I thought I would share some of the things I am putting in my talk. They may already be old news to some of you (which seems such a funny statement considering the product is only in alpha!) but to those of you who haven't ventured in, I would love to leave a crumb trail to entice you to look further.

The class for Garbage Collection, System.GC, has two new methods: AddMemoryPressure and RemoveMemoryPressure.

Although the way GarbageCollecton works is pretty complex (and fascinating) here's a simplified explanation. GarbageCollection is triggered by the amount of memory being used by your managed objects and based upon different triggers, it goes and cleans up objects that are no longer being used. If one of those managed objects owns an unmanaged object, that unmanaged object's memory allocation is not taken into account. Imagine the confusion (and inefficiency and possibly worse...) created when a small managed object instantiates a very large unmanaged object.

Using these new methods, you can add or remove a value that is used in the GC's calculations that help trigger it's functionality. The value that you pass in could literally represent the size of the unmanaged object, or just be your own value that helps to almost “rate” or “rank” the priority of the object.

If you don't have the Whidbey alpha, you can still read more about these methods online in the SDK Documentation. AddMemoryPressure  RemoveMemoryPressure . I have to say that the explanations in the documentation are really very clear and I recommend that you look into them for further details. Also Brad Abrams wrote a much more indepth explanation of Memory Pressure in December.

I always notice that Jason Salas posts lots of reviews on the AspAdvice forums and on his blogs. I think that he puts them on the ASPAlliance site also.

We get a lot of books from publishers coming to our user group. We even have a book review page! I do have the opportunity to grab what I want before I push them out to my members. Usually I just ask if I could get my hands on them afterwards. But I generally find I don't ever have time for leisurly reading as opposed to being VERY happy to have these books around when I am trying to learn a particular thing or solve a problem. I would love to be able to find the time to do what Jason does, which is why I always notice when he posts yet another book review.

Werner got a way-cool laptop. The kind a rocket scientist should have! But he's already having second doubts about it.

• In early december he ordered the machine. Here is his post about that.
• Earlier this week, he recieved the box and expressed some dissapointment as well as some hope for it.
• One day later, he is now thinking about a Dell. Here is why.

I wonder how his laptop compares to the Longhorn machine that Clemens Vasters is now toting around Europe.

• Here is where Clemens lays out the specs of the box.
• Here is where he receives it.
• Here is where he installs Longhorn on it and realizes that he will have to make some concessions, though raves about the support from the manufacturer.

No, I'm not announcing it's availability. I just shipped it off to Sys-Con but it's not where I want it to be. By the time the conference rolls around it will be a thing of beauty. The process of doing this talk (What's new in the Whidbey BCL) has been incredibly educational. It has forced me to dig much more deeply into the documentation to explore what is in there than is my nature. Having now been through that experience, I highly recommend it to everyone who really wants to learn about the tools that they are trying to use! I sure hope that brings a smile to Sam's face!

“Europa” by way of Robert Scoble.

Having been a FoxPro developer for many years before I switched to VB4, there is always a soft spot in my heart for the product, though moreso for the community.

Robert Scoble pointed out the TabletPC Tour that is bringing a hands on tablet pc experience to 7 cities around the country in late February and early March. It's not a developer event as it is targetted at IT Decision makers -- i.e. come see why you need your company to use tablet pc's. Anyway, still a good way to get a hands on educational experience with Tablets if you are interested or trying to get your client or boss to get interested so you can start having fun writing ink-enabled applications!!

SecretGeek, aka Leon Bambrick. This is the guy who brought us the famous VB Refactoring menu in Whidbey (I'm pointing to my post on this because we already crashed him once with so many) . Have you read his blog lately? Are you even subscribed?

from Microsoft-Watch

Microsoft has something free for Linux fans

I'm happy I'll get to see Brian in Boston as he will be speaking at the EdgeEast conference also on BizTalk Server 2004.

But today I had a special treat when my two new copies of ASPNetPro arrived and there he was talking about INETA.

I struggled with webclient for a while trying to ftp and naturally, I blogged about it.

Enter  System.NET.FtpWebRequest as well as my favorite sentence in its' remarks: “You can also use the WebClient class to upload and download information from an FTP server.”

Though I still have to play with it to believe it!

Michael Lane Thomas also gets into the FtpWebRequest class in his excellent article in Code Magazine. If you don't recognize the name, it's probably because you know him as “The .NET Cowboy”.

http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/

This ad itself is killer.

