Here is my first official TechEd update. So far its been a blast and the sessions have been pretty good too <g>. I have been meeting lots of people in the vendor fair including DataGridGirl, folks from Sams/Que and lots of MSFT folks. I need to give a shout to Sara F, who is absolutely the greatest and most fun person ever.
Saw Don Box give a Web Services session on Monday morning. Found out that wordml is >cool<!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dno2k3ta/html/ODC_Office2003Page.asp
(The wordml schema is apparently in the Development SDK)
No more having to deal with the crap word automation server in order to generate word docs on the server and push to clients.
Went to a good session from Scott Guthrie on ASP.NET performance tips. Got several new pieces of information, specifically related to which perf counters we should be watching when stressing ASP.NET apps and what they should be generating. You can get his slide deck that has lots of the info and code samples from his website www.scottgu.com.
A bunch of us INETA folks went to a local Dallas UG meeting tonight featuring Billy Hollis and Keith Pleas. Billy is apparently supposed to release a bunch of controls tomorrow at one of his TechEd sessions for free that make forms validation in WinForms a snap. He demoed them for us at the meeting.
Tomorrow will be going to see the second Nikhil server controls session. Plus the Developers Party is tomorrow night (yea!).
On another side note, my cell phone is officially dead. A long story involving a party and a pool there.
Also, all of the INETA are all hoping the Chris Pels (http://www.bostondotnet.org/) has a speedy recovery. He comes all the way from Boston and ends up spending the conference in the hospital!
Well we have chosen our 13 new INETA Speakers Bureau members which will announce at the INETA conference this Sunday. Congratulations to them and thanks to all of the people who submitted their information.
Update: Here is the list of new members:
http://www.ineta.org/Default.aspx?tabindex=2&tabid=16
Saturday morning my girlfriend and I were woken by a phone call letting us know that her oldest friend had tried to commit suicide by overdosing on her medication. She was being flown by LifeFlight to another hospital as we were on the phone, so we ended up quickly throwing some clothes in a bag and driving the 2+ hours to the hospital to comfort her husband and assure him that everything was being done that could be.
I must say that its a pretty disturbing site to see someone laying in a hospital bed with a breathing tube in and the activated charcoal dried in her hair. Knowing that had she taken only a few more pills, she probably would be dead, or at least in much worse shape. I don't think I can understand the depression that someone would have to be living with that would make them think that ending their life is actually an alternative, although in this case, I think some of the ingredients for her depression were pretty obvious.
Thankfully as the day progressed the drug level in her blood began to lower (with the help of dialysis) and by 10:00pm, they were able to remove the breathing tube. My girlfriend and I drove back home that night and talked about how much we hoped and prayed that she gets the psycological help she needs since she has such a great life to live for.
The
INETA speakers bureau sent out invitiations to approximatly 50 new potential members tonight and we will be announcing the new additions at our TechEd conference.June 1st. There are lots of great new names we would like to add to our current membership so good luck to those invitees.
Wow! My very own blog to play with. So hopefully I will be posting something interesting to someone at some point, but at least it gives me an outlet to rant.