The content for the mobility touchdown events that I was at in Los Angeles and Las Vegas has been updated and is available for download from Q4Tech's web site at Mobility touchdown content. If you attended any of the events around the world you will want to get the final content as all the bugs were fixed as the content was bending given.

For a review of what the Mobility touchdown events were see the MSDN blog http://blogs.msdn.com/mobilitytouchdown.

Just incase you had not seen this back in November Q4Tech released to CodePlex an implementation of the Patterns & Practices Mobile Updater Application Block. I have seen it used and it's quite feature complete, I hope to have my line of business application demo back online soon and have it using this block.

A area of development that miss not working with as often as I would like is programming for Windows CE. I did a lot of development for CE with the Compact Framework before I joined Microsoft and have contented to develop some small proof of concept applications to show what is possible but as always if not part of your day to day job you tend not to keep up and that is where I am at with this (and many other) topic.

I recently found the HopperRX blog that has a bunch of good advice and tools to help develop applications for CE I hope it can help any of you keep up as well.

This was an interesting article with a  report that shows some statistics on who in the world is blogging... quite strange to see how much I don't have in common with other bloggers. Such is life I have always been an outsider. 

Advertising Age - Digital - Who Blogs?

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!