Daily Archives: June 9, 2005

Kate Gregory – Regional Director of the Year

Community Cheerleading

Oh, now here’s a big shocker! Kate, who I love, admire, respect and trust, both as a professional and as a great human being, has been named RD of the Year by the MSDN Regional Director program. My understanding is that all of the other 120+ RDs around the world have a vote on this.

Here is a fantastic blog post all about Kate and this lovely honor.

And here is a post by Kate which is a great insight to what really makes her tick. 🙂

 

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Working the floor for VTdotNET

dotNET

Although I have had conversations in the past with Tim, Dr. Neil and Rob about speaking at VTdotNet this year, I have managed to (nearly) lock them in while at TechEd. Yahoo! Now I have the rest of the year covered (with December being our christmas party). I realize that I have got all of our INETA events piled into this half of the year!

                 

06/13/05 : Sam Gentile (INETA event)
07/11/05 : Kathleen Dollard (INETA event)
08/08/05 : Julia Lerman
09/19/05 : Neil Roodyn (97% sure) 
10/17/05 : Tim Ewald
11/14/05 : Rob Howard (INETA event)



http://www.AcehAid.org

Steele Price writes a summary of the Bleeding Edge BOF from Wednesday night

Just Rambling

http://blog.steeleprice.net/archive/2005/06/09/640.aspx

I was very lucky that Steele showed up as well as Michael Kaplan and a pair of folks (one developer, one marketing person) from Mobiforms who have all of their bets on a 3rd party tool they are working on for Avalon developers. I don’t think of myself as bleeding edge when I work in Whidbey because I look at people who are doing Indigo, or heck, the people who build (and keep pushing) the edge as bleeding edge. One thing I know is that it is all relative. I have more thoughts about last nights discussion and will write about that after I let them simmer a bit. But as Steele mentions, I think that the common theme was MOTIVATION. What motivates a developer or business to go to future products adn how do you motivate your developers to look ahead.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Yes I am going to sessions

Tools

I will write about what I have learned when I have time to absorb it all but I have seen great presentations by Steve Schwartz (overview of the variety of technologies to pick from for designing connected systems), Michele Leroux Bustamante (awesome look at doing ws-security with wse2 “beyond the wizards”), Mark Fussell (my *must see* .. WSE 3.0) and Tim Ewald (who I have locked in for Oct. 17th at VTdotNET 🙂 ) Tips & Tricks for implementing Web Services – so great that this is what he will be doing at my user group. I have never seen Tim present before and he is a TOP notch presenter. He has mastered the art of not flying through his content but making a statement and then pausing, letting you spend a moment thinking about what he has just said. I am going to try to be conscious of this when I present.

Although I have had many strings trying to pull me to skip TechEd today and go to Epcot Center (“if you can see only one thing while you are here….”), I will make a point of doing more sessions today.

http://www.AcehAid.org

How-To-Select [3rd party tools] Guides

Tools

xTras.Net is one of the most creative vendors of 3rd party developer tools out there and owner Mike Schinkel has come up with another great idea! Xtras is publishing the “How to Select” guides edited (and  sometimes authored) by Mike Gunderloy. I saw the first in the new series which was How to Select PDF Components. I took a look, there a a long list of these to choose from and I could only think of one that I know (off the top of my head). When Mike showed this to me, I just thought what a GREAT idea! People are always looking for this type of advice which is a different spin than reading straight reviews.

So keep your eye out for these!

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEd Speakers Celebrity Auction for Aceh Aid

Asia

There is another auction happening right now to benefit Aceh Aid at IDEP (now renamed to Aceh Recovery at IDEP). Twenty three TechEd speakers have put one hour blocks of their time on the auction block. The auction goes until Thursday, June 16th. We raised over $10,000 for this incredible organization in January and many lucky winning bidders got some great advice from some of the top consultants and brains in the industry. So whether you want to spend an hour asking Juval Lowy some tough architecture questions, learn about the future of communication with Don Box, get some of your tough VSTS questions answered by Richard Hundhausen or Joel Semeniuk, you can do that and lend some aid to help the people of Aceh Province Indonesia who still have a loooong way to recovering from the terrible disastrous Dec 26th tsunami (and consequent earthquakes).

HERE IS THE LINK!!

http://www.AcehAid.org