*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

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. 

More information about the bus.

Of course space is going to be limited so you better get signed up as soon as information comes available.  Oh, and if you haven’t registered for DevLink, remember you only have a few days left until registration goes up to $75.00.  Stop procrastinating and go register.  You may not think it matters to register early but it REALLY helps those of us organizing the event.  It is hard to budget for an event if you don’t know how many are coming.  Thus, go sign up!

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 are two sites I have found that will crash Firefox 3 every time. 

1.  MSDN Library

Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com and at the top of the page click on the Library as show here.  When you do.  Good bye Firefox 3!

2.  Go Daddy

The second site is visit http://www.godaddy.com and click the “My Account” link as shown here.  When you do, good bye Firefox 3.

These are the two I’ve found so far.   I seriously don’t understand what they are doing to cause this.  It works in IE! (haha)  I’m sure it has to do with JavaScript. 

Anyway, if you are using FF3, stay away from these two sites until either FF3 fixes what they are doing or these webmasters figure it out and fix it.  If you find other sites crashing, add it to the comments below and I’ll keep updating the screen shots.  This could turn into a fun exercise to see how many sites are actually broken.  By the way, the OS I’m running to get these results is Vista with SP1.  If someone has a Mac handy, I would like to know if this happens to you as well on these sites.

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 is the solution we built during the talk yesterday.

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 we finished at Kinkos all of us headed to the Festival of the Moon in old downtown Lansing for the speaker get together.  After an hour or so we headed down the street to a pizza place to sing karaoke where we were joined with some local developers.  Jeff, Alan, Dan and myself put our names in the pot to sing. 

I didn’t think I was going to get to sing but they called my name last.  I sang a rousing rendition of a Billy Vera and the Beaters classic called “At this moment”.  The pizza placed closed at 11:00 PM and it was a long day of travel and time to get some sleep.  We headed back to Jeff and Carla’s home where they had graciously offered up their home for out of town speakers to stay (thanks again guys!). 

The next morning I got up and stuck around the house to work on my slide deck.  I had started going down the path of reworking the slides and had to finish my “theme” I had started. 

I arrived at the conference about 9:30 AM on Saturday and met up with old friends and people I hadn’t seen in awhile.  I gave my talk on Structure and Guidance for Organizing Solutions in Visual Studio at 11:00 and the room was packed.  There were 70 chairs in the room and there were people standing up in the back of the room.  I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards and later that night at the get together that said it was a really good talk.  I think reworking my slide decked helped that a lot.

After the LDoDN event ended instead of all the speakers and organizers going out to eat, Jeff and Carla decided to have the get together at their house.  Like Jeff said, it was cheaper to just buy food and have everyone over to the house than trying to go out and eat somewhere.  Not only that but a lot of the attendees came over as well which is what made it worth it for me. 

Once it got dark a bond fire was started and we sat around the fire playing guitar and singing.  This is me playing blues on Corey’s harmonica with Alan.  A bit later Rock Band was broke out and we played until about midnight.  I hadn’t played Rock Band in probably 3 months so my drumming was incredibly rusty.  I need to get back into practice mode.

The bar was definitely raised for Day of .Nets with LDoDN and I was happy I got to participate.  I can’t believe how much “community” has been built in the Midwest region just over the past year.  I think it all started with Codemash a few years ago and it has just been a snow ball rolling down hill since.  I also think Twitter has played a large roll in keeping the community together as well but that is a post for another day.

Great job to the organizers and a big thanks to Jeff and Carla for opening up their home to us.

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 that talk because they were not going to be able to attend the event.  I have the slides on my presentations section but they are WAY out of date.  I’ll be updating the slide deck once it settles down. I’m constantly tweaking things and right now the slide deck is a serious moving target.  I also need to create a video that shows how this is done.  The slides are OK but until you watch it in person and learn all the tricks you may not get it.

Woody and I are planning on trying to record a podcast or two on Saturday if time and a great topic appears magically out of thin air.  No guarantees what we record will make the air but we at least want to try to record something since we’ll both be there sporting our DFB t-shirts.  

Sunday I’ll be back in Livonia.  I’ll be in Livonia through Wednesday.  Thus if you are in the are and want to hang out, just let me know.  Text msg, twitter, smoke signal or whatever.  Now to finish packing (the worst part about traveling).