I had the great pleasure of being on .NET Rocks speaking about SQL Everywhere and a whole lot more! I really should have gotten them a better photo - but such is life.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=202

Tuesday, October 24, 2006 2:37:39 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

Download: GrokTalk-10DevToolsIn10Minutes.ppt

Thursday, October 19, 2006 5:40:13 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I wanted to publically apologize to Jennifer Marsman for not mentioning her in the announcement to my new job. She is the Depth Developer Evangelist for the Heartland District. She deals with a lot of bigger accounts in the Heartland District and is a ton smarter than me, Drew Robbins and a lot of us other Breadth Evangelists...

For proof that she's smarter - check out her patent:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220060074902%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20060074902&RS=DN/20060074902

Wednesday, October 18, 2006 11:33:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

After several good years working with SRT Solutions and the good people there (Bill Wagner and Dianne Marsh as business partners and John Hopkins, Patrick Steele, Darrell Hawley, Alex Gheith and Martin Shoemaker as sub-contractors) I’ve gotten an opportunity that I can’t pass up.

I am joining Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist.

I am not going to be moving from my happy home in Manchester, MI. My office will be in Southfield, MI and I will be covering the Heartland District (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee). While Darryl Hogan and Jon Box are Depth Architect Evangelists, I’ll be a Breadth Architect Evangelist. What that means is that they will be spending a lot of time with a few clients while my focus is much broader and community based. As the title suggests, my job will be to meet with and evangelize to architects throughout the district. A large part of my job will be to cultivate the architectural community the way that Drew Robbins (Developer Evangelist for the Heartland District) does for developers.

I’m really looking forward to working with many of you through my work at Microsoft.

Monday, October 02, 2006 9:43:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 

I went shopping for a new laptop for my brother this past weekend. It was nuts - Circuit City didn’t have the display model for the one that we wanted to buy and they would not open the box to let us look at the one that we were interested in. My brother didn’t care, but I was a touch perturbed by it all. It’s the little things that really make a difference to a real road warrior and they wouldn’t let us check those things. It turns out that I was right to want to check – it was set up as a left handed laptop. What I mean by that is that the power was on the right hand side where it’s in the way of the mouse and the USB ports and the like were on the left hand side where you have to run cables from the mouse all the way around the rest of the box to plug it in. This would be great if me or my brother were actually left handed but we are not.

I don’t know of other people think the same way that I do about that, but it drives me nuts when I see that type of setup. I think that laptop manufactures should put left handed or right handed on the box so we know when they put all of the ports on the sides of the box. The laptop that I’m using right now (Fujitsu T4020 Tablet) has a USB on the left and one on the back. The one on the back is obviously for the mouse. The power is also on the back. This means that it can be ambidextrous. I guess that’s one of the differences between a $550.00 laptop (what my brother bought) and a $2000 tablet (what I bought).

I wonder if the manufacturers consciously think about these issues…

Monday, May 22, 2006 9:50:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I’m still alive – I’m just swamped! I’m working full time onsite with a huge deadline on Friday and trying to organize a conference (http://dayofdotnet.org) this week. I could drop either of those tasks and still have a busy week. I don’t know where I’d be without the help of John Hopkins and Jason Follas on the conference and with John’s help at the client.

I did squeak out to hear a fantastic talk from Dustin Campbell at Ann Arbor .NET Developers Group on the top 10 developer tools that everyone that uses Visual Studio needs. I even picked up a few last night. ILMerge was new to me. I learned a lot about CodeRush last night as well. I’m an avid fan, but I still learned a ton…

More next week – after things calm down.

Thursday, May 11, 2006 11:54:18 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Last night’s Grok talks were a smashing hit! I was so happy with how everything went off. We had:

Jason Follas speaking on T-SQL Enhancements in Sql Server 2005 SQL CLR (Turns out Jason reads my blog and corrected me... :)). Jason is one of the local experts on SQL Server 2005 and ran through a quick preview of what his talk is going to be on at Day of .NET.

John Hopkins speaking on ADO.NET Table Adapters. He showed how much code you could save with careful use of the table adapters. It’s amazing how little control you are giving up for that much power.

Darrell Hawley speaking on role based authentication for web services. It was impressive that he got through that much code in that little time. He showed how to secure the web service with roles so that you could have no access, view access, edit access or add item access. All of this is very close to reality so it was, in addition to being entertaining, was very practical.

Bill Wagner talking about C# 3.0. As always, I learned something new when listening to Bill talk. He talked about the var keyword in C# 3.0 and explained how it’s actually a strongly type keyword, it’s just that the type is not known until compile time.

Aydin Akcasu talking about Kids Programming Language. This was a preview to his talk at Day of .NET. It was an exciting talk that got me excited about the possibilities that I could have with my son programming.

Martin Shoemaker talking about building speech and ink applications for the tablet. This was an interesting talk because Martin didn’t talk the whole time – his tablet did all the talking. While he didn’t show as much code as he might have in a traditional talk, he showed what was really possible.

Josh Holmes (me) talking about the ASP.NET 2.0 – Health Monitoring. I also MC’d the whole deal. That was fun! It was also a treat – I came in on time because I had a lot of people timing me that were under strict orders to pull the hook if I went over.

And finally

Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks talking about remote podcasting. This was fun because he was remote. He was tied into the PA system through a phone connection and VNC’d into Bill Wagner’s laptop so that he could do his presentation. There were a ton of moving parts, but it all went rather smoothly.

I’m hoping that we will repeat the Grok talk idea really soon. It was a ton of fun and the audience seemed to get a lot out of it.

Thursday, May 04, 2006 7:21:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I’ve been listening to some of the old (January 2006) HanselMinutes (http://www.hanselminutes.com) and found a fantastic utility called SharpKeys (http://www.randyrants.com). It’s a key editor that will remap any of the keys on your keyboard.

I’ve had one HUGE issue with my new tablet (new as in December) which is a Fujitsu Lifebook T4020. That issue was that the End and Home keys are function keys! In other words, I have to hold down the function key and then press PageDown to get End. I use End all the time and in combination with other keys whereas I rarely use PageDown and only use it by itself so it’s not a big deal to hit a function key for that. It took just a quick moment to reverse those so that End is where PageDown used to be and PageDown is the function key.

	Randy Rants's site
	Home page for the guy that wrote SharpKeys
	http://www.randyrants.com
	Hansel Minutes
	Home page for Hansel Minutes

Thursday, May 04, 2006 2:39:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I'm an officially published author now. It's very cool to see my name and BIO on article. I think that this will be the first of many.

This was a joint article between me and Gabriel Torok of PreEmptive Solutions.

It covers 8 specific ways that you can Reduce Your Code Vulnerability to various attacks.

	Reduce Your Code Vulnerability
	The article on Visual Studio Magazine's Web Site
	http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2006_03/magazine/columns/gettingstarted/

Friday, April 14, 2006 12:55:05 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]