MarkItUp

Jason puts the call out for anybody wanting to attend the Adelaide Geek Dinner:

Code Assassin - Adelaide Geek Dinner Approaches

If you'd like to go, head over to Jason's blog and contact him from there about it.

See you there!

I meant to blog about this earlier:

Code Assassin - Adelaide Geek Dinner

I think that Jason has about 8 people who have replied so far.  Should be good!

OK, so technically there was no kiss

Here in the Expo hall at Tech.Ed there's an area called the Blogger's Lounge where bloggers can go to chill out and do some blogging - a sort of inflection point for blogging and ideas.  While sitting here a minute ago I was chatting with Mitch, Grant, and Frank about how things had been going so far... very nice

I just attended Tom Hollander's Software Factory session - a nice presentation but still not a set of technologies that we'll be using in the Dev Centre any time soon:

I kinda challenged Tom about what I see as either an NIH syndrome by the P&P team or a poor prioritization of features.  I personally feel that there's a focus on building designers and code generators and not much focus on integrating with the tools that we actually use in real projects.  A good point here was that Tom mentioned that there are plans for greater integration with TFS work items in the future (why wasn't this delivered in this release instead of new designers?).

Tom did mention a post on his blog about reuse which looks interesting:

Tom Hollander's blog : The Seven Deadly Sins of Reusable Asset Development

Michael Platt, Director, Web App Architecture, Microsoft US: 

Michael gave a talk about SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.0 which was very informative - what would you expect from a guy who has major insights into the architecture behind things such as the Live brand!  It's great to be able to hear from this caliber of people.

Michael's point was not that SOA, SaaS, or Web 2.0 are "it"... Microsoft's definition of the new model is S+S (Software + Services - think iTunes).

During the talk Michael said that he see's massive opportunities in the near future for (personal) devices that take personal data and push it up to the cloud - maybe a SPOT-style watch which can monitor your heart and send data to a service that your doctor subscribes to.  Because of this, I approached Michael after the talk and asked whether the Live platform will provide the ability to easily deploy agent software that might act on behalf of users.

I think that Live needs something like this - similar to how Facebook allows front-end application developers to plug-in, Live needs to allow agents (or broker software) to be deployed into the cloud to carry out the business of consumers.  In this way you might build an agent which does the monitoring of your health signs and does the job of notifying your GP when certain triggers are met.  Michael was in agreement with me on this point.

Interestingly I spoke to Tatham about this after the session and he pointed me at this article that he wrote last week (coincidentally I already had it bookmarked to read) which would allow developers and consumers to build this sort of agent-style of applications over the Live Contacts database today.

Note: Thanks also to Tatham for this blog post.

Note(1): Frank has posted a list of links to blogs about what happened yesterday:

http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/archive/2007/08/09/barely-had-time-to-stop-and-teched-day-2-starts.aspx

Today I was fortunate enough to have been on a panel as part of a conversation about Web 2.0.  Nick Hodge has all the details of the questions and answers, plus a bunch of photo's here:

http://www.nickhodge.com/blog/archives/2035

Long Zheng has more photo's here:

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070808/teched-day-1-bloggers-lunch/

Long Zheng has the best coverage of the Tech.Ed keynote.  Read and watch his post about it here.

I've just left the keynote where we saw an awesome keynote speech by Michael Twigg of AnimalLogic.  AnimalLogic is an Australian-based company who did CGI special effects for movies such as The 300, and Happy Feet.  Michael spoke to us about how they put these kinds of productions together and explained some of the methodology that allows movie directors to interact with the digital process in the same kind of dynamic way that they interact with actors and the process in the real world.

Right now I'm sitting down watching Nikhil talk about Ajax design patterns:

Grant offered up his Tech.Ed schedule here so I thought I'd blog mine too...

As Frank blogged yesterday, there will be a blogger's lunch on Wednesday at Tech.Ed next week to discuss Web 2.0 and Social Networking.  I'm on the panel with 4 others:

Panelists

• Jane O'Connell, Product and Network Strategy, ninemsn.
• Phil Sim, Founder, MediaConnect
• Darren Neimke, (Me) 
• Michael Platt, Director, Web Application Architecture, Microsoft US
• Frank Arrigo, Technical Community Manager Microsoft Australia

What a great opportunity to discuss Web 2.0 and ponder what it means for traditional media.  If you'd like to take part in this discussion then Frank has also blogged what you need to do to register for the event here.

