Larry and his wife live in Hawaii. For a reason. This is an amazing story!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Since I plan to attend Wintellect's Devscovery in Reston, VA in early May, I have submitted talks to the Code Camp that is that Saturday (May 7th) in the same building as the Devscovery conference.

The website for Devscovery is pretty funny. It says "our aim is to have you beg us to stop cramming information into your head."

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I am just catching up on a lot of posts and see that pricing announcments were made regarding Team System. I had heard  about the new SKUs for MSDN Universal a while ago and scratched my head about small or independent consultants not having easy access to learn some of the tools that will be priced way over their heads (6 month trials notwithstanding...). But one of the interesting points about this is that Microsoft is clearly aiming the VSTS stuff directly at the large enterprise shops and the benefit is that, as Jonathan Cogley and Eric Sink note, they are not leaving the market for 3rd party tools like NUnit and SourceGear mostly in tact.

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Funny to see a CNN report on Mud Season!

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http://www.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/03/23/blackberry.rim/index.html

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I got home in the wee hours of the morning from a fantastic 5 days at DevConnections in Orlando. The conference was, as always, just great. (Note that the spring 2005 show is getting archived. Watch this page for links to that show.) It was held at the Hyatt Grand Cypress which is a real paradise-like resort. Shirley and Gary Brothers run such a top notch show. I was very happy with my presentations and I ended up doing my session on What's new in ADO.NET 2.0 twice. Unfortunately that extra session was due to the fact that Dino E was unable to make it. Of course there is just no way anyone can duplicate Dino's effervescent presentation style - he is truly unique (in a wonderful way).

Thanks to everyone who attended my talks. It is your response to them that inspires me to keep doing this! Don't forget to email me those questions and I will blog the answers!

The 2nd ADO.NET 2.0 session was in a one hour slot and we somehow managed to get through the whole thing at a fast  pace since there just wasn't anything I was willing to cut out. As expected, I heard gasps and applause when I showed how SQL Server Query Notification was tied into ADO.NET and ASP.NET.

I had two sessions that were challenged by being scheduled at the same time as an Indigo session by Ari Bixhorn and a live recording of .NET Rocks. Three of my talks were held in the humongous 500 (looked like it a least) seat ballroom -- though I encouraged the 30-40 or so attendees to sit up close.

I also got a hot off the presses copy of the updated (for beta) version of Alex Homer, Dave Sussman and Mark Fussell's new ADO.NET and System.XML 2.0 book from A-W, which I perused for additional insight before my ado.net 2.0 talks.

I did a 1/2 day workshop on Sunday which was teaching Web Service Security Fundamentals (the cryptography stuff) and an intro to WSE2.0. Although it wasn't heavily attended, it  went great and I think everyone there really got a lot out of the session. I LOVE doing that talk. And the more I do it the more fun it is to do. The more fun it is for me to do the more fun it is for the attendees. The 1st part of the talk - the crypto stuff - has become my "I want to teach the world to sing" talk. Perhaps I'll look into doing a webcast on it. I do have an article coming out on MSDN Online with that content.

Also of course, hanging out in the speaker lounge with so many of my friends (old and new) is just the best best fun. The expo was great and I had fun hanging out with Dave Noderer at the INETA booth (thanks to MSDN for that). Stan Schultes also drove down from Sarasota for dinner one night.

Anyway - thanks again to everyone attending my talks (and especially to Chandler from Vegas who was grinning from ear to ear throughout the entire ADO.NET 2.0 session!) I will be uploading my powerpoints and demos to my website on the Talks page, here.

I will be presenting at DevConnections in the Fall in Las Vegas. The line up right now looks like this:

Leveraging SQL Server 2005 Query Notification in ASP.NET 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0
Both ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 take advantage of SQL Server 2005's Service Broker. Although ADO.NET 2.0 is only able to receive query notification from SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 2.0 has an implementation that will also know about database changes in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 7. This session will demonstrate how to receive notifications through both ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2 as well as cover the pros and cons and the many rules surrounding Query Notification.

A Look at WSE 3.0
WSE 3.0 is slated to be the last version of WSE prior to Indigo. It is also the first release of the Web Services Enhancements that will be fully interoperable with Indigo and incorporates more of the WS-* specifications than previously. Come to this session to see highlights of WSE 3.0 as well as how it relates to what we know about WSE 2.0 and to the upcoming Indigo.

Customizing the debugging experience in Visual Studio 2005 with new Debugger Attributes
New features in .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 allow you to take more control over how information is displayed about classes while you are debugging. Debugger Visualizers are custom user interfaces that can be written to display information about .NET classes or your own custom classes. The new debugger attributes can be applied to your classes to define the formatting of debug info displayed in the watch windows. This session will walk through how to write and deploy custom visualizers as well as how to leverage the new debugger attributes found in the System.Diagnostics namespace.

