The first annual HDC is over and here are a number of people who have written about it:

Kent Tegels

Robert Hurlbut

Sam Gentile

Matt Hawley

keynote presenter Rocky Lhotka

and conference organizer Joe Olsen.

I would like to add that Joe, who is a liaison on the INETA User Group Relations Committee, the leader of the Omaha.NET User Group and a real community leader is the guy who put on this show. He never organized a conference before. I have seen some of the stats and am just completely amazed. Somebody buy this man a beer (or a beer hall maybe for next year?).

This guy is way too prolific – lucky for us. Mike Gunderloy continues to share the lessons he has learned in over 25 years of software programming. Mike’s next books is Developer to Designer.

designed to help you and other experienced developers build GUIs for your programs that are simple to learn, easy to use, and painless to maintain, even though you’re not user interface experts. Inside, the focus is on the essentials of Windows and web GUI design: simple ideas that require modest

So if you listened to Kate Gregory on DotNetRocks, you know this is a book for her! She said that all of her forms look like a programmer wrote them. And we laughed ’cause we knew exactly what she meant!

So this book not about becoming a Hi-Res* web designer, but about taking pity on the poor end users who have to work with your programs day in and day out. You know where to send a review copy! I wonder if he wrote this book on a Tablet PC? (snigger)

*Hi-Res is a design company who’s site I was pointed to a number of years ago. They are always experimenting. They are brilliant and have always pushed the envelope with their design. I have watched over the years as they have acquired bigger and bigger and more high profile projects. If you want to be inspired to think out of the grey box of database forms – this is the fix I always recommend!!

Worthwhile sold out

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It wasn’t long ago that Klaus Aschenbrenner was puzzled by a mystery

Now he has a mystery of his own for us to wonder about! 🙂

yeah – Peter Rysavy’s blogging again with his rapid fire posts and great insights. He’s happy to see Tablet PC ISV Business Development lead Frank Gocinski blogging (as all of us tablet geeks are!), thrilled with the promise of the Tablet PC Gaming SDK and more. He even has a new domain “Peter on Tech“! I’m not the only one whose happy to see him posting again! Larry and Loren have also commented. I like Peter’s point about Microsoft’s persistence with the TabletPC. Frank and many others believe in this technology with all of their hearts and are fighting an uphill battle in terms of marketing. Eventually, Tablets will be laptops, laptops will be tablets and digitizers on the desk will be commonplace.

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Thanks to Glenn Munlawin of APress who sent some software business books to raffle off at the next meeting of VTSDA. We have one of Vermont’s top Intellectual Property lawyers, Peter Kunin, speaking at the next meeting. It’s fun to spread out to something that is not strictly about .NET and meet people from many different types of software development companies and still be able to share with them some of the great resources that I have access to. Aah, my ever expanding horizons! 🙂

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And rightfully so. Their application, Art Rage, is amazing even though I can’t even begin to take advantage of it. I’m a smiley face artist. It is used by real artists.

Hearty congrats to them!!!

(saw the news by way of Tablet PC Talk)

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Rod Paddock, Code Magazine editor (and so much more…:-)) is hoping to pull together a geek dinner while in Sioux Falls on 12/7.

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Roman is one of my favorite SQL Server gurus. Okay, maybe I’m jaded becuase he lives nearby and is a GREAT cook, too! Roman is now posting weekly SQL Server tips on his blog. I emailed him and said “really?  YOu are going to keep this up every week??” and he definitely plans to. Roman is a wealth of knowledge so this will be great.

This week’s tip (2nd week) is about a problem I know personally. Connecting to SQL Server over VPN. I am a good example of someone who did just give up and go with SQL Authentication. Roman explains a work around to use Windows Authentication.

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Mario Cardinal, who is one smart and very fun French Canadian geek, is hosting a web audio .NET talk show in French called BlaBla dotNET. I  know Mario  is completely great to chat with in English! And that’s his second language. His first guest was Eric Cote, one of my favorite geeks in Montreal. Next is one of my other favorite Montreal geeks, Guy Barrette. Okay, so I have a bunch of favorite French Canadian geeks… That accent, those chocolate croissants…what can I say?

Darn – my high school french just won’t do, though.

Mario is speaking at Vermont.NET in January on the Application Blocks in Enterprise Services. It’s a great run down of the application blocks since most people only know about one or two of them.

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