What do you think?  Is Web 2.0 worth all the hype?  In what area of your life does "Web 2.0" have the biggest impact?

 I see that Dave Glover is talking about Oryx at this week's user group meeting in Adelaide

make it along to this months ADNUG/MSDN Lunchtime Update, the session is a pre run of my TechEd Oz session and looks at rapid database centric web development with ASP.NET and the up and coming ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls.  

Dave Glover "Down Under (Oz)" : ADNUG/MSDN ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls (Oryx) this Thursday (Aug 2nd, 2007)

The Oryx stuff is seriously cool.  The Oryx bits were orignally previewed in the May 2007 Futures - see http://www.asp.net/downloads/futures/default.aspx for a screen cast.

Mitch and Greg have both posted their thoughts on CodeCamp SA so I thought that I'd better mention it too.  It was great to catch up and re-connect with several old Adelaide friends and also to spend time with colleagues again.  Greg's talk on DMV's in SQL Server 2005 that was very interesting.  There's a lot of functionality in there - particularly the new reporting features that come as a standard part of SQL Server - that I didn't know about.  Dave Gardiner has posted a more thorough analysis of Greg's talk here. 

On Saturday evening I went out for dinner with Mitch, Dave Glover, and Jey Srikantha (from K2) and we had some great food and conversation.

It was also great that Mitch could stay over at our house and catch up with our family again - the kids were delighted to spend time with "Mitchy Mitch"   Mitch really helped me with getting my PowerPoint deck sorted out too!

My talk was a new topic that I'm working on and it was good to present it for the first time.  It's basically a "Tips and Tricks" session about managing a remote development process.  It was great to get it out there for the first time and I got some good feedback about the structure.  Below is my deck for anyone who was interested or who was unable to attend.  Next time I give this talk I'm going to change slides 15 and 16 from conversation-style slides and bust it out into maybe 6 more explicit "Tip and Trick" style slides.  It will vastly improve the structure and make the outcomes much more concrete.

	My opening slide
	It was originally advertised that I was going to talk about EntLib
	Nope
	Then it was advertised that I'd be talking about Enterprise 2.0
	Nup
	The topic of this talk
	Who I am - professionally * Consultant * Accounting/Finance background * My blog
	Who I am - personally * Coach of sporting teams * Book author * User Groups/Community * MVP, ASPInsider
	Who I work for * .NET Readiness Leaders * Tech.Ed's, Code Camps, User Groups, ReMIX, etc * Canberra, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane
	What I do * [Showed video of Cat Herding] * Herd cats  * Manage the Dev Centre
	What is the Dev Centre * Manage internal development * Some special characteristics
	1 - We are Remote * You cannot see your colleagues * Easy to go dark * You need strategies to work remotely
	2 - We are Mobile * Many tasks need to be done on devices * Need to make work processes more asynchronous
	Our processes * Our SCRUM implementation had to change * We have had good success at introducing the business to iterative development * Manage expectations of people coming to do work * IT rocks.  They work with us, not against us and are jointly a part of the delivery process.
	Our Tools * TFS - don't just use, make it work for you * TFS enhancements - TFSIntegrator, TFSDeployer, etc * Shared View - pair programming * Connected One Note sessions - our whiteboard
	How we Communicate * Wiki-based open communications policy * Good use of detailed check-in comments * Outcome-based scrums as opposed to task based * Message oriented communication
	Thanks for coming!

I haven't done a community talk for a while but it seems that I might have a few coming up - particularly in the Enterprise and Web 2.0 space!  This weekend I'll be giving a talk at Code Camp SA about managing a remote development process.  Here's the blurb:

Managing a remote development process.

For the past year, Darren Neimke has managed internal development within Readify.  Learn how Readify’s development processes have evolved to provide adequate support for distant/remote teams while still ensuring that they are able to capitalize on their own unique strengths.  In this talk Darren explains how the development process is managed within Readify both from a methodology perspective as well as by looking at what tools are used to support the process.

