I’m in Milwaukee for the Deeper in .NET event that is happening today. Five speakers back to back all day starting with Michele Leroux Bustamante doing a talk on WCF, then Scott Hanselman, my (data access talk), Bill Hatfield and Jason Beres. I hear there are nearly 500 people registered. Wow!

Yesterday I had a great look at and taste of some of the specialties of the area.

My first surprise was the Bloody Mary that had something a little different in it

Yes, in between the celery and the lemon is a sausage. It’s just the way they serve them here! This drink was ordered (and consumed) by Chris Barwick who I didn’t think I knew until he told me he was OptionsScalper. Oh! I sure know him by that alias! Chris picked me up at the airport and I was amazed to learn all of the brainy things (like F# research at Microsoft’s Cambridge UK research facility) that he’s involved in.

There was a dinner last night for the speakers and some other locals and out of towners which was “taste of Wisconsin” – all of the Wisconsin treats. The bratwurst was awesome and they also had, get this, Beer Cheese soup. Had to try that and it was tasty.

It was a blast to get to meet Avonelle Lovhaug in person finally and Val the C# Gal too! Casey Chesnut is here and I divulged to him the secret of how I got ink on Virtual Earth. It’s a big deal for me that I actually figured out something that Casey the mad genius got stumped on. Probably the only time *that* will ever happen.

Oddly there is a small FoxPro conference here too so it was a great surprise to bump into my dear friend Ceil Silver and some of the ol’ FoxPro gang.

(links later)

Milwaukee is a city filled with beautiful old buildings (it was the 2nd biggest inland port city after Chicago in the 1800’s. I’m looking forward to strolling around tomorrow to see more.

Scott Isaacs and co. have done an amazing job and I’m really looking forward to the day.

From Chris Sells’ blog:

Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn’t change the meaning of anything.

With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice.

Egad!

I have a feeling that Charles Petzold is doing the same about now, since on 4/5 he said he had one more month before his 1000 page WPF book is due.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some very knowledgable people are debating WSDL first. I think reading these types of threads where you get not only people’s opinions of pros and cons, but the why’s start getting answered too.

It starts with Craig Andera’s post about protecting himself (and the world) from poorly written WSDLs by implementing iXMLSerializable.

This post woke Tim Ewald out of his blog slumber who, as a big contract first proponent,thinks that Craig’s proposal is overkill.

Craig responded.

Aaron Skonnard got in on the conversation.

Christian Weyer did too (in Craig’s comments) since he’s got THE tool for doing contract first web services.

All in all, very educational thread, whichever side of the fence  you are on. Me … I’m just, as always, on the fence.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org