PDC all the way baby...
PDC is the bomb and I'm excited to be able to go this year. Yes, even more excited than TechEd which I didn't get to go to and whined about it for many posts. Like a good whine wine (or woman for that part) the best part of PDC is waiting in anticipation for it. Channel 9 has their PDC contest going strong for another month so see my auto-magic post below. I think I'm doing pretty good on standings so far. Last time I checked (a couple of days ago) I was in the one of the top 3 or 4.
Me: 72
Steve Hebert (smarter dude than me): 85
Roy Osherove (another smarter dude than me): 80
Not bad for the portal guy who whines wines a lot. Of course this is just on referrals alone and we all know its also about content and not just clicks (feel free to use that sometime as it has a nice ring to it). In any case, here's another pathetic plea for you to send a geek to Los Angeles for a week of debugging and debauchery.
Hmmm, update. I just checked the PDC05 Contest Sightings page and found that Steve Hebert is WAAAAAAY out front now with 164. Also a bunch of others have crept up in the last few days leaving me back down in the dust. Guess everyone found Steve's blog and hey, why not vote for the smarter dude. Anyways, maybe the SharePoint community will take pity on me and help an old portal guy out. Here's the updated standings (counting all referrals):
Me: 102
Steve Hebert: 164
Roy Osherove: 92
This time I'm using Brendan Tompkins most excellent Web Service to write my entry. Brendan took it upon himself to be creative on his entry and think outside of the box. Rather than writing some funny or provocative or even useful (like Roy Osherove who posted his RegEx blog and then decided to give a fine tutorial on Regular Expressions to boot) Brendan built a Web Service that you can call to create the blog entry for you. I was one of the first ones to try it out and it's great. Brendan personally has my vote to go. Anyways, check out his service if you want your own blog entry and join the club. Simply brilliant.
Here's what you need to quickly bang something together and get the results delivered to you in a string:
private void Form1_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
EntryServiceRequest request = new EntryServiceRequest();
request.BlogUrl = "http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser";
request.FirstName = "Bil";
request.LastName = "Simser";
request.Interests = ".NET, C#, ASP.NET, SharePoint, Agile, DDD, TDD";
PDCContestEntryService service = new PDCContestEntryService();
EntryServiceResponse response = service.CreateBlogPostEntry(request);
textBox1.Text = response.PostBody;
}
Then just cut and paste the results (from response.PostBody) into your blog. Mine follows below. Guess I need to get a little more worldly as far as Amazon is concerned. And hey, while you're scrolling down the page feel free to click on the bloggie icon and bump up my counter. Yeah, I need to take as many cheap shots as I can as we get into the home stretch, this won't be the last grovelling from me on this.
You really don't want me whining for another week about how I couldn't go and if I do win, you'll get my lovely blow-by-blow commentary on all things SharePoint and .NET 2.0 that I stumble over and after a few drinks we'll kick up a live demonstration of Whack-A-Fitz.
I’m Blog’n my way to the PDC!
If you haven’t heard, Channel9 has started a contest where you can win a ticket to the PDC, including an airline ticket and hotel! This is one amazing contest, and all you have to do to enter is have a blog, and post why you should win the prize. So here’s my official entry:
Here's some information to help you get to know me better:
Why me?
Why do I want to go to the PDC? Because I love to blog! And I'm prolific! Here's some of my more popular blog posts links according to Google :
What are my interests?
Well, here’s a list of books that I'll probably be reading on the plane to LAX :
I'm not very interesting according to Amazon.Did I type up all this ugly HTML for this Blog post myself?
Heck no! I’m lazy! But that’s exactly why I need to go to PDC! The PDC is all about the future, and in the future, we’ll all be using cool technology to do things like typing tedious, boring contest entries. I’m getting a head start on the salad days, so I figured out how to use ASMX web service that Brendan wrote! To prove it, you can see that I'm on this list of other, lazy coders who would rather sit back and use a distributed Web Service to do their work!