To learn more about Code Camp SA, please visit the following news page for ADNUG which summarizes the talks for the weekend:

http://www.adnug.com/news.htm

I love the blurb that they have up there for me right now   I told them that my talk would probably center around "Enterprise 2.0" concepts and I think that they thought I was going to give a talk on EntLib!  Here's the blurb that ADNUG prepared for me

Enterprise 2.0. The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a library of application blocks designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Application blocks are a type of guidance, provided as source code that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on enterprise development projects. This release of Enterprise Library provides similar functionality to the previous releases for the .NET Framework 1.1; however, Enterprise Library has been redesigned to use the new capabilities of the .NET Framework 2.0.

Believe me... I will not be advocating EntLib!

This is good to see... 

Brad Abrams : Visual Studio in Second Life

I wonder how long it will be before Readify has an apartment in there?

See you in there! 

At home I have this habit where, whenever I purchase a new article of clothing, I turf out an equivalent number of old items.  Buy a new shirt - turf an old one.  In with new socks, out with some old ones.  New hanky in - old hanky out.  You get the picture.  The idea is to drive towards a wardrobe of clothes that always represent a current set based on what I prefer to wear.  It's like survival of the fittest where each article of clothing has to compete to remain in the fold - although old jocks can only survive for so long .

I've started to actively do the same with my RSS subscriptions.  I use the trigger of new subscriptions as a point of evaluation for items in my current subscription list.  I don't unsubscribed from feeds on a pure 1-1 basis.  What I do is to look at the number of items that the new feed will add to my reader each week and look to unsubscribe from a number of feeds that is representative of that number of individual reading items.  This helps to ensure that the signal to noise ratio is always being fine tuned on a proper comparative basis.

Over the past 6 months I've started tuning in much more to feeds that focus on the theory knowledge management and less on individual technologies and implementation related blogs.  As an example I've added blogs such as:

• http://800ceoread.com/blog/
• Wikinomics
• 7 Breaths
• and Jonathon Schwartz's blog

At the same time my interest in low level details about implementation has waned somewhat.  In recent times, to match the intake from the blogs that I've listed above I've unsubscribed to some really excellent blogs about CRM, SharePoint, and design patterns:

• Shade Tree Developer - a great blog about implementing code and design patterns.
• Same Shirt Every Day - Alex's new Rails blog.  Sorry Alex, I'd love to get excited about Rails but I lack the time
• Stunnware's CRM Corner - This guy has customized CRM to within an inch of its life but I'm not so interested in actual CRM customization as I thought that I would be.
• Steve Pietrek's SharePoint links blog - Not to be confused with his original Links Blog which I can't see myself ever unsubscribing from!

It's not that these blogs are not a good read - they've served me extremely well in the past.  It's just that, beyond a certain point, reading stuff can interfere with doing stuff.  So hence the need for constant pruning and vigilance in maintaining the right level of signal to noise.  By the same token, there's a couple of blogs that I've kept - mostly because they are friends - but who seldom update me with their articles these days:

• Rocky Heckman
• Geoff Appleby
• Dave Glover
• Nikhil Kothari - Nikhil is actually posting a little bit, but not about the sort of stuff that I'm interested in so much any more.

Although they tend to clutter my reader I've kept a hold of them in the hope that they may one day again inspire me with their tales from the trenches

I've written about Shared Items on Google Reader before but wanted to re-post because they are so cool and I wonder how many people are making use of that feature.  This has drifted back to my attention after yesterday, having had a chat about them with Warren Schaefer at Melbourne airport who agrees about their coolness.

How it works is that as I'm reading items within Reader, there is a "Share" button at the bottom of each item:

As I come across articles that I think are of exceptional value I click on that button and the item is then available to be shared.  By sharing the item it is available via the following link which also exposes itself as an RSS feed:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/17231039675326267877

There is also a nice web part that they make available so that I can present a view of my shared items on my blog:

I'm firmly of the opinion that each of us must read some incredible articles each day and without a sharing experience such as this, then this knowledge sharing opportunity is either lost or just poorly translated as time passes waiting for me to blog about it.  Clicking on a share button means that the "cream of the crop" is always shared though and so the things that I read that are valuable are available as a filtered list for people to view.

