So - for me, the hottest coolest new thing I saw at TechEd was the TabletPC Thinkpad by Lenovo. I kept telling Arin Goldberg that I'd be MORE than happy to trade my Toshiba M200 with 1GB for it. Oh well. But now I see Avonelle's got one on the way. Thatta girl!!!

Posted from BLInk!

I just received an email from my awesome webhost, Alentus, saying that they had to move my website to a new server. Although not even in the top 10 of bandwidth there, they said my site was contributing to the heavy load at about 30GB a month! Oh my.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

I can't believe that I just found a picture on Kirk Allen Evan's blog documenting what had to be the BEST TechEd session this week.

I was sitting at a cabana table this morning with some of my favorite German and North Carolinian guys, and the topic of transactions came up. I am admittedly pretty light when it comes to distributed transactions, but have had to dig deeper into them as of late, for example in preparation for the MARS webcast which I did with Glen Gordon (who I got to meet in person this week!) and also in yesterday's conversations about DTC. Mentioning this, I suddenly found myself having a 20 minute private training session with Clemens Vasters, Rich Turner and Christian Weyer all teaching me about transaction resource managers. Just me. Three brilliant instructors, one student. 

Clemens walked me through a transaction resource manager that he has written and I was introduced to a whole new flavor of programming model. I have been limited to thinking about transactions only in the scope (ummm, no pun intended) of database transactions. I always feel that I am pretty much representative of the bulk of developers out there, so surely this is not an uncommon misconception.

Kirk posted a bunch of TechEd pictures and as I was looking at them tonight, I  was surprised, but happy, to see that he had captured the moment!

I think that we will soon all have our eyes opened up a little more about leveraging DTC to create transaction resource managers.

Also in the photo are Don Smith and Don Browning at the same table, and Robert Hurlbut (who also knows a thing or two about DTC) at the table behind us.

Posted from BLInk!

Oh, now here's a big shocker! Kate, who I love, admire, respect and trust, both as a professional and as a great human being, has been named RD of the Year by the MSDN Regional Director program. My understanding is that all of the other 120+ RDs around the world have a vote on this.

Here is a fantastic blog post all about Kate and this lovely honor.

And here is a post by Kate which is a great insight to what really makes her tick.

 

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Help promote the TechEd Speaker Auction!

Put this image on your website along with the link to the auction

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TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Although I have had conversations in the past with Tim, Dr. Neil and Rob about speaking at VTdotNet this year, I have managed to (nearly) lock them in while at TechEd. Yahoo! Now I have the rest of the year covered (with December being our christmas party). I realize that I have got all of our INETA events piled into this half of the year!

                 

06/13/05 : Sam Gentile (INETA event)

07/11/05 : Kathleen Dollard (INETA event)

08/08/05 : Julia Lerman

09/19/05 : Neil Roodyn (97% sure)

10/17/05 : Tim Ewald

11/14/05 : Rob Howard (INETA event)

http://www.AcehAid.org

http://blog.steeleprice.net/archive/2005/06/09/640.aspx

I was very lucky that Steele showed up as well as Michael Kaplan and a pair of folks (one developer, one marketing person) from Mobiforms who have all of their bets on a 3rd party tool they are working on for Avalon developers. I don't think of myself as bleeding edge when I work in Whidbey because I look at people who are doing Indigo, or heck, the people who build (and keep pushing) the edge as bleeding edge. One thing I know is that it is all relative. I have more thoughts about last nights discussion and will write about that after I let them simmer a bit. But as Steele mentions, I think that the common theme was MOTIVATION. What motivates a developer or business to go to future products adn how do you motivate your developers to look ahead.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I will write about what I have learned when I have time to absorb it all but I have seen great presentations by Steve Schwartz (overview of the variety of technologies to pick from for designing connected systems), Michele Leroux Bustamante (awesome look at doing ws-security with wse2 "beyond the wizards"), Mark Fussell (my *must see* .. WSE 3.0) and Tim Ewald (who I have locked in for Oct. 17th at VTdotNET ) Tips & Tricks for implementing Web Services - so great that this is what he will be doing at my user group. I have never seen Tim present before and he is a TOP notch presenter. He has mastered the art of not flying through his content but making a statement and then pausing, letting you spend a moment thinking about what he has just said. I am going to try to be conscious of this when I present.

