It’s happened again. Not one, but three user groups in one trip!

Here’s the schedule of my July INETA user group speaking tour:

Tuesday, July 18th: Central Penn .NET, Harrisburg PA, “Developing Ink Applications with the Tablet PC SDK”

Wednesday, July 19th: Lehigh Valley.NET, Bethlehem PA, “Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005”

Thursday, July 20th: Dot Net Valley, Wilkes Barre PA, “Five Scary Things about .NET (That Don’t Have To Be)”

The icing on the cake is that after the Thursday night talk, I will drive to north and visit my parents for a few days. 🙂

Tomorrow I leave for a trip that I am really excited about. I am going to speak to INETA user groups in some of the most beautiful places in North America: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. These are places I have wanted to visit for most of my adult life. I’ll be talking about Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0 on the first two nights and the ADO.NET 2.0/SQL Server 2005 Integration on the third.

In between talking about data,I will be kayaking in the Bay of Fundy, touring along Nova Scotia’s marine coast line and hiking the wild and windy world ofthe most eastern points of land on the continent.

Thanks to u.g. leaders Derek Hatchard and Amanda Murphy for inviting me and for INETA for sending me.

I just did my first solo MSDN webcast today. Being the worrywart that I am, I was a little nervous. Here’s the lowdown …hopefully useful for other first timers! [read more….]

[A DevLife post]

I did an MSDN Webcast today on Introducing WSE 3.0. Since I had an unusually short amount of time to get through all of my demos,I practiced them over and over (even though they were old hat to me ;-)) just to make sure nothing unexpected happen.

On the very last demo, where I created a new Policy that had “SecureConversation” turned on, it threw an error when I ran the client side app. There was not time to deal with the error and since I knew I had done everything correctly, I moved on, highlighting the key take-away of the demo (which was not seeing “Hello World” on a black screen, but what SC is and how easy it is to implement.)

Now I have just gone back to see what wasn’t lined up. I ran the demo again so that I could see what the error was and make sure the code was a-ok before I posted it…. and wouldn’t you know, it just friggin worked. And I hadn’t touched anything yet.

As my grandmother and all of her grandmothers before her would say: Oy Vey!

[update: see this post for information on the sample code, etc. and this post for more info on the SecureConversation demo]

Somehow, almost everytime I schedule an INETA speaking event, I end up getting asked to speak at another nearby group as long as I’m there. Why not? I say. It’s fun, and I control my schedule. Luckily, the user group leaders have been flexible enough so that I can do the talks on consecutive nights.

I have 3, not 4 such trips coming up.

The first is a twist on the concept: my “Atlantic Provinces Tour”. I am speaking at 3 groups in Canada’s Atlantic Provinces over the course of 10 days. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is my summer vacation and my husband is joining me.

June 19th: New Brunswick.NET in Moncton, New Brunswick.
June 20th: .NET Nova Scotia in Halifax, Nova Scotia
June 26th: We Develop.NET in St. John’s Newfoundland

Trip 2 is a Western Pennsylvania tour. Coincidentally (yeah, right), the last meeting is about a hour drive from my parents house. So I will spend a few days visiting them before I head back to Vermont.

July 18th: Central Penn in Harrisburg, PA (right near Hershey, PA… yummmm)
July 19th: Leihigh Valley.NET in Bethlehem, PA
July 20th: Dot Net Valley in Scranton PA

Trip 3 is an Ohio tour which started with the idea of paying a visit to Lake Quincy (Steve and Michelle Smith’s home) near Cleveland. Then I added on two other meetings.

Sept 12: Cleveland .NET SIG
Sept 13: Findlay Ohio .NET User Group
Sept 14: Dayton .NET Developers Group

In between are scattered events: NYC in mid-August, 2 Massachussetts groups in early August and Syracuse in September.

(rather than sit here and do all the links, I will point you to my talks page where you can click to these groups’ websites)

Reminds me of an old song from the musical Oklahoma!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

The “News Quirks” column of this weeks edition of Seven Days (Vermont’s weekly indie) has a interesting story on reducing the stress of public speaking. The story is at the bottom of the page.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Milwaukee was great at Deeper in .NET. I wrote a little about that this morning over here and posted some pics here.

Next week I go to Huntsville, Alabama as an INETA speaker to talk about Advanced Data Access Techniques with ADO.NET 2.0. Then the next week is DevTeach in Montreal. Hopefully it will be springier there than it is here!

Code Samples from my two latest CoDe Magazine artcles:

• Ink on the Web
• SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications Tell .NET 2.0 Apps When Critical Data Changes 

 are on the “articles” page of my website.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have been doing a bit of organizing and gotten the following two sessions from DevConnections on-line.

• Advanced Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0
• Five (Supposedly) Scary Things about .NET

These can be found on the “talks” page of my website.
The talks are listed alphabetically with links to the PPT and ZIP files just after the descriptions.

I still have to package up the code from the third talk: “Preparing WSE3 Web Services for WCF Clients”.

With most conferences,speakers need to submit their powerpoints way in advace of the conferences. Attendees are provided with books filled with the printouts of the decks so that they can take notes during the conference. It is not uncommon with a new talk to fine tune it between that early preparation and the actual time you your presentation.

Though this has only happened once, it struck me (and stuck in my brain) when an attendee wrote on an eval that it was a pain that the slides in my talk were different than the book.

So this time around,rather than hoping that I’m going to remember in the middle of a talk and say “oh, I changed this slide a little (for your benefit)” I am just putting tiny little notes on the bottom of modified slides: “This slide is slightly modified from the original printed version”.

Hopefully that will mean one less negative comment this time around! 🙂

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org