dino Esposito, Don Keily, Kathleen Dollard, Cathi Gero and more!

Look for the Data Access track which is listed in both the Visual Studio and ASP Connections conferences.

I'll also be doing a session on Astoria Web Mashups in the ASP Connections conference. I was bummed that the current Astoria bits don't line up with Silverlight 2.0 so I can't do that demo any more, but instead I have put together a cool little demo combining Astoria with Popfly. As far as I know, it's the only implementation out there. The session is in one of the 60 minute slots so I'll just have to talk fast, par usual.

If you're at Connections, say hi!

The fall DevConnections is coming up in another 10 days (Nov 5-9) in Las vegas.

It looks like they will have about 5,000 attendees again, like last year which is amazing.

I will be doing a variety of talks.

One that i'm especially looking forward to will be teaming up with John Sudds from the Internet Explorer team to present on embedding Ink-Enabled Win Forms controls into ASP.NET 2.0 pages. This will be part of the Microsoft Day session for Mobile Connections. John brings a new level of expertise to the work I have done in this area and solved some problems I was never able to get around. John will be the demo god in this session and i get to do my favorite thing: Talk!

I will also be doing a talk about Annotating with Silverlight as part of the Mobile COnnections show. Don't let this fool you. Annotating in Silverlight, while best on a tabletpc, also works  nicely on regular pcs and on Macs - anywhere that you can run Silverlight. If you haven't seen the various test apps that I have deployed on the web, you can check them out here: the Step-by-Step series and the database persistence application.

In the ASPConnections show, I will be doing a session on ASP.NET DataBinding with LINQ which will explore many flavors of LINQ, not just LINQ to SQL.

And then there is the Data Access track in which I will be presenting and advanced talk on Entity Framework - Real World Entity Framework with a focus on multi-tier apps. John Papa will precede this talk with two intro type talks.

Lastly, I will be a presenting a post-conference 1/2 day (9am-12pm) workshop on guidance for accessing data in .NET 3.5. We now have ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and three ways to query data in Entity Framework. There will be a number of entity framework and LINQ to SQL talks during the main conference, so this session is aimed at comparing and contrasting them and providing guidance on when it makes sense to use each one.

There's still room to sign up! http://www.devconnections.com   

This is a great thing that DevConnections has been putting together for the past few conferences. There will be a separate luncheon area on one day for women attendees to get together and gab away. In the fall, we did it on the last day and everyone said they wished they had been able to meet each other at the start of the conference, not just as they were getting ready to go home.

So that has been accommodated. I'm looking forward to it yet again.

It will be on Monday in the Crystal Ballroom. There is no formal presentation, it is purely social.

The past two days at DevConnex have been busy indeed. I got a chance to write about them while waiting for my midnight flight home. Read more...

[A DevLife post]

My first two days at DevConnections have been busy. Read all about it here. Now I need to get back to making sure tomorrow's talks will be great.

[A DevLife post]

DevConnections is this coming up this week! Here are some last minute things to know about.

The registration is unbelievable this year. There are nearly 5000 people registered for the combined shows. More stats: 190 speakers and held in a convention center that is literally one million square feet!

1. If it's not too late, don't forget to vote before you leave! Check with your town clerk ASAP.
2. There's a Women in I.T. Lunch on Thursday for attendees and speakers. Space is limited, so sign up for it when you register.
3. Bring your suit! You may find some time to enjoy the beach and big pools at the Mandalay before, between or after sessions. The weather is looking great - low 80's and sunny during the days.
4. Bring comfortable shoes since you'll be doing a lot of walking. Not that I've ever seen a programmer in high heels.
5. Evening activities
   1. Monday Keynotes 6:30 - 8:30pm
   2. Tuesday 5-7pm reception in Expo Hall
   3. Tuesday 7:15 - 9:15 Microsoft Unplugged for attendees of ASP.NET/SQL/Mobile Connections (w/pizza & beer)
6. If you've never been to Las Vegas, get a pass for the local 2 decker bus that drives all the way up the strip and back. The strip itself is 4 miles and ends at the Stratosphere, but the bus goes past that and through the old downtown, too.  It's $5 for a whole day (just pay for the pass as you get on the bus) and seeing the strip at night is a must. I only did this for the first time last year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Strip
7. I've never done it but have constantly heard that the last minute tickets to the Vegas shows are the way to go as they are heavily discounted. I think the deal is just walk up to the ticket window shortly before the show. Something to consider. 

