*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Next week is the MVP Summit.  This is one of the events I have looked forward to the most since I was fortunate enough to go last year. 

MVPs from all across the world descend upon Seattle and Redmond during this week to meet with MVP Leads and product teams from Microsoft.  Someone asked me what it is like and I described it as hanging out in the speakers lounge 24/7 at a gigantic conference. 

Sunday evening is Party with Palermo.  Jeff’s parties have become a staple event for everyone to gather and have fun. 

Monday we’ll kick off the summit with a registration, a special key note, and some other break out sessions.

Tuesday we’ll be on the Microsoft campus meeting with product teams viewing the new bits and weighing in our thoughts.  Rinse and repeat for Wednesday and Thursday.

Thursday night is the Geek Lager which is going to be held at Kell’s Irish Pub right off of pike street.  If you aren’t flying out late on Thursday night or will be in the area, stop on by.  You can RSVP for the Geek Lager here as well as get more information.  The Corner Bhoys are playing that night starting around 9:00 PM.  We’ll kick things off around 7:30ish. 

As I mentioned in the title, I am planning on doing some podcasting from the summit.  My goal of the podcast sessions are to capture the real world stories about various technologies.  Thus you won’t hear anything about something that is coming down the road.  If they turn out worthy enough of publication I’ll put them up onto a new domain I have.

Never Installed The ClickOnce Of Witty?

If you’ve never installed the previous version, no worries just click the link below to download and install the app.

Download here:  http://keithelder.net/software/witty/witty.application

Previous Install

If you happen to be running the ClickOnce version of Witty I created, the new update I just put out is going to break the automatic update.  If you are running the following version of Witty, via the ClickOnce install I published, you will need to uninstall this version to upgrade to the latest release.

Why?

Answer:  Because my idiotness knows no boundaries and I deleted the certificate I had originally created when I deployed the application.  Thus, the application won’t update since the certificates do not match.  Here are the steps you need to go through.  It is really simple, I promise.

Uninstall 0.1.6.2 Witty

Open the control panel and select “Programs and Features”.

Once your applications show up, select Witty and then click the “Uninstall/Change”.

You should get the following screen.

Click OK to uninstall Witty.

New Version Features

A lot has changed from the previous version, lots, too much to even mention but I’ll throw out a few highlights.

Witty options screen has gotten a lot of work.

And of course context menus were added.  Yeah!

Another feature is Popups when new tweets come in.

Lots of people have contributed a lot of time to bring new features.  And it will just keep getting better!

Install It

To install the new version which is published as version 0.1.7.9 click the following URL:

http://keithelder.net/software/witty/witty.application

The following screen will appear.

Click Install and you’ll have the latest version of Witty Twitter as of this morning.

Once you get it downloaded, checkout the options screen and setup things the way you want.

Will I Have To Do This Again?

At some point yes.  The plan is create an official Witty Twitter site where we can host the ClickOnce install of it and do regular pushes.  However, that takes time to get setup and built out.  In the meantime, I’ll continue posting updates of Witty Twitter to make it easy for those that like to live on the cutting edge to do so with relative ease.

How Often Are You Going To Do Updates?

I plan on starting to publish new versions of Witty Twitter at least once a week or when new cool functionality is added into the source tree.  At some point, we’ll make an official cut over to the new site once that is up and ready to roll.

UPDATE 4.5.2008 12:11 PM:  There was a bug I found that if you had sound enabled, the popups would cause a threading issue.  The new version is now 0.1.7.11. 

UPDATE: This post was posted on April 1st and thusly is an April Fool’s.  It was posted about 5.5 hours after another post that was also an April Fool’s that started the whole thing.  Maybe now the emails and phone calls will stop.  🙂

I spent weeks writing up the previous article I posted to this blog this morning about how I had joined the silver card carrying members club at Apple.  Congratulations poured in from the community congratulating me on my accomplishment.  My Macbook Pro and iPhone were already on order as well as my wife and I were shopping for houses in California.  For once I thought, I might be able to make her happy.  A few moments ago my world came crumbling to an end.  I received an email from legal at corporate.

Mr. Elder,

…… (legal blah blah)

…. as you are aware each employee at Apple must sign an employment contract.  Any violation of that contract may result in immediate termination.  Due to the article you published this morning on your blog about your new job at Apple, we regretfully must inform you that your position at the company has been terminated, effective immediately.

…… (more legal blah blah)

……our legal counselors will be contacting you soon.

