All posts by Julie

Rob Howard’s VTdotNET presentation

dotNET

In February (’05) we had Rob Howard scheduled to speak at VTdotNET as an INETA speaker, and we were very excited. Even with a snowstorm, there were a lot of people planning to come. Unfortunately, the snowstorm prevented Rob from getting to Vermont …. he got stuck in Chicago at the airport waiting for his flight to take him to Vermont. The plane was delayed so many hours that we finally decided to cancel the meeting and Rob got on a plane back home to Texas. The Vermont bound plane did not arrive in Burlington until after 8:00 pm.

But he still wanted to come (and we still wanted him to!), so we scheduled Rob again and that meeting was last night – and it was worth the wait!

Rob did a presentation on ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Tricks. He had a list of 10 cool things you can do with ASP.NET 2.0, but also talked about others that he was using in the code samples, such as master pages and the fact that VS no longer boggles your HTML formatting. Talks like these are great. Sure I can find the info elsewhere, but I am busy and focusing on many things at once, so having this stuff spoon fed to me is almost a necessity. One thing that makes a session great is not just showing how, but also explaining why, which Rob did regarding each of his 10.

Of the list, the one item that is the most intriguing to me is the cross page postback. I have had to do an enormous amount of trickery to move inkdata around in a web application as the ink data is client side data and I want to do things with it on the server side and have to do things like expose it in a hidden field, grab it in the server side code of another page from the page.request object then stuff it into a session and have my way with it. Pre-RTM,  I was having problems with ink on the web in VS2005, but will now be able to explore the possibility of simplifying moving the data around with the cross page postback. I still have the problem of the ink data being on the client side, not the server side, but with some additional tools at my disposal, I may be able to come up with a better solution.

Rob’s talk was great. As he said, he was only able to skip a stone across the surface of the goodies in ASP.NET 2.0, but it’s a fantastic start for people to be able to take advantage of the new release. The power of getting this information out in front of people is expressed well by Dave Burke, who said in a blog post this morning “because of Rob’s presentation the fear of potential problems in migrating my primary development machine from Beta 2.0 to the RTM has been lessened by the anticipation of using VS2005 exclusively.”

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

E-Commerce (well, lack of) in South Africa

Just Rambling

Here’s a market for someone to figure out how to capture. While I was in South Africa, I was talking with Microsoft S.A.’s Lillian Serobatse about buying clothes on the internet, trying them on at home and shipping the rejects back. This works well when you live in the boonies and retailers like Patagonia have their big annual sales online! Lillian was surprised. “You bought clothes on the internet?” I was surprised (at her question). “Don’t you?” I asked.

Lillian explained to me that e-commerce has not really taken off in South Africa. One of the reasons, she tells me, is that like many South Africans, she LOVES to shop. The shopping trip itself is a good part of the fun – as it is for many here in the U.S. I personally hate shopping. I only go when I have to find something very specific. I don’t like wandering around from store to store just looking at stuff and maybe buying something I didn’t really need.

I imagine that purchasing stuff from outside of S.A. is cost prohibitive – think of the shipping! So it would be South African retailers that would benefit from this more than anyone. Perhaps a retailer in Jo’burg that does not want to open a storefront in Capetown or Durban (or visa-versa).



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rob Howard tonight at Vermont.NET

dotNET

Rob Howard has come to Vermont on a cold, gray, cloudy, blustery day. Maybe we can make it up to him with a great pancake breakfast!

Rob is presenting at Vermont.NET tonight (thank you INETA!!) and will be giving a talk on ASP.NET 2.0 tips & tricks. We are very excited to have him here!

Addison-Wesley has donated 6 copies of ASP.NET v2.0 which Rob co-authored, to raffle off at the meeting! Plus we will be raffling off a copy of Infragistics Net Advantage.

Our .NET Newbie session is by Mike Soulia who teaches .NET development at Vermont Tech and also owns two awesome retail stores on Church Street in downtown Burlington (www.kissthecook.net and www.applemountain.net) which he built .NET e-commerce sites for in the very early days of ASP.NET (you may recognize the UI 🙂 ). Mike will be talking about Extreme Programming concepts.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Airline pilots