DevConnections (combination of 6 conferences: ASP, Visual Studio, Mobile, Sharepoint, SQL Server and Office) is only a few weeks away. I'm going out to present 2 sessions for ASP Connections (Managing & Deploying ASP.NET 2 Sites and Asynchronous ASP.NET), one for Mobile Connections (an advanced Ink on the Web talk) and a 1/2 day post-conference workshop on Advanced ADO.NET 2.0.

I'm sorely disappointed that my flight schedule is having me miss the Monday night keynotes, especially this one that Scott Guthrie and Brian Goldfarb are giving: Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and ASP.NET AJAX.

There is going to be so much going on at DevConnections, including some Microsoft "hear it for the first time in the U.S.") announcements from Microsoft. I hope I don't end up holing myself up in my room trying to perfect my talks again (so that means they need to be perfect before I go to the airport! ). Of course, there's always the lure of the gambling tables and the girlie shows (just kidding - not really interested in either), but still Vegas is certainly a fun place to be when you do want to take a little break from the geek fest!

Now that all three of my DevConnections powerpoint decks and demos are online, I just wanted to have one post for linking to them all.

If you were an attendee of ASPConnections or Visual Studio Connections, you should have password access to this stuff on the DevConnections site.

Otherwise, they are on the presentations page of my pwn website.

On that page, the talk are listed alphabetically. Look for:

1. Advanced Data Access Patterns with ADO.NET 2.0
2. Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That don't really have to be)
3. Using WSE 3.0 Today to Prepare for WCF Tomorrow

On that last one, note that I have also recorded the demos associated with that talk. Check this post for links to those videos.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

The TabletPC Hands on Labs were very popular at DevConnections. I think I heard that over 600 people did the labs. Upon completion of the HOLs, the attendees were given a bright orange Mobile PC baseball cap. Throughout the conference, 3 attendees wearing those hats won a new Toshiba M400 Mobile PC (you know, a tablet). Lora Heiny has a lot of great pictures of the thrilled recipients here.

You can imagine that every time attendees were in one big room, for example at breakfast or lunch, it was a sea of orange, as they were all wearing the hats in hopes of winning the M400.

But even after all of the M400's had been given away, people were still wearing the hats. They were kind of cool. At the closing session, where perhaps 1,000 of the attendees were all seated, I took this short video to show the sea of orange hats.

It is only 12 seconds long. The AVI version from my camera is 25 MB and the choppier WMV file is only 2.9 megs.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

From Damir Tomicic's weblog: Great offering for INETA User Groups in Europe - DevConnections, 24-27 April 2006, Nice, France, with ScottGu, Dino Esposito, Michele Bustamante, Juwal Lowy, Prashant Sridharan, Hans Verbeeck and many more: "...Hi Damir,  I would like your help getting the message out to INETA members in Europe that we are offering them a discount to the event in Nice and I will give you a discount code to offer..." You are INETA UG leader or INETA UG member? You would like to attend the conference and get INETA discout? Contact me at: Damir Tomicic@ineta.org

---

Now in its sixth successful year in the US, Developer Connections now makes it s European debut on the French Riviera. Meet Microsoft developers and DBAs from around the world and build a network of peers to stay in touch with.  Unwind and relax with you colleagues in Europe on the French Riviera while obtaining the most relevant technical advice from Microsoft's ASP.NET, Visual Studio and SQL Server teams and training with Microsoft architects and world-renowned developers and DBAs delivering over 80 in depth, no hype sessions!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

At Scott Guthrie's DevConnections keynote, Petyo Ivanov (from telerik) noticed that Scott was using CSS for the page design in his Atlas demos. Petyo asked him about it later at the Microsoft Unplugged event. [read more ...]