If you are interested in * 2.0 (Web, Enterprise, etc) discussions, team based development, .NET, then I'd highly encourage you to subscribe to my shared items feed because that's where you will find the best knowledge that I see each day about those topics.  And if you have a Shared Items link please add it as a comment to this post so that I can subscribe to yours - in your comment please let me know what content categories your shared items are likely to contain

My 2 biggest role models in the .NET world are Scott Mitchell and Dino Esposito - sure there are others that I have huge respect for such as Mitch Denny, Scott Hanselmann, and Phil Haack, but somehow Scott and Dino both strike a special chord with me.  Both of these guys are a real testament to the fact that through persisting towards a goal you can create great things of real value.  There are so many examples of the rich assets that both of these guys have built up over the years - blogs, books, websites, articles, starter kits, etc.  Here's an example of the latest work that Scott has produced:

Working with Data and ASP.NET 2.0

This is an asset that Scott has produced over the past 15 or so months: more than 50 high quality tutorials.  A great example of what you can do if you stick at something, not lose focus, and give it your all!

I remember a few years ago I was a total forum junkie.  I had several thousand posts on ASP Messageboard and I was the most active poster on the ASP.NET forums for the first few months.  During that time I was answering questions so that I could learn about new scenarios for coding and using (primarily) ASP.NET.  One thing that always blew me away was that, no matter how much help you gave, the people in these forums would always want more.  You could literally spend a few hours helping someone, even to the point where you basically wrote all of their code for them and they'd still ask for more. 

After a time I became pretty jaded.  Not so much because of the time but also because of the lack of appreciation that people often show for the help that you provide in forums.  Many are the time that you'd pour a few hours into solving some guys business problem with code and, instead of a heartfelt "thankyou", you'd instead get another ream of (often) indecipherable code placed in front of you.

These days I tend to avoid forums altogether.  Most of my learning is done in the serenity of my office and increasingly through my growing participation as a technical reviewer of books on upcoming technologies.  A much more pleasurable way to grow... for now anyways!

I've given a couple of copies (signed ) to CSharpZealot who will be giving them away as prizes in competitions:

Link to CSharpZealot : Swag for the community or sponsorships..

Cool stuff!

I've been a bit slow out of the blocks in blogging about the MVP Summit which takes place this week but Mitch and I arrived in Seattle yesterday.  Mitch has written about our journey and the associated delays here.  We did have delays but thankfully, we didn't miss our luggage as Frank did when he came here last week!

Mitch and I are staying at the Hilton hotel. 

The highlight for me so far has been the hotel elevator.  Here they must be using wormhole technology because even though I'm staying on the 15th floor I can get from the lobby to my floor in an instant... truly!  Seriously, I get in at the lobby, press '15', and woooooosh... I'm there.  There's not even the typical feel of inertia that you would get from such a fast ride. 

Tomorrow I think that I will take it for a spin to another galaxy.

Thanks to Keyvan I've been tagged  so I have to reveal 5 things about myself that you may not already know; here goes:

1. I was born at Glenelg private hospital in Adelaide, South Australia on July 22nd 1968.
2. I have played both cricket and hockey at state level.  I played state junior hockey and played senior turf cricket for both SA and also QLD.
3. I used to work as a trading floor operator for a stockbroking firm and was on the trading floor on the morning of the 1987 stockmarket crash - Black Monday.
4. I try to have a different breakfast each day of the week; some of my favourites are: Sliced Tomatoe's on Toast, Honey and Banana on Toast, Cheese and Vegemite on Toast, Muesli and Yoghurt.
5. My MVP got renewed for 2007 today

I'll keep the tag alive by tagging Mitch Denny, Greg Low, Paul Stovell, Andrew Coates, and Grant Holliday.

How can you start a mailing list and get over 100 subscriptions in a single week - that's insane.  Grant did it.  Not only that, but OzTFS already has among its subscribers:

• most of the AustralianDPEteam
• the Readify TFS brains trust
• and some guy named Rob Caron :-)

In addition to the mailing list, Grant is planning to have a weekly article which digests the highlights from the week's activity on the list.  Apparently Rob Caron thought that this was a good idea because he blogged about it today!

