Just an FYI – PCConnection has a rebate up until 1/31 for a 128MB thumbdrive ($4.95 after rebate) and a 128MB SD card ($1.95 after rebate)! (plus shipping)

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I just went through an interesting process with Michael Stiefel who is also presenting on WSE2.0 at the Web Edge conference.

What we are doing is basically a part one and part two talk.

His talk, “Securing Service-Oriented Architecture with Microsoft’s WSE 2.0” is a more advanced version of my part two though it covers a lot of the same ground.

So after talking back and forth about it, I finally decided that I can just literally remove the 2nd half of my presentation. It was hard to do. All of my hard work at trying to learn this stuff so I can explain it – gone. My nature is to want to stay in the room for the entire day and tell people every single thing I know about a topic. But our allotted time is only 50 minutes! So this was the realistic approach. At least Michael’s talk is at the end of the day, so he actually can go long if he needs to. I added the subtitle “laying the groundwork”.

For all of us very independent people I think it’s a good exercise to do something like this. Hopefully it will help me in the future where I always feel like I am being remiss if I am not telling every single detail of my topic.

http://www.AcehAid.org

There is  a LOT going on around the Web Services Edge East Conference that is in Boston from Feb 15 – 17th.

Right now there is still a $300 discount available until Jan 21st.

15% discount to MSDN Subscribers (that’s on the registration page).

There are a TON of special events that are free.

So, you can register for FREE to get an EXPO Pass (normally $50, but free courtesy of Microsoft) which also gets you into the Keynote (Ari Bixhorn from MS and Matt Ackley from EBay are doing keynotes).

Or you can register for that and the FREE tutorials.

All of the above is detailed on the registration page.

The INETA Sponsored Cabana night is free and requires no registration.

If you are in the Boston area, you should DEFINITELY at least take advantage of all of the free events going on!! Stay tuned for more details about the INETA Cabana night (Wed 2/16 6pm – 8pm).

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I have a new client that I am doing some mentoring for. I think that I love this more than any other form of billable work.My mentoring clients are mostly companies that are just now getting started with .NET, so with my nearly 3 years of .NET experience and a bizarre memory of many resources (“oh yeah, I remember there was an article on that by so and so last summer”), I can really help VB6 developers leapfrog past a lot of their learning curves for the specific tasks they need to do (including planning and architecting the program).  I really really enjoy doing this. Getting paid for it almost feels like a bonus.

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Awesome, thans Sofwaremaker for checking this out!

I am very excited to update to dasBlog 1.7. I know that Omar and Scott and their team have been working their butts off on it!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am doing this talk at Visual Studio Connections on an inspiration from my painful experiences of diving into C# on occasion. There are a bunch of things that bite me over and over since I don’t use C# consistently enough. I also remember spending about 1/2  hour trying to figure out how to say “OR” in C#. Lots of syntax things like how to construct IF may not seem hard, but if you have been doing it a different way for 5 or 6 years, it really is hard to sort out brackets here, parens there, brackets sometime, not others. And all of the problems that cause compile time errors that are not picked up by intellisense are huge pain points as well, especially when the compile time error message isn’t really telling you what the problem is. Sure there are extensive books on the differences, but I am just going to try to point out the things that a VB6 dev probably uses the most frequently and the most naturally, and try to ease some of the pain of the transition. This isn’t so much for the purpose of converting VB developers to C#, but being sure that folks are at least somewhat fluent in C# even if they go the route of VB when they make the move to .NET. This talk will actually be pretty much the same as if I were doing it VB.NET vs. C# as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Why being stubborn is good when you are a programmer

I agree. Though actually I have always said I am stubborn and lazy. Stubborn is the “I will NOT let the computer win” part, and lazy is the part the makes me not want to write the same code over and over again. We all know that it takes more time to write reusable code than to just whip out some code to solve a particular problem. But it’s worth it to make it reusable so you don’t have to do it again. Or to write code that will automate more processes. Etc. Lazy, I say.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I submitted some abstracts for Code Camp III. All of the Code Camp submissions are being displayed here on Thom Robbin’s site. You can submit abstracts up until the end of January and then Thom, myself, Chris Pels and a few others will start building a schedule. Since Rod Paddock is beginning his little North American User Group Tour at Vermont.NET on the Monday following Code Camp (March 14th), he has also put some sessions in for Code Camp. So now his tour will be extended even more. We should start tracking his tour on MapPoint – Waltham MA, Burlington VT, Montreal QC and then Toronto ON are on the list so far!!

I was happy to see a submission by my pal Dave Burke!! He has been doing some amazing things with customing .Text for his own blog site, so his session is to share some of the things he has learned about custominzing .Text.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I’m watching Josh Ledgard giving a tour of all the cute guys (and girls, too, yippee!!)  on the VS Core Team 😉

I just wanted to lay this quote down that came out of a conversation on debugging:

“there’s no correlation between the size of the error and the effect it has on the product”

Having been a programmer for over 20 years I can only say “amen” to that comment.

As always, this inside look is really interesting and enlightening.

Okay, back to watching some more!

The FBI is scrapping may scrap a $170million dollar investment in a failed custom software application. One hundred and seventy million dollars to write a computer program? And it’s SO bad that they are trashing it? Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! How do companies (the company that has $170M in their pocket) get away with this sh*t? I heard the story on NPR but it’s not online yet so here’s a CNN link.

From that CNN article: Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the program “a train wreck in slow motion.”

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