*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Tonight I’ll be speaking at the Shreveport, LA .Net User Group.  This is my first trip back to Shreveport in 12 years and I’m looking forward to the visit.  I used to live in Bossier City / Shreveport, LA after I graduated college.  It was there I had my first teaching job.  It is funny how life makes full circles because the leader of the .Net Group there, Brian, I taught when he was in 8th grade. 

Tonight I will be Demystifying Windows Communication Foundation.

Summary:

Windows Communication Foundation was released with the .Net 3.0 framework and is the future of the platform for distributed computing. With .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) became a first class citizen with additional tooling and add ons for Windows Workflow Foundation. In this session we are going to look at WCF from the standpoint of how to transition from ASMX web services and some of the important things you should know about WCF. If you have been hesitant in adopting WCF and still writing ASMX web services, this session will hopefully put you over the edge to giving WCF a try. I assure you, once you do, you will never look back.

If you are in the area I hope you’ll come out and join the conversation.

My birthday was a few weeks ago and my lovely wife had the idea to get me a Deep Fried Bytes birthday cake.  I just now got the pictures synced up so I thought I’d share it. 

The most important thing about the cake was it had thick, I mean extremely thick icing on it.  It was delicious.  The employees at Home Bake in Hattiesburg did a great job. 

It is official, it is Christmas in July for many MSDN / Technet subscribers.  The official RTM version of Windows 7 will be available for download on MSDN / Technet on July 13th. 

Wait… I thought it was supposed to be released on October 22nd?

The October 22nd date is the date it will be available in stores.  The July 13th release is the same version that will be cut to the manufacturers.  It takes the manufacturers time to get their stuff in order so units can start shipping (usually about 3 months).   Thus pending any major bugs, the July 13th release is the official version.

The official story broke at http://geeksmack.net/microsoft/438-confirmed-windows-7-to-rtm-july-13th.html and then got picked up by http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/07/03/confirmed-windows-7-set-to-rtm-on-july-13th. 

July 13th I’ll be in Fort Smith, AR presenting at the local .Net User Group there on the topic of distributed caching with Velocity (Microsoft’s new distributed caching product). 

This will be my second trip to the state of Arkansas as I was in Little Rock earlier in the year.  Before hitting Fort Smith, we are planning a mini-vacation to Branson, Mo.  We’ve been there before and it will be fun to spend the weekend there. 

Here is the abstract and title for Monday night’s presentation:

Distributing Cache One Byte at a Time With Velocity

Have you ever used the built-in caching capabilities within Asp.Net? If you have you know that as long as you have one server to cache information it works really well. What happens though when you add an additional server? Or even better let’s say you add an additional 10 servers! Now what? What happens is you’ve got data replicated all over the place and it gets out of sync. Not to mention it becomes really hard to manage as data gets changed. Enter “Velocity”, Microsoft’s new distributed caching product. In this session we’ll do a thorough look at all of the pieces of Velocity from installation/deployment, configuration, the API and some of its features like regions and tags.