I think that the focus of my BCL talk (here and here) has finally congealed. My talk is supposed to be about level 200 +. My target audience corporate developers (not plumber types) who may already be using .NET or might not even be there yet. So the focus of my talk is going to be that Microsoft has figured out what things people are struggling to do. A lot of these things are those that the average developer would never attempt or may just not be familiar with. However, the tasks that are being accomplished should absolutely be part of every developers “quiver” (as we say in the ski-bum world). A perfect example of this is the DoubleBuffered property of the windows.forms.control (and it's counterpart the new System.Drawing.BufferedGraphics). It helps reduce flickering by parlaying the graphics data to a buffer and then when it is all together, flipping it back to the display. Skilled developers with graphic intensive applications have realized a need for this and gone to the effort of orchestrating code to make this happen. The average developer might just accept a little flickering in their form and be done with it. But a simple property like this will now help that average developer put a little more polish in their application. And therefore I feel like it is my mission (in this talk) to help ensure that the average developer does not miss out on the fact that these very simple solutions now exist to help them be above average.

This is REALLY COOL!!!

Two scientists have unearthed a complete skull of a mammoth that wandered the English countryside 50,000 years ago -- only the second intact example found in Britain.

(caveat - if it's not a hoax or something...I'm so gullible!)

I have found this incredibly informative thread on Dell of all places (thank you google) that talks about a variety of backup solutions revolvoing around an external hard drive and various software (eg. Retrospects Dantz is bundled with Maxtor One-Touch, vs. Ghost vs. some others).

I am closing in on a solution which will involve occasional complete images via ghost and then frequent incremental backups. I have a 160 gig hard drive with 3 partitions.

The various Maxtor options look great for a single hardware solution - encased USB2 or Firewire hard drive. And they these drives got a “storage product of the year“ award from an industry magazine.

Gha - why do I have to learn all this stuff? Oh yeah, cause I'm a geek and it's fun!

The Daily Grind. Admit it. You (developers) all read it and this is how you read it. First you do a quick scan to see if your name is in there - if you actually wrote something (comment/software/utility) worthy of being listed in one of the most valuable online developer resources. Then and only then do you go back to the top, read Mike's quip on whatever is going on in his life that day, then start ticking through the great links (and keen observations) he has listed.

I am clearly procrastinating at the moment. Rich went skiing (boo hoo hoo) and I said “You go on and have a nice time, honey. I am working on my presentation today!” New snow, no crowds a little bit of sunshine and blue sky peeking through and temperate weather. This is why I have a season pass and live 7 miles from Mad River Glen. Whine whine whine.

I have a lot of fun discovering what's new in the base class library for whidbey. Besides just digging through the documentation , there are some other great resources.

Kit George's PDC presentation (using bits that are different that from what we have)
Newgroup discussions
Michael Lane Thomas article in Code Magazine
BCL Team page on GotDotNet (code, articles, demos, etc)
BCL Team Blog

and of course lots of weblogs of other people in discovery mode, too.

Also, I have learned a lot from some of the comments in some of my own posts, as well.

Everybody has a different set of things that they think are cool when given a time or space limit and you really have to select.

So my EdgeEast talk has to be 45 minutes (though I'm at 4:00 pm with nothing after me, so maybe my time is longer) and I have to go through the list of everything that I found interesting and pick and choose from there what I will talk about, demo on, breeze by or or just have to skip for now. I think it would be a lot more fun if my talk was 8 hours long!!

If you don't know Bill Evjen - he wears a lot of hats. He is a Regional Director, an ASP.NET MVP, an ASPInsider, the leader of the St. Louis .NET User Group and most notably the founder and executive director of INETA. He also has recently become a prolific and interesting blogger. But Bill is also a prolific technical author. If you go to the home page of his blog you will see links to all of the above organizations as well as his many books and articles.

But that's not even why I wanted to write this post. Here's what I love about Bill's books. When you are trying to learn something, reading his book is like having him sit there and explain it to you. He seems to know that in explaining a particular piece of technology, you may not know some of the background so he explains that to you. For example in his web services book, he walks through how to do some basic settings in IIS. I have always found that he speaks my language. He doesn't explain things from the point of an administrator or a plumber, but from the perspective of someone who is trying to write corporate applications and gets stuck having to worry about a lot of the details that you might not necessarily have the time to become an expert in. I have told this to Bill before, but I thought I would share it.

Especially happy to hear this one. Eric is on my INETA Committee (User Group Rleations Committee). He runs the Chatanooga .NET User Group. He is just relentless in trying to help out other developers and other user group leaders. We can't hold this guy back he has so much energy and passion. His energy benefits user groups all over his region and all over the world.

Hooray for Kate. She's just became an MVP too. Well, she has been most valuable and very professional for a long long time. But the award is new. Kate is an MSDN Regional Director out of Toronto, author of numerous books (including the new Visual C++.NET KickStart), very involved wtih the Toronto.NET user group, a popular conference speaker and INETA speaker and just an all round really nice person. I finally met her last May after having so many people ask me if I knew her. We didn't even need an introduction. Just looked at each other and said “Kate?“ “Julie?“

Here you can read more about what Kate does and has done...

Sorry if I'm drooling, but has become a good friend and I'm just thrilled that she got the MVP award.

Well, I have spent 4 hours trying to create a backup that I will be able to automate.

I have had to throw 3 cd's away.

I really have to get some WORK done!