Travel

gotta love them. I am always SO happy it’s them flying the plane and not me. I am terrified of flying and every bump and jiggle the plane makes turns me a little paler. I have learned to remind myself that these guys and gals know what they are doing and I don’t need to be so afraid. .Yesterday was a windy day. We didn’t get the tornadoes that were further south but it was still wicked up here. Landing in D.C. was a little unnerving, but the flight in a smaller plane between D.C. to Burlington was worse. As we descended through the two cloud layers towards the Burlington Airport we found ourselves in very gusty winds. I know up at our house it was anywhere from 30 – 50mph. The plane was bouncing around a lot. I could barely contain myself when the pilot had to bank the plane a few times to circle around and line up with the runway. Even as we were merely hovering over the runway, about to touch down, the plane was still bouncing a little – side to side. That was really scary. Poor Rich sitting next to me. I was clinging to his pant leg pretty tightly (…he said I didn’t hurt him). But even with all of that, they landed the plane with no problems (and I made note of the fact that there were no fire trucks and ambulances waiting on the runway  so it was really just business as usual.. 🙂 )

This is what they are trained to do! It is just *me* that doesn’t know how to fly a plane in turbulence. You should have seen me on the overnight flight from Frankfurt to Johannesburg. It was a really bumpy ride. I was in a cushy business class seat with Kate Gregory sleeping peacefully in the seat next to me, but I coulnd’t sleep. Eventually I dozed off but was startled awake by a big bounce and then spent a good hour or so wondering how I was going to get back on the plane again to come home. Such a worrier. But I’m still here to talk about it! Yay for pilots.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Presentation tip: Help with timing in doing sessions

Presentations

Many speakers have big problems with timing, especially in a conference setting when you cannot go long. Though I have practiced talks against a clock, this does not really help me when I’m in the session – if a question takes more time than I should have allowed or I ramble, then the time I took in practice means nothing. I’m sure other speakers have ways to deal with this, but I inadvertently came up with something on my own that helped me enormously last week and wanted to share it. It is probably not a new idea, but it worked well for me since I thought of it rather than trying to follow someone else’s suggestion.

I had ended up with one of the one hour session slots at the end of DevConnections for my WSE3.0 Overview talk and knew that posed a problem.

I looked at the powerpoint deck and divided the presentation up by topic. Then, off the top of my head, wrote down how many minutes I thought each topic (including demos) should take. Luckily, this added up to 55 minutes!

Then in a notebook (notebook is a tip I got from Ingo Rammer) I wrote down a name for each section and then, based on how long I thought the previous section should take, what time it should be when I started that section.

It looked like this:

Start2:45
Turnkey2:55
Programming Model3:15
TCPIP3:15  (the previous was only 1 minute, so it was easier to just write down the same time)
MTOM3:25
SecureConversation3:35

The session was supposed to end at 3:45. I knew I was cutting it very close for Q&A, but since it was a short session, I told them at the beginning that we would not have a lot of time for Q&A and could continue it in the hallway or online afterward.

So this worked for me like a charm. I had my little travel clock right on top of the notebook and it was easy enough for me to remember to take a very quick look over there as I started each section to see how I was doing. In this way I was able to determine if I needed to speed up or if I was okay.

I wish I had come up with this prior to TechEd South Africa where we had one hour slots but were told to leave 15 minutes for Q&A, making the presentations only 45 minutes long. But now I know I can do this from now on and hopefully it will help someone else.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

HP tries to show that the information age can help poverty stricken areas

Just Rambling

I cannot find a link to show you where in South Africa this particular village, but HP is working with the government to bring technology into villages like Dipichi as another attack against poverty. This is not about teaching people how to use word processing programs, but how to find information. Here is a reuters article on the project and their hopes.

Skeptics asked what use a computer was when people were hungry, dying of AIDS and too poor to send their kids to school?

But as multinationals start to invest in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, they are touting technology as a panacea for development.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Hiking up to Angel’s Landing at Zion

Travel

Angel’s Landing at Zion National Park is at the tip of this mountain:

and begins with this warning:


I am terrified of heights and have Vertigo, but up we went.

After a while of normal switchbacks and through a canyon, we hit the famous Walter’s Wiggles – a series of very tight switchbacks that are built up for support.

Sometimes, there is no edge on Walter’s Wiggles:

Eventually, we reached Scout Lookout to be greeted by these happy little one-holers…

 

and another warning…

but on we went… to this

 

I went up a ways, but eventually was pretty scared and knew that going down would be harder. So I turned around and Rich went on. Here are a few pictures to his journey over this hump, up the next…

 

then across this narrow precipice (with a 1500′ drop!!!)

and on to the glory of Angel’s Landing and this view.

Then he had to come all the way back to where he left me still recovering from my few feet on the rocks. Yay Rich!