A while ago I wrote about the need for a deeper community experience for certain types of people within the community - one which goes well beyond what we get from user groups, forums, and mailing lists.  In that article I wrote that I'd like to consider using a form of geek dinner to encapsulate the experience and I was calling them "Community Dinners".

    http://markitup.com/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=4bf99253-d6aa-434d-b952-0d6beb63e0be

Since writing that article in April, I've been giving the idea more thought because I still wasn't happy with the delivery mechanism.  To recap, I wrote that the group would ideally be between 7 and 10 people and would agree to meet regularly for the next 12 months.

The part that didn't sit well with me is the size of the group.  From my experience, once you go much beyond 3 or 4 people, you start thinning the conversation.  The whole point of the type of group that I'm talking about is that you would really want to avoid this thinning because the people who are involved would really want to dig into the meat and potatoes of the various subjects that they choose to discuss.

So, in wanting to come up with the perfect medium for this community I started thinking about the kind of experiences that I was hoping to emulate.  Some of the experiences that came to mind were things like:

• The conversations that I had when I was travelling home from Code Camp this year
• Conversations that I've had with various people in airport lounges over the past 6-12 months
• Lunch conversations that I've had with various people at various times

Then you look at that list and it's clear what I'm hoping to capture - it's simply real community interaction.  When you put 2 or 3 smart, passionate people together for a short period of time, interesting conversations are sure to happen.  So, in effect, I'm already there - and I can increase the number of experiences that I have simply by meeting more people, and more often. 

This is easy.  It can be a matter of simply ringing somebody and committing to having lunch together.  Maybe it's a coffee after work.  Maybe it's going for a walk with somebody together.  Maybe it's even just sharing a ride in to work with somebody on the train.  It's any and all of these things, and it can be as regular or irregular as you like.  Put simply, it's all about the time that you spend with the people within your network.

Think about the value that is returned by going 25 minutes out of your way for a morning and committing to meet somebody on a train platform and sharing a train ride to work.  That would be a day filled to the brim with new thoughts from which new connections could be made from existing ideas.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've started a new website that I hope may form the beginnings of an Aussie Gadget Community.  The site is hosted at http://OzGadgets.com.au and the plan is to be an aggregator of information about Australian gadgets and also to post some tutorials about creating gadgets while I'm at it.

So far the only Aussie gadget that I know about is my AFL Ladder gadget, so if you know of others, please let me know about them so that I can feature them on the OzGadgets blog.  Likewise, if you have requests for Aussie Gadgets that you'd like to see, then please let me know about those too so that I can add them to the site.

I hope to post a few tutorials up on the site over the next week or so about creating and deploying gadgets.  Over time, the tutorials will include scripts for doing common tasks - such as displaying grids of data, or providing a customization interface for your gadget.

Please let me know if you'd like to get involved with the site - maybe we can make http://OzGadgets.com.au the first multi-user instance of SingleUserBlog :-)

In a comment to a recent post, Matt asks where I'm grabbing the data for the AFL Gadget from.  It's all a dirty trick though, because, as I told Matt in my reply, so far I've just created a static XML file and am hosting it from this site:

    http://www.markitup.com/data/aflladder.xml

My plan is to actually remove that file at some stage and replace it with a web service that other people can access via a subscriber identifier - not that I'm thinking of charging for it, I just want to be able to track who's using it.

I'll probably move the web service over to my new domain:

    http://OzGadgets.com.au

Where I envisage hosting a number of data services for "Aussie" sports data. 

More about http://OzGadgets.com.au to follow :-)

While reading my morning feeds I see that Frank has given Dave the thumbs up to get a new community up and running. 

I'm sure that I can think of a few people who would be keen to collaborate on ideas in and around team based development - perhaps I should give them a gentle nudge in the right direction :-)

I've been an MVP now for 3 years and it's that time of the year where my MVP status comes up for renewal and so I thought that I'd blog some thoughts about the program and revisit this old post from Dave Lemphers:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/davidlem/archive/2006/01/20/515165.aspx.

