All posts by Julie

Dan Wahlin’s Silverlight/ASP.NET AJAX Album Viewer

ASP.NET

Dan Wahlin and Matt Gibbs have a book just coming out about ASP.NET AJAX (Prof. Asp.NET 2.0 AJAX) from WROX. So Dan has now spent a LOT of time with AJAX and is very knowledgable. Then Silverlight comes out and boom – he’s got a Silverlight ASP.NET AJAX app that is VERY cool. I’m supposed to be writing an article on Entity Framework right now, but boy do I want to continue playing with Silverlight.

 

Going to TechEd? Visit Eric at the SourceGear booth

Tech Ed

Since I won’t be at TechEd, I want to make sure Eric Sink is well-entertained! Of course, he’s a pretty entertaining guy, so do yourself a favor and go visit him, get a cool t-shirt, get a chance to win a Wii and see some awesome developer tools like my favorite source control program.

[The fine print: I was not asked, paid, cajoled, bribed or otherwise to make this post, but I admit that I was definitely flattered!]

Microsoft Surface – life imitates art….

Just Rambling

It’s always entertaining to laugh at the unrealistic things people do with computers in television shows – most often shows like CSI. I remember seeing one of the early demo apps for WPF that Carter Maslan created in early 2004 and thinking that it looked like the fantasy computing scenarios from t.v. coming to life.

Now another of the Microsoft Research projects that looks like life emulating art is coming unveiled… Microsoft Surface. Considering that I recently publically declared my love of using a touch screen computer, this looks like the best of that combined with the best of WPF and then blown up to a huge surface. It’s very cool and promising and apparently coming at the end of this year. There will be a unit in a NYC Sheraton starting next week and then another will be at a tech show in San Diego later this summer. Check the FIND IT page for more details. I highly recommend watching some of the demonstration videos on the site and exploring the history as well. COOOOOOOOOL….

TechEd Focus Group on LINQ to Entities direction: SIGN UP DEADLINE IS TODAY!

Data Access

The ADO.NET team is conducting a focus group about Linq to Entities during TEchEd. Unfortunately, they posted this today and the deadline to sign up is today.

Here’s the info to sign up.

I won’t be at TEchEd this year and neither will Roger Jennings, but Roger has already created a great list of points he would bring up if he was there. I basically second all of his suggestions. Many of them point to clarity on Microsoft’s messaging around Entity Framework (though I personally feel comfortable with this at this point) and then technical details such as being able to deal with perfectly normal relationships between data…you can read what I mean by this if you check out this forum thread.

PDC indefinitely “postponed”… looks like I’m home for more than just the summer

Just Rambling

While I have been revelling in the thought of not travelling all summer, today I learned two things that translate to my not having any travel plans until November.

I had hoped to speak at the SDN conference in the Netherlands in September but none of my session topics were selected. After that I had planned to attend PDC in October, but that’s not looking so good anymore.

Well, I’m definitely going to be in Las Vegas for DevConnections in the fall. We have a whole track just for Data Access talks in November, starting with 4 talks on Microsoft Day and then 9 more on the next two days. I am following up with a postcon 1/2 day also (more Entity Framework).

Then DevTeach is having a conference in Vancouver at the end of November. Of course, I can’t assume I’ll get to go there as a speaker, but I am crossing my fingers!

As for INETA user group engagements, I am currently waiting for the folks who do the scheduling to get caught up on their backlog of requests, but at the moment I have absolutely no INETA talks scheduled, which is weird after having done 15 in the current fiscal year. That is probably why I have nothing scheduled! Most speakers do 2 or 3 talks in a year. I just got a little carried away, but boy was it fun!

So my hope is that I am going to have a life this summer; ride my bike etc. Maybe when I reappear in the fall I’ll have shed a few of those nasty .NET pounds I have put on since 2002. Or maybe not, but a girl can dream 🙂