Spring has arrived in Vermont, but I'm leaving.

This afternoon I start my overnight journey to Stockholm where I will be participating in the Developer Summit 08 and have been working with Patrik Lowendahl and Mats Rydin who are coordinating. Patrik's company, Cornerstone is instrumental in this conference and everyone there has been wonderful in helping get me prepared.

I'm really looking forward to it. Stockholm is an incredibily beautiful city with lots of history and I've never been there before. Plus there's a great line up of speakers some who are friends that I always look forward to hanging out with and others who I am looking forward to finally meeting! And David Chappell, who is coming by way of Eilat Israel (a 2 day trip) from TechEd, is giving the keynote!

When I have asked anyone if they want me to bring anything back for them, they all have said "oh, yes, a beautiful Swede!" Well at least my single friends have made that request.

Swedish is not among the languages I ahve ever studied so I was happy to find some really useful lessons on Survival Phrases.com. I downloaded a bunch to my iPod to listen to again if I need them. They don't just say how to say a phrase but when it's appropriate as well as providing other background.

I still needed to see what these words look like so a simple list like Basic Swedish Phrases provides good backup. This won't enable me to give my presentatino in Swedish, but at least I can be polite when I have to find the toaletten.

I'll be doing an Advanced EF Session, a talk on Silverlight Annotation and on Friday a full day workshop on Entity Framework including some Hands on Labs. It should be a blast.

And even with my dreadful lschedule right now, I'd be a fool not to at least poke around Stockholm so I am flying home on Sunday (6am flight -uggh) and will have Saturday off to be a tourist.

Over the next few months I'll be presenting at 4 conferences in Stockholm, Orlando, Toronto then again Orlando. I'll be doing talks on Entity Framework, Astoria, Silverlight and Data Access in general. Details and links are here...

[A New DevLife Post]

 

I found out recently that I will be giving not one, but two sessions related to Entity Framework at TechEd 2008 US Developer.

Advanced Entity Framework: Entity Data Model in the Enterprise

and

.NET 3.5 Data Access Guidance

I'm sure there will be plenty of other ADO.NET/EF/Data Services sessions there as well.

Since we'll be nearing the end of "the first half of 2008" which is the period of time in which E.F. is supposed to be released, this could end up being E.F.s coming out party. But, it's only early June, and there will be 3 more weeks in the first half of 2008 after that, so it's hard to call it at the moment.

I am very excited about this!!

I will be presenting 2 sessions and a full-day workshop at the Developer Summit 2008 in Stockholm April 9-11.

The workshop is "Entity Framework 0-60"  and the sessions are Entity Framework in the Enterprise and Silverlight Annotation.

Patrik Lowendahl, one of the organizers, tells me that Stockholm is really lovely in the Spring!

It also means I get to see my buddy Christian Weyer and meet Tess Ferrandez (the ASP.NET goddess at Microsoft Support), Jimmy Nillson and a bunch of people I've heard about for a long time and not had the chance to meet.

In case you can't get to Sweden, I"ll be doing the full-day workshop at DevConnections in Orlando in late April.

Although these have been available to conference attendees, I have uploaded the presentations slides from the following sessions to the TALKS page of my website:

• ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview
• Real World Entity Framework (multi-tier issues and patterns)
• ADO.NET 3.5 Data Access Guidance
• Access RESTful DataServices in the Cloud (aka Astoria/ADO.NET DataServices)
• Databinding in ASP.NET with LINQ
• Inking in ASP.NET, AJAX and IE7
• Annotating and Drawing with Ink in Silverlight

 

This will be DevTeach's first non-Montreal based conference. I've never been to Vancouver and am looking forward to seeing it.

As always prior to a multi-day trip, I have a little trepidation.

We're just getting beautiful snow and I want to ski. My parents (who live 5 hours away in the Binghamton NY area) just had a litter of 17 puppies and could sure use my help. And as always, it's hard to leave Tasha and Daisy who's days are quite numbered.

