I travel to Europe several times a year, particularly to teach classes in Sweden. One of the nice things about ending up on a European carrier like SAS or Lufthansa has been the availability of wireless inflight. I had hoped that the american carriers might catch on and start offering that too. Unfortunately it looks like there are not enough of us geeks out there who took advantage of the service, and Boeing is dropping it due to lack of interest.

I guess I just have to continue to think ahead and get everything staged to my machine that I need to get work done in flight...

For my students in Linkoping Sweden this week, thanks for attending!

Here are the demos and labs: Download Here

I gave four talks at the Software Developers Conference in Netherlands this week. This is a very fun and interesting conference that is put on by a large user group organization called Software Developers Network, run by Remi Caron and Joop Pecht.

This conference is one of the most enjoyable conferences I get to do anywhere in the world. It is amazing how professional and well run this conference is, especially when you consider that it is being put on by a user group organization and it is better run than many U.S. conferences put on by companies that are supposed to specialize in this kind of event. All of the user group members that run the conference are volunteers, and yet the quality and professionalism that comes out of that is outstanding.

The attendees are hard core, ask great questions, and make the event fun for the speakers as well. For those of you who attended and find your way to this post for the slides and demos - thanks!

You can grab the slides and demos here:

Build Smart Client Data Apps with Windows Forms 2.0:  Slides   Demos
Build Custom Data Bound Objects and Collections:  Slides   Demos
Present Rich Tabular Data with the DataGridView Control:  Slides   Demos
Drive Application Behavior with Application and User Settings:  Slides   Demos

I spoke at DevTeach  in Montreal Tue-Thu of this week and had a great time as always. If you haven't checked out this conference, you should plan on signing up next year. Great location, great speakers, very well done conference with lots of hard core sessions.

If you attended one of my sessions and want to get the slides and demos, here you go:

NET371 - Drive App Behavior with Application and User Settings:  Slides   Demos

NET391 - Custom Bound Objects and Collections:  Slides   Demos

NET463 - Advanced ClickOnce:  Slides   Demos

MusicLibrary Database Creation Script:   Script

For the students from my recent class in Sweden, you can download all the demos I did dynamically (as opposed to the ones you already have in your demos folder and available on our site at www.idesign.net) from the following link:

http://www.softinsight.com/downloads/Linsoft05ClassDemos.zip

 

I finished teaching a .NET Systems Programming class (aka Advanced .NET Master Class) this week in Linköping Sweden. This was my first time to Sweden, and I was very impressed. It is a very beautiful country and the people are very welcoming and friendly. The class went well, and then yesterday I had the chance to spend the day touring Stockholm. The first thing I discovered is that one day is not nearly enough! There are so many things to see there. I spent some time wandering around the Gamla Stan (old city) section, shopping and having some lunch. I visited a couple of churches and the palace that date back to the 13th century. Then I headed over to the Vasamuseum, where they have the recovered Vasa - a 1600's man of war that sunk within 1 km of where it was launched because the crown got a little carried away trying to make it the most impressive warship afloat at the time and ended up making it so top heavy it flipped over as soon as the wind caught its sails. There were a bunch of other museums and sites I would have liked to see, but I ran out of light and time and had to catch my train back to Linköping.

I'm supposed to teach another class over here in March, so I will definitely try to work in another Stockholm visit then as well.

If you are ever debating about which European cities you ought to visit on a pleasure trip, make sure you add Stockholm to the top of the list!

Home for one day from Dev Connections, and now I am off on travel for another week to teach an Advanced .NET Master Class in Linkoping, Sweden.  

Currently somewhere over Maine headed Northeast and enjoying wireless connectivity in flight. I had heard some airlines were considering doing this, I guess SAS was the first, and maybe still only one. A little pricey at $29 for an 8 hour flight, but worth it when you have online work you really need to get done and 8 hours to kill. Kind of cool.

I'm catching a flight early tomorrow morning to Vegas for VS Connections and am really looking forward to it. VS Connections in particular, and DevConnections in general (the overall conference event) is well run, in great locations, and always has a lot of great content that I can benefit from as well.