[A DevLive post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I just returned from another fantastically successful DevConnections conference. There were so many attendees, the weather was great and just so many fantastic speakers and sessions. In addition to what you can learn in sessions, just being there provides a lot of opportunities to learn even while wandering the halls. Here are seven things I learned in between sessions..... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Posted from BLInk!

Though it was 70 degrees on Friday, it is back to the 30's here in Vermont so the warm weather is just one more thing I am looking forward to as I take off for Florida shortly (shortly as in I should be putting my bags in the car, not sitting in front of the computer.)

This will be my 4th time speaking at DevConnections. Paul Litwin teased me last year because I was sad that I was missing all of the awesome sessions - since I was spending most of my time preparing my sessions. The pre-con sessions are running today. Tomorrow (Monday) is Microsoft Day and I could very happily sit in sessions all day long. We'll see how that goes. Tuesday and Wednesday are the "third party" speakers.

I just love DevConnections as a speaker and as an attendee (I was that at one time) and yes, it would be great if I could somehow make copies of myself so that I could be in many rooms at once attending every talk and at the same time focus on my own sessions so that I can do the best job presenting that I can.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

DevConnections is coming in a little over a week. Hooray! At Tuesday's lunch, there will be a bunch of tables reserved for women so that we can all get together and meet - attendees and the women speakers. That will be fun.

I remember when I first started going to conferences, I was so excited to see other women programmers that I just wanted to meet every chick that I saw in the hallways. This will be much more subtle and less embarrassing way to achieve that!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Well, not quite Paris, but how about the beautiful locale of Nice France?

This year, DevConnections is expanding it's venues to Europe with it's first conference in Nice form April 24 - 27th.

Many of the speakers that you are used to seeing at DevConnections in the U.S. will be there.

I won't be there, but will be doing four sessions at DevConnections in Orlando April 2- 6th.

See you in Orlando!

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I will be doing 4 [new] talks at Connections this spring. I was happy to learn that both Alex Homer and Dave Sussman will be also there this time. These guys are in the U.K. so they can't always make it. Now to find a great sushi restaurant and see what other squiggly things I can talk Dave into trying!

Posted from BLInk!

Adnan Masood is a lucky guy - an attendee at DevConnections who fully took advantage of his time there. He not only attended a great variety of sessions, but documented his experience very well. Lucky for me since I spent most of my time there fine tuning my sessions. You, too, can experience DevConnections ...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have sent all of the revised powerpoints from my 4 sessions at DevConnections to be put up on the Connections website. If you were an attendee, there is information in your book on how to download these. I will be packing up the demos and getting them off to the conference organizers as well. This won't be for a few more days though.

Posted from BLInk!

If you are doing evals for sessions at DevConnections or any conference, comments are really helpful in addition to filling out the checkboxes. If you liked our talk - what did you like about it? If you didn't like it - it is extremely useful to know why! The same goes for the other questions that are asked, such as about presentation skills. The goal is to always improve... as it benefits everyone ...  so metadata (even if it is not love) is very helpful!

Posted from BLInk!

Dan Appelman and I had a fun time talking about casing with some C# developers over lunch at DevConnections yesterday... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

Sushi with Charles Petzold, Kathleen Dollard and Esther Schindler ... [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

Shirley & Gary Brothers (who run DevConnections) invited the speakers up their amazing suite in "THE Hotel" at Mandalay Bay for cocktail hour this evening. Here are some photos... We are such good and reponsible speakers though and had to leave so we could work on our talks!

Evjens

 
Active Nick, Brian Noyes, Paul Litwin, Juval Lowy, Robert Green

Kathleen Dollard, Dan Appelman

 
Charles Petzold, Kate Gregory, Torsten Grabs, Active Nick

Robert Green, Shirley Brothers, Bernard Wong, Ken Getz

 
Our Wine Steward!

