Only a few hours until Festivus. Oh, how I enjoy the airing of grievances. I hope that your Festivus pole is up already. Oh, the excitement is building..................
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus
PS. Uncle Kirk called me last week and wished me a Merry Festivus.
Lori sent me this jingle that was published in the Huntsville .NET /
VS.NET mailing list. I wish she would sing it for the podcast.
(chorus)
Oh there's no user groups quite like Huntsville has,
VS NET, IT Pro, or Office fan,
If you pine for geek fellowship or techno-talk,
We get that in Rocket City, Alabam'
(verses)
We've had two speakers come from Tennessee, Ron C. and Wally M.,
plus Greg Y., Marks B. and D. from north G-A,
Russ F. and Joe and Blain came traveling up from Tampa's sunny shore,
TechNet John came up from Texas, DE Doug did not neglect us.
From the east coast, INETA Rock Stars Brian, Julie and Miguel,
Up from Texas, Chris, and Russ from bright LA, (plus Wally M.)
We so appreciate your insights and your coming all this way,
From Atlantic to Pacific, thanks folks, you were all terrific.
As for our locals, five guys stepped up, ably handling meeting chores,
Thanks to Josh for January's launch event
And then to Ben, Kevin and Eric and to Rodney, thanks again,
With pride in them I'll be vocal, they're great talents right here local.
Thanks to Todd M. who drove from Birmingham and Andrew from Mobile,
Thanks to all who came to talk at Code Camp, too,
The guys from CLS and Compuware and all the volunteers
who taught folks from Valley Garden, our success, you've had a part in.
As always, thank you goes to Intergraph for giving meeting space,
and to Dominos and Pepsi for the nosh
Thanks telerik, ADTran, CODE Magazine, VS Net Pro, and more
Culminis and our INETA, your support could not be better!
(final chorus)
Since there's no place like home, we'll not meet this month,
Happy Holidays, best wishes for next year
Hope to see you all soon and together find
that we'll all be running Vista on new gear!
Just wanted to throw out the one major change that I have seen in the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Release Candidate that I have seen so far. The namespaces have changed. What was previously Microsoft.Web has become System.Web. I think that this was a good to change to go ahead and move the code into what will most likely be the final namespace in the Orcas timeframe.
You probably won't even notice this change unless you are programming against the actual classes themselves instead of the controls. Note that you will also need to change the web.config of your app to match the new namepsaces. Or you can just dump the new web.config in your app.
If you haven't heard of it, CodeMash is coming up. It is a two day event in January in Sandusky, OH (right outside of Cleveland). There will be a number of big name folks there, including Scott Guthrie.
Here is a small blurb from their site:
CodeMash is a unique event that will educate developers on current practices,
methodologies and technology trends in variety of platforms and development
languages such as Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP. Held January 18-19, 2007 at the lush
Kalahari resort in Sandusky, Ohio,
attendees will be able to attend a world-class technical conference amid Ohio's
largest indoor waterpark.
Who would have thought that you could be right off of Lake Erie in January and go to a waterpark. Very cool indeed.
I wanted to give a shout out of thanks to
Dave Wanta and Advanced Intellect. Dave has written a component called AspNetEmail. You may be asking yourself, "Email is built into .NET, so what?" Well, getting calendaring done is kindof a pain. I plugged in Dave's component and it just worked. I had a few questions and Dave knew the answers before I even asked. His components are well worth the money.
Its been an interesting last month or so. I've been watching traffic to the ASP.NET Podcast XML feed go way up. I've been trying to figure out why? Is it my sparking good looks, cute smile, sterling voice, or something else? Well, I think I have figured out why. Here is what I have found:
- I've been promoting the podcast fairly heavily. I think that helps some.
- I had been screwing up the feed previously. As a result, Scott Allen took me off of his odetocode.com site. I told Scott that I would do my best to keep things correct. As a result, he has put me back on his site. I am seeing an increase in referals from his site now.
- The ASP.NET site has several podcasts aggregated together now. They are listed at: http://www.asp.net/learn/podcasts/default.aspx. Personally, its an honor to be listed on the site and its an honor to be listed with Carl Franklin and Scott Hanselman.
- I've been doing some videos here recently. I think people like videos more than audio.
Wally