I have two talks to do today – one for ASP Connections and one for Mobile Connections. Therefore, this morning I decided to treat myself to room service breakfast. I learned years ago from Kate Gregory to have a good breakfast and protein when you are speaking. Kate is one of the best presenters I have ever seen (and usually one of the highest rated at conferences) so I pay close attention to her advice! Rather than stuff myself with the yummy bagels and breads they have for us in the speaker room, I ordered eggs benedict. Yummmy. At about the right time, I could hear the room service cart bouncing down the hallway. The hallway is long with stretches of carpet followed by a stretch of marble. So every time it went from carpet to marble from mrable to carpet, it would rattle. I could hear him approach my room and went and opened the door and there was the poor guy kneeling on the floor next to the metal box that is used to keep the food warm. The box had fallen off the cart as he bounced off the carpet on to the marble in front of my room. Eggs all over. The guy really felt bad, but I assured him it was not a problem and after he poured me a cup of coffee, headed downstairs to get me another plate of breakfast. In the meantime, I have sun streaming into my room and can look out at the beautiful range of mountains past the airport.

Lots of news in the last few days! Here’s a list of all that has rtm’d and what is finally very imminent: read more…

[A DevLife post]

I was on a flight yesterday that required a re-boot of the plane’s computer system. Huh? [Read more … ]

[A DevLive post]

The U.S. elections are Nov 7th. There are two big conferences next week in our community: TechEd Europe in Barcelona, Spain and DevConnections in Las Vegas, Nevada.

If you are leaving home for these events, don’t forget to vote before you go!

In Vermont, absentee voting is allowed for 30 days prior to the elections. I’m not sure how this differs in other states. Here, you can get an absentee ballot in the mail from your town clerk (which needs to be back to the town clerk by Nov 6th, or to the polling place by 7pm on Nov 7th) or just go there and vote. I went to the town office and just sat down and voted there.

It didn’t occur to me to do this until about a week ago even though I’ve known for a long time that I’d be gone. I just hadn’t put two & two together!

I’ve been helping a client deal with a website that we think was designed by DOS programmers. [read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Code Camp 6 was this past Saturday. It started out with a somewhat nervewracking 200 mile drive to Waltham due to torrential rainstorms and high winds. But I had a fun companion in the car who kept me well entertained throughout – Dave Burke, who was ridiculously kind when I was adamant that we needed to go south on Route 91 (totally wrong) and let me get away with it for 10 miles before I let him convince me to turn around. I suppose it’s one thing to deal with female logic when it’s your wife, but a totally different conundrum when it’s another chick.

When we arrived at the event on Saturday morning, I learned some wonderful news. Athough we are all sad to see Thom Robbins go (and thrilled at his new job at Microsoft) he made a fantastic choice for our new Developer Evangelist in Chris Bowen. Chris is a local guy who has been involved with the .NET community in Boston for a long time and is someone I have a huge amount of respect for. So I was very happy to hear this great news.

Since people quickly disappear into the conference rooms, it’s always hard to tell how many are really there, but at lunch time, it certainly seemed like major swarms of people heading for the pizza. I did only two of my three talks. As I expected, the Persisting Ink on the Web talk, which I was hoping to practice prior to Mobile Connections in a few weeks was waaaaaay to narrow so nobody showed up. But the Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Websites and Moving Big Data with ADO.NET 2.0 talks were both well attended.

I spent most of my free time futzing with the impact of the “click here to activate and use this control” issue that is now a permanent part of IE7 and has a big impact on the embedded winforms controls that I use to do ink on the web, rather than sitting in on other talks, so I missed out on Richard Hale Shaw’s C# talks where I’m sure he couldn’t resist a dig or two against VB ;-).

There were a bunch of VTdotNETters there which is always great to see.

The other very nice surprise was seeing Noah Coad who I have known for a number of years, originally through the MVP academic community. He has been at Microsoft for a while now (they scooped him up the day he graduated from college), but I didn’t realize he had recently moved to the east coast. So I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of him.

When all was said and done, Dave and I hopped in the car for the drive back to Vermont in what was thankfully great weather on a beautiful fall night.

I had a mentoring client ask me a question along these lines. She’s very ready for the next steps after drag ‘n drop .NET. I have been thinking all week about how she can learn the every day things she should know.  [Read more …]

[A DevLife post]

I recently attended a meeting in Burlington aimed at small businesses to give them some ideas about what they can be leveraging on the web…. [read more]

[A DevLife post]

I just accidentally wrote a line of code that looked like this:

private boolean MyMethod(byval x as someobject)

Yes I was going for VB, but I’ve been doing a bunch of C# coding lately. At least I didn’t hit the semi colon, too! 🙂

The funny part is I although C# doesn’t come very naturally to me, there are definitely some syntax things I love. Though I still have a really hard time getting my brain to grok code like Kate writes (though that’s pure C++…)

I was flipping through a magazine and getting lots of great programming advice from the article highlights. Then I realized I wasn’t even looking at a coding magazine! [read more…]

[A DevLife post]