lots of buzz about the MS Live announcement. When .NET came out the message was all about web apps and web services. THen for the last few years it has been all about smart client. Now with AJAX and ATLAS on the horizon, web apps are getting richer and competing with Smart Clients again. Now there is windows live and office live - but somehow the repetetive them that kept jumping out at me when reading the press release was "advertising".

"Windows Live will primarily be delivered free to users and supported by advertising, "

Office Live Basics helps a small business establish an online Internet presence including a domain name, a Web site with 30 MB of storage and five Web e-mail accounts at no charge through an advertising-supported model.

Advertiser Opportunities The addition of Office Live and Windows Live services enables advertisers to reach an even larger, more engaged audience. Today Ozzie outlined Microsoft’s vision for an advertising network powered by MSN adCenter, where advertisers will have access to tools that provide them with control, insight and intelligence to create more meaningful connections with customers. The advertising network will be open to partners over time so advertisers can connect with a broader audience through traditional media as well as new scenarios such as Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and mobile communications products.

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

How cool is this. Microsoft After Dark

Five Microsoft V.Ps (not MVPs, but Microsoft Vice Presidents) and the one and only Michele "I'm gonna crush you" Leroux Bustamante play poker to send their favorite developers to Launch in San Francisco. Totally check this out. Wait till you see who wins.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

There is only one computer left in my quiver that does not have some flavor of VS2005 on it. The one I call my "daily driver" that I sit in front of about 15 hours a day doing most of my work. That will soon change.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Note that the js controls (and commercial controls) for Virtual Earth will be moving. Here are the details.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Want to find out who is mucking with your computer? Would you believe it is one of the biggest corporations on the planet? Thank goodness for brains like Mark Russinovitch! [Read more....]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Okay so nobody from Microsoft made the list, but EBay, IBM, HP and Oracle are represented. Though of course these are business women, not I.T.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have thought about getting one of these for a while but didn't do anything about it. When I read Dave Sussman's blog post about his experience with it, I knew I had to have it. I just set it up and I love this. It will really save me when I'm paying bills and logging into lots of different websites. Dave says "Very, very useful, for both the terminally forgetful (me), and the lazy (me again)." Me too!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I still have to get the pic of Hilton and me that Kate took, but here is a photo of me with Thea, Ernst and Armand - not only bloggers but user group leaders as well.

Here are some from Thea's blog

This is Thea, me, Armand and Ernst

Armand and Ernst petting the cubs while they were very busy working on a cow's leg. It was a big leg but they are really on it like glue. That's me, Kate and Oskar's foot. Oskar was great - gave us a tour of the lion park.

I also learned how to pronounce my friend's names properly. To translate for us Americans: Thea is "tee-a", Ernst is "Air-enst" and Armand is Armand, just the way we thought!

One of the places I plan to checkout while at DevConnections next week is Lucille's BBQ.

Lucille's has 6 California locations and one just south of Vegas in Henderson, NV.

It is BBQ & live blues (on Fri & Sat nights) - and is owned by a couple who owns some of my parents' newfies.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 are live and on MSDN Online now. Good luck trying to get them though! The servers are getting quite the workout.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Champlain College offers the first college level e-gaming program and it is headed up by two women...[read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

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

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

There was a big messy wet snow storm earlier this week in Vermont while I was in hot sunny South Africa. The power went out all over the place and was slowly restored over the next day or so. However the northeastern part of Vermont was slammed really hard. The electric company that provides power there is the same one that we are on so they are having a lot of trouble and we still have no power. Here's the latest article from the local paper on that. Listening on the radio last night I heard them say that the damage to powerlines (and electric poles) was worse even than in the ice storm of 1998.

Luckily I am married to a guy who is a super-camper and we have a small generator to boot. The generator is inverted power so we are running the computers and the refrigerator for a little while. As we have a gas powered stove, Rich made not only eggs for breakfast, but used a campfire toaster to make us toast this morning. Rich also was smart enough to fill both bathtubs before the power went out (we had perfect conditions for an outage so he is one of those great "be prepared" kinda guys) so we can even flush the toilets. We have a gas fireplace in the office and in the living room - so since it's not that cold out, this is keeping the  house perfectly fine. The only place where I notice any real inconvenience is the inability to take a real shower and wash my hair.

However as I just typed the word hair - guess WHAT!?! The power came on. Yahoo! I'm gonna go wash my hair!!!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

As I prepare for my last TechED SA session, What's New in WSE 3.0, every time I hit a slide that focuses on policy or look at a policy file in the code, I think to myself "boy I love wse3 policy." I really look forward to being able to do some conference sessions on just policy or articles in the near future as well as just keep blogging about it.

Posted from BLInk!

(This was written on Sunday) After a long bumpy night we have finally arrived at Sun City. Kate is a good airplane sleeper. I woke up at 4 and couldn't get back to sleep then did then was startled by some big turbulence at 6. Kate slept through it all! Both of our flights on Lufthansa coming to South Africa were on Business Class - which was unexpected and very nice of the organizers. I have never flown business class before. It was very nice, including being able to go in the lounges at the airport.

