My fellow DE Kirk Allen has a good list of items that develops should consider getting up to speed on and the reasons for it.

Check it out in his blog post What Technologies Should I Focus On?

This weekend I went on the last on the years Indian Guide camp out and while it all sounds corny it's a great program and always a good time with my Son Max. One of the long staining traditions for the last camp out is to have a "chariot" race where the boys pull the chef of the tribe. Well this year I was the chef and the boys pulled but the chariot did not hold up to my fat a@@. You can see the picture below where I earned the award for best face plant! But even with this Max and I had a great time! :)

I don't know how you lean best but I love using the web with live presentations as a way to lean about stuff that I want to learn about to see if I really want to dig in to. Well this upcoming web cast look quite interesting to me so I got them to open it to the world so join me in learning some new stuff!

Live Meeting: The Power of Predictive Analytics at Every Desktop

SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Excel 2007

Join this Live Meeting to learn how you can take advantage of the power of predictive analytics with SQL Server Data Mining add-ins for Excel 2007. You will discover how SQL Server Data Mining add-ins for Excel 2007 empower business users with an easy-to-use, comprehensive set of tools for predictive analysis, directly within their tool of choice - Excel. This session will be led by Kirk Nason, Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence Technology Specialist in Southern California.

Registration:

Online: http://msevents.microsoft.com/ and search on the Event Code. 1032343081 or go directly to: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032343081&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

By Phone: Call 1.877.MSEVENT (877.673.8366) Event Code. 1032343081

LA event next week... sorry for the late heads up.

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN LEARNING ABOUT THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE WEB?
Come join our Web Experience Events where you can learn about design tools, web building and web management software!

Friday, June 08, 2007 8:00 AM - Friday, June 08, 2007 6:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 7:30 AM

Microsoft Los Angeles Office
333 South Grand Ave,
Suite 3300 Los Angeles California 90071
Map

Register

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!