Category Archives: Just Rambling

Code Camp 7: Keep submitting those abstracts

Just Rambling

I just took a peek at the list of abstracts on the Code Camp 7 site, with a thought to decreasing mine from three to two. However, there aren’t tons in there yet. There could SO easily be more. Do a chalk talk. Come show off someting you’ve been working on or something you think is really cool. There is no need for a TechEd type of presentation. If you’ve got a story to tell, surely there are plenty of geeks who will be interested in hearing about it!

http://thedevcommunity.org/

MIX07!

Just Rambling

The stars have aligned and I’m going to MIX07.

I am ignoring the fact that this is going to mean a whole lot of flying . In a 5 week period I will fly to Orlando and back (from Vermont), then to Seattle and back and then to Las Vegas and back. Oy, silly me.

 

One more month as a homebody then it all starts again

Just Rambling

After 8 INETA trips (speaking at 15 user groups), two code camps (both overnight trips), conferences in Orlando, Milwaukee, Montreal, Bulgaria and Las Vegas and then summit at Microsoft – all of this in 2006, I promised myself that I was staying home for the winter. After the last trip (in early December) I was not going to travel again until DevConnections at the end of March this year. Though it ended up meaning that I had to pass on the MVP Summit in mid-March, I’ve stuck to my promise. (I’m sneaking past the fact that I’ll be doing a quick overnight in Albany at Tech Valley .NET (about 3 hours away) in mid-March.

But I can feel it starting again already. I have my reservations for DevConnections. The day after I return from Orlando, I have to drive to Massachussets for Code Camp for the weekend and then a few weeks after that I’ll be flying out to Seattle (see I get to go after all :-)) in April to speak at the South Sound .NET Group in Olympia. I’m skipping MIX07 but of course contemplating TechEd.

I will really relish the next month in Vermont, even if I spend most of it in front of the computer. 

LINQ to SQL in Web Apps at VTdotNET on Monday

Just Rambling

I’ll be doing a talk on Building Web Apps using LINQ to SQL at VTdotNET on Monday.

I have seen Scott Guthrie do a session on this topic a few times and got so excited I wanted to dig in more and show it off as well. Scott has probably done this talk at least 20 times over the past year, has posted his PPT and demos, writes about it and even has a a recent video webcast on the topic.

He’s a REALLY hard act to follow, but I have tried to stay away from his session as I build my own so that I’m not just trying to do his talk. One of the interesting things about LINQ is that although you can easily group it into things like straight queries, joins, filtering, shaped data, paging and insert/update/deletes and then “advanced :-)”, there are a LOT of ways to do queries. Just like there are a lot of ways to construct a query in any other query language. So in the 90 minutes I have to do my session, I will be giving some specific examples, but more importantly, trying to open up people’s eyes to the power and flexibility of using LINQ to SQL. Then I’ll point them to the 101+ samples as well as the more advanced stuff that people like Fabrice are doing.

I keep worrying that people will say “why do I need to bother coming to your session on this topic when I can just watch THE MASTER do it.” Ummm, free pizza?

But, I trudge on…

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to help with the search for Jim Gray

Just Rambling

Watching the Tenacious Search blog over the past few days, the only name I was familiar with was Werner Vogels, who a few years ago went from researching at Cornell over to Amazon. I know Werner’s a brilliant guy! Even though I am astounded by what I have been reading on the blog (people pointing satellites in the area where Gray was last known to be, the satellite imagery becoming available through the blog, the discussion of what people are doing with teh imagery), I had no idea who the brains behind all of these names were. This NY Times article, published today, enlightened me quite a bit. What has been obvious is that the technology and the minds that Jim Gray has developed, inspired and influenced over the years are all being put into force to help try to locate him.

It’s a dazzling effort, though so far, with heartbreaking results – not a hint of him has been found yet. This isn’t the Bermuda Triangle we’re talking about. How can it be that not one piece of evidence (even if it’s evidence of something tragic) can be found.

You can help, too. Amazon has an app that will display a handful of the satellite images with explanation of what you are looking for. You can go there and look at images and mark them. It’s called Amazon Mechanical Turk.