I also believe this is the first conference I've attended where summer clothes won't suffice. I hate having to pack a bag that I can't carry on, but it might make my life a little easier. But it's not cold enough for snow at least so I don't have to bring *that* much.

Here's the DevTeach website....www.devteach.com

There's something about a conference that inadvertantly makes me go dark.

I did 4 sessions and a workshop at DevConnections last week.

In the weeks leading up to to this, I was heads down finalizing my presentations. That includes mucking with the PowerPoint's and fine-tuning demos and stuffing as much into my brain about the various technologies as I can.

While I was at the conference I spent a lot of my time in my room continuing on this path. The speaker room is a bad place for me to work - too many people I want to talk to!  I did get to attend a number of Entity Framework and Astoria sessions on Tuesday, but that's all that I saw in the entire show.

Because I had disparate topics (tablet pc, silverlight, entity framework and LINQ), I needed to really clear my head of the previous topic and wrap my head around the next one.

During this time I did check emails, but I didn't check my office voice mail, I didn't do any client work and I managed to write only one blog post. I even got to go out to dinner one night, but most of the rest were working in my room.

(I'm not complaining, by the way, just sharing what it's like...)

At the end of the week, I went to Colorado for a few days to hang out with my sister & brother in law. I checked email but again, no work, no blogging.

Not only did I not blog, but I wasn't reading blogs. I had missed the DevCOnnex keynotes and no idea that the VS2008 RTM date was finally announced, that live services came out of beta and more was going on.

I got home Monday afternoon, spent two hours at my house then got back in the car for the VTdotNET user group meeting (another blog I need to write). Since it was the birthday of our illustrious speaker, Russ Fustino, we went out and I got home at about 11:00pm.

Tuesday I finally got to do some client work for the first time in about 3 weeks! I have a huge list of things to do, but topping that list were a host of things one of my client's has been patiently waiting for.

It still amazes me the impact that conference speaking has on my routine. I am hoping to get my head above water by the end of this week. I also am bummed that I haven't had any exercise since before I headed to the conference. I had high hopes and brought my swimsuit, sneakers and other related clothes with me, but they never got touched!

So I have LOTS to blog about and so many people awaiting so many things from me. I will just be getting through it all one step at a time...

 

Okay, I lied. I thought I was staying home all summer, but it turns out that the Greater Lansing User Group had a request in to INETA and it just so happens that their July meeting date falls the same week as the famous Ann Arbor Art Fair that I have always wanted to go to. So, I will be doing an INETA event on Thursday, July 19th in Lansing and as long as I'm going there, I will speak on the previous night at the GANG (Detroit) User Group.

Thanks especially to Bill Wagner and Darrell Hawley for their help in coordinating. Darrell runs the user group in Ann Arbor but their meeting date is weeks before.

I'll be doing a session on the ADO.NET Entity Framework at both groups.

My Entity Framework presentation at DevTeach was in the last slot of the conference. It was scheduled in the theater which looks like something out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Some of the speakers were referring to it as the muppet theater.

About 5 minutes into my presentation, we were informed that there was a snafu with the hotel and they had scheduled a dress-up cocktail party in the theater. So we had to pick up and move to the ballroom on the other end of the conference center. No worries. Except that when we arrived, there was no projector or screen.

So, while the IT guys from DMIB (thank you thank you!!) set up a projector and screen for me, I just stood up and started talking about the Entity Framework for about 10 minutes until I had the use of my slides and demos again.

I wasn't too phased by this since I could easily sit in a bar with geeks and talk about this stuff for hours with out the aid of a computer. Also I had a VERY great audience of attendees who were totally understanding! Thanks to you, also.

I have posted the demos and a revised Powerpoint for the ADO.NET Entity Framework presentation to the DevTeach site for attendees and to my own website at www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx for others. I have run these demos in the March CTP of Orcas.