I've been spending most of my recent prep time fine tuning the demos for my two WCF sessions, Build Event Driven Applications with Indigo and Connecting Smart Client Applications with Indigo. The more I work with Windows Communications Foundation (aka "Indigo"), I am struck by a number of things:

• I am impressed by how capable Indigo is.
• I am awed by how elegant and simple solutions are to complex aspects like security, transactions, queuing, callbacks, and so on.
• I am dumbfounded by how hard it is to figure out how to get to those elegant and simple solutions.

The last bullet is not really a criticism of what they have come up with, it is just the nature of the beast. I would draw on an analogy from my flying days to explain why this is so. Imagine the cockpit of a WW I fighter aircraft. You probably have half a dozen or less simple dials and gauges, and a stick and throttle. Imagine trying to use that set of controls on an aircraft that can fly at high subsonic speeds at high altitude carrying hundreds of passengers for 12 hour transoceanic flights. Not going to work too well. This is basically where you were at with past technologies to build complex, distributed, heterogenous, connected enterprise systems. It could be done, but the end result was not going to be pretty and it was going to take you a long time to get there.

Now with WCF, it is more like climbing into the cockpit of a 777. There is a technological elegance to everything that is there. But there are still hundreds (if not thousands) of individual switches, controls, displays, electronic gages and dials, menu driven control panels, etc. A great deal of human engineering has gone into everything that is in there so that for any given common task, there are only a couple of relevant controls that you have to touch and put into place to get the job done. The challenge is in knowing which one of those hundreds of knobs and dials to tweak.

The same is true for WCF. Microsoft has created an incredibly powerful and technologically advanced platform that is well adapted to building large distributed enterprise systems. In order to do that, there needs to be hundreds of switches and knobs that you can throw to address different scenarios. The downside to that is bullet number three above - you have to learn which switches and knobs are relevant for a given task, and in what order to throw them.

This is somewhat aggravated right now in that we are only at Beta 1 of WinFx (and its parts WCF, WPF, and WinWF), and the names, shapes, and locations of all the knobs and switches is constantly changing as they work on that human engineering task of trying to make it easier to use. Meanwhile the documentation and samples are seriously lagging, so working with it right now is a little like stepping into that 777 cockpit without any labels on the controls. When you say to yourself, "I just need transactions and certificate based security", it is kind of like saying "I just need to call the flight attendant at the second aft flight station". Simple to describe, but God help you in figuring out which switches and knobs to throw. At least there are not really any destructive ones that you can throw by accident. If you get it wrong, your app may not work, but you would have to go out of your way to write some code that would do bad things when WCF fails to let you communicate.

I'm looking forward to continuing to work with this technology and learn what all those knobs and buttons are for. Learning all the controls of the aft cockpit of the F-14 to run the weapons system, navigation systems, communications systems, and other tasks was one of the funnest things I have done in my life. The fact that we got to do that while strapped to a couple of 50K lb + of thrust zorching through the sky pulling G's and landing on the carrier certainly helped make it interesting. Sitting at a computer leaves a little to be desired in that department, but the learning challenge is still just as fun.

I gave a talk on ClickOnce in both St. Louis and Kansas City Monday and Tuesday evening this week and had a really good time. After the St. Louis talk I was able to go out for a beer with Bill Evjan, Scott Spradlin, and some of the other group members, which is always a great chance to network while I am there. KC was more of a quick strike since I had to fly out first thing in the morning to head to the MVP summit in Seattle.

The code samples and slides can be downloaded here.

I'm on my way out to the west coast for some work with a customer and to attend a VSTS SDR prior to PDC and connected through DFW (Dallas Fort Worth) today. This is like a whole new airport since the last time I connected through here.

I always liked one thing and one thing only about DFW before - it is one of the only airports in the country where Pepsi has the primary soda contract. Anyone who knows me knows you will rarely see me without a bottle of Diet Pepsi nearby. I can tolerate Diet Coke, but greatly prefer Diet Pepsi.

