Random .NET Ramblings

The Indigo Road show information is now posted and official! go check out www.indigoroadshow.com for more information. The Orange County show is being to be epic we have a huge place (916 seats) with food and all!

Yes it looks like .NET Rocks will be coming out to SoCal as part of there, what I am sure will be known as an epic, road trip. I you don’t know about .NET rocks I urge you to go get some of the shows from the site and give a listen.

So on November the 3rd the San Diego .NET Developers Group will have a special meeting with the .NET Rocks gang. And on November the 4th the local greater member groups of SoCal .NET will host the .NET Rocks in Long Beach.

Each place can handle at least 300 people and I will bet dollars to donuts that there only be staining room at both events.

I will post when more information is available.

I spent a great weekend in Portland for the first the Portland Code Camp, we think it was the first one west of the Mississippi! Wow what a great event it was held at Reed College. There was a ton of great presentations I learned about some about some great topics that I never would have gotten to look in to.

This was a great display of a developer community coming to gather to pull off a stellar event that was a contribution to it’s self. I hope that we can get some people excited enough to get one or more of these going in SoCal.

OK the web is killing me! There is so much good information out there! No not much good stuff on the normal places (yahoo, msn etc) but one that I have been lurking on quite abut is http://www.makezine.com/. Phillip Torrone now has his blog there and all I can say is wow! Phillip is the Martha Stuart of the geek world, with way too much time on his hands and a creative mind. I only wish I had any time to replicate his projects. I just subscribed to MAKE Magazine as well just so I could have more envy of people who have the time to do fun projects.

With my new job I have discovered how much people in large organizations rely on other people to do there thinking for them. One prime example is Gartner (the research firm) as they describe themselves on there web site “We are the world's leading provider of research and analysis about the global information technology industry.” I think anyone who spends any time reading there “analysis” could find huge lack of real world experience and little depth of knowledge in many of the topics the cover but hey I am not here to batch them as they did get this one correct  Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms, 2005

I found a couple of cool resources today, they are nothing new but quite interesting.

The first one is the Microsoft Skills Assessment here you can look to see how well you know all types of developer topics. The second is Microsoft Learning Resources you will find all types of free training content here, the content is all normal Microsoft Official Curriculum. You can also read many books online for free from here are well.

If you have felt disconnected when using there mobile device then you need this application!

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/downloads/global/default.mspx

I have been using a MS internal tool like this time for some time on my smartphone and wow it makes me effective when I am not online.

Recently Microsoft launched a site that helps people find interesting information about all types of development issues. it’s called Lunch with Microsoft check it out and let me know what you think.

Microsoft is now made two books available for free:

• Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers
• Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

I have not read either book (I will over the weekend) but they look like a great way to help move to VB.NET.

WOW what an experience! I had a great time at JavaOne, I spent most of my time talking to developers about Java and .NET interoperability. The overall reception to Microsoft being at the show was incredibly positive. There are a lot of people who are having to make Java and .NET work together and they were glad to see that Sun and MS are working to make there lives better.

I also had an opportunity to be the camera man for some Cannel 9 videos, I will post again once any of them make it up on the site.

On Tuesday night we had a fun event at the “W” hotel across from the convection hall, the venue was great and the people who showed up were great to talk to, I hope to have some pictures up soon.