SecretGeek has some fun with something that always drives me nuts when watching shows like CSI…

Great post by Rick Strahl on what makes a good conference session.

And another one by Avonelle Lovhaug and what makes a bad (even if it’s free) training session.

Once upon a time I was a FoxPro developer and I still have many roots in that community, so I’m happy to post this great news for my FoxPro friends.

The “Europa” beta (VFP 9.0) is now online for download.

Many VS.NET users don’t realize how much we owe many of the data tools that we have to the experience of FoxPro.

Since I also was repeating the misinformation that XPSP2 release was being delayed until September (trying to remember who I told that to…), I just wanted to point out this news item from Microsoft Watch that debunks that rumor. Now the word seems to be  Q3… and Mary Jo is quoting late July.

I was talking with my neighbors last night about an embarrassing problem I had with my server a few months ago when rebuilding it. It was not recognizing my hard drive. I was almost in tears trying to solve this problem (remember tears = so mad my head is going to explode). My husband came along and said, check your cables. I said oh, it’s not the cables, it’s something really complicated. It was the cables. I had 5 gazillion ideas of things to check when I had this problem. What do you choose first? Second? 100th? Rich only knew of a few possible things. Isn’t it always like that when you are trying to solve a problem? Where to start….?

Roman Rehak, track chair for SQL PASS, announces that the SQL Pass Schedule is on line. The summit, normally in Seattle, will be in Orlando this fall.

Tablet Day

Tablet Sessions

Yes, I did many tablet related things at TechEd. There were really only 3 tablet related developer sessions for the entire TechEd and the scheduling gods were not smiling on the tablet team. They had two back to back sessions – 8:30 am and 10:15 am on Thursday and then one final one at 2:45 on Friday. Egads. I attended the Thursday talks and learned a ton. David Hale did the first session on basics and Arin Goldberg did the 10:15 session which was more advanced. David is going around the country to user groups who request the Tablet Team talks at their meetings.

In fact there is SO much going on around the country with the TabletPC Developer Tour and other events. THe best place to keep track of it all is the new & improved MSDN Developer Center for Tablet PC @ msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc.

BCL Tips & Tricks

After lunch I headed to the cabanas and hung out in the BCL Tips & Tricks that Kit George was going. He did it quiz style and had everyone stumped over why you might have some problems comparing file names as a test. Boy did we guess and guess and guess.

Web Cert Test

I didn’t stay for long since I had my next certification test scheduled for 3pm and having just passed the windows test by a hair, I thought I better do at least some prep for this test with the free practice exam. (see this post for more on that). While I was doing the practice test, I managed to finally get my hands on one of the Haagen Dasz bars – hahahahahahah! Of course, this turned out to be a really bad thing. YOu know the sugar high and then the drop? The drop happend while I was taking the real exam and practically nodding off. I checked at least half the questions for review as I was so unfocused. But somehow, though I absolutely expected that I had failed, I passed by a good margin.

Hangin in the Cabanas, the party and meeting Renee

I went back up to the cabanas and spent the rest of the afternoon parked there with Kate and Marcie and a slew of people. Marcie had the best joke of TechEd which stemmed from my mention of the equal # of Brian speakers and female speakers at TechEd (from my DevSource interview). So Marcie would always attempt to ensure parity. One time she just stood in the cabanas and called “Brian“ and immediately she got two Brian’s to come over. Then she had to send away the excess non-Brian males. Then Kate and I went so she could drop her stuff off at her room and we then took a bike cab over to my hotel so I could do the same and then got on a bus to Sea World.

Kate and I went to see the Shamu & friends show. I was just completely amazed by the relationship that the whales must have with their trainers and how much fun the whales were very clearly having with what they were doing. This was far from some horrible animals in captivity forced to do stupid pet tricks thing. After that show, we bumped into Stan Schultes and Steele Price and went down to watch the whales in the plexiglass walled tanks. They came up the the glass to visit with us spectators. It just blew us all away.

A little later we ran into a woman I had kept seeing throughout TechEd and with her overalls and long braid, I just kept thinking she reminded me of myself. So I took the opportunity and introduced myself and she hung out with us the rest of the night. This is a very cool chick from Juneau, Alaska named Renee Rieser and of course I spent the rest of TechEd looking for Don Kiely (who lives in Alaska and yes, I know it’s  a huge state, but still…) to introduce them.

We had some caricatures done. I think mine was all nose … ah well. Renee has it, as we had ours done together, but someone took a picture. Steele’s caricature was awesome. You can see it here if you follow his link to his gallery from TechEd.

I think Kate and I are going to have to strong arm Renee into blogging. Heh.

Quick quick before my memories of TechEd become one big melting pot of goo…

SESSIONS

Tom Arnold: Unit Testing with VS2005 Team System (is there not ONE easy to type out product name any more at Microsoft? ONE?). This was probably one of the hottest buzzes at TechEd. Tom went over in detail a lot of the implementation of this feature to oohs and aahs of the audience. There was an unfortunate 3rd party demo in the middle which just did not fit in and took away precious time for Tom (my opinion).  Rob Caron has a very detailed write up of the session.