Yesterday, I presented a session at DevTeach called Hacking ClickOnce. I have lived the web based deployment pain for many years and finally found success with ClickOnce after I worked out some unsupported scenarios with ClickOnce. I wrote about this in an article in CoDe Magazine's Nov/Dec 2006 issue called Real World ClickOnce. I then decided to turn my lessons into a talk for DevTeach.

At the end of March, I got a new laptop that has Vista on it and have been using it for presenting ever since. Unfortunately, I discovered an unsurmountable problem with one of my hacks when trying to emulate deploying apps via IIS7 (it is locked down much more tightly than IIS6, even when using the "classic .net" app pool) on the Vista machine. But since my hacks work perfectly well in IIS6 and that is still the current web server technology for Windows, I went forward with my presentation; working around the IIS7 issues because the lessons are still totally valid.

It was definitely a little frustrating but hopefully worth the effort.

I have posted an updated version of the Powerpoint along with the demos onto the DevTeach site for attendees as well as on my TALKS page for others to check out.

On Wednesday, I presented a session on Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET 2.0 Developers. The purpose of this talk is to introduce programmers to the new async features for ASP.NET 2.0 (Async Pages, Asyn Tasks, Event Based Async Web Services, Async DataBinding and when there is time a little pet feature of mine: PostCache Substituion). These are some simple functions that programmers can use to go after the "low hanging fruit"

Since I have modified the powerpoint for this talk, I put a newer version on the DevTeach site for attendees and also uploaded the newer version to my TALKS page on my own website.

The demos are also zipped up and on my website and the DevTeach website.

There are dreams that are common for people; the one where you are flying, the one where you suddenly realize you have no clothes on and the one where you walk into college or high school class and there is a big test and you realize you haven't been to any classes all year.

Since I've been speaking at conferences, the last one of those has shifted, not once but twice.

I have often dreamt that I walked into a room to do a conference session and realized I hadn't even prepared it!

Last night I dreamt that I gave a new talk at a user group and was about to give it again about 1/2 hour later. I thought the talk had gone really well. While I was setting up to do the 2nd iteration of the talk, I asked someone (I think it was Dave Noderer) how he thought the first talk went. "Okay," he told me, "but I think it would have been nice if you had done some demos."

Luckily something woke me up from my sleep while I was trying to figure out how I was going to solve this problem with only about 10 minutes before the session started.

I do actually have a talk that is totally codeless; it is a session that explains some basic security concepts. But in this dream, I was doing a talk on ADO.NET, so no code demos probably wasn't such a good thing.

I have posted the powerpoints and demos from my four talks at DevConnections last week.

They are all on http://www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx.

Each session is listed alphabetically. At the end of the session description you will find a link for the PowerPoint deck and for the zip file with the demos.

The four sessions I just posted are:

• Advanced ADO.NET 2.0 (3 hour post-conf workshop)
• Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET Developers
• Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Applications and Web Services
• Persisting Ink on the Web
  

Torn between wanting to just get 'er done and wanting to have a complete comprehension of everything that is going on under the covers? That's the line I have to constantly wrangle with when giving conference presentations and it's truly hard to please everyone, though I do know who I'm aiming for. Read more...

[A DevLife post]

After I warm up by speaking at my local user group tonight (Vermont.NET) about Asynchronous ASP.NET 2.0, I am taking the proverbial show on the road and will be presenting this same session in Cleveland tomorrow night (9/12), then my session called “5 Supposedly Scary things about .NET” in Findlay on Wednesday (9/13) and I wrap up in Dayton on Thursday night (9/14) doing a talk that explains some of the security fundamentals that anyone getting ready to do any flavor of Web Services Security (WSE, WCF (aka Indigo), or even non-Microsoft platforms) should have under their belt. The last talk is all concept (eg: what the heck is a digital certificate, what is encryption, what is signing) and no code, but pretty powerful, especially for people who don't know a lot about security and are daunted by all of these mysterious crypto tools.

