Are you a video jockey? Create a screencast starring Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 or Biztalk Server 2006… and you!

I am happy to announce that the East Region Evangelism Team and TechSmith have come together to promote the Launch Tour 2005 with a screencasting contest. To join the funs – and competition – download a free 30 day evaluation of Camtasia Studio. Then record you on onscreen action, your audio, and even your webcam feed.. To show off your rock star personality.

Winners will be selected for the following tour cities only: New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Orlando. All winning entries will receive a backstage pass to these events and rock star treatment at the event, as well as various prizes includes a copy of Camtasia Studio.

The grand prize winner will be flown to New York City (from within the continental US) to give a demo live, onstage during the during the Steve Guggenheimer keynote!

The winning screencasts will be featured on Channel9

Ready to go to Rock School?

1. Register for the event that you’ll be attending
2. Send your AVI screencast submission to Thom Robbins. Entries must be received at least two days prior to each event.

 Official rules, Camtasia download information and additional details can be found here.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have CA EZ Antivirus on my computer. It decided to install the firewall. I don’t want it and am happy with WinXP’s firewall. It’s on my demo machine so I don’t have to deal with it often but it’s stupid. It says “do you want IIS to run” and I select “remember this setting” and click “Allow” which is dim, but still active (doh) and next time I turn on my computer it asks me all of those questions again for a series of apps. SQL Server, svchost and more. The big problem with this is I get sick of it and say “yes yes yes” without looking. I turn it off and turn on Windows Firewall, but when I restart the computer it’s there again. Next step is to just uninstall it. My recommendation is to avoid this program. (Sorry CA) 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I figure if Don Box can do Indigo demos in VB, then I should do them in C#. That of course, will make my demo take a tad bit longer as I will likely have to compile a few times to find all of the VB syntax I typed into the C# code.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

This is a Wissif Wippif

(it’s a Toyota Avalon in Indigo Bunting Blue – so an Indigo Avalon – WCF WPF… get it? I’m sure this is already an ancient joke but it sure had me and Kate giggling today)

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Burlington Vermont’s Champlain College is definitely on the cutting edge of  I.T. Education, so it does not surprise me to see this new degree program that they are offering.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I had the good fortune of having Melanie Spiller edit a recent article for the upcoming CoDe Focus issue on Tablet PC and Mobile PC Development. (Free issue by the way, subscribe here).

One of the habits she noticed was my use of the word “actually”. We talked about it a bit and she happened to mention that another problem word is “basically” which, she told me, people use when they are guessing. That actually (see, I use that a lot) makes a lot of sense. Of course, being THE editorial blogger for technical authors, I was able to find a blog post where she talks about “actually”, “basically” and some other oft misused adverbs.

I wonder what she thinks of the infamous “So…” that begins every sentence of Microsoft employees when they answer a question…

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I had to laugh when I read this post. It all sounds so familiar!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Everyone has them – the performance anxiety dream. You know, the one where you are back in college or high school and walk into a class to find there is a test or pop quiz. Then suddenly you realize that you have somehow managed to not have attended any of the classes all semester and are totally unprepared. This dream has shifted for me recently because of my nasty habit of presenting at conferences. I have had the new version of the dream more than once and had one yet again last night. This time it was my Indigo talk at TechEd South Africa. I was up on the stage with one minute before I had to start. My computer wasn’t even started up. Then suddenly I realize, though I have my deck prepared and written all of my demos,  I have never once practiced them. I will be doing it totally cold. (Worse yet for this conference – the talks are only 45 minutes to allow 15 minutes for Q&A.) And Don Box is in the audience. Egad! I’m sure I’ll be using that many many many hours of travel to go over it about a thousand more times. And that’s only one of three, no really 5 (including an Atlas and an Indigo demo at the Futures panel), that I’ll be doing. I’ll be the crazy person talking gibberish up in the front of the plane.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Michael Swanson blogs that the PDC DVDs will be going out in early November which is pretty fast turnaround considering that they have ended up with 4 dvds worth of content. But even more exciting is that they will host all of the session videos online and free for all (for 6 months)!

(by way of Owen Allen)

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

There are many developers in Pakistan and we have 15 user groups from Pakistan registered in INETA.

Though I haven’t seen anything yet on some of the blogs I know such as on INETA Pakistan, or DotNETPakistan, Stephen Forte has some links to some of his friends there. Stephen speaks at conferences all over the world and leaves a wake of new friends everywhere he goes.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org