Since I plan to attend Wintellect’s Devscovery in Reston, VA in early May, I have submitted talks to the Code Camp that is that Saturday (May 7th) in the same building as the Devscovery conference.

The website for Devscovery is pretty funny. It says “our aim is to have you beg us to stop cramming information into your head.”

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am just catching up on a lot of posts and see that pricing announcments were made regarding Team System. I had heard  about the new SKUs for MSDN Universal a while ago and scratched my head about small or independent consultants not having easy access to learn some of the tools that will be priced way over their heads (6 month trials notwithstanding…). But one of the interesting points about this is that Microsoft is clearly aiming the VSTS stuff directly at the large enterprise shops and the benefit is that, as Jonathan Cogley and Eric Sink note, they are not leaving the market for 3rd party tools like NUnit and SourceGear mostly in tact.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I got home in the wee hours of the morning from a fantastic 5 days at DevConnections in Orlando. The conference was, as always, just great. (Note that the spring 2005 show is getting archived. Watch this page for links to that show.) It was held at the Hyatt Grand Cypress which is a real paradise-like resort. Shirley and Gary Brothers run such a top notch show. I was very happy with my presentations and I ended up doing my session on What’s new in ADO.NET 2.0 twice. Unfortunately that extra session was due to the fact that Dino E was unable to make it. Of course there is just no way anyone can duplicate Dino’s effervescent presentation style – he is truly unique (in a wonderful way).

Thanks to everyone who attended my talks. It is your response to them that inspires me to keep doing this! Don’t forget to email me those questions and I will blog the answers!

The 2nd ADO.NET 2.0 session was in a one hour slot and we somehow managed to get through the whole thing at a fast  pace since there just wasn’t anything I was willing to cut out. As expected, I heard gasps and applause when I showed how SQL Server Query Notification was tied into ADO.NET and ASP.NET.

I had two sessions that were challenged by being scheduled at the same time as an Indigo session by Ari Bixhorn and a live recording of .NET Rocks. Three of my talks were held in the humongous 500 (looked like it a least) seat ballroom — though I encouraged the 30-40 or so attendees to sit up close.

I also got a hot off the presses copy of the updated (for beta) version of Alex Homer, Dave Sussman and Mark Fussell’s new ADO.NET and System.XML 2.0 book from A-W, which I perused for additional insight before my ado.net 2.0 talks.

I did a 1/2 day workshop on Sunday which was teaching Web Service Security Fundamentals (the cryptography stuff) and an intro to WSE2.0. Although it wasn’t heavily attended, it  went great and I think everyone there really got a lot out of the session. I LOVE doing that talk. And the more I do it the more fun it is to do. The more fun it is for me to do the more fun it is for the attendees. The 1st part of the talk – the crypto stuff – has become my “I want to teach the world to sing” talk. Perhaps I’ll look into doing a webcast on it. I do have an article coming out on MSDN Online with that content.

Also of course, hanging out in the speaker lounge with so many of my friends (old and new) is just the best best fun. The expo was great and I had fun hanging out with Dave Noderer at the INETA booth (thanks to MSDN for that). Stan Schultes also drove down from Sarasota for dinner one night.

Anyway – thanks again to everyone attending my talks (and especially to Chandler from Vegas who was grinning from ear to ear throughout the entire ADO.NET 2.0 session!) I will be uploading my powerpoints and demos to my website on the Talks page, here.

I will be presenting at DevConnections in the Fall in Las Vegas. The line up right now looks like this:

Leveraging SQL Server 2005 Query Notification in ASP.NET 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0
Both ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 take advantage of SQL Server 2005’s Service Broker. Although ADO.NET 2.0 is only able to receive query notification from SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 2.0 has an implementation that will also know about database changes in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 7. This session will demonstrate how to receive notifications through both ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2 as well as cover the pros and cons and the many rules surrounding Query Notification.

A Look at WSE 3.0
WSE 3.0 is slated to be the last version of WSE prior to Indigo. It is also the first release of the Web Services Enhancements that will be fully interoperable with Indigo and incorporates more of the WS-* specifications than previously. Come to this session to see highlights of WSE 3.0 as well as how it relates to what we know about WSE 2.0 and to the upcoming Indigo.

Customizing the debugging experience in Visual Studio 2005 with new Debugger Attributes
New features in .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 allow you to take more control over how information is displayed about classes while you are debugging. Debugger Visualizers are custom user interfaces that can be written to display information about .NET classes or your own custom classes. The new debugger attributes can be applied to your classes to define the formatting of debug info displayed in the watch windows. This session will walk through how to write and deploy custom visualizers as well as how to leverage the new debugger attributes found in the System.Diagnostics namespace.

Hopefully I’ll also be doing the C# for VB Developers talk again which is a look at syntax and some IDE differences as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org