I spared you the legal jargon in the body of the letter but the main reason my tenure at Apple was short lived is because I used certain words that hadn’t been approved by marketing in my previous post such as:   iPrize, iTalk, and iNet.  Ultimately the word that drove the nail in my coffin was iWeb. 

To those of you who wished me farewell in numerous emails, Twitters, personal phone calls and more, I say thank you.  All of your warm wishes and congratulations make this blow seem easier to swallow.

I received an order cancellation moments after my termination email.  My dreams of owning a shinny new silver Macbook Pro and an iPhone are all but faded memories now.    The hardest part was telling the real estate agent in California the bad news.

My words of wisdom for anyone getting a job at Apple.  Just don’t blog about anything. 

For those in the Microsoft community I only hope that you can forgive my transgression of wanting to work on really cool technology that could have changed world.  Please let me back into your circle.

Sincerely,

Elder, The

UPDATE:  This post was posted on April 1st, and thusly is an April Fools post as is the follow up post.  Maybe the phone calls and emails will stop now. 🙂

Today publicly, I am announcing for the first time that I will be going to work for Apple Computer.  It is no doubt monumental news that I’ve been holding back until the final contracts and NDAs were signed.  This evening everything was finally settled.

You are probably wondering what in the Wide Wide World of Sports is going on!  What would Apple want with someone who refers to himself in the third person as The Elder?  It turns out a lot. 

Apple for years has been trying to break into the Enterprise, slowly and secretly.  Sure they are known for building end-user devices but the company has realized they can only convince about 5-7% of the population to switch to Apple products.  There are countless rogue Apple computers throughout corporate America that are breaking through silos and mindless thinking but it isn’t enough.  A top down approach must be taken.  If Apple is going to fully embrace the enterprise they are going to need someone who has not only used their products, but someone that also knows the competition as well as how corporate America thinks. 

As a result I will be heading up their iPrise division at Apple.  This division will be solely responsible for getting Apple products into the enterprise and fulfilling the destiny of the underlying BSD operating system. 

In my new role, I will be working with the XCode product teams to fully port Mono to Mac OS X to make sure the majority of existing .Net applications run flawlessly on the Apple platform.  Apple realizes just like Novell there is a large investment in .Net technologies and this move is imperative to make sure existing applications can be used on Apple products.  This is going to be very tough so please be patient as I breakthrough new ground between Steve Jobs and businesses throughout America.  Apple has always been secretive about products and SDKs so it is going to be a very tough, long, and rigorous process.  Please be patient.

New products will also be released to help enterprises everywhere.  A few of the first things planned is to replace some existing technologies with Apple specific ones.  Here are a few items on the list.

1. iTalk – This will replace BizTalk Server, services and message platforms. 
2. iHibernate – An easy to use ORM mapping platform.
3. iNet – The Mono .Net replacement for Mac OS X.
4. iWeb – An Asp.Net MVC framework built using Mono.
5. iLight – A WPF / Silverlight implementation for Mac OS X.
6. i* – Anything else that is missing.

In the end I have no doubt we’ll prevail.

I submitted a Birds of a Feather submission for Tech-Ed 2008.  The title of it is “.Net War Stories”. 

I’ve always wanted to moderate a BOF session at Tech-Ed but just never really came up with anything I was willing to submit.  For the past several days I have been thinking a lot about .Net.  During a conversation after work with a friend last week he said, “I get more out of talking to you in one hour than I would have if I’d spent that time at the computer reading countless blogs and documentation.”  He wasn’t saying that I’m a genius, far from it, his point was that it is the stories I have to tell about this technology or this technology that are the difference.  This is when it hit me, we just need to tell our war stories!  Here’s the session details I submitted.

Within a few years we’ve had a lot of technologies to keep up with on the .Net platform including .Net 3.0, WPF, WFC, WF, .Net 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, Asp.Net MVC Framework, Silverlight, LINQ and soon the Entity Framework. Are you feeling like you are at Information Overload? Don’t worry, we all are! At some point you have to take all these technologies and solve business problems with them. Demos are great but what’s the “real world story” from the trenches? And where do you start? Which ones work, and which ones don’t? This discussion isn’t about marketing and demos it is about the shiny pennies (the good) and the rusty washers (the bad) with these technologies. Bring your .Net war stories to this discussion and help others wade through information overload.

I don’t know if anyone even thinks this would be a great session but I think a lot of people like myself are in information overload.  Maybe this session would help.

At this point I have no idea if the session will get taken by Tech-Ed.  Contact your Senator or Congressman if you think it should be on the list for Tech-Ed 2008.

If you wish to vote for this session you can cast your vote here:

https://www.msteched.com/dEv/voting.aspx