From the photos on Thom Robbins’ website (MS Dev Evangelist for New England – that’s MY dev evangelist and maybe the best one in the country), it looks like this weekend’s Code Camp (2 full days of sessions with 3 tracks, running from 9 am to 9pm both days! and for free!!) was well attended which is a good sign. I am looking forward to seeing more info on his weblog.

Kathleen Dollard has posted a wonderful blog full of advice in response to a question asked “how do I break into a development career?” Like Mike Gunderloy’s Coder to Developer, Kathleen brings many many years of practical experience to the table.

Omar has worked in the Mac area of Microsoft for 5 years, most recently as the Lead PM for the VPC Mac team. He is now packing up his proverbial bag (8 boxes that is) to move over to the “FrontDoor” team which is things related to email: DAV, Passport, Hotmail, SMTP, etc. He will be the lead program manager. This is one of the beauties of working for a huge company. You can stay there for many years and still have lots of change. I had dinner with Omar in Boston in February and will never forget hearing him talk about how much he loves working for Microsoft.

Michele knew what she was going to call this dasBlog based blog a long time ago…DasBlonde is finally live. For those of you under-the-rock dwellers that don’t know Michele, she is an MSDN Regional Director in the San Diego area, a prolific technical author (MSDN, Code Magazine, Fawcette, etc. etc.), well known conference speaker, an associate of Juval Lowy’s IDesign and someone who is extremely knowledgeable in many areas of development. Michele has created an empire of .net training at UCSD Extension. Well, the list does go on and on. Michele is a woman with an incredibly impressive background and a lot to teach us all. Welcome to blog world, baby!

Boy is Tim one fun and entertaining and smart guy! If you are familiar with the Iron Chef, you will understand Tim’s tales about doing the Iron Developer at a Bill Gates keynote. We had a blast last night with him as the Vermont.NET presenter (thanks to the fact that he is an INETA speaker, we were able to get him to come all the way to Vermont). Tim talked to us about the broad topic of Smart Clients, continuously inviting us to debate with him about the definition over a beer after the meeting!

This was based on his upcoming (and well travelled but ever-evolving) TechEd 2004 talk “Architecting and Building Smart Client Applications with .NET”. Because it is a broad topic, there are many approaches one can take in presenting on it, and this talk was not only a great overview, but dug into particular details in a way that I was also able to learn a lot of new things.

For example, I have struggled on occasion (and then just given up so I can move on with development) with “oh it’s SO EASY NOW” deployment in .net win apps. Early on I bought into the “deploy/install” from the webserver” flag waving and gave up after countless hours of not being able to get the app.config file to install on particular machines. Now the true method is to install via MSI or other normal means and then update from the webserver. I still haven’t been using that in my thankfully small enough that I can still get away with it – clients. Recently I thought I would just take a look at the Application Update Block and quickly discovered that I was going to have to spend some serious time with it before I could use it. (yeah yeah, click once NEXT year! 🙂 ). These events are not so great for one’s ego. So I was very happy to have Tim confirm that a) webserver install was in fact half-baked for anything with complexity to it and b) the App Updater Block was not for the faint of heart. So I will go back to the AppUpdaterComponent that has been around for quite a while, which he showed us (and I missed at DevDays since I was presenting in the Webtrack). It’s one of those things that, having seen in live, in action, made the difference for me.

Anyway, Tim was great fun, quite entertaining and we learned a lot. After the meeting a bunch of us, including blogger Dave Burke, took Tim and his wife, Kelly, to one of the local breweries to “sample” some of their beers and great English pub fare.

And we had three completely new people at the meeting last night. I always love that!

Tim is on his way to Ft. Lauderdale for another INETA speaking engagement tonight at the Gold Coast Users Group.

Student Ambassador Mark Mehalis has helped coordinate an afternoon of .NET at Sacramento State Computer Science department along with the help of a Microsoft Academic person, some professors and his good networking skills at the MVP Summit.

Mark has Ted Neward, Eric Meijer from Microsoft (of X#/Xen/etc. fame) doing the keynotes as well as some help from the local .NET (INETA member) user group, SACDOTNET, lead by Manoj Keechillot.

It’s great to see this kind of collaboration  happening at the local level.

The meeting is today from 12-4. Here’s more info

Robert is doing some killer security talks at WinDev this year. I would love to attend both of these sessions!

Just kidding!

Kate Gregory writes about the recent Regional Director Summit in Canada. Here’s what goes on and links to a Microsoft.ca site area all about the RDs.

And already lots of food for thought!!

”Nascent Geek Girl” is rolling up her sleeves to learn programming – VB.NET style. She is planning to document the process on her blog. Only a few posts so far, but I’ll be watching with interest!