Brian Loesgen, president of INETA, is a San Diego area resident and gives some good inside info on San Diego. Weather, things to do and cost of living.

I was actually hoping to find time (ha!) to see the San Diego Zoo but Brian actually recommends the Wild Animal Park, one of zoo’s outposts, more.

wiht one day to go (Saturday doesn’t count since my flight is at 7am) I need to start doin’ my laundry and packing. of course, that’s not happening. I’m working , have an old friend coming for dinner tonight and really want to do some weed whacking around the flowers cause if I leave that for Rich to do the good stuff will all be gone when I return from San Diego.

However, Bill Evjen had made a GREAT checklist for what to bring to TechEd. Check it out.

Also if you have an MSDN Subscription, bring your card. Sometimes they have swag for card carrying MSDN subscribers.

Well, it’s official – my name is on the website (although my pic and bio haven’t made it up yet). I will be doing 3 sessions at ASP.NET Connections in November in Vegas.

• Developing Ink-Aware Applications with the Tablet PC SDK
• What’s New in the “Whidbey” Base Class Libraries for ASP.NET Developers
• Web Services Security for Dummies with WSE2

The Tablet talk is the only tablet specific session in the whole DevConnections line-up.

The WSE2 talk is the only WSE session.

The Whidbey talk is definitely NOT the only Whidbey session! 🙂

Vegas, baby!

re: Michele Leroux Bustamante, he says:

Everytime I see her publicity head shot, I think about redoing mine…or just using hers.

LOL! 

Thanks to Denise Smith for getting these changes not only onto the CommNet site for TechEd but reprinting the signs that go outside the rooms!

I have done a little juggling thanks to Chris Reed who switched his session slot with one of mine.

New date/time

Tablet PC Design Considerations  Tuesday  6:30 pm

Women who Code   Wednesday 7pm (this will now be AFTER the Women in I.T. luncheon)

I caught this on the home page of the TechEd website:

Now confirmed! Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will give the Tech·Ed opening keynote on Monday, May 24

Does this mean we are going to get the Developers Developers Developers chant???

Michele writes about the extensive work involved in coordinating the Web Services Interop workshop. She’s talking WSE2, Apache Axis, BEA Weblogic Server, x,509 serialization issues and… phew. Sounds exhausting. Check it out. Post 1 and post 2 …surely there will be more as the week wears on and the workshop gets going on Saturday morning.

Elisa Johnson, one of the team members who have won the Canadian rounds of the Imagine Cup, and a University Student, is embarking on her 2nd week of a summer co-op position where she is getting some real world experience. This super post of Elisa’s is a beautiful example of why Mike G’s Coder to Developer book should be the graduation present of every CS major on the planet <g>.

“…you need to think about your user! … They have no idea what a “Null pointer reference error” is…. and they don’t care that the error came from SomeNewClass.System.SomethingElse()”. 

(no, Mike is not paying me for every mention of his book…)

DevSource has a poll about getting your butt to conferences. Below is a picture of the poll. I like “I whine until they give in.“ It’s actually an important question. I’m self-employed and completely in charge of finding a way to get myself there. Thanks to my involvement with INETA I have been able to go to a three (that includes next week’s TechEd) because of our user group leader meetings. For PDC, I used frequent flyer miles, shared a hotel room with Michele and the real kicker was a big discount for the conference through the MVP program — which is the only reason I could go. In the future, I think a few speaking gigs will get me to some conferences as well. And that should be enough conferences for me! Anyway, I don’t know how successful I would be if it was up to my ability to convince an employer to foot the bill.

Follow the link to go vote. And while your at it, check out their contest to win a free trip to the VSLive conference in New York City!

So it is time I MUST install the Tablet PC SDK1.7 somewhere. I cannot put it on my development machine as I have production work with SDK1.5 there. I can’t put it on my tablet because that tiny little Acer C110 is just NOT something I want to do development on. I don’t have enough mmmph on my main desktop machine or my laptop for VPC. My laptop has Whidbey latest on it which forced me to uninstall all previous versions of .NET (VS 2002/2003, .NET 1.0/1.1). But the laptop is the only conceivable box I have to install this on (which requires .NET 1.1) that I can try to experiment on.

Or not…maybe I’ll just try it on the Acer (which also has XPSP2 on it already)…oh decisions desicions. For my current tablet apps, I have done all of my development and most of the testing on a regular desktop and then just deployed to a tablet for the true inking tests. That’s what I would prefer to do in this case also. Well, check back in tomorrow and see what happened….

Maybe I should install XPSP2 on my laptop anyway. That should be okay by now with Whidbey.Oh, to have 10 machines (or one powerful enough to run VPC) or extra hard drives…wait. I HAVE an extra harddrive come to think of it. I have a 40Gig drive sitting right here in this machine. Unattached. Maybe, just maybe…