While I have been revelling in the thought of not travelling all summer, today I learned two things that translate to my not having any travel plans until November.

I had hoped to speak at the SDN conference in the Netherlands in September but none of my session topics were selected. After that I had planned to attend PDC in October, but that’s not looking so good anymore.

Well, I’m definitely going to be in Las Vegas for DevConnections in the fall. We have a whole track just for Data Access talks in November, starting with 4 talks on Microsoft Day and then 9 more on the next two days. I am following up with a postcon 1/2 day also (more Entity Framework).

Then DevTeach is having a conference in Vancouver at the end of November. Of course, I can’t assume I’ll get to go there as a speaker, but I am crossing my fingers!

As for INETA user group engagements, I am currently waiting for the folks who do the scheduling to get caught up on their backlog of requests, but at the moment I have absolutely no INETA talks scheduled, which is weird after having done 15 in the current fiscal year. That is probably why I have nothing scheduled! Most speakers do 2 or 3 talks in a year. I just got a little carried away, but boy was it fun!

So my hope is that I am going to have a life this summer; ride my bike etc. Maybe when I reappear in the fall I’ll have shed a few of those nasty .NET pounds I have put on since 2002. Or maybe not, but a girl can dream 🙂

At MIX, I was somehow fortunate enough to be included in an intimate luncheon with Scott Guthrie, Ray Ozzie and a handful of bloggers from inside and outside of the .NET community. I’ve finally written about the luncheon and what I took away from it (no, I didn’t steal the silverware!) over here…

[A New DevLife post]

While I had taken some baby steps with using the mediaElement in Silverlight (eg playing one of the wmv videos included in the sample videos in Vista) I had not investigated much further even though I was having fantasies of a sample Ink in Silverlight demo that would involve annotating your favorite YouTube videos.

I have started playing with drawing in Silverlight in this sample app. The cool thing is that while it works best on a TabletPC, it is not a requirement. You can even use it on a Mac.

However, I quickly learned that YouTube videos are formatted using a flash format (FLV). I had no idea that this existed. I really know so little about media encoding. I’m a database developer, not a designer.

Silverlight only displays WMV formats.

So my next idea was to point to Microsoft’s YouTube wannabe site , SOAPBOX, but was surprised to see that while they are tweaking the features, the site requires a login to access videos. So much for writing an app to help promote SOAPBOX.

Then I looked at Yahoo… more flash videos.

Then it was time for dinner. So I might have to do my first experiments with some canned videos. But I REALLY like my idea and want to find a way to make it happen.

The Universal Thread “offical coverage” of DevTeach provides writeups of a variety of sessions from the conference. Those are now available. Read more ….

[A New DevLife post]

The DevTeach pre-con workshops are today. I am heading up tonight as the main conference is Tuesday through Thursday. Montreal in the spring – aaaah!

There’s so much going on at DevTeach.

Tomorrow morning, Pablo Castro will be doing his keynote, which I’m looking forward to. He will follow up wiht a focus group on Entity Framework in the afternoon.

There is going to be a lively panel on OpenSource on Wednesday night as well as two Birds of a Feather sessions.. one on pair programming with Oksana Udovitsdka and Wendy Friedlander of Oxygen Media in NYC. I’m looking forward to meeting these two hip young women programmers even though I know I will stand next to them feeling like a frumpy old middle aged lady programmer. 🙂

I’ll be doing three talks. One is on Hacking Click Once, based on my experiences I wrote about in this CoDe Magazine article. It’s been hell getting this to gel with IIS7. I will also be doing a presentation on using the asynchronous features of ASP.NET 2.0 and then I will be talking about Entity Framework on Thursday afternoon.

I’m also looking forward to seeing Kate Gregory, who I haven’t seen in way too long. Kate and I first met at the first DevTeach. We had each been told “you should meet…” and without having seen pictures of each other, we recognized each other immediately when we passed in a hallway. In fact there are many people that I met at DevTeach who have since become friends. It is a conference I truly look forward to every year.

I’ve spent the good part of this lovely spring Sunday trying going around in circles with this problem. At least I have a workable solution for now.

[A new DevLife post]

Esther Schindler sent me this link since she saw it came from a library in a small town in Vermont.

I never even heard of this linux based o/s (only because I really don’t pay much attention… there’s already too much for me to learn.). But the video says it all. Happy happy librarian.

At MIX, attendees received a copy of Expression Studio, but rather than in it’s standard pacakaging show here:

we received a commemorative edition which is pretty cool…

Now the challenge is to figure out how to use it!

I was happy today to bump into a few people I haven’t seen in a while. Don Box is at MIX to give a talk tomorrow with Steve Maine on “Navigating the Programmable Web” .

Danny Thorpe blogs about a MIX session about a windows Live technology that is SO secret that the sesison title and abstract are not in the MIX session list.

the buzz is building about the “secret session” that isn’t listed on any of the printed schedules, nor on the billboard at the room entrance.  We unequivocally cannot confirm or deny that it may or may not be scheduled at 11:45 in room Lando 4204, entitled “Windows Live Data services” and presented by the devlive team’s king of privacy paranoia, Yaron Goland.  We deny any involvement in annotating the room signage with a sharpie of unknown origin. 

The session is real, but it was withheld from the printed matter to avoid showing our hand too early.  It is actually listed in the online schedule.  I can’t tell you about it (yet), but it should be a knockout session.  Maybe not quite as sexy as spinning video cube Silverlight eye candy, but I’m sure it’ll get a rise out of the true data diehards who manage to actually find this session.

his post is also a fun read on hanging out in the speaker lounge with Anders Hejlsberg, and chatting with folks like John Lam and Miguel de Icaza. He refers to them as power hitters. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that he’s considered one of them! 😉