Hopefully I'll also be doing the C# for VB Developers talk again which is a look at syntax and some IDE differences as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

[From ProgrammingfromHome.com]

Part time programmer
Seeking programer to develope a order entry application with web input and output capabilities. VB.NET MS SQL SERVER DATABASE EXPERIENCE 

The employer posted this job on:   3/23/05

Special Benefits Include:
- Full Telecommute (work at home)- Will consider applicants on a part-time basis- Independent contractors may respond

 

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If you are going to be at DevConnections this week, come by and visit us at the INETA booth!

 

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I'm doing my last minute org for DevConnections and making note of the times of my talks.

• Sunday 3/20: 1-4 PM Web Security for Dummies and WSE 2.0 Introduction
• Tuesday 8am - 9:15 am  ASP.NET Beyond System.Web Namespace
• Wednesday 8am - 9:15 am C# for VB Programmers
• Wednesday 1:30 - 2:30 What's New in ADO.NET 2.0 (just noticed this is only one hour!)

My husband is laughing over the 8am talks. At home I am not an early riser, but he doesn't know that when I'm travelling I tend to get up at 6 am or so. (shhh, don't tell)

I will also be manning the INETA booth  Monday from 9-9:30 and Tuesday from 10:45 - 11:15.

http://www.AcehAid.org

.NET plumber, John Bristowe's, twin sister Ashley having a baby. John is very close to his sister and I always love seeing how proud he is of her and that he is able to share that with the world on his blog. Not a lot of guys do that.

His latest post was written as he was leaving to go to the hospital with Ashley and her husband last night, so hopefully by now, he's an uncle.

Congrats Uncle John!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Beth Massi points to a xml data visualizer on GotDotNet that you can use today in VS2003. Since she is speaking at DevTeach, I hope she'll get to come to my session on Customized Debugging in VS2005 so I can show her the debugger visualizers. Of course she may not be able to wait so in that case, I bet anything she subscribes to CoDe Magazine and can read my article in the current issue! hee hee

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And I don't mean he's going to another class! Awesome Kent! Big Congrats!!

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It's been nearly 3 months since the disasterous tsunamis destroyed many countries, killed nearly 200,000 people and displaced millions. In the weeks after this happened I was very involved with an organization in Bali, Indonesia that was doing amazing relief work in Aceh Province. They continue to go strong but have shifted their efforts to Recovery. I was their "website medic" for the first month and was doing what I could in Frontpage to be posted to their Linux server, basically taking little pleas for this getting this and that information quickly onto the site. Now they have a real web designer on board, Sylvia Tu, as well as some breathing room to think the content through rather than just be doing crisis management on the site. The website is looking fantastic and there is all kinds of excellent information and stories about what they are accomplishing. I know most of the world has gone on with their lives and forgotten the millions still in need. Keep track. Pay attention. Maybe they'll again need something that you can help with.

www.AcehAid.org

http://www.AcehAid.org

Thanks Mike G for pointing this out.

With verification/validation from Brad Abrams (Microsoft), Paul Vick (Microsoft), Tyler Whitney (Microsoft) and Erik Porter (MVP), Cory Smith has put together an excellent document on VB.NET Coding Guidelines. We all tend to get lazy and should probably take a look at this monthly!

Why this is on his blog and not on the VB Developer Center, I'm not sure. Yo, Brad!!! Lookee here...

http://www.AcehAid.org

I don't remember seeing this in the past, but the Feb CTP bits have a hissy fit if you change the name of a control on a web form or windows form. Web Forms want to refactor your code behind for you. Sometiems it hangs. WinForms throws a whole lot of compile time errors to the Error reporting system, but then gives control back with nothing lost. Beware...

http://www.AcehAid.org

I'm fiddling around with nullable types in Whidbey and just discovered a DataRow property that is not even new, but I had never known was there (or maybe it flew by me once but it didn't stick in my brain):

DataRow.IsNull("mycolumnname")

Obviously invaluable when dealing with value types.

I guess in the 3 years I have been doing .NET, I just hadn't needed it. My main production app has a sql server database that started out being used by VB5 then VB6, so I was used to not creating DateTime columns as nullable, or dealing with nulls directly in the stored procedures. Well, I'll be!

http://www.AcehAid.org

So I popped over to blog feed reader and I see "Got Indigo Day" in Boston. I can't see the whole post and I can't help thinking "who the heck is gonna do that?". Who in Boston knows Indigo well enough already to present on it on behalf of Microsoft? Will they just be reading a script or something? Then I scroll down and get a big aha! moment -- it's David Chappell. Okay, I'm conviced!  

http://www.AcehAid.org

Rod has his downloads from Code Camp on his website (www.dashpoint.com). The SQL Server 2005 DataTypes with VS2005 presentation he did at VTdotNET on Monday night are included in the MSDN Code Camp downloads.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I'm curious to see if anyone that I know who is coming to DevConnections is signed up for my pre-con workshop. It is a special workshop, not included with the regular conference. I am *so* looking forward to this session!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I want to keep reminding folks attending DevConnections that my talk titled "C# for VB6 Programmers" will be just as useful for VB.NET programmers (who likely came from VB6 anyway).

I got more confirmation of this when doing it to a packed room at Code Camp III which chose to stay an extra 45 minutes during lunch just so we could experiment some more.

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