Rob Windsor's Weblog : TechEd

TechEd EMEA Resources and Demos - Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint 2007

windsor — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:24:00 GMT

I'm about two hours away from delivering my SharePoint/AJAX at TechEd EMEA and I realized my Resources slide is a little thin. Here are some additional links to resources along with a link to the session demos. I'm sure I've missed some so please feel free to suggest others via comments.

Slides
http://www.slideshare.net/rob.windsor/integrating-aspnet-ajax-with-sharepoint-presentation

Session Demos
http://shrinkster.com/12wg

ASP.NET AJAX Developer Center
http://www.asp.net/ajax/

mssharepointdeveloper.com
http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com

MSDN RampUp - SharePoint Developers
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/dd221355.aspx

SharePoint Team Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

AJAX Toolkit for SharePoint
http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointajax

Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
http://shrinkster.com/y2w

Technorati Tags: [Sharepoint, AJAX]

TechEd Developer EMEA 2008

windsor — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:16:00 GMT

I found out a few days ago that I've been selected to speak at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona. I'm really excited as this is not only my first time speaking outside of North America, it's my first trip to continental Europe. My session is on using ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint 2007.

Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint.
SharePoint provides a great infrastructure for quickly building intranet and Internet applications. ASP.NET AJAX provides a foundation for creating highly productive Web interfaces. Combined they are two great tastes that taste great together! In this session we will cover the basics of working with ASP.NET AJAX inside of SharePoint 2007. We will take a look at how to prepare a Web Application for ASP.NET AJAX and how to use various ASP.NET AJAX tools such as the JavaScript libraries, JSON-enabled Web services and UpdatePanels to build add rich interactivity to your SharePoint sites.

If you're attending the conference and find the session interesting the please feel free to go to the session list and rate it. I don't know for sure but I think that your rating and the number of people who give a rating have an effect on the scheduling of the session. I'm positive that the number of ratings you receive helps determine if your session will repeat.

I'm not going to be able to attend the PDC this year (this event and the PDC were too close together) so I'm glad there's a PDC track at TechEd. From all reports PDC is going to rock so at least I'll be able to get a taste of the content.

I'll be Twittering (http://twitter.com/robwindsor) and hopefully blogging from the conference. If you're there feel free to look me up or better yet drop by my session.

Technorati Tags: [TechEd, SharePoint, AJAX]

TechEd Developer 2008

windsor — Sat, 17 May 2008 11:47:00 GMT

The spring conference season keeps on chugging along. The MVP Summit and DevTeach just finished and TechEd is just around the corner.

It will be interesting to see what effect splitting the conference into a developer week and an IT Pro week will have. I've been spending a lot of time with SharePoint lately and that's a topic that has firm roots on both sides. I'm sure there are many other disciplines (SQL Server and VSTS come to mind) that are in the same boat.

This year I'll be taking it easier on the "networking" than I have in the past. I'm moderating a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session and co-presenting an early-morning TLC talk and want to do so with a clear head. I'll also still be in the process of upgrading ObjectSharp's ASP.NET course from 2.0 to 3.5 which will be delivered for the first time the week following the conference.

I went through the session builder earlier and there are a ton of things I want to see. I had two or three (sometimes even more) sessions per time slot that I wanted to see. This morning I deleted all those and later this weekend I'm going to go through and pick the sessions that I absolutely don't want to miss (my sessions for example) and put those in Outlook. Everything else will be done spur of the moment at the conference.

For those of you who are attending the conference for the first time, you might want to check out my Guide to Attending TechEd or PDC.

I'll be Twittering (http://twitter.com/rob_windsor) and hopefully blogging from the conference. If you're there feel free to look me up or better yet drop by one of my sessions.