However, even my Diet Pepsi addiction was not enough to make me like the DFW of days past. You inevitably had to do a marathon walk or take their clunky slow tram to get from one end of the all-to-linear airport to the other, and the hallways were crowded and narrow. The past couple of years of connecting through here has seen lots of construction going on with the promise of something better, but I didn't believe it until I saw it. The major improvement is the Skyway, which connects all the terminals with a well designed high speed elevated rail system. Now when you come in on one end of terminal A and have to go to the far end of terminal C, you don't have to don a pair of marathon shoes and you will be there in a few minutes. The hallways are all expanded out, and seem even more so because of the lower foot traffic resulting from the skyway. To add ]icing to the cake, they have nice little laptop lounges with desks, power outlets, and Herman Miller chairs by the escalators for the Skyways, so there is a great place to camp out and get a little work done between flights.

If you avoided DFW as a connection in the past as I did, you might want to give it another try.

I had a great time speaking at the TampaBay .NET Users Group last night. We had a great turn out and it was a fun crowd. About 20 of us retired to a nearby bar afterwards for some suds and good conversation. Apparently they do that fairly regularly at their group. That is definitely the largest interactive mass of people I have encountered at a user group that goes out and really networks and has a good time together after the meeting on a regular basis.

Thanks for having me down guys and gals!!

The talk was on ASP.NET 2.0 Data Binding, and was a little rough since it was the first time I had given this talk. But hopefully people still got a lot out of it. I did all the demos on the fly, and as a result, a few of them didn't work out because I decided to take a few little side trips that I had not practiced, which is never a good idea on stage with new material.

If you are interested, here are the slides and outcome of the demos.

After my bitching about lack of wireless on travel here, I decided to shell out the bucks to make it a non-issue. I got a Verizon Wireless broadband PC card, so I now have 400-700 kbs speeds in about 25 major cities in the US, including here in the DC area, and 114 kbs just about everywhere else stateside. Sweet. I went with Verizon despite switching my cell away from Verizon to Cingular recently because Verizon's broadband access still kicks ass on speed compared to what Cingular and others have to offer.

I don’t get it. Why is it that every little Podunk airport I fly through (yesterday it was Ft. Wayne IN) has wireless internet access in the airport, but many major commuter hubs (Washington National, Dulles, Chicago, etc.) do not. I realize that for the bigger airport they would need to invest in a number of access points to give wide coverage. But it wouldn’t be that expensive. How many years is it going to be before you can reliably connect while killing time in an airport?

For those who want the demos from my session on data binding in Windows Forms 2.0 at TechEd Europe today, here they are.

Come on, this ain't fair for my first full week in Amsterdam in the middle of summer!! I might as well be in Seattle.

I arrived in Amsterdam yesterday to speak here at TechEd Europe. I am giving four sessions:

WCD221 - Deploying Applications with ClickOnce

WCD322 - Making the Most of Windows Forms 2.0 Data Binding

WCD324 - An In-Depth Look at Windows Forms in Visual Studio 2005

WCD440 - Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization

Should be a good time, this is my first time to TechEd Europe, and only my second time to Holland. The last time was in May for the SDC 2005 conference, but we were out in Arnhem and the schedule was packed, so I didn't get to see much. Hopefully I will have a chance to do a little more sightseeing in Amsterdam while I am here. People in old town Alexandria where I live like to brag about our 200 year old homes and buildings, but some of the structures here dating back to the 1600s or even 1400s kind of put old town to shame.

And yes, I did wander through the red light district last night to see what all the hubbub was about. Holy crap, talk about sensory overload. The laws are quite liberal here indeed. I didn't imbibe in any of the carnal pleasures available. It was enough of a shock to the system just wandering through. And Las Vegas calls itself sin city? Hah! Las Vegas is like a friggin bible camp compared to this place. :)

It does make an interesting contrast to the puritanical approach to everything that is the default in the US. Here, they just allow it, tax it, regulate it, and a lot less people get hurt in the process (both from the indulgences themselves, and especially from the lack of crime that surrounds the industries).

I'm speaking this week at DevTeach, a nice little conference in Montreal Canada. Today I presented three sessions, two on ClickOnce and one on Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0.

Here are the slides and demos:

ClickOnce:    Intro Slides   Security Slides   Demos

Data binding: Slides   Demos

I just got back from Holland Thursday after speaking at SDC there, and now I am in Orlando to speak at TechEd. These things are nothing but fun, but man, the travel can get crazy.

