Monthly Archives: March 2008

TechEd Birds of a Feather submissions need to be in by April 2nd

Tech Ed

From INETA:

TechEd 2008: Get Involved with Birds-of-a-Feather

Contribute to the Community and Get Rewarded

June 3-6 Orlando, FL

Help Us Make the Birds-of-a-Feather Discussions a Success!

As we said in the February newsletter, INETA is once again coordinating the Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions at TechEd 2008. Based upon feedback, we have extended the deadline for topic submissions to Wed 4/2/2008 and the voting deadline to Mon 4/7/2008.

 

Announcing a program to recognize individuals who help make the BOF sessions a success!

 

If you sign up to host two sessions and moderate one session OR host three sessions, you will get the following special BOF Volunteer Package including:

  • A TechEd 2008 Day Pass allowing access to all conference sessions, hands-on labs, meals, etc. on Wednesday 6/4/2008 (20 available on a first-come, first-served basis).
  • Special BOF t-shirt.
  • From all the volunteers, five of their user groups will get an extra INETA speaker between now and the end of 2008.
  • Technology book from a major publisher.
  • Attend a special lunch on Wednesday 6/4/2008 for an informal discussion with some technology experts like INETA speakers and individuals from the Microsoft product teams.
  • Have access to the BOF team room Wednesday evening before and during the sessions where you can get food and drink, take a break and check in with other volunteers.

Contact us at noram.bofhelp@ineta.org to volunteer and make the BOF sessions a success!

 

Additional Reources: 

Bof Flyer,  February newsletter, topic submissions, voting, moderator instructions/guidelines

 

Please distribute this Bof Flyer to anybody that might be interested in attending TechEd.

 

Thank you.

 

The INETA BoF Team

Code Camp 9 Update

VTdotNetFeed

Code Camp 9 has a beautiful new logo created by Bryan Philips.

Chris Bowen reports that the session for the April 5-6 Code Camp are filling up and the registrations are as well. At last count there are 40 sessions submitted.

Deadline for abstract submission is March 24th.

There is an introductory track this year which is a great opportunity for people who are new to presenting to do a session. In addition, Chalk Talks are a fabulous way to lead a conversation about something that you are interested in wtihout having to do the work of preparing a session and demos or worry about standing in front of an audience giving  presentation.

Submit sessions and register at www.TheDevCommunity.org.

Writing a book means: Learning the word “NO”

Book

As a book-writing newbie, I have had to learn to say “no” when I’m used to always saying “yes”. For example, I just turned down an invitation to speak at a conference in India. I’ve never been to India. I hope I’ll get invited again.

But you know it’s serious when I had to say “no” to watching the first NEW episode in forever of Two and a Half Men last night. It pained me to hear Rich laughing his butt off while I stayed in front of my computer and tried to keep focused.

It’s gotten to the point that I was grumbling about having to go to a Dr. appointment on Monday. But I figured, heck, if I die, I can’t work anyway, so I might as well go and make sure I’m okay. Luckily it wasn’t a doctor who work in the mental health field. Surely they would have locked me up immediately!

Then of course there’s the skiing and other forms of exercise that I’m not getting. Thankfully (for me, not for the Mad River Glen’s finances) the snow has been dreadful lately.

My saving grace was that the power went out yesterday for an hour. SO I went outside and took a “brisk walk” (is that a sign of age? Not even a run!).

I was thrilled this evening when Rich presented me with an altered part to an old bike trainer that I was hoping to use at least to get some spinning in. The trainer didn’t fit my bike. So Rich altered the part and now it fits. Yay. Of course, I’m not on it, I’m working (well, blogging only for a momentary diversion).

It just occurred to me that this blog post sounds like an Andy Rooney commentary. Egad! Well back to work. Tick tick tick.

Congratulations to Red-Gate

Community Cheerleading

Red-Gate is one of those companies that you just can’t help but love. They produce phonemenally useful and popular developer /data developer tools, and the community facing people are a joy to work with. It doesn’t surprise me that this stems from a company with a good soul. So it’s no surprise (but still quite nice) to read that they have been chosen (for the 2nd year in a row) as one of the “Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work For” in the U.K. by the Sunday Times. Read more on Red-Gates’s website.

Crystal REports 2008 Service Pack provides integration with VS2008

Just Rambling

In my article, What Visual Studio Developer Should Know about Crystal Reports 2008, for ASPAlliance, I pointed out the fact that CR2008 integrates with VS2003 and VS2005 but NOT VS2008 and that this would be eventually be rectified with a Service Pack.

Thanks to Guy Barrette’s blog post “Will the real Crystal Reports 2008 stand up?“, (and because I still can’t figure out how to subscribe to the Crystal Reports team blog), I learned that the service pack that fixes this is out.

The Crystal Report’s blog post about the service pack [Crystal Reports 2008 Service Pack 0] details the changes. Those related to Flash integration and Business Objects Enterprise connectivity aren’t of interest to me, per se, but the VS2008 integration definitely is. It also says that CR2008 now runs on Windows 64 bit O/S.

The blog also points out that “It is also now available through the Update Service.  Use Help > Check for Updates within Crystal Reports 2008 to update your version. “ but since my 30 day trial ran out I didn’t realize this. Now it’s time for me to see if the other showstopper problem for me has been resolved.

I’ll report back.

EF & LINQ to SQL queries against spatial data (not SQL Server 2008 though)

Data Access

[thanks to Roger Jennings for the correction about spatial data]

Samir Bajaj, a developer on the Entity Framework team has begun his blog with a bang.

He describes a sample application (available on MSDN Code Gallery) that can switch  between LINQ to SQL or ENtity Framework, highlighting the differences between the two.

The application targets an business case that he is very familiar with  – searching  a database filled with drawings which are based on a collection of shapes. Samir has a background working for a CAD company and explains that it is a common task to search for drawings that contain particular shapes.

Thanks to SQL Server 2008’s new spatial data, this gets really interesting.

Added: While SQL Server 2008’s spatial data may have been an inspiration, it will not be not supported by LINQ to SQL or EF in the near future, so Samir is using his own techniques with SQL Server 2005.

Check out his blog post and then the app, called Sketchpad (requires SQL Server 2008 CTP)