WIN07-TLC Strategies for Moving Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Applications to Microsoft .NET
Wednesday, June 4 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM
Blue Theatre 1

BOF806 Strategies for Moving Your Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Investments to .NET
Thursday, June 5 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
S330 E

Technorati Tags: [TechEd, Visual Basic, VB]

TechEd BOF Session: Strategies for Moving Your Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Investments to .NET

windsor — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 03:02:00 GMT

If you're not familiar with the concept, a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session is an open discussion lead by a moderator who is not a Microsoft employee. The sessions are not presentations, there are no projectors. Unlike the Keynotes and Breakout sessions which are mostly one to many communication, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are many to many communication and don't necessarily focus on Microsoft products or technology. They are about people talking with people - connecting, sharing, networking, and creating community.

This year I'd like to do a BOF session at TechEd Developer. From my expereince with the community at user groups and conferences it's pretty clear that there are lots of developers who still work with classic VB code at least part of the time. Many are still questioning what to do with this legacy code and how to move it forward or integrate it with .NET. So I've proposed the following:

Strategies for Moving Your Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Investments to .NET: For years Visual Basic 6 (VB 6) was used by organizations world-wide to build key line-of-business applications and components. Now they have thousands to millions of lines of code representing a significant organizational investment. Many have struggled in the past trying to move this legacy code base to .NET, many are just starting that journey. The path from VB 6 to .NET has not always been clear - there are options but there is no one size fits all approach. One option is to rewrite your applications so you can re-architect and take advantage of all the features .NET has to offer. Another is to migrate the applications so automated tools like the Code Advisor and the Migration Wizard can assist you. Finally, you can use COM Interop and the Interop Forms Toolkit to continue leveraging existing working assets while phasing in new features built on the .NET Framework. In this session we will discuss all three options and explore the pros and cons of each. The goal is raise awareness of the choices and the tools available so you will be able to pick the best strategy for your organization going forward.

~~So, if you're going to TechEd and you'd like to join in on the discussion, please head on over to the~~ ~~BOF voting page~~ ~~and add your vote. Voting closes on April 7.~~

Update:
The BOF was selected. It's running on Wednesday, June 4 from 8:30 to 9:45 AM. I think to room is S330 EF but I'm not positive. If you're planning on attending please let me know the subject(s) you'd like to discuss by adding a comment.

Update (April 28, 2008):
The BOF was selected. It's BOF806 and is running Thursday, June 5 from 1:00 to 2:15 pm. If you're planning on attending please let me know the subject(s) you'd like to discuss by adding a comment.

See you then.

TechEd 2007 - Videos of the Final Round of Speaker Idol

windsor — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:48:00 GMT

The videos from the final round of Speaker Idol have been posted to the Virtual TechEd site.

http://virtualteched.com/pages/videos.aspx

Update: I recorded a second video which is a recreation of what was showing on the screen behind me as I was doing my presentation. I tried to match the timeline so you just have to start both videos at the same time to get the proper effect.

~~http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=74c9f66c-bd32-4160-ac90-10c5aef1b239~~

Update 2: I figured out how to do picture-in-picture with Camtasia so I've uploaded a new version to SoapBox that has the two videos merged.

http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=8237cbf0-a1e4-4995-bfa3-dc65cb7608c9

Tags: [TechEd07]

Things I Learned at TechEd 2007

windsor — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 18:28:00 GMT

Richard Campbell knows everything.

DonXML has the power to find the bar with the shortest line at the attendee party. It's a gift.

SharePoint 2007 is awesome, the Visual Studio 2005 tooling for SharePoint is not.

Having a pink Martini spilled on you during dinner can actually be quite refreshing.

If you co-present with Ted Pattison, you will be the straight-man.

Jeffrey Palermo throws a really good party.

It's possible to do a good conference talk using MS Paint.

When geeks congregate at Universal Studios, it rains, a lot.

A hamburger in a bag is not likely to be a good hamburger.

Visual Studio "Orcas" will be released in 2007 but will be called Visual Studio 2008. Can anybody say Merry Christmas.

The chicken wings at Hooters really are quite good.

If James Kovacs releases an album, don't buy it.

It is possible to pick up someone at a bar while wearing your conference name badge.