I don't think I have ever been to Ohio - except for driving through it on a road trip to Colorado nearly 10 years ago.

You can see my full schedule here.

You can see the schedule of all INETA sponsored events here.

Yo yo yo! Chickity check it out. www.devreach.com and I'll be there! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I had a blast presenting in NYC Thursday night on ADO.NET 2.0 Query Notifications. It was also a great whirlwind trip to my old stomping grounds where I lived for my first eight years out of college. I did a little of everything...subway, taxis, Museum of Modern Art, falafels in Union Square, the farmer's market in Union Square, walking through the "new & improved" Times Square, an incredible meal at a French restaurant in Chelsea, Penn Station, NYC bagels.... Stephen Forte and Andrew Brust were great hosts!

It was my first visit to the microsoft offices up on 6th Ave. Last time I was there they were on 50th and 8th, in the same building where I happened to work at N.W. Ayer in the late 80's. Thanks to the receptionist there for allowing me a little reprieve and internet access (and a cookie or two) prior to the user group meeting.

I have updated my Query Notification samples where I was [accidentally] overdoing it with the unecessary VB Static to cache my datatable rather than the simpler VB Shared. Although my samples worked perfectly well, they were not as efficient as they could have been. Thanks again to Andrew for pointing this out when hundreds of developers before him have either not noticed or just not bothered to mention it. (Read more about that as well as my recent (somewhat aggravating) education on VB Static over here.)

The deck and samples are on my TALKS page of my website. Scroll down to "Leveraging Query Notifications ...."

I had a great time speaking at the Western Mass .NET group last night (thanks INETA!)

THe group meets sometimes in Northampton and sometimes in Easthampton, Mass. Northampton is a very hip small city replete with coffee houses where the groovy people hang out and vehicles roaming the streets with kayaks on them (sounds like where I live!) I was lucky to stay in a beautiful historic hotel ,Hotel Northampton, in downtown northampton (ask for the corporate rate to get an affordable way to stay there).

Last night's meeting was at the Atalasoft offices. Atalasoft makes imaging software and .NET components (eg the DotImage toolkit). Imaging is pretty complex, especially over the web, (they have windows and web components) and they have some insanely bright people working there. The office is in a huge old mill building called Eastworks in Easthampton. Part of the building's past was as home of Stanley products (you know, door locks etc). Now it is home to lots of art studios, cool shops and office space. It's very Tribeca (NYC) and I think it's brilliant for communities to leverage these old buildings rather than knocking them down and spending gazillions to build new ones. Outside of Burlington, in Winooski, there are a lot of historic old mill buildings along the Winooski River. Some of the history is not great as it involved child labor etc in the turn of the century. But the buildings are really gorgeous and now house all types of creative companies.

I presented on many of the new asynchronous features in ASP.NET 2.0. I couldn't do this without showoing client side callbacks, which, prior to Ajax/Atlas were a huge improvement over trying to do xmlhttp yourself. But now, with the 8 steps I laid out to set it up, seems a little embarrassing to show (since there are now easier and more sophisticated alternatives). Still, it's there, and it was interesting learning how to use it and since there were plenty of peole there who hadn't used any of these types of features (ajax, etc), it was a great eye opener.

The beauty of all of these tools though is that they enable a lot more people to leverage asynchronous processing without having to become gurus with threading and delegates. There were people there who are very comfortable and knowledgable with threading and delegates, which led to some questions and discussion that I was able to learn from. (I love that!) Additionally, thanks to some of the folks who have been doing a lot with AJAX already, we were able to take the discussion of the client side callbacks a little deeper. (I am now getting SO ready to make the leap!)

Robert Hurlbut (Mr. Enterprise) happens to be working with a client in the area, so it was great fun to have him come to the meeting as well as very handy to have him there when some of the threading discussion got a little deep.

