August 2005 Entries
Hmphh...sitting in the departure lounge at Edinburgh airport has to be one of my least favourite pastimes (right below having a migraine). Mind you, I never help the matter by my totally anal need to get to airports at least 1.5 hours before the departure of the flight. Well here I am, my flight to Belfast was meant to leave at 7am but they've just cancelled that one and made a new one at 10am...so 3 hours to hang around the departure lounge.
Well, what's been going on in my life and whey the hell haven't I been blogging about technical stuff lately! Basically, I've been travelling a whole lot, Seattle 2 weeks ago, London last Friday, Belfast today and London for the next 2 weeks...good(9ish) news though is that I have some focussed work to do during that time too...
If you're interested in Smart Clients you'll be happy :-) I plan to write as much as possible whilst learning more about how Smart Clients work with Whidbey including such things as ClickOnce, the Composite UI Application Block, the Enterprise Library (which though it works in .NET 2.0...but isn't yet really built for it).
Well, that's about it for this post...now off to cash in my Refreshment Voucher (£5.00 which should get me most of a can of coke at the airport...); also off to see what random gadgets Dixons has today.
Just got back a few hours ago from Seattle…not technically slept for coming up on 32 hours so I’m a tad tired (trying to go to bed at a normal time…hopefully that’ll stave off jet lag a bit).
TechReady1 was pretty cool as you have probably guessed by my two previous posts…perfect?…far from it but still pretty good.
Seattle was pretty amazing, the weather was beautiful the whole week and it was just a really nice place to be for a week.
This whole thing has also gotten my technical brain kick-started a bit more as well…really looking forward to working on some more smart-client stuff as well as exploring what I can do with some of the new C# 3.0 features (I’ll save up the posts I make on that and go public at PDC time). Will have to reformat my laptop first; it’s a bit messed up with all the pre-release software I’ve installed
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Also got to sort out more car related stuff…oh and claim a huge quantity of expenses…busy week!
get it here...that is all...
Well, that's it...TechReady1 is at an end, as with all conferences there were some high and low points (usual lows, level of content...length of sessions etc). The highs were pretty good though!
C# 3.0 is just looking amazing - you'll just love this stuff when you see it at the PDC; there have been some *sneaks* which may or may not be true and I guess there will be some controversy about some of the new stuff...but I just love it! Seeing Anders Hejlserg's presentation and Chalk Talk you can tell how excited he is about this stuff too...just get your butt to the PDC!
A lot of thought is going into the whole smart client / occasionally connected scenarios - this is going to be a big area for the future and some of the stuff that's planned is pretty cool (new Whitepapers on this stuff are due soonish...).
Some great keynotes - lots of stuff I can't talk about yet (it kills me to say that...working for Microsoft is a two-edged sword!) some great stuff coming in Vista and Office as well as some great stuff for Enterprise customers certainly looks like it's going to be an interesting year ahead! Oh, I have a video snippet of Jim Allchin playing guitar today...hope I grow up to be just like him ;-)
Well, I'm off to try and get a machine loaded up with C# 3.0,Vista Beta 1, VS.NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon) and BizTalk 2006...wish me luck :-P (actually...pretty sure this is totally impossible right now...just in case you were wondering...)
Well, just finished my first day at TechReady...have to say, some exciting stuff about...highlights so far:
Keynote from Bill Gates...slightly disturbing video featuring him and Napoleon Dynamite...Bill dances...very disturbing...
Composite UI Application Block...if you're working with Smart Clients you'll be dumb as hell not to check that out! It's just an amazingly powerful system to allow you to build winforms clients with plug-in UI components as well as incredibly rich services...
Office 12...very pretty!
Enterprise Library - a huge leap over the previous blocks...I have been intimidated by this in the past and shied away from using it but it really seems to be very easy to use as well as really configurable (and some really cool stuff is coming up involving that system...)
Smart Clients...really seems to be the way things are moving, Microsoft ('we' I suppose ;-)) seem to be really up for delivering really nice tools for developing these apps...
Anyway, that was day one...just waiting to find out where everyone else has gone this evening...so I'll probably end up having an early night and watching commercial infested US TV (we don't seem to have the BBC in this hotel...pah!)
Well, I'm in Seattle this week for an event called TechReady1 - going to see a keynote by Bill Gates tomorrow. Hotel is pretty nice (sharing a room...but that's OK) currently on the 30th floor of the Westin in Downtown Seattle - view is really amazing over the harbour (and Macys :-)). This wil be a short post, I'm pretty tired; my body is telling me it's 5:21am even though it's 9:21pm local time...plus I've been up since 3am...26 hours and counting :-(.
I'm really looking forward to learning about all the new stuff we've got going on...I'll blog about whatever I can. Until then...if you're in Seattle drop me a line...I need to find a decent bar!