It would be cool if you could get a DVD of all the random conversations you had over the week. It would probably be as valuable as DVD with the recorded sessions.

Tags: [TechEd07]

TechEd 2007 - Speaker Idol

windsor — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:24:00 GMT

My TechEd experience has not been exactly what I expected, at least not since Tuesday afternoon. That's when I found out that I had been selected to be a wild-card entry at Speaker Idol.

Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks! set up this contest where 16 attendees of TechEd had a chance to win a spot speaking at next year's conference. There were four heats of four speakers, each doing a five minute[1] presentation in front of a panel of judges. The winners of each heat moved forward to the finals. Three of the people in each heat were individuals who submitted proposals for this year's conference but didn't make the cut. The other was a wild card, someone (like me) from the conference who thought they had what it takes to be a speaker[2].

In my heat there was a tie, so both Sarbjit Gill and I ended up advancing to the finals. I did a standard TechEd type talk on WCF while Sarbjit did an amazing talk about Split DNS using Paint. Since our talks both had merit but were so totally different, they had no real way to break the tie.

In the finals I tried to incorporate the judge's feedback from my first session by taking a demo from the end of my talk and moving almost to the beginning. I also chose to do some of the code live instead of walking though a completed example. In the end, this may have been my downfall as I went close to eight minutes long. All the speakers did great presentations but in the end an awesome ASP.NET caching demo by Steven Smith won the day. Congratulations Steve and good luck with your talk next year.

[1]- Trying to get a few slides and a demo that tell any kind of story in five minutes is freaking hard!

[2]- I was offered the chance to submit proposals for sessions but I chose not to because I didn't plan on attending.

Tags: [TechEd07]

TechEd 2007

windsor — Sat, 12 May 2007 19:58:00 GMT

I made a last minute decision to go to TechEd this year. I need to cram on the new stuff in SharePoint and I thought this conference would be the best place to get started.

After attending TechEd last year I wrote A Guide to Attending TechEd or PDC. One of the things I mentioned in the post was to not worry too much about the sessions.

This does not mean that you shouldn’t go to sessions. It does mean that you shouldn’t feel you have to fill your schedule with sessions. Remember, you can get slide decks and sample code from CommNet, you’re going to get a set of DVDs with all of the recorded sessions after the conference, and many of the conference sessions are already available as webcasts. Leave a slot or two per day to visit the experts area and do some hand-on labs.

Obviously I'm not very good at taking my own advice. I just finished putting together my schedule and, unless I figure out a way to clone myself a few times, there's no way I'm going to attend half the stuff I'm interested in. Oh well, this schedule is just a guide anyway - things always change when your actually at the event.

I'm going to spend a little less time networking (read partying late into the evening) so I'll be able to get in some hands-on labs during the breakfast hours and catch the morning sessions. I will be at the big social events like the Party with Palermo and the Attendee Party at Universal Studios. I'm also going to try and make the Jam Sessions one of the nights (at least I think I am - I'm not even sure what they are at this point). If you going to be in Orlando and you want to get together and talk geek send me an email, I'm sure I can fit you in between Building Advanced Web Parts and Creating Custom Field Types on Wednesday :)

Tags: [TechEd07]

A Guide to Attending TechEd or PDC

windsor — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:20:00 GMT

Good job dude! Putting out a guide to attending TechEd days after the conference is over. Yes, this was poor planning on my part but there will be other TechEds and PDCs and hopefully this will help people attending those conferences.

1. Arrive Early
The conference centers where TechEd and PDC are held are huge. It really helps to get there before the conference starts to walk around and familiarize yourself with the location. I didn’t have a chance to do this at TechEd so I didn’t even know there was a conference bookstore until the third day. You’ll also want to find a quiet, out-of-the-way spot where you can go and chill or make a phone call. Most of the regular gathering areas have comfortable couches or bean bag chairs but they can be noisy due to the number of people. A final benefit of arriving early is that you can avoid the lines when registering.

