TechEd Monday - Thursday

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Confessional: Please forgive me, it's been about a week since my last blog,
but I haven't had any free time.

Dallas was exhausting, but all the locals were great and really made the trip worth
it. I met so many great people in such a short amount of time!

Monday

Thank you to everyone who attended my C# Past, Present, and Future talk on Monday. 
If you did attend my C#, Past, Present, & Future talk for academia  on Sunday
or the same session on Monday, here are some links you might be interested in:

- SSCLI ("Rotor")

[SSCLI Community](https://www.sscli.net) web site

I'm looking to post both the slides and the demos once I get a team site setup on
GotDotNet. 

The TechEdBloggers meeting was on Monday
night and I think it went really well so big thanks to Drew.
You can find more recaps on TechEdBloggers or Brian's (B1's)
Blog.

Tuesday

I met with MikeH who I used to work with while in DC.  He's done a
lot of neat stuff using Active Directory, Exchange and .NET, but he also had some
valid complaints about not being able to find .NET samples on the web for this stuff. 
For those of you interested, there are some nice add-ins to the Server Explorer like
the AD
add-in (seems to only work with VS 7.0), WMI
extensions, and the Web
Services Toolkit for Exchange. Harry
also blogged on some newly announced VS.NET Power Toys. If you're interested in
using AD for applications, make sure you check out AD
Application Mode (pronounced Adam).

Wednesday

After working all night on demos, my Middle Tier apps with C# presentation went well,
again thank all of you who attended!  The bad part was that my web service security
demo proved too secure to work in front of the crowd.  Luckily, I was able to
draw parallels between why people watch Nascar and technical presentations...it's
all about the crashes.  The reason my demo didn't work, or didn't work without
a network connection, is that it was trying to validate against my corporate domain,
which it did successfully in my hotel room when connected to the network, but failed
in front of my now most intimate acquaintances:).  I've received a lot of great
feedback on my demos and I promise to upload them soon to my team page, once I get
it setup on GDN.  I'll also probably post a blog entry that walks through the
code for those interested.

<aside> I'm also looking to create a simple P2P remoting application
that shares images in a specific directory Napster-style between users and adds those
images to a screensaver.  I'll get to it in  my "free" time. <aside>

Wednesday night we also had a "Hang with the C# Team" event and while we didn't have
great attendance, there was a lot of really good conversation points.  These
lucky attendees also walked away with C# t-shirts and the ever-so-coveted C# press-on
tattoo.

Thursday

On Thursday EricGu and
I went to go meet with one of our local customers that's doing a lot of cool stuff
with .NET today.  They gave us fantastic feedback into what's difficult today
and how we can make their lives easier. I really think we can make some great changes
in the next couple of revs of VS that will absolutely change the way developers work.

Thursday evening, EricGu and I had a C# User Group meeting in Irving, Texas. 
This was another awesome meeting and it's always enlightening to get about 60 developers
with varied backgrounds in a room talking about programming language design, and what
features will make the next killer application.  We had the user group vote for
what they want in the next release (#1 release framework source, #2 Edit & Continue). 
What was interesting was that some of the requests people asked for are currently
available in the .NET Framework or VS.NET (it's almost like we have clairvoyance). 
In case others don't know about these, I'll comment on some of them here:

- Suggestion: Borland has a shortcut key, CTRL+click, that jumps to the definition.
Add this to VS.NET.   You can Right click on a member and select Go To Definition or click F12 to go directly to a class definition in VS.NET.

*Suggestion: Make remoting work through firewalls*. Remoting can be used between  
firewalls, and while DCOM could, it was quite a pain. Simply specify that the formatter  
will be [SOAP](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemRuntimeSerializationFormattersSoap.asp) and  
not binary.

After the user group meeting, (PS to those of you in Dallas, I'm mailing about 16
shirts for those who didn't get one after the meeting), Eric and I drove to the attendee
party.  This was a lot of fun, but since we didn't get out of the UG meeting
until late, we only had about 1 1/2 hours to frag other attendees at Halo.  I
think we stood our own, and from what I hear, the C# team is outstanding at Halo. 
The attendee party stopped at midnight, but we were just getting started.  Brian
(B2), me and several other members of our team went to the Velvet Hookah where I met Donny
Mack and company and had an amazing time! This place completely resurrected my
opinion of Dallas nightlife. Read Donny's
post for more details...

By Friday, I was at the WiFi-enabled DFW airport where I had my first "celebrity"
run-in, a TechEd attendee screamed out my name on the tran to tell me he had been
to my session and really enjoyed it, which made a week's worth of sleep deprivation
worth it.