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For quite some time I’ve wanted the new Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard/Mouse combo – before I left Microsoft I burned through my Microsoft store credits as quickly as possible and of course had to buy this!

So far it’s pretty great – My only complaint is that it’s not a natural keyboard (split in the middle), other than that it works just like another keyboard/mouse except there are no wires. I did a fun little experiment today where I walked around my house pushing different buttons on the keyboard. I found out that I can type from my kitchen (the furthest room from my office) and the keystrokes are captured! Why that’s useful – since I can’t see what I’m typing – is still too be determined 🙂

First a bit of news… Today is my last day at Microsoft. I’m leaving the the mothership and headed out on a new venture. It’s been a dream for nearly 6 years, it’s been in planning for 18mo, and it starts next week! I’ll post more details on what I’m doing next week, but my rhoward@microsoft.com email address is only going to work until May 31st. My new email address is rhoward@telligentsystems.com or you can use my other email address rhoward@devadvice.com.

Hope to see you at DevTeach or TechEd Europe! …slides from TechEd US are below:

Blackbelt ASP.NET
Lot’s of super-useful tips & tricks for making your web application better: using multi-result set stored procedures to background threading to database cache invalidation (modeled after the ASP.NET 2.0 database cache invalidation mechanism) and many, many more.
Slides | Demos

Server Control Tips & Tricks
We started with some basics and quickly dove into some advanced composition topics related to building server controls. We built some custom controls, but if you want to see more server control source, check out the http://forums.asp.net.
Slides | Demos

Running www.asp.net
This talk was more of a tour of how we manage and run www.asp.net. Most people are surprised to find that we serve: www.asp.net, weblogs.asp.net, blogs.msdn.com, www.dotnetnuke.com, forums.asp.net, www.aspinsiders.com all from a small cluster of 2 web servers and 1 database server.
Slides

I’m leaving for TechEd this morning, it should be a really fun week!

ScottGu is giving our two introductory ASP.NET Whidbey talks and I’m giving a talk on www.asp.net, BlackBelt ASP.NET Programming, and advanced server control topics.

The BlackBelt talk is going to have some great content. Topics such as: Database paging; Building a Please wait… page; Dynamic template loading; and Database Cache invalidation to name a few. If there are other topics you’d like to see covered, let me know!

I’ll also be at TechEd Europe this year, which I’m quite excited about since it means a trip to Holland where I’ve got a lot of extended family — although I don’t speak Dutch, so it’s always a bit awkward!

Please do say hi if you’re at either TechEd U.S. or TechEd Europe!

Next week I’ll also post about some other stuff I’ve been working on for the past several months 🙂

A little bit of a soapbox today…

On the ASP.NET Roadshow one of the common demos shows the creation of a graphic using an HttpHandler. Internally within the HttpHandler the System.Drawing APIs are used to paint onto a bitmap stored in memory and then the bytes are copied to the ASP.NET Response.OutputStream. It just so happens that this graphic is a bar chart whose graphs are changed using the values of querystring arguments.

It’s a great demo, and much easier to author than the first dynamically created images I remember (byte arrays with Perl to create odometer page counters!). Invariably a few people come up after the presentation asking for the source code, it’s freely available at http://www.asp.net/roadshow, wanting to take this code and use it to create graphs for their applications. It always takes the wind out of their sails when I tell them they should really consider buying a component that does this vs. attempting to use our demo-ware.

What surprises me is how reticent some developers are to buying commercial components. Frankly, if I were building a reporting application and had to do even the simplest graphing I would spend the money on one of the many awesome server control packages already out there. Just look at the ASP.NET Control Gallery for a listing…

Sure you could write your own, but why? You might spend 3-6 weeks writing such a control only to find that later on you have to account for new requirements which you didn’t originally design for. In fact, you would likely save money by buying the component – if the component is $1,000 and your time is $100/hour if you spend more than 10 hours working on it your wasting money and more importantly your time. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely cases for writing your own controls, but for most scenarios it’s just much easier to buy 🙂

ASP.NET has an awesome market for rich server controls. Definitely check it out.

