I was in front of 40+ developers and designers and none of them had heard of the MSDN Flash the flash is our primary communication method we have for the developer audience. You can customize it for your location and then you will get all the local events from Microsoft, User groups & third party's in your location.

My only heads up is get ready to help to hash through a lot of content to find the few gems you want. Microsoft has consolidated all of it's developer communication in the Flash so there is a lot of information in it.

I loved working with Visual Basic, I stared with VB 1 just after spending more then 6 months learning to program Windows 3.0 with C and the Windows API (yes that C not even C++) so naturally VB was a great thing for front end programming. The VB "hello world" app was 0 lines of code vs. Petzold's  HELLOWIN.C file of 82 lines (yes that includes wight space) so I loved that (on a side note his entire book is on line at http://www.charlespetzold.com/books.html).

When I started to program .NET I did most of the projects for Microsoft (as a contractor) and all the projects and code samples were in C# so I moved back to the work of curly brackets and semicolons but wow do I miss my "End" statements!

But what still shocks me is how many people are still using VB6 but many do not know that Microsoft has invested a lot to make the migration of VB6 projects to .NET much easer in the latest round the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 has been released. Beth Massi has a good blog post that explains what the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 is read the post "Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 Released!".

My life after 4 out of 5 weeks of the road have been filled with Silverlight all the time. My boys and wife are cursing Silverlight every day now as I just keep running them out of my office so I can work on more Silverlight 1.1 alpha.

While looking for more information on I found this cool mind map of the Silverlight universe, enjoy!

I am sitting in on a Software Deign Review (SDR) by the Connected Systems Division. I was not invited but they have yet to kick me out and thank goodness! I am getting exposed to the great work and ideas they have been working on for .NET 3.5. The exciting thing is that unlike every other SDR I have been involved I can talk about this today! You can see most of what they are talking about at BizTalk Labs web site. Also you can watch (once it's posted) the MIX session "DEV03 - Navigating the Programmable Web" at the MIX Session site.

The big caveat for this stuff is that this to totally fluid, you can expect many changes before any of this gets any level of support.

The things on the plate are (not all are live now):

• BizTalk Identity Services
• BizTalk Connectivity Services
• BizTalk ServiceBus Services
• BizTalk Workflow Services

I am super stoked to see what happens with the Connectivity Services components as they have implemented a non-UDP protocol for this witch will make firewall administrators happy. With multicasting and integration with HTTP, RSS & more.

I get asked quite often for a holistic list of user groups in Southern California so I have compiled the list of Microsoft Developer focused user groups that I know if. Do not came this is the holistic but I hope that others will comment about other groups.

I hope all of the groups on this list are registered on codezone.com so that can be more of a central place to get a holistic list. By the way the nice thing about codezone.com is that there are some (but there needs to be more) non-MS focused groups listed there as well and I think it is important for all developers are going on in there overall community.

San Diego .NET User Group
http://www.sandiegodotnet.com/

Orange County .NET Server Users Group
http://www.ocnsug.org/

San Luis Obispo .NET User Group
http://www.slodotnet.org/

Inland Empire .NET User's Group
http://www.iedotnetug.org/

Southern California .Net Architecture Users Group
http://www.SoCalDotNetArchitecture.org/

Orange County C# Developers Group
http://www.occsharp.org/

Hawaii .Net
http://hawaiidotnet.org/

Santa Barbara .NET Developer Group
http://www.sbdotnetug.org/

Southern California .NET Developers Group
http://www.socaldotnet.org/

Los Angeles .NET Developers Group
http://www.ladotnet.org/

Orange County Visual Basic .Net Usergroup
http://www.ocvbug.org/

LA C# Developers Group
http://www.lacsharp.org/

San Diego .NET Developers Group
http://www.sddotnetdg.org/

San Diego SQL Server Users Group
http://www.sdsqlug.org/

Central California .Net User Group
http://www.centralcaldotnet.com/

XP San Diego
http://www.xpsd.org/

LA Fox
http://www.lafox.org/

Los Angeles SQL Server Professionals Group
http://www.sql.la/

SoCal DotNetNuke Users Group
http://www.socaldug.org/

The FoxPro Developers Network of San Diego
http://www.foxdevsd.org/

Orange County FoxPro Developers Group
http://www.ocfox.org/

San Diego .NET User Group ASP.NET SIG
http://asp.sig.webpublishing.com/

Orange County Internet User Group
http://www.ociug.org/

San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group
http://www.sgvdotnet.org/

It's here in all of it's glory!

There are a lot of write ups of what the MIX keynote was like but the big thing for me was the announcement about Silverlight 1.1 having a cross platform CLR.

For more information checkout the new Silverlight web site Link to Silverlight.

I just had a wow moment... I was not paying attention to the presentation I should be paying attention to and catching up on blog reading and found this entry by Adam Hems Link to A British Geek in Texas Pontificates : Caching in Winforms / SmartClient Apps. The interesting thing he suggests is to use the System.Web.Caching namespace on a Windows Form application to cache client data... WOW I have used the winforms namespaces in a web app in the past but I never thought to try the reverse. I can't wait to play with this.

I have been getting this question a lot of late and I don't think there is a good answer but I think this video gives a good perspective of some of the Web 2.0 features.

Enjoy!

I am in Redmond for some training on the developer side of live.com a lot of what I am seeing will not be announced until MIX so I can't say much but watch dev.live.com for some great stuff!

A Partner Training event is making a tour around the country and wow do I want to take this training!

The title says it all "Designing Windows Experiences with Expression Blend" it is a two-day hands-on class so at the end you should have a good feel of what you can do with Blend. The target of this class Flash & Director designers (I know that is not me) but if you know someone who is a designer you should let them know about this class.

Check out all the information US Partner Readiness site in SoCal the class will only be available in Los Angeles on June 28 & 29. I hope to take it but if the class is full guess who will get bumped :(.

Part of my job is to help the local user group community in SoCal I can't tell you how much time this takes and how different I have to do things for each group. The rub comes when I want to try and get all the groups to do something that would help them and me there is always some groups that decide not to participate. Now don't get me wrong I love my local groups and the leaders are great and after helping run a group for many year before this job I know how much of a pain in the a@@ doing anything extra can be but... (there's always a but) I finally have something I think is so compelling and will only get more so to get all the groups to do something that will make there lives easer and my life as well.

It's CodeZone.com this is not a new site but it finally has functionality that will make managing a user group much better! What is it... well the now people and register as a speaker on CodeZone so user groups can find them. So what dose this mean? If you are interested in speaking at the local user groups go to CodeZone.com and register as a user then once you are logged in you can register as a speaker. Then user group leader will be able to find you and ask you to speaker at there group. In SoCal so far we have 4 people registered as a speaker but we need more!

Let me know what you think of CodeZone.com I work quite closely with the team that created and supports this site and we want to find out how we cam make it even better!

Last week and this week I was helping out with two different Mobility Touchdown events last week was in the Microsoft office in LA and this week I am in The White House in Las Vegas (note The White House is the coolest event venue for hands on class I have ever been to).

I said in LA and have promised some here in Las Vegas that I would post some of the class content. This includes 4 PDF files this includes the lab book the slides and pre & post install docs.

Download HERE!

I hope all that have taken the class have or am enjoying it.

Resources for content:
'Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator' kit
PocketPC FAQ
Compact Framework Case Studies
MobileBlocks on www.codeplex.com