Always the last to know! I got an email from a good friend of mine who is a Java programmer at BEA telling me about www.theserverside.net (“Your Enterprise .NET Community“) which was just launched this morning.

The Middleware Company today announced the launch of TheSeverSide.NET, Your Enterprise .NET Community. In his opening letter, TSS.NET Editor-In-Chief Ted Neward talks about his vision for TheServerSide.NET, his commitments to the community for the future, and why TheServerSide.NET is important to the .NET community as a whole.

Wow! Take a look at that. Ted Neward is the top dog editor. They’ve got video interviews with Don Box and Scott Guthrie. Looks like it is chock full of content – original content.

My java/BEA pal tells me that theserverside.com is “the” place for J2EE. So they’ve got lots of great experience already that will be leveraged for the .net version.

It looks awesome. Oh god, MORE GREAT STUFF TO READ! EEEEEEEEEEEEEK! (When’s a girl to find time to sleep?)

Robert is asking this question of Mark Cliggett, the new community guy for VS.NET. This will only cover a slice of those asking, but if you live in the u.s. (or are visiting) and have access to one of the 30 major cities on the DevDays tours, GO GO GO!

I love the description of this talk!

Zen and the Art of Web Services (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WSDL)

Will Web Services save the world? More importantly, will they save you time? Are Web Services just a bunch of hooey? We’ll separate the good from the bad and dig into the WHY of Web Services and the HOW of the . NET Framework. We’ll go low level and sniff packets on the wire and we’ll go high level and design business documents with XML schema. We’ll auto-generate Business Domain Objects and Messages. We’ll discuss the meaning of the WS*.* specifications, interoperability and get our heads around the “Zen” of Web Services and see where . NET succeeds and where it falls down. This talk will be as technical as you want it to be, but it will also be valuable for the Business Person or Project Manager who really wants to answer the question “Web Services: So What?” Doesn’t sound like the typical Users Group meeting, does it? You’ll just have to come by and find out!

Scott is an INETA Speaker and this event is being sponsored by INETA.
more here…

Pat Hynds is our Regional Director (though he’s about 3 or 4 hours away). He is also an INETA speaker, a big-time conference speaker and a security expert. Pat is also one of the nicest guys (ask anyone in the development community). The trivia I love the most, however, about Pat is that he holds the world’s record for Microsoft certifications!

Pat is coming to Vermont to speak to Vermont .NET tonight on his own, rather than through INETA.  The original plan was that he would come up and enjoy a weekend in Vermont and then do the presentation. Unfortunately, his schedule changed and he is driving up and back on the same day. Maybe it’s just me. I hate travelling, so the thought of driving 7+ hours for a 2 hour talk seems god-awful. But Pat, in his absolute kindness, has said that he doesn’t feel abused, rather he feels that he is abusing my hospitality by not taking advantage of it.

Awww shucks. Well, this will be a great talk “Best Practices and Techniques for Building Secure ASP.Net Applications” which he is revving up for the EdgeEast conference and also is the title of one of the presentations of the next round of MSDN events (that won’t be in Burlington anyway).

I’m sitting here with my laptop open to the help topic on String Members in Whidbey and my desktop on String Members in .Net 1.1 going back and forth to i.d. new members. (Sorry but I don’t have every single property method and event in the framework memorized!) It would be a lot easier to have two of me while I’m doing this. Sean & Scott  – now I get it!! 🙂

Working on my vs.net 2003 project, I had a dream that perhaps Whidbey would let me drill into ado.net objects in the more seamless manner I had grown accustomed to in Visual Basic.

But alas. I’m sure there is a reason — a good one. But the problem persists.

You can’t get into a collection.

So if you have a dataset you can basically see the tables.count, but you can’t drill into  a table.

In a datatable, you can see the count of columns, but you can’t see the columns.

It’s a huge PIA when you are debugging and you want to see something about your datastructure or your data. I’m almost starting to wonder if there has been some other functionality in there all along that I have missed and I am just looking for the wrong thing.