Tonight we kick-off round 2 of the ASP.NET Roadshow in Atlanta. Join us for 3+ hours of ASP.NET fun with 1 hour dedicated to ASP.NET “Whidbey”.

If you’re in Ft. Worth I’ll be presenting at the Ft. Worth, TX User’s Group meeting tomorrow night. Be sure and drop by and say hi!

Finally the edits on my Provider Article part 2 are just about done and should go live on http://msdn.microsoft.com in the next several days. Speaking of which Andy Smith has a great post on his blog about his opinions on the provider design pattern.

A couple months back I mentioned publishing our provider specification we’re using for Whidbey. It’s now available on MSDN in the resurrected Nothin’ but ASP.NET column. This first article outlines the pattern, and in the following column we’ll walk through using this pattern for ASP.NET 1.1. There are in fact two ASP.NET 1.1 applications following it today: the ASP.NET Forums (http://forums.asp.net/) and DotNetNuke (http://www.dotnetnuke.com).

Thanks to Kent our MSDN ASP.NET community superstar for helping get this pushed through — and convincing the MSDN staff to start the column back up again! Hey, it was only a short-break (2 years <g>).

Looks like we’re going to add some new dates to the ASP.NET Roadshow — a tentative list of the planned cities is below, but we haven’t announced any dates yet:

• Atlanta
• Washington D.C.
• Phoenix
• Detroit
• Cincinnati
• Philadelphia

Stay tuned to www.asp.net/roadshow for details on dates for these citites!

It’s official Jason Alexander (creator of www.ngallery.org) and Shane Henderson have started the Plano, TX .NET User’s Group and PDNUG has officially been recognized as an INETA member.

So, if you live in the North Dallas, TX area check out the site and come support this new user’s group. Looks like the first meeting is going to be in early April (although not yet announced) and I’ll be presented on ASP.NET 2.0 (topic TBD still).

We’re about to kick off the next round of ASP.NET Roadshow events  (we’ve added more cities and will be announcing them soon @ www.asp.net/roadshow). Tomorrow I’m headed to Wisconsin for the Deep in .NET event – it should be a great event with lots of great technical content. Steve Smith IM’d me tonight ‘are your slides done?’ — sorry Steve, I was watching my Tivo’d copy of CSI — … nope not done yet, but hey that’s what the plane is for, right?

Checked the weather in WI: a high of 24 degrees tomorrow! Yikes, should I bring my hockey skates? Speaking of hockey I’m playing in the 2004 Kids Cup in Ft. Worth, Texas. If you live in DFW, swing on by — it’ll be a great event, all profits from the game (tickets, hats, shirts, etc.) are being donated to the children at the Ronald McDonalds House.

We’ve also finally announced a little covert project that Scott Watermasysk and I have been working on: http://blogs.msdn.com/ (more detail: http://blogs.msdn.com/saraw/). Yes, all the Microsoft bloggers have a happy new home here on our www.asp.net cluster @ the blogs.msdn.com domain!

The ASP.NET Forums (http://forums.asp.net) have really come a long way. We now have support for 6 languages built-in, as well as many other great new features (including an NNTP server for off-line fourms support). It’s a gigantic project now, well over 80 server controls alone. I’ll have to blog about the experiences there soon…

I finally replaced my old Blackberry and my Sony-Ericcson phone with a new Blackberry 7320. I’ve been using it for about a week now and thought I would share some of the postives and negatives:

Positives:

• It’s great to have one device for both email and phone
• Charges itself off a USB cable — really nice if you travel a lot.
• The blackberry keyboard is wonderful. I have terrible handwriting; so I’d much rather type than attempt writing with a pen based device.
• Synchronizing the device with Outlook is a breeze
• Clicking to call phone numbers or open web addresses within emails is really nice
• The built-in web browser is sufficient for most tasks, plus the real-estate is good.
• Lastly it’s really small and slim. Easily fits in a pocket.

Negatives:

• No backlighting by default. Although the screen is full color, it relies on contrast (there is a backlight you can enable, but it’s really only useful at night)
• Not a lot of add-on applications (so far). Would be really nice to have an RSS consuming tool on there…
• Runs Java – it would be much better if it ran .NET 🙂
• Included software ‘Desktop Manager’ is quirky.