Josh Holmes - Sometimes respectable passionate technologist…

I want to thank everyone for coming out to the .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow
in Grand Rapids. I had a great time and hope to come back to Grand Rapids more
often.

We had about 40-45 participants and all seemed to enjoy themselves and were
really engaging. If I had a typical Grand Rapids group – I’m definitely going to
have to speak there more often. I was a little disappointed at the student
attendance as we only had about half a dozen or so and getting students to
attend was one of the reasons that we held it at the GVSUAuditorium (Nice facility).

Many thanks go to GVSU – for hosting the event, Eric Maino
for organizing and running the event and West Michigan .NET Users
Group and the Grand Valley State .NET Users Group for helping with
marketing.

As promised – below is the link to the code samples that I wrote or showed
during the show. The Scan and Amazon only works on a Symbol device
with a barcode scanner and the Symbol .NET SMDK installed.

.NET To Go Mobility Roadshow on Thursday, December 2, 2004 at the
DeVos Center-Loosemore Auditorium.

The .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow will provide
you with the answers to your mobile development questions. Digging into the
details, using more code and fewer slides, these technical sessions will show
you how to develop and implement mobile solutions using the .NET Compact
Framework and languages you are already familiar with. To register for this
FREE event or to learn
more, go to www.msmobilitytour.com.

Registration is required to make sure that you can get in. You can register
at the MS Events page.

Someone forwarded me this resume (CV depending on where you are in the
world). I get a number of these, but this took some real creativity so I thought
I’d post it here.

Here’s the English version:
http://213.186.36.10/~al/alstudio/cv/en.htm

He did it in his native French as well:

http://213.186.36.10/~al/alstudio/cv/fr.htm

Here’s the full list – including the standard word formatted CV.
http://213.186.36.10/~al/alstudio/cv/en.htm

Anyways – kudos for creativity and I hope that this helps him find a job.

GANG (Great Lakes Area .NET Users
Group) is helping to host the .NET To Go Mobility
Roadshow on Wed., Oct 20, 2004 at the Microsoft Offices in Southfield.

The .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow will provide
you with the answers to your mobile development questions. Digging into the
details, using more code and fewer slides, these technical sessions will show
you how to develop and implement mobile solutions using the .NET Compact
Framework and languages you are already familiar with. To register for this
FREE event or to learn
more, go to www.msmobilitytour.com.

Registration is required to make sure that you can get in. You can register
at the MS Events page – http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032259728&Culture=en-US.

Bill Wagner (Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group President, Regional Director
and author of the C# Core Language Little Black Book and Effective C#) is going
to be doing a webcast on how to install and configure Data Driven Web
Applications.

If you’ve faced the frustration deploying a data-driven
Web application to a server, or tried moving applications from one server to
another, you need to attend this webcast. Learn how to create installations for
your Web application as easily as a desktop application. By attending this
webcast you will learn:

• Why your Web application needs an installer
  
• What problems you will face deploying manually
  
• How to create multiple Web sites and virtual
  directories in the same installation
• How to connect to and configure SQL Server databases
  
• How to manage security for your application
  
• How to edit web.config to customize your installation
  

Join Wise Solutions and Bill Wagner of SRT Solutions as
we cover the process of creating an easy installation
for a complex Web application.

Thursday, September 30 @ 8:30 a.m. EST

For Registration go to http://www.wise.com/wfwi_webcasts.asp.

Patrick Steele (http://weblogs.asp.net/psteele/archive/2004/09/16/230473.aspx?Pending=true) and Scoble have been talking about using descriptive titles on your blog posts to make it easier to scan and triage what posts you read. That’s actually a great point. I know that I scan 150+ blogs and Patrick is in the same ballpark. That’s an average of 80-120 posts a day and some days are more intense than that. The good news is that NewsGator (http://www.NewsGator.com), SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) and RSS Bandit (http://www.rssbandit.org/) all make scanning new posts.

Patrick went on to post about the number of pictures that are on blogs and how frustrating that is when you are offline. One the one hand, I agree with that. It’s really frustrating that when you are offline and the major portion of a given blog with an interesting headline is a picture. On the other hand, I really like the pictures that are on some of the blogs that I read. Some examples of this are:
http://bucsfishingreport.com/pMachine/weblog.php

http://weblogs.asp.net/jrule/Rss.aspx

I’m not saying that the pictures make the post but it does help the item. Some other blogs just add pictures for the fun of it and they don’t really add anything to the post.

There are few things that I’d like to suggest about pictures.

First, be judicial in your use of pictures. That is, make sure that they add something to the post.

Second, in the short term, make sure that you provide alternative text for all of the pictures on your blog.

Third, I’d love it if one on the readers (or all of them for that matter) would have an option to download pictures and the like with the posts.

I thought that this was an interesting item. It’s the history of programming languages back to the mid-50s. There are a few things that I saw that were interesting – such as the fact that Fortran will be 50 this November and is the ancestor to a number of programming languages. There were a few inaccuracies, such as the fact that they skipped from VB 1.0 to VB 6.0 and completely missed all of the releases between.

Oh well, it’s an interesting thing anyways…

There are a number of reasons that you might want to host a native windows control on the Compact Framework and now there’s a way using the OpenNetCF framework.

The Windows Mobile Team just published a white paper on migrating from eVB to VB.NET on the Compact Framework. This is a really good thing and is worth a read.

I know that it’s not a really big deal to many authors, but I got my first article published on the Fawcette Reports web site.

I didn’t know that it was actually published until I started getting emails about it – but it’s linked below.