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!]
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….
After my first series of exploring the InkPresenter in Silverlight, I have done some playing with having video interact with ink in Silverlight. You can read more about that here…
[A New DevLife post]
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.
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.
A recent column in the New Yorker magazine has some interesting insights into feature creep and users who want more features but are then overwhelmed by them. Read more …
[A New DevLife post]
I found a simple way to highlight information on a master/details form. More here…
[A New DevLife post]
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 🙂
XML is a pain to work with but because of it’s importance, Microsoft is adding tooling into Orcas to make it easier. So, I was poking around in Orcas looking at what’s new in tools for XML and XSLT. I even learned some stuff that was in VS2005 that I never paid attention to. Read more here…
[A New DevLife post]
At MIX, I was somehow fortunate enough to be included in an intimate luncheon with Scott Guthrie, Ray Ozzie and a handful of bloggers from inside and outside of the .NET community. I’ve finally written about the luncheon and what I took away from it (no, I didn’t steal the silverware!) over here…
[A New DevLife post]
News stories about flying on planes always catch my eye because I travel a lot. Here’s one from www.cnn.com today:
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Customs officers at Cairo’s airport have detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.
The officers were stunned when a passenger, identified as Yahia Rahim Tulba, told them his carryon bag contained live snakes after he was asked to open it.
Tulba opened his bag to show the snakes to the police and asked the officers, who held a safe distance, not to come close. Among the various snakes, hidden in small cloth sacks, were two poisonous cobras, authorities said.
The Egyptian said he had hoped to sell the snakes in Saudi Arabia. Police confiscated the snakes and turned Tulba over to the prosecutor’s office, accusing him of violating export laws and endangering the lives of other passengers.
According to the customs officials, Tulba claimed the snakes are wanted by Saudis who display them in glass jars in shops, keep them as pets or sell them to research centers.
The value of the snakes was not immediately known.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.