First, the MVP program is many things to many people.  To some it's just a bad form of Kool Aid, while to others it's a set of rules.  Heck, according to this guy, it's now actually being run by Kofi Anan!  So whatever your take on the MVP program, it's clearly an emotive discussion point.

For my part I'm in agreeance with Dave Lemphers thoughts about it and would really like to see a greater churn in the program for a couple of reasons.  First, by having greater churn I think that you could keep the size of the program down and, in turn, reduce the administration effort that is required to maintain it.  Secondly, greater churn would provide an opportunity for some people who may not otherwise get the opportunity - because of timing or bad luck - to be an MVP; and that would be a shame.

Aside from the obvious benefit of the free MSDN Subscription the MVP program is great because of what it allows you to do.  The MVP program is really a set of tools that allow you to plug in to Microsoft at a pretty low level and to use those tools and your own energy to do things that might otherwise have been unachievable. 

I'd like to see that the MVP's that are awarded are those people who are most likely to benefit from the use of these tools and the doors that they can open.  For example, take some of the guys that I've worked with in the community of late: Joseph Cooney (WPF), Paul Stovell (Languages), Keyvan Nayyeri (.NET Developer Community) and Tatham Oddie (Web 2.0).  Nice guys, great attitude, 1000% more energy than me - not MVP's.  So here is me, with this terrific network that I've built, sitting at the top, licking cream.  While they are stuck with having to work two or three times as hard as me just to get the same level of information.  It's an exaggerated example used for effect.

If those guys were MVP's they'd get the invites to the right meetings; they'd get access to the right newsgroups, and they'd have the opportunity to mix their current levels of energy with the product teams to create unique and interesting things with the product.  And just as important... they'd get the recognition that they deserve for the effort that they've put into the Microsoft developer community.

So this is why I agree with Dave when he talks about being a nominator.  It's not just about sharing the love, it's about being a leader and growing the community.  It's a mentor mindset as opposed to a me mindset.

And "Yes", while the satisfaction of giving someone else a go will be great, letting go of that MSDN Subscription will be hard :-)

I opened Live Messenger just a moment ago and Frank was gleaming so I clicked on his contact card and read this.  I didn't know what ASCCA was so I quickly Googled it and the third entry was this which explained things a bit better.

Anyways, if you're still there Frank, I hope it's all going well :-)

Given that I've somewhat stumbled into Open Source development of late - new major release of  BlogML due out this week and new open source project to be announced shortly hopefully - this article is probably right up my alley... well, that's if I ever get to work on code again :-)

Link to What's the difference between working on an open source project and working on a paid job | TortoiseSVN

In getting ready for Tech.Ed I started having a bit of a play with the main technologies in the sessions that I'm going to attend - which are: Architecture, LINQ, Atlas, and performance/testing.

To kick things off I re-installed the latest Atlas, Linq, and Blinq bits and started building a little website to try things out.  Most of today was spent re-learning Linq and taking my first look at Blinq.  The first thing that I did was to fire up Blinq and point it at my test database like so:

> Blinq /t:c:\Projects\PD1 /database:projectdistributor /server:. /sprocs

Blinq is a command-line application which calls through to SqlMetal to produce a database context and then creates a website with pre-generated pages for every crud scenario using a series of DetailsViews and GridViews.  Some highlights from the output of a Blinq web app are that they:

    - generate a file called StaticMethods.cs which has static methods over all of the SqlMetal stuff
    - use CssAdaptors for nice menus

As for the rest of the website that gets produced, I'd say that its intent is to show "DLINQ in Action" from a web application perspective.

During the day I was reminded of how totally cool Linq is.  Here is an example of calling a business proc in my ProjectDistributor app:

Projectdistributor db = Projectdistributor.CreateDataContext() ;
int newID = db.AddUserToApplicationRole(1, 1) ;

Both the Projectdistributor class here and the AddUserToApplicationRole method were generated by SqlMetal. 