Now I have to head about 90 miles east to Waltham, Mass (to the Microsoft office) for the New England VB Pro user group, where I will be giving this talk again (another INETA talk) tonight.

I'll be presenting at two user groups in Massachussets next week. I will be giving the same presentation at both groups: "Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET Developers".

Description: Asynchronous programming makes so much sense for web applications but is often tough to achieve. With .NET 2.0, there are a number of new methods to simplify asynchronous development. These can be found in web pages, in ADO.NET, in Web Services and other ASP.NET 2.0 functionality. This session will examine these various ways to leverage asynchronous programming in your web development and make suggestions for which methods are appropriate for particular scenarios.

The talk will be straight ASP.NET 2.0 features, so it will not be abou AJAX or ATLAS, though I will include their baby cousin, ClientSideCallBacks.

Tuesday Aug 1: Western Mass .NET User Group in Easthampton, MA

Wedneday Aug 2: New England VB Pro User Group at the Micrsoft Offices in Waltham, MA

Thanks to INETA, once again!

I'm finally recovering from my whirlwind trip of three .NET User Groups in Pennsylvania last week. Thanks to INETA fr enabling me to go an to the u.g. leaders for inviting me.

Here are links to the powerpoints and demos on my website. I have also given your u.g. leaders permission to put them on your u.g. websites as well, so you may find them there too.

Tuesday July 18th: Central Penn .NET: Introduction to Tablet PC Web Development. This was an interesting talk to do. We went from 0 to 60, which is people who have never used a tablet pc and never used the Tablet PC APIs flying through intros to both so that we could get to the fun stuff - ink-enabling web applications. One attendee observed that my solutions all seemed kind of like a big hack -and he was absolutely right. There is no built in way to do this stuff, so I just figured out the best ways that I could to make it happen.
Downloads: The more generic powerpoint is on my website TALKS page. Scroll down to "Developing Ink-Aware Web Applications with the Tablet PC SDK". You will see the Powerpoint and the zip file for the demos. Since I modified this talk specifically for your group, I have sent the exact powerpoint that you saw on Tuesday to Judy.

Wednesday July 19th: Lehigh Valley .NET: Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005. I had a lot of fun doing this talk and wrote all about it on my DevLife blog here. Thanks for all the great questions and the excellent New York style pizza. I spent some time in downtown Bethlehem on Wednesday, including a great lunch at the Apollo with two of the people from the u.g. and then walked around to see the incredible 18th century buildings. Bethlehem is steeped in history. I was really happy to get a chance to go there.
Downloads: I have sent the ppt and zip file to Chris, but you can get them on my site TALKS page. Scroll down to "Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005" and you will find a link for the powerpoint and for the zip.

Thursday: July 20th: DotNetValley: Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That shouldn't have to be). I'm sure you guys can tell I love to do this talk. These are all topics that I was afraid to approach myself at one point. I am still not a guru in them, but I am certainly past "know enough to be dangerous" at this point. I think that my non-guru-ness makes it a lot easier to explain it because nothing is so obvious to me that I would assume it is obvious to you. Thanks for having me again and for some of the nice emails you sent after the presentation.
Downloads: You can get these from the TALKS page on my website. Scroll down to Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That don't really have to be). The powerpoint on the site is from a different event, but it is the same as what you saw on Thursday night.

It's happened again. Not one, but three user groups in one trip!

Here's the schedule of my July INETA user group speaking tour:

Tuesday, July 18th: Central Penn .NET, Harrisburg PA, "Developing Ink Applications with the Tablet PC SDK"

Wednesday, July 19th: Lehigh Valley.NET, Bethlehem PA, "Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005"

Thursday, July 20th: Dot Net Valley, Wilkes Barre PA, "Five Scary Things about .NET (That Don't Have To Be)"

The icing on the cake is that after the Thursday night talk, I will drive to north and visit my parents for a few days.

