Category Archives: Community Cheerleading

Michele Leroux Bustamante’s DotNet Rocks show knocked my socks off

Community Cheerleading

Now that I have an IPOD, I finally have a means of listening to DotNet Rocks. I cannot listen to it while I am working and cannot just sit in front of the computer doing nothing, listening to the show either. So, I downloaded a bunch for my six hour drive to Syracuse this week. Among them was a recent show with Michele Leroux Bustamante where she talked with Richard and Carl about WS Security, Infocards and Indigo. In New York state you are not allowed to talk on the cell phone while driving. I literally pulled off to the shoulder of the highway because I just had to call Michele when I finished listening to tell her how blown away I was by the show. To put things into perspective, I have been working with WSE and WS Security for about 1 1/2 years and have finally started digging my teeth into Indigo. So I have some context to what she is talking about. However, since I work with so many different technologies, I am sometimes very sadly a “Jack of All Trades, master of none”. And I do not use the term “master” lightly here. Michele is absolutely and solidly a master of these technologies. Her knowledge is so deep. She is not just about “how to” but also about who, why and when. She understands how these technologies fit into the bigger picture, not just about interop, but architecturally, historically and with a very knowledgeable eye to the future. Michele constantly amazes me – almost every time she opens her mouth.

I remember the reaction from the VTdotNET user group when she spoke there last fall. It was the same. Most were not familiar with her so they saw this beautiful blonde get up to the podium and might have expected some cute little drag and drop session in ASP.NET. It was fun to watch their faces, both the men and the women, as Michele opened up the guts of ASP.NET and explained to everyone how it worked. Here is one VTdotNetter’s reaction, caught on his blog.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Dr. Neil on Channel 9!!

Community Cheerleading

Dr. Neil Roodyn contracts with a few different teams at Microsoft, and spends 1/2 the year travelling around the world as a consultant. He has a PhD in Software Architecture for Real Time Systems, recently wrote a book on Extreme Programming (Extreme .NET), is a Tablet PC geek, and runs ViaVirtualEarth. And that only represents a small slice of his recent ventures. Neil is a fascinating and very nice guy who I was fortunate to meet and befriend at the Tablet PC DevLab last summer. Check out Robert Scoble’s Channel 9 interview of Dr. Neil.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

PDC ShowOff videos online!

Community Cheerleading

Mike Swanson blogs that the PDC Showoff videos are now online. Kudos to Mike and Thomas Lewis for organizing all of this!

There are 25 videos and they are here.

I did manage to see some of the videos during the ShowOff screening after the Going Solo BOF, but there were a lot I missed and now I can watch them. Of the ones I did see that night, my absolute favorite, was the robotic arm ride at LegoLand. It’s called RoboCoaster and is the very last video on page 2.

Mine was pretty dry compared to some of these VERY creative videos. I merely did a screen capture of my Virtual Earth on Ink web application in action and a voice over describing what it was doing. But lots of people actually got out their video cameras and feigned some acting skills (which is very entertaining) and showed some actual code, too! The bar has definitely been set for the next ShowOff challenge.

There were a bunch that were basically advertisements which took some of the fun out of those videos. Mike and Thomas plan to have a few more rules next time.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org