I think that when we get to using Linq in real world applications that we may use procs for some business level operations - such as above - but that most of the time we'll just code directly off of the SqlMetal produced proxies.  For example, using nothing but the generated proxies I could page through the records in my Users table like so:

    gvw.DataSource = db.Users.Seek(100).Take(25);

This would grab the 100th - 124th records from the Users table and bind them to a GridView.  If the Users table was quite "wide" I could also improve the efficiency by binding to a projection from that table instead:

 
    gvw.DataSource = from user in db.Users
                       orderby user.UserName
                       select new {
                           UserID = user.ID,
                           FirstName = user.FirstName,
                           City = user.City,
                           IsPublic = user.IsPublic
                       };

This would produce SQL under the hood which only requested the 4 columns from the User table.  ScottGu has a great post here which shows how simple it can be to display data on a web page using Linq.

Hanselminutes #28 is out and in this edition Scott Hanselman and Carl Franklin discuss Open Source software.  It's a very interesting discussion and explains some of the gray areas.  One of the highlights for me was that Scott mentioned ProjectDistributor as being a great place to host some forms of open source software.  Heck!  ProjectDistributor is even an open source project itself :-)

Open Source projects are interesting beasties and it's a topic that I've always been interested in.  As I mentioned, recently I've had a great deal of satisfaction in making BlogML an open source project and seeing Keyvan add features that I would never have had time to commit.

Listen to Scott's podcast and then leave me a comment about your experiences with open source.  What's your opinion of it?  Is it free as in beer or, as Phil Haack coined... free as in a flower :-)  For me it's both, depending on what I'm using it for.  

Some of my favourite open source software are: Draco, NUnit, NAnt, .Text, IBuySpy.

Over the past week we've seen amazing scenes in the Australian blogsphere between Paul "WPF" Stovell and Bill "VB" McCarthy over who has the coolest Tech.Ed session picker.  We've heard allegations, muckraking, read fraudulent claims, and even witnessed name calling.

For what it's worth, I don't think that the winner comes from either of those applications but is instead the Session picker on the Tech.Ed site.  The reason is simple - it's a web application!

Because of this I don't have to install anything, and it can run on any platform such as Vista or XP without requiring special versions of pre-requisites to be present first.  The Tech.Ed session picker is readily available from all of my machines and I know that when I walk into Tech.Ed on 23rd August that I'll be able to go to any Internet Kiosk there and pull up my sessions from it.  The Tech.Ed session picker is fast due to its use of of Ajax and it allows me to query data in myriad ways such as: by Keyword, Timeslot, Speaker, Session Level, Session Type, and Track.

So sorry Bill and Paul, both of your apps are great, but I'm a web guy! :-)

http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/archive/2006/07/28/681288.aspx

None!

Go on, place your mouse over a Readify consultant... you know you want to :-)

I see that Frank (busy guy that he is) has taken the time to collect the Meego images for his team that are working on Tech.Ed.  You can view his pyramid here. 

As I was looking at those Meego's I started wondering whether the Meego environments that have been chosen by each of those individuals provide a glimpse into their inner-self.  For example, from these images can I glean that:

• Tech.darryl, Tech.Andrew Coates and Tech.Jeffa obviously like presenting
• Tech.Nils enjoys the labs
• Tech.Alex and Tech.Scott see it as an adventure
• Tech.Deeps mans the stands

Maybe it's time to get a Readify inverted pyramid together to see what our guys are going to be up to when we hit Tech.Ed.

A week or so ago, Andrew Coates posted a draft session plan for something called the "Developer Tools Track" at TechEd.  All that I'll say about this session is that it's great to see that there are still companies that have the budget and that there are tireless people who have the energy to continue to offer a lifeline to those lost souls who still haven't moved up.

Anyways I was talking to Nigel the Nightowl about TechEd and he's informed me that Dave Lemphers will be posting up the Connected Systems track outline soon.  Hurry up Dave!

I awoke this morning to the news that the two Aussie miners - Todd Russell and Brant Webb - who have been trapped for 14 days in a mine 1km underground in Beaconsfield, Tasmania have been released.  This is one of those unbelievable moments where an entire nation is bonded as one.  Congratulations go out to the workmates of Todd Russell and Brant Webb who worked tirelessly and under incredible physical strain for the entire 14 days to free them.

Todd, Brant were trapped in the mine after a rockfall which was triggered by earth tremors on Anzac Day.

A third miner - Larry Knight - was also trapped below but did not survive.

Related Links:
Russel, Webb walk from gold mine.