 

Tomorrow I leave for a trip that I am really excited about. I am going to speak to INETA user groups in some of the most beautiful places in North America: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. These are places I have wanted to visit for most of my adult life. I'll be talking about Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0 on the first two nights and the ADO.NET 2.0/SQL Server 2005 Integration on the third.

In between talking about data,I will be kayaking in the Bay of Fundy, touring along Nova Scotia's marine coast line and hiking the wild and windy world ofthe most eastern points of land on the continent.

Thanks to u.g. leaders Derek Hatchard and Amanda Murphy for inviting me and for INETA for sending me.

I just did my first solo MSDN webcast today. Being the worrywart that I am, I was a little nervous. Here's the lowdown ...hopefully useful for other first timers! [read more....]

[A DevLife post]

I did an MSDN Webcast today on Introducing WSE 3.0. Since I had an unusually short amount of time to get through all of my demos,I practiced them over and over (even though they were old hat to me ) just to make sure nothing unexpected happen.

On the very last demo, where I created a new Policy that had "SecureConversation" turned on, it threw an error when I ran the client side app. There was not time to deal with the error and since I knew I had done everything correctly, I moved on, highlighting the key take-away of the demo (which was not seeing "Hello World" on a black screen, but what SC is and how easy it is to implement.)

Now I have just gone back to see what wasn't lined up. I ran the demo again so that I could see what the error was and make sure the code was a-ok before I posted it.... and wouldn't you know, it just friggin worked. And I hadn't touched anything yet.

As my grandmother and all of her grandmothers before her would say: Oy Vey!

[update: see this post for information on the sample code, etc. and this post for more info on the SecureConversation demo]

Somehow, almost everytime I schedule an INETA speaking event, I end up getting asked to speak at another nearby group as long as I'm there. Why not? I say. It's fun, and I control my schedule. Luckily, the user group leaders have been flexible enough so that I can do the talks on consecutive nights.

I have 3, not 4 such trips coming up.

The first is a twist on the concept: my "Atlantic Provinces Tour". I am speaking at 3 groups in Canada's Atlantic Provinces over the course of 10 days. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is my summer vacation and my husband is joining me.

June 19th: New Brunswick.NET in Moncton, New Brunswick.
June 20th: .NET Nova Scotia in Halifax, Nova Scotia
June 26th: We Develop.NET in St. John's Newfoundland

Trip 2 is a Western Pennsylvania tour. Coincidentally (yeah, right), the last meeting is about a hour drive from my parents house. So I will spend a few days visiting them before I head back to Vermont.

July 18th: Central Penn in Harrisburg, PA (right near Hershey, PA... yummmm)
July 19th: Leihigh Valley.NET in Bethlehem, PA
July 20th: Dot Net Valley in Scranton PA

Trip 3 is an Ohio tour which started with the idea of paying a visit to Lake Quincy (Steve and Michelle Smith's home) near Cleveland. Then I added on two other meetings.

Sept 12: Cleveland .NET SIG
Sept 13: Findlay Ohio .NET User Group
Sept 14: Dayton .NET Developers Group

In between are scattered events: NYC in mid-August, 2 Massachussetts groups in early August and Syracuse in September.

(rather than sit here and do all the links, I will point you to my talks page where you can click to these groups' websites)

Reminds me of an old song from the musical Oklahoma!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

The "News Quirks" column of this weeks edition of Seven Days (Vermont's weekly indie) has a interesting story on reducing the stress of public speaking. The story is at the bottom of the page.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Milwaukee was great at Deeper in .NET. I wrote a little about that this morning over here and posted some pics here.

Next week I go to Huntsville, Alabama as an INETA speaker to talk about Advanced Data Access Techniques with ADO.NET 2.0. Then the next week is DevTeach in Montreal. Hopefully it will be springier there than it is here!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Code Samples from my two latest CoDe Magazine artcles:

• Ink on the Web
• SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications Tell .NET 2.0 Apps When Critical Data Changes 

 are on the "articles" page of my website.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have been doing a bit of organizing and gotten the following two sessions from DevConnections on-line.