I had a great time last night joining in with the crowd at the Party with Palermo, which evolved from a loosely organized geek dinner into a great gathering of speakers, RDs, MVPs, and attendees in the Peabody hotel restaurant and bar. Today there are a collection of overlapping events that I plan to try to attend portions of, including some MVP events, the INETA summit, and some of the pre-con sessions.

The rest of the week is already pretty packed. My breakout session is not until Friday, but I have a bunch of other things I am participating in / presenting as well:

Tuesday 7 Jun:

3:15-6:15 PM- proctoring Juval Lowy's Instructor Led Lab (ILL) on Generics (DEV20/DEV20R)

9:00 - 10:00 PM - Preparing for Indigo Birds of a Feather (BoF) given by Juval

Wednesday 8 June:

8:30 AM-11:30 AM- proctoring Michele Leroux Bustamante's ILL on Iterators (DEV23/DEV23R)

7:00-11:00 PM Influencer Party

9:00-10:00PM Leading BoF session on Smart Client Deployment (BOF051)

Thursday 9 June:

3:15 - 6:15 PM - Giving System.Transactions ILL (DEV 22/22R)

Friday 10 June:

10:15 AM -12:00 PM - Answering Q&A questions through LiveMeeting for Juval Lowy's Simulcast session Being More Productive with the .NET Framework (DEV325)

1:00 - 2:15 PM - Presenting CLI440 Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization

 

Those are just the items that warrant an unchallenged block on my calendar. There are a ton of other events mixed in there as well to keep the week packed. I also need to get some more work done on my book this week getting the second half of the book up to date with Beta 2 and ready for Tech review, and also want to try to blog a few technical posts about stuff I am working on. Hmm, when is thattime expansion device going to be on the market??

I gave 4 sessions at the Software Developers Conference 2005 in Arnhem, Netherlands yesterday and today. Great little conference and a lot of fun to get to speak at.

Here are the slides and demos from the sessions:

Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization:  slides   demos

Extending ASP.NET with Custom Handlers and Modules:  slides   demos

Smart Client Communications with the Middle Tier: slides   demos

Tackle Complex Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0:  slides   demos

I gave a talk at Tulsa .NET Users Group on Monday 25 Apr on Windows Forms 2.0 Data Bining and had a great time. The group is large and growing, standing room only with over 40 folks. The group is well led by Caleb Jenkins, he is a great MC and keeps the group very dynamic and motivated.

Here are the slides and demos.

I had a great time speaking at the Austin .NET Users Group and Texas A&M .NET User Group last night and today, giving my talk on Extending ASP.NET with Custom Handlers and Modules

For those that attended, or others that are interested, here are the slides and demos that I gave. If you have grabbed earlier versions of these from when I have given the talk in the past, you may want to grab the demos again since I added a custom handler demo that does watermarking of images that I wrote on the plane ride to Texas monday.

If you are a Texan and live in the Austin or College Station area, come on out to the Austin .NET Users Group on 11 April or the Texas A&M .NET Users Group on 12 April to see my Extending ASP.NET with Custom HTTP Handlers and Modules talk. I will be covering the ASP.NET processing pipeline, how/why to create custom handlers as endpoints for ASP.NET requests, and how to create custom modules to perform per-request processing across your application.

Hopefully them Aggies won't throw a lynching party afterwards since I am a boat school graduate...

I'm doing a lot of talks at various conferences, user groups, and code camps over the next few months, mostly on smart client topics. Here is the line up:

Visual Studio Connections - 20-24 March - Orlando, FL:
http://www.vsconnections.com
Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization
Smart Client Communications with the Middle Tier
Secure Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce
Advanced .NET Fundamentals Full Day Tutorial

Philly .NET Code Camp - 23-24 April - Philidelphia, PA
http://www.phillydotnet.org/Default.aspx?alias=www.phillydotnet.org/codecamp
Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization
Secure Smart Client Deployments with ClickOnce
Tackle Complex Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0
Present Rich Data Interfaces with the DataGridView Control

Tulsa .NET Users Group - 25 April - Tulsa OK
http://www.tulsadnug.org/DesktopDefault.aspx
Tackle Complex Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0

Mid-Atlantic MSDN Code Camp - 7 May - Reston VA
http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/articles/383561.aspx
Secure Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce
Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization
Microsoft Application Blocks Chalk Talk

