Well, I think I've got my schedule down for the first half of this year. Here's what I've got so far. TechReady6 - MS Internal Event, Feb 11-15 in Redmond ( Nerd Dinner on Weds !) Mix08 - ASP.NET MVC Framework - March 5-7 in Vegas Boise Code Camp - Keynote: "Community and the Big Blue Monster" - March 9 in Boise Devscovery - Keynote: "I Am ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions and So Can You!" - April 1st in NYC MVP Summit - I'll talk if someone will listen - April 14-17 in Seattle ALT.NET Seattle - Open Spaces - April 18-20 in Seattle PNPSummit - Keynote: "Je suis ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions et ainsi vous pouvez vous!" (joke) - May 6-8 in Quebec City DevTeach Toronto - Keynote: "Are you tired of hearing about .NET yet? Well,...

I recently got a copy of Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials: Client-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Explained by Cristian Darie and Bogdan Brinzarea . I think it is very, cool that there is a whole book on the Microsoft Ajax Library ( download )... I think this is a far two unsung asset of the ASP.NET 3.5 . The first half of the book is really an Ajax and javascript overview.. the big take away from this section is that you DO NOT want to be doing this stuff by hand. You gotta use a framework. Of course, I am slightly partial to the Microsoft Ajax Library, put Dojo, Prototype, or any of the many others would be better than doing this by hand! The second half of the book is a good walk through of the Microsoft Ajax Library.. how to do basic networking,...

Please check out Maarten Balliauw's great blog posts on ASP.NET State Partitioning and Load Balancing. ASP.NET Session State Partitioning using State Server Load Balancing ASP.NET Session State Partitioning ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.NET state server (aspnet_state) Read More...

I often get the question “Why isn’t IntelliSense working?”. The most common cause is an error in one of the referenced scripts. If there was an IntelliSense update error, the status bar will tell you. Given this situation, the Error List will complement the status bar with one of two messages. Error Message 1: A script failed to execute… This type of error is commonly caused by either a syntax error, calling a member that doesn’t exist, or an infinite loop. The filename/source is provided to help you debug. After the script error is fixed, IntelliSense will automatically retry. Note: I’ve noticed the line number to be off by 1; we’ll be fixing that. Error Message 2: Something more serious… In rare occurrences, our execution/analysis engine Read...

If you're new to this, each week I post some snippets of particularly interesting (read: beautiful, ugly, clever, obscene) source and the project it came from. This started from a belief that reading source is as important (or more so) as writing it . We read computer books to become better programmers, but unless you're reading books like Programming Pearls , you ought to peruse some Open Source projects for inspiration. And so, Dear Reader, I present to you fourteenth in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." Here's some source I was reading this week. Over the last year or so I've seen an increase in discussion around so-called "fluent interfaces" in many languages. The addition of extension methods...

A while back I did a customer briefing about how to use Silverlight and ASP.NET to build a great media driven web site. You can find the write-up, demo, and slides on my original post. Recently, I got a hold of the video! Read More...

Are you in King County/Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue Washington and surrounding areas? Are you a huge nerd ? Perhaps a geek ? No? Maybe a spaz , dork , dweeb or wonk . Maybe you're in town for an SDR (Software Design Review) or TechReady6. Quite possibly you're just a normal person . Regardless, why not join us for some Mall Food at the Crossroads Bellevue Mall Food Court on Wednesday, February 13th around 6:30pm? Here's some links to help you remember and add this to your calendar, or head over to http://nerddinner.events.live.com . There's photos of previous Nerd Dinners up on Flickr thanks to Orcmid . Add to your calendar Microsoft Outlook Windows Live Calendar Apple iCal Yahoo! Calendar Google Calendar I hope to see you there! NOTE: Even though...

I have a love/hate relationship with the ASP.NET Session. It's such a convenient place to put things, but when you start putting applications into production there are a number of less-than-obvious edge cases that can come up and bite you. Most often the Session is used when managing state over a long process like a multi-step wizard or questionnaire. However, when people use the Session, they often lean on it a little. They'll bake it into their design so deep that when it doesn't work, they're screwed. That's not to say they shouldn't be able to lean on it, I'm just saying that there's a lot of things going on with Session (not just on ASP.NET, but other frameworks as well) in order to get it to look seamless. Built in Options ASP.NET offers...

Some of you have noticed :) there are a number of new bloggers on weblogs.asp.net. Some are adding great posts of technical value. Others are posting less useful information like letting us know that the overslept today. Thanks to all of you have have emailed me to share your frustrations (ScottGu included.) I've been doing feature planning for some time to add much greater "Social Networking" functionality to www.asp.net including blog and post rating and a variety of related RSS features. Unfortunately, developer resources are limited, etc, etc, etc. In the mean time, if you are a brand new blogger and have noticed that your blog posts are not appearing in the main aggregation, it's because you made a non technical post and included it in...

At the risk of embarrassing myself and eliciting more groans, I am going to share a joke I made up for my Code Camp talk . I was inspired to come up with some humor based on Jeff’s Sesame Street Presentation Rule post. I fully understand his post was addressing something deeper than simply telling a gratuitous joke in the presentation. The context is that I just finished explaining the various dependencies between the Model, View, and Controller within the MVC pattern. UPDATE: Updating this joke as the feedback comes in. The original is at the bottom. So a Model, a View, and a Controller walk into a bar and sit down to order some drinks from the bartender. The View has a few more drinks than the others and turns to the Model and says, “Can you...