As mentioned already by Mitch, my Vista talk at Code Camp generated a lot of interest around how we will cope when we are forced to run as a Standard User.  This got me thinking harder about an idea that I've had for some time now...

Over the past year or so I've been attending a lot fewer user group meetings.  Actually I've reached a point where I'm actually unsure that spending 3 hours attending a user group meeting is a good investment of my time.  This is not to say that my community exposure is any less - in fact, quite the opposite.  Over the past 6 months I've participated in Code Camp Australia, TechEd Australia, Vista TTT, and geek dinners.  I'm also very deliberate that I make the time to catch up with people interstate whenever I'm travelling.  So it's not like I see people any less since withdrawing from user groups it's more that my experience of community is changing.

Before continuing I think that I should describe what we'll refer to as the 4 levels of community involvement (there are probably many more beyond the fourth but my own limited understanding and experience only allows me to see that far).

• Level Zero - Stays at home.
• Level One - Attends community events.
• Level Two - Participates in community events.
• Level Three - ...

NOTE: For now I'm trying to avoid the term "thought leader" for the fourth level but I'll throw that term in here just so it's clear what type of person I think falls into this category.

It's pretty clear about how people in the first three categories get and provide the stimulation that they need to grow and there's an abundance of activities available that suit those people: user groups, roadshows, forums, mailing lists, etc.  For people in the fourth category however, sitting in a user group for an hour listening to discussions that are largely irrelevant to where you are at represents a distinct under-utilization of time and effort. 

Give that the arrival of Longhorn is now right on our doorsteps, the next 12 months represents a significant challenge for Level Three people - as these are the people most responsible for:

• Choosing methodologies
• Implementing patterns and practices
• Selecting suitable team structures
• Deciding on what tooling to use
• Designing application architectures
• Running under LUA
• Uses for InfoCard

While some of the existing activities that I've mentioned are not well suited to openly discussing topics such as these, other activities - such as geek dinners - are very well suited to open discussion.  Given the number of topics that are available for dicussion at the moment (as shown above) I think that there is an opportunity for Geek dinners to advance to a more prominent role in how community operates.

... Now back to the idea that I've had for a while now...

What I'd like to do is to start a geek dinner group in Canberra that would meet monthly on a structured date (just as user groups meet at a timed interval).  The group would ideally be between 7 and 10 people and would agree to meet regularly for the next 12 months.  The ideal person for the group would:

• be involved at the right level of business and development decision making
• have opinions
• have some level of passion or interest for excellence

I think that this could be a great way to explore "fringe" thoughts and to gain insights that are not regularly available outside of less structured geek events - such as Code Camp.

I'm heading to Singapore on Monday to attend the Vista Touchdown Trainer Event.  Throughout the 4 days of training we cover Vista User Experience, WPF, InfoCard, WCF, and WWF.  After attending the course I will be a "go to" trainer for the Vista Touchdown program which will start in Australia around the middle of the year.  The Touchdown program will be run bu the DE team in Australia so keep an eye on Frank's blog for details.

One of the highlights of the Singapore training trip will be that I get to meet Ian Griffiths (who is the trainer for the week).  I've followed Ian's writing for a long time and it will be great to finally meet with him.

After reading Geoff's announcement of the next Geek dinner I thought that I'd better write something just as witty so I started analyzing what he'd written and planning an equally witty response.  Then I remembered an old quote and thought better of it.

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it."
- E.B.White (1899—1985). 

OK, so here's my version of the announcement.  Geek Dinner in Canberra on the evening of Wednesday, February the 8th.  F*ck knows where at this stage :-) but Geoff and I will "collaborate" on that one and blog it next week. At this stage I imagine that it will probably be at Babars in Civic again because of its centrality.

And on that note I'll end with another quote...

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."    — Winston Churchill.

The following photo was taken from the back of the Microsoft room where I attended the Canberra UG meeting tonight.  As you can see from the shadows on the wall it was all eyes to the front as Mitch walked VSTS through it's paces:

The big news of the evening though was that Geoff and I decided that it's time for another monthly Geek dinner here in Canberra.  As soon as I get back from my Redmond trip in a couple of weeks we'll sort out a date and venue and will post on our blogs accordingly :-)