• Advanced Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0
• Five (Supposedly) Scary Things about .NET

These can be found on the "talks" page of my website.
The talks are listed alphabetically with links to the PPT and ZIP files just after the descriptions.

I still have to package up the code from the third talk: "Preparing WSE3 Web Services for WCF Clients".

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

With most conferences,speakers need to submit their powerpoints way in advace of the conferences. Attendees are provided with books filled with the printouts of the decks so that they can take notes during the conference. It is not uncommon with a new talk to fine tune it between that early preparation and the actual time you your presentation.

Though this has only happened once, it struck me (and stuck in my brain) when an attendee wrote on an eval that it was a pain that the slides in my talk were different than the book.

So this time around,rather than hoping that I'm going to remember in the middle of a talk and say "oh, I changed this slide a little (for your benefit)" I am just putting tiny little notes on the bottom of modified slides: "This slide is slightly modified from the original printed version".

Hopefully that will mean one less negative comment this time around!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My quiet (snowless boo hoo hoo) winter at home is winding down. Soon I will have to start tugging at the roots that have been deeply embedding me into my beautiful little place in the world and flit about the country ...err continent, that is.

It all begins again in about a week.

April 3 - 6: DevConnections in Orlando (I have 1 talk at ASPConnections and 2 at VSConnections)

April 10: Not a trip, but I'll be presenting at Vermont.NET!

April 11-13 - Maybe attend  Devscovery in NYC.

April 22: Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee.This will be new for me - a big one day user group event with myself and 4 other speakers that I am honored to be included with (Michele on Indigo, Scott Hanselman on ASP.NET seen through dasBlog, UI guru Jason Beres and ASP.NET book author Bill Hatfield)! I also get to spend a few days visiting a good friend.

May 2: Huntsville, AL to speak at the HUNTUG User Group run by Lori McKinney (an INETA event). I am looking forward to this as well, though I won't be doing the usual INETA speaker visit to the nearby Space Museum. nor two attractions that are more up my alley: Cathedral Caverns State Park and Burritt Museum.

May 9-11: Montreal for DevTeach! Yay yay! One of my favorite conferences. It's less than 3 hours from my house. Many of my friends are there as speaker and attendees and Montreal is beautiful in the spring! Then after that Alan Griver and Beth Massi are coming home with me for visit and Alan will be speaking at VTdotNET. Yay.

June - A whirlwind. I'm hoping to announce soon a Vermont Code Camp in early June. Then there's TechEd and then I'm off on a 10 day trip that is a combined vacation and INETA tour (with my hubby) to the Atlantic Provinces in Canada. I have always wanted to go to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and have been eyeing the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick for years, as well. I will be visiting New Brunswick.NET, the .NET Nova Scotia and finally We Develop.NET in St. John's Newfoundland.

The list goes on. I have a whole bunch of INETA gigs scheduled through September already and am talking with Thom Robbins about a possible mini-code camp, too.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Brad Abrams has a long list of credits for the folks who helped him create demos for this MIX session. When I was at TechEd last June, I saw a totally awesome demo in a WCF Reliablility session that also had some top talent at Microsoft involved in building the demo. The Microsoft demos for the Indigo overview talk that has been done a lot by Ari Bixhorn takes a truckload of equipment and even a mini support team to run (whereas I had some ho-hum console apps when I did that at TechEd South Africa). I spend a ridiculous amount of time on my demos  but will never have anything like the ones these guys get to pull off for their nice shiny sessions. Sheesh.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Michele Leroux Bustamante has posted code samples from her sessions at SD West. The posts keep coming and coming. I think she did something like 40 sessions! Not really, but it looks like she did 5 regular sessions and 2 half day sessions. I do not know how on earth she manages that. It must be an IDesign thing, since Michele and Brian Noyes and Juval Lowy also do a zillion talks each at DevConnections.