In my Sql Query Notification session, I had an odd problem. My SqlCacheDependency demo did not receive it's invalidation. This happened when I set it up in code and also when I set it up in <%Cache> directive on the page. This is a demo that I have done many times in the past year so I was not only mystified, but a little heartbroken.

The only thing that was different was that I had run a SqlRequestNotification demo right before it. This demo listens for the notification on a separate thread.

Now playing with it some more, I see that after I end the first demo (SqlRequestNotification) and start up the SqlCacheDependency... when I change the data, I hit the event handler in the first demo. So that was still hanging around.

What I think is happening is that even when I end the demo and close the page, the file based web server is still there (I can even see it in my system tray right now). The app was still alive and the listener was still listening. So now I am going to have to dig further into SqlRequestNotification in a real scenario even though it is not something I think I will not use frequently. If it wasn't the web app, it is likely that in this non-best practices demo code, I am not disposing enough things (though the listener's main task is within a using statement) or something along those lines. Most importantly, it is not a likely scenario to run these two things back to back and therefore this is an unusual problem that I encountered.

I couldn't really take the time to think this through in the session and probably wouldn't have come to this conclusion under the small pressure of the clock ticking and those expectant faces in the audience. So I just had to go with "I promise you this works! This is the right code for you to use..." and move on to wrap up the session.

Posted from BLInk!

Really ... I wish I could just go to all of the amazing sessions around me. So many things I haven't explored yet in VS2005 that I could  be learning!! Though of course, I'm thrilled to be able to share what I have learned by giving the sessions. So I will just keep working at making my own sessions as good as I can.

I did sit in on a bit of Kathleen Dollard's "Polishing your Winforms Apps" session this morning. There is just so much to learn...

There are a LOT of attendees here this year. I overheard someone (not official) say something like 3000. That would be amazing. I think it was 1600 last year.

Posted from BLInk!

WSE 3.0 is now fully released. Thanks to Mark, Sidd (the two I worked with most closely) and the whole team for all the work on this great product that I love to love. Hmm, I wonder if my session on Thursday will be the first presentation to use the full release of wse 3.0? Too bad it's only a one hour slot...

Posted from BLInk!

They are both sessions that I am doing tomorrow.

Customizing your Debugging Experience at 8am (gotta talk to Carl about those 8am sessions) and then my favorite ado.net 2.0 topic at 2pm. Tomorrow. Vegas. DevConnections.

Posted from BLInk!

Where better to talk about the MenuStrip, ToolStrip and other cool new WinForms controls but in Las Vegas. Jessica Fosler who owns these pieces of VS2005 WinForms is presenting today. Unfortunately, I'm now up in my room prepping my own 4 sessions but definitely enjoyed meeting her this morning in the speaker room. Charles Petzold was there who's new Programming Windows Forms (for VS2005) book has an entire chapter called "Cruising the Strip" in his book about these tools. Being in Las Vegas had us all giggling over the possibilities of jokes Jessica could make in her presentation. Hopefully, we didn't corrupt her too much.

Posted from BLInk!

Typical - must leave for the airport in 1/2 hour and have been doing client work all morning. Still have to pack (thank goodness I washed all my clothes already). Hopefully my travelling duds aren't too wrinkly!

I am so looking forward to another DevConnections conference and then a vacation in Zion National Park and Bryce Canyone with my husband!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

If you are going to DevConnections and plan to get outdoors:

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm reviewing my demo that I built for caching data at the middle tier that is part of my query notification session at DevConnections next week - and had a funny moment. I wrote this a while ago and am just revisiting it and felt pretty impressed with myself when I saw how it worked. It's a little complex but now it seems simple. I used what I learned watching Pablo Castro's DAT320 session that I have on my TechEd 2005 video as the basis for this. I watched him do it in the video and translated the concepts into a simpler version using VB. I had to deal with some differences in the way static variables interact with shared methods in VB that had me pretty confused (as I'm not so adept with that)  - very different than how Pablo did it in his C# demo. But I did get it working and now have a big satisfied grin on my face. And next week I get to share (show it off) with attendees of my session.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This is an attempt to alleviate a problem that I have had a few times when presenting. Even though I check the time constantly during my talk (and will be using a travel clock from now on rather than my watch - great tip from Kate Gregory and also they were provided for us at TechEd), I have, on a few occasions gotten so involved with the talk that I couldn't even remember what time it started or when it was supposed to end. Stupid, right? Hey, let's just call it "passion"! You should be thrilled that I am so enthralled, eh?

