Get yer RTM here, hot fresh RTMs...

The following excerpt from Scott Adam's Dilbert newsletter had me cracking up:

"

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

1. The world sure needs more of ME.

2. Maybe I’ll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.

3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.

4. I know – I’ll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.

5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn’t involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.

6. What? It’s called a blog? I’m there!

The blogger’s philosophy goes something like this:

Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.

"

You can subscribe here:

You can request a new subscription to the Dilbert Newsletter by entering your e-mail address at:

<https://members.comics.com/members/registration/showDilbertLogin.do?aid=1>

I'll be speaking at Visual Studio Connections (part of DevConnections) in Las Vegas from 5-8 November. This is a great and growing conference that happens twice annually in the US, usually Orlando in the spring and Las Vegas in the fall, that I have been privileged to speak at for the last couple years. If you haven't been to one yet, you ought to be hammering your boss for permisson/funding to attend for the following reasons:

• It will rapidly and time-effectively expose you to new solution technologies you might not get a chance to explore on your own
• You will get concentrated advanced training in current and future technologies, getting you up to speed on them in far less time than you can achieve on your own
• You will get presentations from the top speakers in the business
• You will get a chance to network with peers in the industry, learn from others experiences employing .NET technologies, which will make you more effective at employing them yourself
• You will have a lot of fun (OK, maybe don't tell your boss this...)

You can learn a lot peripherally from the conference too by reading the DevConnections blog here. There are posts from other speakers as they develop their talks and their own observations and experiences at the conference.

I'll be presenting the following sessions:

VSM356: Build Custom Data Bound Business Objects and Collections
VSM351: Secure Smart Client ClickOnce Deployments
VID306: Build Event-Driven Applications with Indigo
VID309: Connect Smart Client Applications with Indigo

If you make it to the show (and you should!!), stop by and say hi!

 

I've got two MSDN Webcasts coming up at the end of November, both part of the "Best Of" series that they are doing surrounding the launch of VS 2005 for those Webcasts focused on .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 that got the highest scores in the last year.

You can click through here to get to the webcasts:

The two I am giving will both be on 29 November:

Presenting Rich Rich Tabular Data with the DataGridView Control
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
10:00 A.M.–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time

Deploy Smart Client Applications with ClickOnce
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

Check them out!!

We just got a new site up and running for IDesign. You can check it out at http://www.idesign.net. Much nicer look and feel, and a lot easier to access the many resources we have available there, such as our download library, articles, events on the homepage, and RSS feeds for dynamic content like events.

I gave a talk at LexDotNet in Lexington KY last night on building smart client data apps. It really boils down to a similar talk to my Tackle Complex Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0 talk, but with a slightly different approach and angle. I did mostly a large progressive demo where I started out with the simple and impressive data binding capabilties for working directly with a database in your Windows Forms app. Then I explained why you should never do that in a serious production application and stepped through how to migrate the functionality to a three or four layer/tier architect without giving up any of the capability of the data binding features in Windows Forms.

Here are the slides and demos that I used.