I just checked the Las Vegas forecast for the next week as I head out for MIX tomorrow.. But I know mostly I have to dress for indoors and a/c.

Wally is wondering which of the two possible covers might work for an upcoming book.

I thought I’d help him out by make the decision a little harder.

Panel on Open Source in the Microsoft Community at DevTeach

www.devteach.com

 Wierd connection right? But ever since I started using Vista, I have had the song “Have a Heart” (from Nick of Time) pop in my head frequently. There is something about the tone and length of the “Default Beep” (Windows Ding.wav) that matches the very first “Hey!” of that song! (Though of course Bonnie Raitt sings it a million times lovlier than my computer.) It’s crazy. “I can name that tune in one note!”, right? But still, every single time that beep sounds, the tune starts up in my head and I finally had to share this.

The joke here is that Microsoft actually hired Robert Fripp to create the many of the sounds in WIndows Vista, though I don’t think the little Ding comes from anywhere but a computer.

It seems each time I start to write a post about the 7th New England Code Camp (“Deer in the Headlights”)  that was at the beginning of April, something has gotten in the way. But once again, this event was a blast and a great success. I drove down to Boston with Dave Burke and Laura Blood who were subjected to a much longer than expected business call that I had to be on. We also lucked out with the weather. The last time we had a code camp in Boston in march there was a pretty bad snowstorm (poor Dave crashed his car on the way down).

Chris Bowen and Chris Pels pulled off another great weekend. The schedule was packed for two days. Jason Haley, who cam ALL the way cross-country for this (and to visit friends and family) pulled together coffee and donuts for Saturday morning. Since I had to do a session first thing in the morning, Chris Pels knowingly saved a few chocolate glazed donut holes for me. Mmmmmm.

I did two sessions (LINQ to SQL in Web Apps and an Intro to ADO.NET Orcas) and led a chalk talk on the Entity Framework. The chalk talk was amazingly fun to do! We were in a small room but it was packed and we spent most of the time looking at the schema files and talking about the potential of Entity Framework in enterprise apps. I’ve never done a chalk talk before and it was an awesome group discussion.

As always, I love sitting in on Richard Hale Shaw’s talks trying to soak up not only knowledge, but learn from his teaching style as well. Richard starts with his powerpoint decks from his training classes that have something like 200+ slides in them. Then based on where the session is going, he pokes around the deck and pulls up appropriate slides to help demonstrate his points.

Naturally, a bunch of us gathered at the Westin Waltham’s hotel lobby bar Saturday night and I finally had to drag my butt to bed, but it was a blast! I definitely look forward to Number 8 and curious what subtitle will be created for it.

This has been on my mind for a while…. read more

[A New DevLife post]

At what point in a project do you start wanting to grab the remote and start flipping the channels? Camey Combs talks about losing that loving feeling on a recent project which, until then, had been filled with intriguing challenges. read more…

[A New DevLife post]

I was looking at Vista side bar gadgets on live.com and noticed gadgets for 2008 presidential hopefuls. While Hillary and Obama’s are for your myspace or live blogs where others may be somehow inspired by your early choice in candidates, the mcCain one is a sidebar gadget. So if I were a McCain supporter, i could share that fact with my dogs, cat and husband who are the only ones that might be in my office.

Kate Gregory pointed to a blog post by Microsoftie, Darren Strange, who just plain old had a bad day. An experienced presenter, he was well aware that he was in a downward spiral, but just couldn’t seem to do anything about it. (Probably not as bad as what he describes.) The hardest part about when talks go south is picking up your ego and moving ahead.

I had a horrible conference experience (that I considered confessing to, but decided to keep a little bit of my pride in tact) and not only had to face myself (and my scores, and the people who had so kindly brought me to speak at the conference) but I had to present a week later at another conference, a sizable one, at that. Believe me, I did not want to. Not at all. But of course, I had a commitment to fulfill and I had to work hard to find the courage to go forward with it.

This was really really hard to do. It made me question if I should even be presenting. (Okay, I question that prior to every speaking commitment I have ever made (and after reading one negative eval, even if it’s surrounded by many positive ones).)

My choices were to just go totally dark or turn my bad bad experience into a series of lessons. I thought long and hard about everything that did not go well, the reason for each of these problems and what I was going to do from then on to avoid each and every one of them.

I was also fortunate to have the ears (and the shoulders) of other folks who do a lot of presenting (such as Kate) to pat my poor ego a little and remind me why I present in the first place – because I really love sharing what I have learned.

I stress out prior to every opportunity I have to humiliate myself publically. Wouldn’t you? 🙂 

Susan Wisowaty and Glen Gordon were angels earlier this week when the normally routine (2 minute) installation of Live Meeting that I had inevitably put off (this wasn’t my plan, of course) to only 1/2 hour prior to the GeekSpeak webcast just would not work. Finally I turned off UAC, rebooted my computer, ran the install yet again and was finally ready about 30 seconds before we went live. Those two, who are serious pros, were cool as cucumbers, professing basically that it was “all good” and even if I just talked about ADO.NET without showing any code (and believe me, I could do that for  hours and hours) it would still be fun. Of course, in the end, the event flew by and it was a blast and hopefully it was beneficial for listeners.

My main machine has so many old apps on it that I don’t want to install .net 3.0 there. Now that I have my other dev box set up on Vista, I can easily check out all of Charles Petzolds cool WPF demos that he posts on his blog! (Such as today’s 3D shadow test.)