It has been about a year or more since Kevin asked me to come speak at the Gulf Coast .Net Users Group and I am happy to report that I will be there with bells on Thursday July 17th!  It took us a while to get things in order but I'm looking forward to traveling down.  The drive isn't that far and let's face it, who doesn't love a peaceful drive down the coast looking at sandy beaches and ocean water!? That Thursday night I'll be speaking on Windows Communication Foundation entitled "Demystifying Windows Communication Foundation".  I may throw...

The Freedom of Virtualization For awhile now I have been enjoying the freedom of developing with virtual machines.  The biggest advantage it has given me lately is the freedom to do whatever I want to the laptop I use as a workstation.  What I mean by that is I don't even blink twice if I want to try a new operating system anymore.  Maybe I want to run a version of Debian Linux or Ubuntu to keep my Unix skills polished up.   Or maybe I want to try running a 64bit version of Windows Server as my main operating system to...

Just drop off the key Lee and set yourself free!  Words from a great classic song no doubt (changed up a little to fit the occasion).  What is this about?  The DevLink bus of course! Amanda Launcher is organizing a bus trip to pickup people all the way from Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky for the DevLink conference.  There will be community leaders on the bus, .Net User Group leaders, MVPs, Microsoft Evangelist and more.  As she put it on her blog, it is a great time to really dig deep with a lot of the experts.  ...

UPDATE:  Having some friends test these sites on their Mac with OSX, FF3 doesn't crash on a Mac.  Good to know. UPDATE:  The problem has been officially fixed!  Installing Siliverlight Beta 2 did the trick.  Thanks to Jon Galloway. I have been enjoying Firefox 3 since it was released until I noticed visiting certain web sites would crash Firefox.  I thought it was just me but then started going back to the same links and Firefox would crash again.  And when I mean crash, I mean shut the entire application down.  Do not pass go, do not collect $200.00. There...

For those that attended my session yesterday, a big thanks.  I appreciate you taking time out of your day to attend the event.  I know after living in Michigan for years that beautiful summer days are scarce and the fact you gave one up to attend a one day event is incredible. Here are the links for the session on Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications in Visual Studio. Power Point Slide Deck  Sample ERP Solution Note, this solution is a very SMALL example. I plan on expanding it down the road to incorporate a combination of things.  This...

I think it is unanimous that everyone really enjoyed Lansing Day of .Net.  I know I did. I arrived Friday evening close to 6:00 PM outside of Lansing, MI in Okemos and met up with the LDoDN organizers at Kinkos.  Jeff put me to work and I wound up preparing all the speaker name badges.  After I finished my task I thought I would personally let each speaker know that I had carefully and ever so tenderly taken care of their speaker badges.  Thus I signed the back of each and every one saying: I folded your card. - The Elder Once...

I'm packing right now to head to Detroit for the weekend as well as the better part of next week.  Tomorrow I will be traveling to Michigan.  I'll be landing in Detroit and then headed to Lansing, MI to meet up with the hosts of Lansing Day of .Net and other speakers.  Saturday I'll be speaking on "Structure and Guidance for Organizing Visual Studio Solutions". I'm pretty excited about this topic because it is one of those classic talks that never gets old.  I've had upwards of 10 people email me already saying they wanted to know more about...

Episode 4 of Deep Fried Bytes is out!  In this episode we sat down with Joe Stump, the Lead Architect for DIGG.Com and discussed all kinds of things.  Joe gave us a behind the curtain look at how DIGG scales, which technologies they use and some interesting insight into language wars.  We promised to give a shirt away on this episode but the show was long enough as it is, thus we'll probably announce the winner later in the week or on the next show. Ways To Listen To The Show There are several ways to listen to Deep...

Michael Eaton threw the gauntlet at me last week wondering why I hadn't blogged about how I got into software development.  Here are the series of questions he proposed and the answers. How old were you when you started programming? I attempted to program a Timex Sinclair 1000 that I got for Christmas one year.  I can't even remember how old I was, maybe 9 I guess.  I spent countless hours trying to figure that thing out but it just didn't sink in.  In 8th grade our Math teacher started teaching some of us Basic. How did you get started...

Yesterday we released the third episode of our Deep Fried Bytes podcast show.  The third episode is about the online social networking phenomenon Twitter.  A group of Twitter power users met up on the last day of the TechEd 2008 Conference to discuss their ideas, experiences and observations of the online service.  You can read more about the show, show notes, and about our guests by visiting:  http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-3-twitter-war-stories/. Ways To Listen To The Show There are several ways to listen to Deep Fried Bytes. 1.  Directly From The Web Site We now support listening to our shows directly...

I arrived at Tech Ed yesterday after getting up pretty early.  After settling into the hotel, Jason Follas, Drew Robbins and I met up for supper and headed over to Universal Walk.  We ate at Bubba Gump Shrimp and then watched Indiana Jones since none of us had seen it yet. This morning Jason and I headed to the conference center to register and then went to lunch with Wally McClure, Rachel Appel and Jim Minatel.  Thanks for lunch Jim! After lunch we headed back to the conference center and found our way to the wireless lounge.  I think Wally...