Daily Archives: June 3, 2005

TechEd Speakers: Another EBay Charity Auction for Aceh Recovery at IDEP

Asia

Aceh Aid is now Aceh Recovery. They are still doing amazing things. Aceh Province is still in a terrible state. It will take a LONG time to recover from the tsunamis and the enormous loss of life, land, infrastructure and sustainability. They have an amazing amount of information on their website now. Please go check it out.

So… I am REALLY excited to report that Microsoft and Stephen Forte have helped gather up 20 of the TechEd speakers for another EBay auction for my friends in Bali who are running Aceh Recovery.

The EBay site will be up soon. Stephen has the list of speakers, but just for google, I will list them here as well, (alphabetically)

Don Box
Andrew Brust
Michele Leroux Bustamante
Richard Campbell
Stephen Forte
Carl Franklin
Jackie Goldstein
John Goodyear
Kate Gregory
Scott Hanselman
Tim Huckaby
Richard Hundhausen
Patrick Hynds
Jesper Johansson
Tim Landgrave
Rockford Lhotka
Juval Lowy
Ingo Rammer
Joel Semeniuk
Kimberly Tripp
Clemens Vasters
Christian Weyer

There is a lot of effort that goes behind pulling this together. Last time Stephen and I spent many hours so I am very grateful for the support from Microsoft this time. And of course to all of the speakers and, in advance, to all of the bidders, whether they win the bids or not.

We will have the EBay site up soon and the rules & regs!



http://www.AcehAid.org

MSDN Tablet PC Dev Center Article on Ink on the Web

Tablet

I wrote an article for MSDN’s Tablet PC Developer Center about how I wrote the Doodle application that lets you ink on the web. The trickiest part of that app was redisplaying the ink image for the user without saving it somewhere. If they want to save it, the also have that option. But moving the ink data through the pipe, from the client side to the server back to the client was vewwwy twicky. Also, thanks to a bunch of ASPInsiders and then Jeff Prosise who laid the final blow to get me to modify my application to use HTTPHandlers. They always sound so scary, so “for plumbers only”…. but actually they are EASY and will get even easier in VS2005.

The article is on the home page of the tablet dev center under the “Recent Articles” section.

Note the article by Dr. Neil right below it, on leveraging the Network Location Awareness API for managed code. I sure wish I had had *that* darned API when I wrote my first few mobile apps. I came up with my own way of detecting “am I on the local network?” “am I on the web?” “am I totally disconnected?”.

http://www.AcehAid.org

To Swag or not to swag

Tech Ed

Here’s one thing that always gets me at the big conferences. The people who go around the expo hall collecting as MUCH STUFF as they can with absolutely no regard for what they are even getting – just so long as it’s free. I remember at TechEd Dallas we didn’t have a proper banner for our wee INETA booth way in the back of the expo hall so I hung up some INETA T-Shirts. We didn’t have give aways, just shirts for the volunteers. What we did have was some of the real rock star .NET speakers who wer also INETA speakers in the booth as an Ask the Experts. That’s a pretty good deal. Free technical advice from some of the top presenters ni the .NET world. But no….. So many people came by asking for a t-shirt. They had no clue what INETA was and no interest in finding out. Just wanted the damned shirt. I actually had an argument with a guy who was demanding I give him a shirt!

I do like to get stuff to hand out to my user group. One year I brought back a box and just dumped it out on the table for everyone to take from. But I’m actually embarrassed to carry a bag around to get stuff. And if I do take something, I will end up spending a lot of time talking to the people at the booth. Rather than just do a drive by and grab fast.

And then there’s getting it home. LOL. Spendng all of that money to ship FREE stuff home. Okay so I got smart and brought an extra soft suitcase last time. Someone suggested a heavy duty canvas duffel bag would do the trick. We’ll see how it goes…

http://www.AcehAid.org

A linux box on the premises

Just Rambling

A friend brought over a laptop that someone had given her. She couldn’t figure out how to use it and I said just bring it over, I’ll check it out.

I turned it on and was totally mystified by what I saw. It was a Dell laptop and had Linux installed with a Freesbee desktop. I couldn’t figure out how to use it either. Happily I had an unopened unused fully licensed WinXP Pro hanging around so we stuck the cd in in and said “yes” to remove the partition and “yes” to reformat. 🙂

Don’t get me wrong – I am not an anti-opensource bigot. There was just no way that either my friend or I was going to figure out how she could use this quickly when she already was well-versed in all things windows.



http://www.AcehAid.org

.NET Newbie Sessions at Vermont.NET

dotNET

This month, VTdotNET is starting something new: .NET Newbie sessions. It is in response to my ponderings about how to deal with the widening knowledge gap in the user group. So I am really excited that this is starting. The first session is this month at our June 13th meeting. Laura Blood, from Blue Note Computing will present on “Object Oriented Programming in .NET – How to Build and Use Objects”.

Then, for the main session, we will depart from Object Oriented program in it’s entirety (just a coincidence) as Sam Gentile presents on SOA and Indigo. Sam is coming as an INETA speaker!

I just this moment realized the irony in that!

http://www.AcehAid.org

My kind of business trip!

Just Rambling

I couldn’t pay my husband to come to Orlando with me for a week during TechEd in June or even in March for Connections. Or to San Diego last year. Or to Las Vegas for Connections. Etc….

I wish I had business trips more like this…

There was a time in my life actually when I did. In my late 20’s I had two fab all expenses paid business trips to London with plenty of time to explore. Both of them were consulting gigs. Ahh the good old days.

There’s still hope…

http://www.AcehAid.org