Sam’s post reminded me that I meant to mention my big problem when I tried to show Vista and Glass to Vermont.NET on Monday night. It wouldn’t work with the projector. In fact, when I plugged the projector into my laptop, the resolution changed on the laptop and did not revert when I yanked the plug out. Luckily it was a smallish group and I finally gave up and said “gather round” and showed them some of the pretty features.

All of the rest I did on my XP box with a Virtual PC since I had way too many versions of VS2005 required to show Atlas demos and LINQ demos.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Whoa – Robert Scoble said he was on the home page of Microsoft.com, so I had to go see. When I went to the home page I noticed this item:

News: Microsoft realigns for next wave of innovation and growth

I followed the link and among the subtitles see all kinds of interesting news! Better go look for yourself!!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

There is no question in my mind that LINQ is going to be very important to .NET developers.

Larry groks the plumbing much better than I do at this point. I’m focused on what it will let me do.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

At the end of PDC, I realized that I was in a bubble all week. I had stopped fretting over the Katrina disaster which is hardly behind us. Not once did I phone my parents to say hi. I didn’t even send so much as a Hollywood postcard to my friend who was in the hospital. The only non-conference related contact I had with anyone was a few phone calls each day to my husband who had had a very scary and bloody hiking accident the day before I left for Los Angeles. I had no idea there was a hurricane in the Carolinas and completely forgotten about the rising cost of gas. This is the conference bubble. The world outside the conference and its focus just doesn’t exist. I was only a few miles from the ocean and did not visit it. Nor did I see the ocean when I was at TechEd in San Diego.

Does anyone else feel this way? It makes me feel guilty to forget the world for a while.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I use XML plenty, but I am no XML guru. I can hack out XSLT and have used XQuery a handful of times. I definitely wondered how XLINQ would impact XQuery but do not have the background to make any comparison. Therefore, I was happy to see this post by Kent Tegels who does some pros & cons on XLINQ vs. XQuery. The big con for XLINQ is that it is proprietary. The big pro for XLINQ is that it is much more powerful. Says Kent: XLINQ wins by a technical knock-out before even getting into the ring. It really wasn’t going to be a fair fight though, was it? The underlying architecture of LINQ really fortify it the point where XQuery isn’t even in the same class. It’d be like a young Mohammed Ali boxing Superman.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Visual Basic 9: Standing Proud

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Ahh – I had such good intentions and lists of sessions to see but ended up talking with lots of people yesterday at TechEd which is such great fun. I also picked up more swag for my lucky user group! After seeing Ray Chen’s 10am session I went to the “big room” where the expo and track lounges are, just for a few minutes in between sessions, but I ended up in there for many many hours. At some point I headed back in the direction of lunch but never quite made it in – too many people to see! [read more, much much more … 🙂 ]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

Yesterday (Day Two) I managed to curtail my socializing enough to attend four sessions! It is so incredibly difficult to choose, but mostly I focused on Indigo which I really need to get sooner than later. I had been told by Angela Mills who is the Group Program Manager for XML Enterprise Services in Indigo (phew long title) that Shy Cohen’s Reliable Messaging in Indigo talk had some to-die-for demos, so it was one of the ones that I was sure to see. Shy is …[read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

I’m sitting in Raymond Chen’s “5 Things Every Win32 Developer Should Know” talk. Ray is one of those “oh my god” Microsoft big brains, however, his blog has definitely made him feel like an old friend.

Ray is talking to the packed room about being conscientious about your environmnet when you are writing applications – how is your app working with memory paging? [read more …]

[A DevLife blog]

Posted from BLInk!

This tool is part of the PAG VB6 to VB.NET Migration Guide that is being developed and is on GotDotNet. It is still a work in progress and they will be happy to have people test it out!

Though there is an enormous amount of detail in the report, the most interesting was it’s assessment of man hours and cost to migrate your application. There are caveats on the assessment of course.

The one I tried, which is a big app that has been evolving for 7 years, would take 9 months and cost $86,000.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org