Speaking of DevConnections - it's only in 2 more weeks! April 2-5. I'll be doing three talks this time, Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0, Building WSE 3.0 Secured Web Services that can talk to WCF and Five Supposedly Scary things in .NET. I have taken liberties with the actual session titles, but that's the gist of it. There is going to be a lot of amazing content.

At the end of the month, Michele and I get together again, along with Jason Beres, Scott Hanselman and Bill Hatfield to present a full day of talks at Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee. This is a full day user group event put on by the WI.NET Users Group.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This spring I will be heading out to speak at the fourth Deeper in .NET event that is hosted by the Wisconsin.NET user group. This is Scott Isaac's first time coordinating it, as former group leader Brian Tinkler has gone to work for Microsoft.

This will be a one day event with 5 talks. Michele Leroux Bustamante will be (very appropriately) doing a session on WCF. Scott Hanselman, Rob Howard and Jason Beres (returning for his 4th year!) are also on the roster.

I'll be doing a talk on ADO.NET 2.0 integration with SQL Server 2005. I could easily spend at least 1/2 of the entire day talking about that, but I will limit myself to my 90 minute slot.

An added benefit of going to Wisconsin is that I am going to spend a few extra days there visiting with a friend who I haven't seen in too many years.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Susan Lennon picks me up in her BMW Z4 to speak at WeProgram.NET in Virginia Beach! Zoooom! (read more...)

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Many speakers have big problems with timing, especially in a conference setting when you cannot go long. Though I have practiced talks against a clock, this does not really help me when I'm in the session - if a question takes more time than I should have allowed or I ramble, then the time I took in practice means nothing. I'm sure other speakers have ways to deal with this, but I inadvertently came up with something on my own that helped me enormously last week and wanted to share it. It is probably not a new idea, but it worked well for me since I thought of it rather than trying to follow someone else's suggestion.

I had ended up with one of the one hour session slots at the end of DevConnections for my WSE3.0 Overview talk and knew that posed a problem.

I looked at the powerpoint deck and divided the presentation up by topic. Then, off the top of my head, wrote down how many minutes I thought each topic (including demos) should take. Luckily, this added up to 55 minutes!

Then in a notebook (notebook is a tip I got from Ingo Rammer) I wrote down a name for each section and then, based on how long I thought the previous section should take, what time it should be when I started that section.

It looked like this:

Start	2:45
Turnkey	2:55
Programming Model	3:15
TCPIP	3:15  (the previous was only 1 minute, so it was easier to just write down the same time)
MTOM	3:25
SecureConversation	3:35

The session was supposed to end at 3:45. I knew I was cutting it very close for Q&A, but since it was a short session, I told them at the beginning that we would not have a lot of time for Q&A and could continue it in the hallway or online afterward.

So this worked for me like a charm. I had my little travel clock right on top of the notebook and it was easy enough for me to remember to take a very quick look over there as I started each section to see how I was doing. In this way I was able to determine if I needed to speed up or if I was okay.

I wish I had come up with this prior to TechEd South Africa where we had one hour slots but were told to leave 15 minutes for Q&A, making the presentations only 45 minutes long. But now I know I can do this from now on and hopefully it will help someone else.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

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!

I plan to show off this mega visualizer in my Debugger Visualizer session today as well as the DateTime visualizer that John Mueller wrote for his DevSource article.

Posted from BLInk!

I will be doing a session on Tablet PC development at GUVSM.NET on December 12th. This is sponsored by the MSDN Canada Speaker Bureau. A beautiful time of year (though perhaps a wee bit frigid) to visit a beautiful city. I plan to stay an extra day to see the Provence exhibit at the museum of Fine Arts.

Posted from BLInk!

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

an overview of my TechEd SA experience.... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Kate Gregory and I leave tomorrow for South Africa to present at TechEd. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org