Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

I took the plunge today and decided to propose a BOF topic for PDC. In case you didn't know, BOF stands for Birds Of a Feather, and according to INETA, is “an hour-long interactive discussion on a topic proposed in advance by a PDC 2003 attendee.” Since I'm going to be there, I'd love to lead a discussion others of you out there. So I've proposed the following topic:

I've decided to take the plunge and get my MCSD, It's an expensive process, but I'm hoping that maybe I can gain something from it, and help others in the process. To that end, I've put together a series of very simple study guides on my personal website to help you guys out. I will be more than likely expanding this area in the near future, and probably making it look prettier. For right now I just wanted to get them out of my Pocket PC.

Ugh, what a day man. Actually, the past 2 days have been pretty messed up. I still can't figure out how the hell my SQL server shut down and rebooted to Linux. It's not a virus, because it's only attached to my web server box, and directly to the monitoring station. The closest thing I can think of is: when the box was set up, they did a quick format instead of a normal one, and the last OS on the disk was Linux. So when the hard drive failed, the system automatically rebooted, and went to the first partition available on the boot sector. That sounds real farfetched, but it's the best guess I can offer.

I can confirm Robert Hurlburt's statement that Generics will be fully supported in VB.NET (meaning that you can create and consume them). It's actually a change that was made at the CLR level, and all .NET languages will be able to support it. Some languages will not semantically be able to support it, but the feature is baked into the Framework. This is not a secret, it just hasn't been talked about for some reason.

And thank a bunch of people for an absolutely wonderful time last week. It was wonderful to finally get a vacation, and what better place to relax than in beautiful Seattle. It was so much better than Phoenix... I may have to move there someday. First off, thanks to the indefatigable Robert Scoble, for letting me crash at his place. It was definitely a pleasure spending a week with a legend. Second, I'd like to thank Dare Obsanjo, Joshua Allen, Jim Blizzard (man I want his job),  Thanks to Mike Sax and Sam Gentile for some very lively conversations at the weblogger dinner. Oh yeah, and Robert Wlodarczyk is a hell of a guy. Had a lot of fun talking to him after security kicked us out of the mall.

In case you didn't know about it, this slick little tool lets you scan networks for the vulnerability.

Tomorrow night, Phoenix hosts the one, the only, ROB HOWARD. That's right, the Valley of the Sun (affectionately known as Hell, or currently The City Without Gas) is hosting the main man of the Microsoft Web.NET team. So walk, ride your bike, take the bus, carpool, or get in that gas-guzzling monstrosity of an SUV (who cares if gas is $2.50 a gallon here!) and get your butt down to SRP tonight at 5:15pm. You're in for a real treat. If you're there, be sure to find me and say “Hi!”. I'll be the guy in the blue “Microsoft.NET” hat and an white ASP.NET t-shirt. Be sure to check out www.azdnug.com for more information. There are only 40 seats left open, so be sure to get there early.

I wanted to take a second and point out a tool that I install on every network that I build, so that I can centralize my patch management. It's called Microsoft Software Update Services, and it runs on Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003. It allows me to synch up local patch copies with MS' public server, and lets me redirect all machines on my network to pull Automatic Updates from my local updates server, instead of MS' public server. This way they can only automatically install updates that I have tested and approved.