Keith Ballinger: WSE2 and Messaging over multiple machines & networks. Keith wrote this stuff , Keith knows this stuff and Keith is a fantastic presenter. The most interesting piece to me of the messaging is the pub/sub stuff. Though I haven’t had to use any of this in my development, I find it to be pretty cool so I just like to keep getting it into my head for the day I can use it or point someone in the direction of it. John Bristowe has a great write up of this session. John and I sat in a similar session by Keith at last TechEd and I remember watching John throughout the talk as it was so obvious that he was grokking every word, every concept and completely excited about it. And it only gets better with the RTM bits.

Women in I.T. lunch

This will get it’s own post or article but basically- fantastic!!!! Maybe 500 attendees and an incredible panel. From our world: Kate Gregory, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Kimberly Tripp, Sara Williams and new to me (god, how have I missed this awesome woman!) Angela Mills. Also there was Caryn ______ from WITI who brought a very insteresting socio and psychological perspective. I know Kate and Michele very well and they both have vast experience in I.T. and had so much to share as did everyone else. And everyone brought a different perspective to the table though the theme ended up being the power of networking. What was wonderful was that not only are all of these women coming to us with experience of what works, they are all very insightful and excellent communicators. I kept thinking that any one of them could have one of those PBS programs where they just get up on stage and inspire millions. Not everyone is interested in being visible of course, but if you do want to be, it’s hard to figure out how to make that happen if it doesn’t just come naturally, so this ended up being the focal point of the discussion. I loved it of course because I think that more visibile women in the industry can encourage more women who love tech to dive in.

Angela is the Group Program Manager on the Indigo team.  Think about what that means she is in charge of. Like all of the panel, she had some incredibly valuable ideas to share. I was really blown away by her!

Women who Code BOF

That evening was the Women who Code BOF. It wasn’t packed, but just about the right size. Kate Gregory helped me lead it. What we ended up doing was everyone introduced themselves and told their story and each story led to some discussion. There were many in this BOF who had never really talked with other women in i.t. before and I think they were incredibly happy to share their stories and hear others and realize that they are not on an island with some of their experiences. Many of us also revel in being one of the few women around. One of the women there works with Fire Departments and because of her history with them and how she has proved her total competency, part of the training the Firefighters get is to treat her like a queen. Okay – now who is going to complain about a bunch of hunky firemen treating her like a queen. Not me!! 🙂

Richard Campbell took pics on Wednesday and one is from the luncheon. Funny, he’s got a picture of Michele giving a presentation, one of Kimberly doing a presentation, a picture of the panel at the women in i.t. luncheon and a picture he took in the hallway that has a bunch of women in it!

SOCIAL

I just can’t start listing who I was hanging around with all day. I hung out at the Cabana, spent a lot of time with Kate and many many people. Forget what days I met up with what people. It was just a constant stream and fun. Tim Huckaby always makes me laugh because every time he sees me he yells “Jules!”. He’s the only one who calls me that..so it’s pretty funny.

Every time I saw Ambrose he was helping to organize another fun (from what I have heard) blogger event. I kept missing them all. There was one at the Hyatt one of those nights. It’s just hard to be everywhere.

Wednesday was the “Influencers” party at Dick’s Hideaway. Then I left at 11 in an attempt to have my first good night’s sleep since my arrival.

There are two nagging questions that don’t have answers people like, so they just keep asking them over and over and over again.

1) Why does MSDN search suck?

2) Is remoting really dead and what about all the investment I made in it?

In case you thought that MSDN was unaware that their searching was kind of slow, well, they know! And they are definitely making a lot of effort to fix the problem. Though it’s incrementally. So when they release a new improvement, it may not be google, but it definitely sucks less.

From talking to some MSDN folks, I think the saddest thing for them is if someone starts at MSDN, can’t find what they are looking for, goes to Google and then gets pointed back to MSDN. That sucks. I have a google toolbar and that is 100% how I search first. But really, they *know* it’s a problem and they are working hard to fix it. Try not to twist the knife so much when talking to them about it.

Ahhh and the other oft-asked, oft debated, oft countered issue of remoting. Although MS is still trying to get the message out about the future of remoting – not everyone reads weblogs or goes to conferences. So there is a constant stream of “oh my god” happening. Besides the “is it dead (or dying or being deprecated or whatever”) question is – “what about all of the time/energy/money we spent learning/implementing” remoting. Again, along with the previous question – it’s not to be tossed, there will be ways to leverage that work, but still I think people are really mad about the change from that respect. The answer is really just about the evolution of software, learning better ways to do things and this is just part of that evolution. Regardless, it’s a tough pill to swallow. I just feel bad for people that are out in the front of audiences who get hammered with this stuff over and over again (especially when they are sick and all bundled up in a sweater…). Don’t kill the messenger – though maybe you can suggest ways for them to learn how to deliver the message more effectively.

So, if you really want to annoy someone at Microsoft, just ask them about these two things and surely, you’ll be successful in your endeavor.

I had to make some mods to my very first little excuse for diving into asp.net over 2 years ago, a small data management tool for my sister’s business. She maintains a list of stores which sell her products on an asp.net page (against an access database – hey, I didn’t have an online sql database yet) and then she pushes the data to an xml file over on her own [Frontpage] website and an asp page then transforms it with an xsl file to create a nicely formatted list of stores where you can buy her products.

Anyway…. 🙂 …. I had to make some changes to it tonight. What a piece of spaghetti crap it looks like to me now. I had no clue what I was doing with ADO.NET, performance, etc. Blecch. So of course I spent hours refactoring the major part of the app – couldn’t help myself.