Monthly Archives: December 2007

At Microsoft talking about MIX08 (and a special guest!)

Just Rambling

I was invited by the DPE team (Developer Platform Evanglism) along with 9 other people to attend the Mix n Mash 08 event where the MIX team is picking our brains while they formulate Mix08. Right now we are talking wiht Scott Guthrie about where Microsoft is headed with development tools.

Here is the list of people who are attending:

Kip Kniskern – www.liveside.net

Molly Holzschlag – www.molly.com

Jesse Warden – www.jessewarden.com

Jonathan Snook – www.snook.ca/jonathan

Keith Peters – www.bit-101.com

Kelly Goto – www.gotomobile.com

Erik Natzke – http://jot.eriknatzke.com

Julie Lerman – www.thedatafarm.com/blog

Rob Howard – http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward

At the end of the day, we get to spend an hour with Bill Gates. I’m definitely excited about this. My husband has ben making a list of everything worng with his computer and his user experience for the past two months with the hope that I will present it to Bill. But, that’s not going to happen.

Last year, attendees came clean with the admission that they had been given the gift of a Zune for attending. This year, as a joking nod to that, we got cookies that were decorated to look like a Zune. Photo later.

Discussions right now are focused on Microsoft in the mobile space. I also asked about the whole firehose problem – of SOOOO many technologies coming at us. The only way to deal with it of course is to ignore most of it and focus on what you are best at – but man that’s is ONE hard bit of guidance to follow.

With my own focus on data access right now, it means that I’ll be able to get you data but might not be able to help you get it on your form.

Watching the weather and air travel patterns

Travel

With the inclement weather all over the U.S. right now and a nasty forecast of snow & sleet for Burlington tomorrow morning, I’ve been watching the weather in Vermont, Chicago and Seattle as well as what’s going on today with flights between those cities. I’m supposed to fly to Seattle tomorrow.

 

One great tool for watching flight patterns between airports is from the FAA’s flight delay information – Air Traffic Control System Command Center website.

 

Another trick is just to go to United or whatever airline you prefer and ask it to show status for all flights between your destinations, rather than a specific flight #. SO I can see that flights between Burlington and Chicago today, some were cancelled, the 12:30pm flight left and arrived on time. The later afternoon flights are seriously delayed (eg 5pm flight delayed until 8pm). So it’s all over the map. Tomorrow morning, my key piece of info will be when the flight FROM Chicago heads to Burlington because that plane turns around and flies back to Chicago which is the flight I’m supposed to be on. Snow & sleet also makes for interesting travel to drive to the airport, much less worrying about planes landing there. But pilots continue to amaze me when they make perfectly normal landings in conditions that have me white knuckled and with a racing pulse. I’ll stick with the day job.

 

DevTeach and DevConnections session PowerPoints uploaded

Presentations

Although these have been available to conference attendees, I have uploaded the presentations slides from the following sessions to the TALKS page of my website:

  • ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview
  • Real World Entity Framework (multi-tier issues and patterns)
  • ADO.NET 3.5 Data Access Guidance
  • Access RESTful DataServices in the Cloud (aka Astoria/ADO.NET DataServices)
  • Databinding in ASP.NET with LINQ
  • Inking in ASP.NET, AJAX and IE7
  • Annotating and Drawing with Ink in Silverlight