Posted from BLInk!

Last night I did an INETA event in Moncton New Brunswick (northeastern Canada). We came early and spent the weekend in the Bay of Fundy area. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world thanks not only to the shape of the bay, but the fact that the amount of time that it takes for the tide to move into the bay happens to be the same amount of time between low & high tide (6 hrs 13 min) . The tides can be up to 46 feet high! We stayed in Fundy National Park the first night at the HIghlands Inn and Chalet which has a collection of totally adorable little chalets that were built in the 50's but are very well maintained. They are also dog friendly. I hope we can get back there someday.

The Park and the whole area is beautiful and very special. Not only is the Bay of Fundy amazing in it's beauty and natural phenomenon of emptying out so much that you can walk on the ocean floor and then quickly filling back up, but the park is an Acadian forest, lush wet filled with spruce and just ends as cliffs right up at the edge of the bay. Rich and I went for a great hike in the park and then paddling at the end of the day with the local outfitters. It was a windy day so we had a blast kayaking in the big waves.

      

When the boats come in, they throw cage-like platforms over the edge which go under the boat. As the tide recedes the boats  are held up on these cages, rather than sinking into the mud. It's hard t see the platforms, but you can easily see the boats are hovering above the mudflats.

That night we stayed at a wonderful B&B called Innisfree. In the morning we went over to see the famous "flower pots" aka The Hopewell Rocks, amazing formations in the bay that are mostly covered at high tide and that you can walk around in at low tide. I'm surprised they don't bill these as the 8th wonder of the world! Here's Rich doing the classic pose we saw in many tourist guides!

 

On our second day in Fundy National Park, we went to Alma for breakfast. We had a yummy classic diner breakfast of eggs, bacon & toast, then I headed over to the local baker, Kelly's Bakery, to get a sandwich for our hike. I ordered the sandwich while enjoying the smell of the sticky buns that had just come out of the oven. Everyone coming in was ordering sticky buns. Then asking me (an obvious out of towner) didn't you get any sticky buns? No, but they smell great. But you must have some sticky buns. Oh, no ... really we just ate breakfast, I couldn't eat any more. This went on with everyone who came into the bakery that was slowly filling up.What I finally learned was that these sticky buns are famous in the province  of New Brunswick and beyond. It's practially the town currency. So we got a sticky bun for our hike and yes, it was amazingly yummy, soft and sweet. Google "Alma 'sticky buns'" and you'll see what I mean!

I did go grab my camera to get a picture of the world famous sticky buns of Alma, New Brunswick. The sun was shining on the pastry case, so this was the best I could do. I also got a picture of four guys who had just come down from Moncton (a one hour 15 minute drive) on their motorcycles just for some sticky buns.

Tonight is the last game of the Stanley Cup. Edmonton and Raleigh have both won three games so this is it. I was really surprised that the attendees of the New Brunswick .NET user group stayed for the whole meeting. Even my husband is at the local pub cheering on the Edmonton Oilers!

Posted from BLInk!

Thanks to Fabrice for pointing out that the whitepapers for the next gen ADO.NET are online. I am really excited abut this stuff.  I'm printing them out for my airplane reading. (Which is wholly unlike me!) I better get back to packing!

• Next Generation Data Access
• ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview

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.

This was the fourth year of having this great event at TechEd. The format was slightly different. The speaker was great and lesson from a past event comes full circle for one attendee. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Mary Jo Foley has an interview with Robert Scoble about his departure from Microsoft. She talks to Robert about how he thinks Microsoft will do with Web 2.0, who was the most interesting person he interviewed on Channel9, if (and how) Microsoft could have kept him in the fold and more.

I satyed with Kate Gregory last night in the Airport Hilton where all of the TechEd speakers are staying. Luckily Kate and I are girls who know to where nice p.j.s when we travel! At about 4am what sounded like a really obnoxious alarm clock started very loudly buzzing in our room. It took a few seconds to realize what it was - the alarm. A woman's voice over the speaker said to evacuate the building. So the entire hotel dumped out to the grass outside of the hotel. Luckily nothing terrible happened - some flooding on the 3rd floor. I was really unhappy to experience how long it took to exit the building through the fire stairwell as people were slowly and casually and calmly going down the stairs. The general assumption is one of "oh, it's just an inconvenience, ha ha nothing important" but how can you really know? One positive sign was the calmness as people from each floor entered to the stairwell which indicated that nobody had seen anything upsetting on any of the floors. Luckily we got to sleep in a little late so it was just like a dream.

Surely there will be many blog posts and pictures about this around the teched blogosphere today!

Posted from BLInk!

Microsoft has flat panel screens throughout the conference center with coverage of the World Cup for all of the international folks here. Most of them have 50-100 people planted in front of them throughout the day. I keep thinking of the money these people's bosses have paid for them to come here and learn but instead they are watching the soccer matches. On the other hand, if it's a non-American company, their bosses would probably understand!

Posted from BLInk!

While at the Marriott in Montreal for DevTeach, Kate Gregory blogged about the plethora of pillows that the hotel had made her bed with. I stayed last night at the historic Omni Parker House in Boston and I think that there must be a trend for making a bed with seven pillows!

I'm all ready to leave in the morning. I think my bag contains 1/3 clothes and 2/3 chocolate and vermont maple syrup (no, not for myself!). This is my 7th big MS conference and I have learned that (unless there is some spaghetti sauce accident) I end up wearing the same pants day after day and have even taken to wearing t-shirts that I pick up at the expo. Sure makes packing easy!

I am still in Vermont and missed Pablo's ADO.NET 3.0 talk. Kent Tegels was there though... [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Geeze -I had my aggregator filtered on TechEd so I could see what was going on and missed the stream of blog posts about Robert making a big move. It does not surprise me, considering all that he wrote surrounding his mother's recent death wrt "not waiting for life to happen". If you want the scoop, I recommend reading Robert's perspective, not everyone else's interpretations. I was hoping that they would be moving east so I could see Maryam more often. You know, like to Vermont! Now I don't even get to see her on my next trip to Seattle. :-( 

Okay, that's just kind of a joke (and a bit of an attention grab!), although I do expect to be surrounded by about 10,000 men at TechEd. But truly the issue is "so much to do, so little time". Here are some of the gazillion things I am hoping to do during my three short days at TechEd this week:  [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

www.virtualteched.com

Live video, including the keynote, all week!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

It seems everyone I talked to today was heading to the airport for TechEd!

I'll be heading down Tuesday morning. My husband is laughing heartily at my idea of getting on the road by 6am. We'll see how it goes!

Jonathan Bruce from DataDirect has organized a data access geek meetup with ADO.NET Technical Lead Pablo Castro (who's name I must mention 10 times every time I do an ADO.NET talk!) and Bob Beauchemin on Tuesday afternoon from 4pm to 6pm. There is limited space at this event, so head over to his blog for details!

I've seen a few posts like Jeff, suggesting that you bring an extra bag in your suitcase to bring swag home. Heck TechEd is in my backyard this year and I'm driving. So if I were a swaghound - I would have the ability to bring home a lot of cubic yards of stuff! I'll definitely go trolling a little for my user group,but that will be about it.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I am looking forward to being able to get my hands on the RTM version of the ASP.NET 2.0 book that Alex Homer & Dave Sussman have coming out TechEd. The previous versions (alpha and beta) were also co-authored by Rob Howard. I have great expectations for this final version, that is written against the final release of ASP.NET 2.0. Developers are fortunate to have so many great ASP.NET 2.0 books at our disposal.

update: here's the inside scoop on the book from Dave who says it's not just a polished up version of the beta book...