Software Developers Conference - 30-31 May - Arnhem Netherlands
http://www.sdc.nl/default.asp@a1pid=12338pdwl&a1sid=29101225200420.htm
Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization
Smart Client Communications with the Middle Tier
Tackle Complex Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0
Extending ASP.NET with Custom Handlers and Modules

Microsoft TechEd - 5-10 June - Orlando, FL
http://www.microsoft.com/teched
Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization

DevTeach - 19-21 June - Montreal Canada
http://www.devteach.com
Secure Smart Client Deployments with ClickOnce
Tackle Complex Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0
Extending ASP.NET with Custom Handlers and Modules

 

Need I say more?

I had a great time presenting at the Little Rock .NET Users Group last night on my way back to DC from VS Connections in Vegas. I was very impressed with this group. They had a good sized crowd (30-40) in a good little meeting room that was actually inside a Pizza Hut, and are led by a great group of guys. One of the most energetic groups I have seen, and when you consider the population and industry presence in Little Rock compared to the group size, you'll realize these guys are doing a great job of running a user group! There are a lot of times we don't get many more attendees at CapArea.NET, even though we meet in the heart of the tech sector of DC.

I want to thank the group for having me out to speak and pass along the slides and demos.

Had a spectacular dinner with my wife Robin last night at one of the swankiest (and priciest) restaurants in the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas last night. The food was outstanding (one of the top ten I can remember, and we eat out at a lot of great restaurants on travel and in DC).

The restaurant was Aureole, and one of their unique features was the four story high, four sided tower of wine that dominates the center of the restaurant. In order to get your bottle of wine, the wine steward, wearing caribiners, hooks into cables and gets hoisted up to wherever in the stack the bottle may reside.

That in itself was pretty cool, along with the great food, but what was interesting was how they manage presenting their extensive (and frequently changing) selection of wines to the customer. The wine list was brought to us as a Tablet PC running an internal web app that you could use to browse the hundreds of choices of wine, and even get additional background information on any that you are interested in. It had a bookmarking feature so that you could select any that you might be interested in as you browse the entire collection, then review your short list to make your final selection. You did all this with simple point and click with the pen.

My first thought, being a smart client zealot, was that they should have made it a smart client application. But the fact was that it was truly just a browsing app, and used a lot of graphics and animation to enhance the experience that would have been more difficult to achieve in a WinForms app.

I was just happy to see yet another powerful user experience enhanced by tablets and technology.

And the wine and food rocked.

I'm out at Visual Studio Connections in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino. Great show so far, runs through Wed. I have three talks on Wed: Synchronize Smart Client Data and Offline Data, Deploy Smart Client Applications with ClickOnce, and Introduction to .NET Deployment (Fundamentals track).

This is a great location for a conference, good hotel, lots to do and see, when you can tear yourself away from the conference facilities, which are top notch.

If you could not make this one, you should definitely consider picking up the spring 2005 show, which should be on the east coast. Keep your eyes on the site to see when it gets announced (very soon).

After a busy, fun, and exciting week in Kuala Lumpur, I'm finally finding some time to blog about it as I kill 7 hours in Singapore airport in the middle of the night waiting for my connection home. From here I go Hong Kong, San Fran, and home. About 36 hours total transit time. Add a 12 hour time difference jet lag to that and I'm thinking I won't be a very pleasant person come Sunday evening when I get home.

I got into KL 8 days ago and started the trip with a fantastic excursion to a Malaysian Elephant sanctuary where I spent the day with Tim, Kim, Richard, and Goksin amongst the elephants, getting to help feed them, bathe them in the river, ride them, and help take care of a sick baby elephant. Then a hike into the rain forest to an isolated native village.

Then the next day we went to the Batu caves and a Buddhist temple:

After that I finally had to get to work and do some sessions for TechEd. One on Wed, Two Thu, and one Friday. The fun didn't stop though, with evening excursions into town sampling the food and malls. The picture below was some food we got in an alleyway kitchen that was pretty scary to look at but the food was very good and cheap. A big group of us were taken there by a couple of the conference organizer young ladies.

Now it is time to get back to real work!!