Daily Archives: April 19, 2008

Finally! United Red Carpet Club has free wi-fi!

Travel

Hip hip hooray.

My only trip so far in 2008 was on USAirways, so I hadn’t realized this until just now as I’m stuck in Dulles for 3 hours because  – oh shock! – my flight from Burlington was delayed and I missed my connection by minutes. As we landed, I saw my plane to Orlando sitting at the gate. I hoofed it down the hallway with my backpack on and my carryon in tow (not great fun in Teva’s), arrived breathless to learn that it had just left. Now why don’t they get the fact that I’m on a connecting flight – one of their own – and just pulling into my gate and just wait another 2 minutes?

Anyway, at least I had the nice surprise of the free wireless to go along with teh carrott sticks and packaged bites of cheese they have for us here in the lounge. Oh, how it makes me miss the Lufthansa and Ai Canada lounges with their real food and (even though I don’t take advantage) local beer on tap!

 

Heading to DevConnections in Orlando

Connections

While it’s very hard to leave Vermont when we are having incredible weather (70 – 80 degree days with blue and sunny skies!) I am on my way to Orlando, FL for DevConnections.

Once again, there is a full track dedicated to Data Access. I’ll kick it off with a full day of Entity Framework tomorrow. Monday is Microsoft day and I’m thrilled that there will be talks by Mike Flasko from the Astoria team and from Danny Simmons and Colin Meek of the Entity Frameowrk team.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we’ll have two more full days with topics like from LINQ to SQL, Synch Services, ADO.NET Perfomance, Entity Framework, Data Sets and more. And top noch presenters like Dino Esposito, Don Keily, Kathleen Dollard, Cathi Gero and more!

Look for the Data Access track which is listed in both the Visual Studio and ASP Connections conferences.

I’ll also be doing a session on Astoria Web Mashups in the ASP Connections conference. I was bummed that the current Astoria bits don’t line up with Silverlight 2.0 so I can’t do that demo any more, but instead I have put together a cool little demo combining Astoria with Popfly. As far as I know, it’s the only implementation out there. The session is in one of the 60 minute slots so I’ll just have to talk fast, par usual.

If you’re at Connections, say hi!