Don Xml's Grok This

If you are attending PDC 2008, you may have noticed that on the Sessions page, if you log in, you can chose the sessions you are interested in attending, along with a link so you can add it to your favorite calendar program.  The only problem is that one of my favorite calendar programs (Google Calendar) will throw an parsing error if you try ...

It is a major pet peeve of mine; presenters that use Console Application Projects to demo some non-UI code.  That’s so 1990’s.  So, what should a presenter use?  Well, Test Projects, of course!  It is something that I think should be added to Scott Hanselman’s 11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation (it sort of fits ...

Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft, but I am a Microsoft MVP.  The following is all derived from public information, and any inferences or extrapolations are entirely the work of my imagination, and is not something that I know that Microsoft is working on.  If I knew Microsoft was working on things like this, it would be covered ...

I spent a couple days in Seattle/Redmond thanks to the MVP program and the MVP Global Summit.  This was my second Summit, and although I thought it to be impossible, it was even better then the first one.  Some of the other MVP groups got to see mostly repeats of the PDC, but not the XML MVPs.  Our team (the System.Xml team, aka ...

Don Smith hinted at it and Hernan de Lahitte gave a little more detail about it, but boy was I surprised at the“Patterns and Practices for Designing Service Oriented Applications — An Illustrated Example” PDC pre-con session.  The guys over at PAG (aka Patterns & Practices) create a Guidance Automation Toolkit for Visual ...

Remember, you heard it here first!  In about 2 years (when C# 3.0) is/has shipped some C# purists are going to start a petition similar to the whole Classic VB petition.  I can see some C# developers complaining that the new C# is too hard for the average programmer.  You will not see me sign that thing, I love the ...

While at the party at Universal Studios, I was complaining that I couldn’t meet up with everyone that I wanted to meet, and Chris Sells joked that “real geeks” are not popular.  Later in the evening (after lots more beer), the “geek fame” topic came up (with a different group of folks), and I said that I’d ...

My friends over at CodeBetter.com do not have someone at the PDC, so Brendan asked me to step in and be their guy at the PDC, and I’m glad to help out.  I’m not going to cross post, but use the other site to write from a more first person, “here’s what it is like to be at the PDC” type view (at least ...

At the last minute I decided to signup for the P&P SO precon.  My friends Don Smith and Peter Provost are 2 of the presenters, and because I know I have a big mouth, and tend to ask questions (a la Code Camp style), I didn’t want to “interfere” with their presentation, so I was not going to attend.  But, I really ...

For those of you that haven’t made it to the conference center yet, it seems as though a lot of the downtown streets are shutdown today (Sunday Sept. 11) for a movie shoot.  So the shuttle buses take a lot longer to get to/from your hotel (mine had to zig-zag all around downtown LA to get to the center).  What should have taken 5 ...