Thanks to everyone who attended the Maximizing Productivity with LINQ Webinar today and to ROI for putting it on.  We had a great turnout and covered a bunch of technologies in an hour.  I didn’t have time to go through the more detailed examples I had of using LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework so I’ve attached those along with the few slides I showed for the Webinar.  If you have suggestions about future Webinars that you’d like to see please let me know.

I came across the following 404 error page link on Twitter.com so I of course had to stop everything I was doing and check it out (so much for following my productivity rules!).  I can honestly say that I’ve never, ever laughed at a 404 page.  Usually it’s the opposite reaction with some less than appropriate language involved when I can’t get to an important page.  This one had me laughing though….pretty clever:

I’ll be giving a free Webinar titled “Increase Productivity with .NET and Language Integrated Query (LINQ)” next week so if you have 40 minutes and are interested in learning more about LINQ feel free to sign-up and attend.  Here are more details about the event:

Ever noticed how some people always act busy but get little “real” work done?  There’s a big difference between being busy and being productive.  I won’t claim to be a time management expert, but here are a few things I’ve been doing that have helped me stay focused and increased my overall productivity.

One of the products my company sells is an ASP.NET server control called SmartChart that generates OrgCharts from hierarchical data sources.  Up until recently the vast majority of our sales were to companies in the US so we never worried much about language localization support.  In the back of my mind I always knew we’d need to get to that, but always put it at the bottom of the feature list since it wasn’t overly exciting.  A few days ago we had a customer from France contact us and mention that they really needed to localize some of the strings we display in the control such as Edit, Delete, Insert into other languages for their clients.  I decided it was time to make the update. 

Microsoft just released the source code for the Silverlight 2 runtime and SDK controls.  Anyone who says they’re not contributing to the world of code definitely needs to take a closer look since they’ve released a ton of code from .NET, ASP.NET, plus more over the past few years.  The amount they’ve opened up is actually pretty amazing compared with how they used to be when I first started writing Microsoft applications.

Wow…there’s a lot of great software out there for mobile devices!  Over the years I’ve purchased a lot of Windows Mobile programs but I’ve never looked at iPhone software since I didn’t have a compatible device.  Over the holiday break I had the chance to play around with an iPod Touch as well as my HTC Touch Pro Windows Mobile phone more.  Here’s some software that really impressed me.