Well, since I am aware that this is a problem, rather than just saying "well, that's silly, I can remember next time" I have a better plan of attack!

 No, they are not glued to my laptop. Just laid out on top of it for the photo op.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

yippee!!

What this means of course is that I will be making some last minute changes to my presentation computer 1 day before I do my What's new in WSE3.0 session at DevConnections. Hey, this is bleeding edge, right? I am willing to take the risk...

Currently I am running VS2005 RTM with the October CTP bits and having only one issue (which may or may not be related to the out of synch bits).

What is that issue you ask? I can't seem to do encryption and signing when my webservice is on IIS. When it's on the development web server, all is well. When I move it to the webservice, I get some wierd problem regarding "decryption" from the Cryptography API. ("Error occurred while decoding OAEP padding".)  I have given all necessary permissions to the ASPNET account for reading the web server certificate and even as a last straw, gave "Everyone" full access to it. Hopefully, I will either get an answer to my question about this problem on the newsgroup or it will mysteriously disappear when I install the RTM bits. Or... I will have to skip that particular demo :-(, but since that session is in one of the 60 minute slots, that might be a good thing.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

One of the things that I am looking forward to at DevConnections in Las Vegas (besides the conference, besides the sessions and besides to my return to Coral Reef where I Kathleen Dollard and I ate 3 nights in a row last year...) is seeing my friends that I only see from one conference to the next. Although I'll definitely miss Alex Homer and Dave Sussman (and didn't see them in October as i didn't go to the MVP Summit), there is a whole host of friends and people who I admire and really enjoy a chance to chat with, who are speaking at Connections (too many to list) that really make these events extra special. Take a look at the speaker list for VSConnections, ASPConnections, SQLConnections and the special 20th anniv C++ Connections (which is bringing together the C++ elite - many academics as well as practioners).

This is of course only enhanced by all of the conference attendees as well. Last spring, I had a great time hanging out at the INETA booth in the exhibitors hall and helping people find user groups in their area or even encouraging them to start one! Getting a chance to "expand" on the sessions is also great - there is only so much you can cover in the time frame of the sessions - and it's fun when people are interested in digging further into a particular area over lunch or a beer or just hanging out in the common area.

When it gets close to time to leave home, leave my beautiful little state, leave my pets and hubby behind, I start getting sad and wondering why I have chosen to do this. But as soon as I arrive at the conference hotel and am immersed in the buzz of so many people with the same passions as myself, there is no question as to why I am there.

One new entry to the Connections conference is Charles Petzold who is going to talk about ink as a new medium for developing applications. You should have seen Charles doing his tablet pc talk last winter at Windows Anywhere. It was a rare opportunity to actually watch him think as he demonstrated how one experiment led him to another and then another. I sure hope his talk is not scheduled at the same time as any of mine.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

As I leave for DevConnections in less than a week, it's time to put my head into Las Vegas now, though it's difficult to extract it from South Africa. DevConnections is going to be awesome. I already love this conference but with the addition of having a launch party, it will be that much more fun. Tuesday is all Microsoft sessions and then Wednesday and Thursday are the rest of us. I have two talks on Wed and two on Thursday - lots of different topics as usual!

Wed 8am: Customizing the Debugging Experience in Visual Studio 2005 with New Debugger Attributes
Wed 2pm: Leveraging SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications in ASP.NET 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0

Thur 8am: Deciphering C# for VB Developers
Thur 2:45pm: A Look at WSE 3.0

Another event that will make this trip special for me is that my husband is coming out and we will be going to the desert for five days afterwards. I will be returning to the beautiful Zion National Park and then we may check out Bryce Canyon, the Hoover Dam and some other sites as well.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org