Although I have had many strings trying to pull me to skip TechEd today and go to Epcot Center ("if you can see only one thing while you are here...."), I will make a point of doing more sessions today.

http://www.AcehAid.org

xTras.Net is one of the most creative vendors of 3rd party developer tools out there and owner Mike Schinkel has come up with another great idea! Xtras is publishing the "How to Select" guides edited (and  sometimes authored) by Mike Gunderloy. I saw the first in the new series which was How to Select PDF Components. I took a look, there a a long list of these to choose from and I could only think of one that I know (off the top of my head). When Mike showed this to me, I just thought what a GREAT idea! People are always looking for this type of advice which is a different spin than reading straight reviews.

So keep your eye out for these!

http://www.AcehAid.org

There is another auction happening right now to benefit Aceh Aid at IDEP (now renamed to Aceh Recovery at IDEP). Twenty three TechEd speakers have put one hour blocks of their time on the auction block. The auction goes until Thursday, June 16th. We raised over $10,000 for this incredible organization in January and many lucky winning bidders got some great advice from some of the top consultants and brains in the industry. So whether you want to spend an hour asking Juval Lowy some tough architecture questions, learn about the future of communication with Don Box, get some of your tough VSTS questions answered by Richard Hundhausen or Joel Semeniuk, you can do that and lend some aid to help the people of Aceh Province Indonesia who still have a loooong way to recovering from the terrible disastrous Dec 26th tsunami (and consequent earthquakes).

HERE IS THE LINK!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEd is many things to many people. During the day and evening, the choices are overwhelming. During each time slot there are 20 standard technical presentations and nearly as many cabana talks. There are dozens of ...

[A DevLife post]

http://www.AcehAid.org

I had someone ask an ADO.NET question last night that I just couldn't answer. It was a little more about distributed transactions which I have little experience with. So I had him type the question into Notepad on my laptop. Twenty minutes later, I saw Pablo Castro and had him type the answer so that I could get it back to Ziga without misinterpretation. Pablo also filled me in so that I understood the question as well as the answer. I thought I would share it here....

Q. What's the performance difference when using a transaction scope vs. assigning transactions to connections & sqlcommands the ado.net 1.1 way?

A. Short answer (there is much more to this topic)

If you're using System.Transactions against a SQL Server 2005 server, then the cost is more or less the same (assuming that you don't bring more than one Sql connection to the scope).

On the other hand, if you're hitting a SQL Server 2000 server, then System.Transactions will be more expensive because we'll "promote" the transaction (into a distributed transaction) even for the very first connection.

Posted from BLInk!

surely this is everywhere on the blogosphere, but I want to be sure to push it to the VTdoNET site!

Paul Flessner announced the official release date for VS 2005 - Nov 7th.

According to Mark Fussell, the program manager for WSE, WSE3.0 will be out somewhere in the 4-5 timeframe after VS2005e is released.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Every year at TechEd it feels like a different experience to me - but always a great one!

In addition to attending some WSE talks today, the highlight of the day was the BOFs at the end of the day. But first was the CodeZone launch party which was fun to attend.

There were 30 BOFs last night! They have 3 time slots with 10 BOFs each. (You can filter on Birds of a Feather on the breakout page to see tonight's schedule.) I attended Keith Pleas' BOF to help people with migrating their VB6 apps to .NET (I'm lucky  -I only had to migrate my mind, not any applications), I co-hosted a BOF for women coders (who sometimes don't generally get a chance to meet other women in their field!). This was great fun as always and Cathi Gero helped me host it. In addition to Cathi, I was happy to have some notable women devs show up including Olga Londer who has authored three books and Ginny Coffey who is speaking at TechEd. It's nice to be able to have some really visible women to highlight. There were also some guys there including the affable Michael Kaplan (who had somehow temporarily evaded his stalkers).

After this I hung around for Tim Huckaby's rousing debate on "What the heck is a smart client, anyway". That one was continued at a hotel bar when the convention center closed down.