Unfortunately, Kate's luggage didn't make it to Johannesburg but should be here tomorrow. The drive from "Joburg" to here was beautiful. Some of it reminded me of New Mexico - the red sandy hills, the scrub but other than that it is just unique. Some reality checks were noticing the very very think cattle grazing on whatever they can find. They are free range - like wandering in the highway free range! We also drove by a number of compounds with a variety of small metal and other types of shacks. This is where people live. I have never seen that before. I had a very bad position for taking photographs but the image will remain.

I am now in the speaker lounge and it's fun to meet a whole new crew of people.

Posted from BLInk!

I did the first of my 3.5 (I have two demos during the futures panel in addition to my talks) today. It was the above titled talk. As our talks are limited to 45 minutes (with an additional 15 for questions) this was a real whirlwind presentation. There is so much to share and I had to do so very efficiently using techniques like showing code, but maybe not always running it ("trust me, it works") or when for some reason, deploying a sql server project did not pop my new sproc into SQL Server, umm, just move on ("trust me it works"). I always have fun talking about one of my fave .NET topics - and had my need to show off even more of SQLDependency sated by an additional 1/2 hour with some of the attendees out in the hall afterwards. This was a bit different than my regular ado.net talk as I focused on the SQL Server Integration and added in demos on the new XML type in SQL Server and it's partner, System.Data.SqlXML and also demonstrated creating a database project in .NET and moving some of the intense but hard-to-code-in-TSQL processing to the server side.

Though I planned to work on tomorrow's demos talk (Indigo intro) and futures panel demos (Indigo and ATLAS) and call it an early night, I have been struggling with the fact that no USB pointing devices are being recognized on my laptop. Fortunately (like, thank the demo gods...) my USB drive for VPC is working and thumbdrive also - so I willl just have to continue struggling with the touchpad. That makes moving the pointer slow going. For my tablet friends, yeah yeah, just use the pen, but picking up the pen, pointing, then putting it down and typing etc is not something I do smoothly either.

Tomorrow's schedule: Tech Check at 7:30 am, futures panel from 10:30 - 1:00, Indigo (err WCF) talk at 2:30. The talk is a "get your head wrapped around Indigo" and I look forward to helping to bring more future Indigo/WCF users to their "oooooooh, I get it!" momentl.

Posted from BLInk!

I had a really bad problem with USB today that I want to blog about (with my resolution) before it spins out of my head.

I am using a USB wireless mouse. It started acting flakey today -- doing things like not reacting to mouse clicks and then lagging a lot when I was moving it around the screen. I rebooted a few times but it didn't help. I then went to a hardwired mouse that worked properly for a few minutes than was flaky in a different way. For example, I move the mouse down on the screen then suddenly it would be at the top of the screen.

For the short term it meant that I had to do my first TechEd presentation with a touch pad which was bad news for me.

So I have spent the last few hours fiddling around with this. I thought perhaps it was my USB port, but was happy to see that my thumb drive and external drive (which I am 100% dependent on for my Indigo talk) was working. My powerpoint clicker, another USB pointing device was also failing. The failure was a) a windows message saying that the USB device failed and b) they stopped working all together!

Nothing made sense so no point in going through all of the things I tried...but what I ended up doing that worked was after noticing that in Device Manager, I had the extended USB hub manager and 4 other usb hub managers with usb devices, I disabled all but one of the 4 hub managers.

The LaCie drive was still working, but when I put the thumbdrive in the 2nd usb port, it didn't work. Well, flaky - windows explorer said there is a D: but I couldn't read it.

Then I reenabled the 2nd of those 4 usb managers with no effect. But when I reenabled the third, my thumbdrive worked and after I stopped and removed it and plugged in the mouse, that too worked.

Hours of needless aggravation and I still want to prep for tomorrows talks! But I know from experience that staying up all hours is a very bad thing for conference prep. I will be much better off going to bed, getting a decent night's sleep and then hammering in the morning.

(written 12:30 am Tuesday morning but posted later)

Posted from BLInk!

One of the best parts of being here is that I have finally gotten to meet Thea Burger who I met via blogging and had a lot to do with my being here as well as the others who took up her "bring Julie to South Africa" meme - Ernst Kuschke, Hilton Giesenow and Armand du Plessis. Kate took a pic of Hilton and I today and I will definitely be getting one of Thea, Ernst and Armand before the end of TechEd.

I can't believe I only arrived yesterday. I feel like I have been here a long time! (that's good, though now I think I'll go phone home...)

(written Tuesday 11:50pm - posted later)\

Posted from BLInk!

Kate and I went on an incredible 3 hour game drive today with our guide Humbu. We saw so many animals and took gobs of pictures. Kate has blogged some here. Here are a few of mine but I must get focused on my afternoon session - ADO.NET 2.0 & SQL Server 2005 Integration.

These are wildebeest. They are a strange looking animal and are said to have been created with leftover parts of other animals.

These are impalas. We saw them frequently on the drive ...

...but not nearly as many as the zillions of zebras we saw. These are a variety that also has a faint brown stripe. The type with only black and white are not in Pilanesberg.

This was our 2nd elephant siting of the morning. The first was in the distance behind the "vacation club" where we were staying. Our eagle eye tour guide spotted them as we were headed to the park. This one, he saw from a distance and drew up a road to show us. Unfortunately, it was a road to a private lodge ("for princes and presidents" as Kate says) and he got yelled at by an employee of the lodge who was also headed up the road. She was very unreasonable and we wondered if her treatment of Humbu was reminiscent of previous relations in South Africa.