Daily Archives: April 22, 2005

Canadian User Group Competition results in some serious apps!

Community Cheerleading

I am watching the webcast from the Toronto VB User Group’s presentation of Pocket Build, their entry into the Canadian Inter User Group Competition. The task was to improve the quality of a developer’s life. TVBUG came up with an amazing application to alert developers of build issues remotely. Not only does the app blow me away, but the presentation and the depth that they went to is amazing. It is a thoroughly designed and planned application. I just can’t get over that they put togehter such a professional project.

More details and all of the links to the webcasts are here, on Sasha Krsmanovic’s blog. Sorry I forgot this link earlier!!

I haven’t watched the others yet, but apparently they were all very high quality, though everyone agreed that TVBug’s had to be the winner.

Congrats to everyone.



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Malek moves to Istanbul

Community Cheerleading

Malek Kemmou, will no longer be “the guy from Casablanc” among us as he moves to Istanbul tomorrow (as a new Microsoft employee). Yesterday Stephen wrote about some departing shenanigans that I’m sure he strong-armed Malek into 😉 and today Malek gives us a beautiful poem about leaving the city he has grown up in. I look forward to the day that Malek can introduce me to both Casablanca and Istanbul.

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Trying to Ghost a clean machine but….

Tools

I totally repaved my Whidbey test box with the intention of using Norton Ghost to create an image of a completely fresh machine before I install the beta 2 bits on it. The last step of the process is to install Ghost and it gives me the message:

“To run Norton Ghost, you must first install Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1”

There goes my pure and clean machine! I’ll have to install .NET 1.1 and then uninstall it after I make my backup. Darn!

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WSE2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0 at Mid Atlantic Code Camp May 7th

Just Rambling

There were so many awesome submissions (speakers and topics) for the MAD Code Camp that poor Andrew Duthie and the track chairs had a really hard time fitting it all in. I made a bit of a nuisance of myself so that I would be able to present my ADO.NET 2.0 session (in addition to my WSE2.0 talk) which ended up meaning that Geoff Snowman, the local Developer Community Champion, gave up his session so that I could do mine. Thanks Geoff! I sure hope I was doing you a favor though!! 🙂

Also, my talk will be right before another ADO.NET 2 topic by Sahil Malik. He will be drilling into concurrency in ADO.NET 2.0, so that will be a great pair of sessions back to back.

Watch this space to see the session schedule which will be put up soon. The Code Camp is from 9am – 9pm with 4 tracks. It will be awesome. It is at Microsoft’s Reston office. There is still plenty of room for more attendees, so go sign up!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

As INETA grows, so grows our volunteer base

Ineta

Do you know that worldwide, INETA has (at the moment) 769 member user groups? INETA NORAM (that’s North America, as in US & Canada) accounts for 250 of those groups. About 200 of them are in Latin America. APAC is about 120, Europe 130 and MEA (Middle East & Africa) is about 70. We have groups in places like Bulgaria, Iceland, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Micronesia and even little ol’ Vermont :-).

Anyway, what started me off was that I wanted to welcome a few of the new liaisons in NORAM: Rob Windsor from Toronto, Scott Spradlin of Missouri and Morgan Baker in Florida.



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