TechEd for me is more about catching up with people and meeting new folks. The cabanas this year are expanded but they have a different feel. Since they have a much larger space, the spaces set up for hanging out are segregated from one another, which somehow makes it different. Hard to explain.

Today will be a jam packed busy day. I'll be working at the MyCodeZone booth for a few hours, then to the Women in I.T. luncheon, hopefully time for some afternoon sessions and then working at the TabletPC booth from 4-5. I even have one of the blue shirts - which I guess I'll have to wear all day since it is a bit of a haul back to the wonderful hotel that I am staying at. Things are definitely spread out and the hotel for mingling is the Peabody - right by the convention center and it is the speaker hotel. But once I get back here, it's basically up to the room and done for the night. A little less partying for me this year. I must be getting boring in my "old age".

http://www.AcehAid.org

One of the more exciting things in a developer's life is going to a conference, especially a really big one. Microsoft's TechEd U.S. conference is starting on Monday and ..

[A DevLife post].

http://www.AcehAid.org

If you are not going to be at TechEd, and come on, there are millions of developers and only 10,000 or so attendees  so there's a chance you aren't  (although there aren't millions of developers reading my blog, so it does narrow the field a bit ) - prepare yourself for a week of torture. Once at TechEd, that's basically all that a blogger (attending) will blog about. Saw this session, met that person, went to this party.... But hey, it's the next best thing to being there....

The first year I was there I did give a blow by blow of all the people that I ran into. Now it is not possible because over the years I have gotten to know so many people. Anyway, I STILL have to pack and the clock is ticking.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Aceh Aid is now Aceh Recovery. They are still doing amazing things. Aceh Province is still in a terrible state. It will take a LONG time to recover from the tsunamis and the enormous loss of life, land, infrastructure and sustainability. They have an amazing amount of information on their website now. Please go check it out.

So... I am REALLY excited to report that Microsoft and Stephen Forte have helped gather up 20 of the TechEd speakers for another EBay auction for my friends in Bali who are running Aceh Recovery.

The EBay site will be up soon. Stephen has the list of speakers, but just for google, I will list them here as well, (alphabetically)

Don Box
Andrew Brust
Michele Leroux Bustamante
Richard Campbell
Stephen Forte
Carl Franklin
Jackie Goldstein
John Goodyear
Kate Gregory
Scott Hanselman
Tim Huckaby
Richard Hundhausen
Patrick Hynds
Jesper Johansson
Tim Landgrave
Rockford Lhotka
Juval Lowy
Ingo Rammer
Joel Semeniuk
Kimberly Tripp
Clemens Vasters
Christian Weyer

There is a lot of effort that goes behind pulling this together. Last time Stephen and I spent many hours so I am very grateful for the support from Microsoft this time. And of course to all of the speakers and, in advance, to all of the bidders, whether they win the bids or not.

We will have the EBay site up soon and the rules & regs!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Oh, boy, if only I was taking my Compaq (my whidbey travel box) with me to TechEd, I'd have something to play with on the airplane to Orlando!!!!! But I have decided to bring my tablet and that's got VS2003 on it.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I wrote an article for MSDN's Tablet PC Developer Center about how I wrote the Doodle application that lets you ink on the web. The trickiest part of that app was redisplaying the ink image for the user without saving it somewhere. If they want to save it, the also have that option. But moving the ink data through the pipe, from the client side to the server back to the client was vewwwy twicky. Also, thanks to a bunch of ASPInsiders and then Jeff Prosise who laid the final blow to get me to modify my application to use HTTPHandlers. They always sound so scary, so "for plumbers only".... but actually they are EASY and will get even easier in VS2005.

The article is on the home page of the tablet dev center under the "Recent Articles" section.

Note the article by Dr. Neil right below it, on leveraging the Network Location Awareness API for managed code. I sure wish I had had *that* darned API when I wrote my first few mobile apps. I came up with my own way of detecting "am I on the local network?" "am I on the web?" "am I totally disconnected?".

http://www.AcehAid.org

http://www.AcehAid.org