2. Plan Ahead Using CommNet
Both conferences provide a Communications Network (CommNet) website which can be accessed via the internet. You can access the TechEd 2006 CommNET site at http://msteched.com. This is a one-stop shop for everything about the conference.

One of the key things this site allows you to do is to plan your schedule. It gives you an up-to-date list of sessions and events and, once you’ve selected what you’re interested in, gives you a personalized schedule. You can add your schedule to your Outlook calendar, export it to Excel or view it as an RSS feed.

Making sure a session is right for you is very important. There’s nothing worse than walking across the conference center just to find the session you picked isn’t what you really wanted and then to realize that your second choice is back where you came from. When choosing sessions be sure to look at more than just the title; the abstract, speaker, track and session level are all important as well. If you’re still not sure you should be able to find the speaker or one of his/her colleagues in the experts area to ensure you’re going to get what you want.

3. Don’t Sweat the Sessions
This does not mean that you shouldn’t go to sessions. It does mean that you shouldn’t feel you have to fill your schedule with sessions. Remember, you can get slide decks and sample code from CommNet, you’re going to get a set of DVDs with all of the recorded sessions after the conference, and many of the conference sessions are already available as webcasts. Leave a slot or two per day to visit the experts area and do some hand-on labs (see below).

4. Use the Experts
Each conference has an area which is manned by Microsoft employees and industry experts who volunteer their time. If you have a question about a product or technology, that’s the place to go to find your answer. For example, at any given time there were two or three members of the VB team in the Blue area of the Technical Learning Center (TLC). If you had a VB question why not take it right to the source? If for some reason they couldn’t help you they’d definitely know someone at the conference who could. I’m sure it was the same for the other products and technologies.

From what I saw and heard from my colleagues who were experts at the TLC, the area was underutilized. It’s a shame because it’s probably the most valuable resource at any conference. You’re never going to find the same kind of combined product knowledge freely available for your taking in any other setting.

5. Do some Hands-On Labs
This conference highlighted a ton of technology that’s currently available in a Beta or Community Technology Preview (CTP) format. For you to use this stuff you normally have to find a machine that you don’t mind repaving or create a virtual machine instance of hardware powerful enough so it’s usable. With the Hands-On Labs all of the setup is done for you; you just go in, pick the lab you want and start rockin’. They are a great way to enhance the learning experience you get at a session or that you’ve had before the conference.

Tags: [TechEd06]

TechEd Days 5 and 6

windsor — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 17:30:00 GMT

Day 5
Like most days, this one started mid (ok, late) morning. Lunch was consumed with a discussion about a “goose” being in the “oven”. I still have no idea of what that was all about and, in the end, I’m not sure I want to know.

The afternoon was filled with sessions. One that I found particularly interesting was given by Jon Rauschenberger from Clarity Consulting. Clarity is building a framework that will allow VB.NET developers to easily build windows forms that will interoperate with VB 6.0. Clarity plans to make this product available for free to the VB developer market when it is complete. Many of the people I associate with professionally have been in the .NET world long enough that we lose sight of the fact that there is still a lot of VB 6.0 development happening out there.

When the conference day ended I took the shuttle over to the hotel to drop off my backpack and change for the attendee party at Fenway Park. From what I heard the people who took the shuttles directly to the party got a full police escort which included road and intersection closures. I assume the police figured getting thousands of people from the conference center to Fenway was going to be such a traffic nightmare that is was better to get it over a quickly as possible.

The attendee party itself was fantastic. As a baseball fan, just getting to go to Fenway Park is a treat but having the run of the park was incredible. I was so busy walking around and seeing the sights that I missed most of the focal part of the evening, a concert by the band Train. I did catch their last couple songs plus the encore which were excellent. My Flickr account has a few photos of the event but I uploaded a bunch more to my MSN space, they can be found at http://shrinkster.com/fz8.

Day 6
The last day of a big conference like this is always kind of a bummer, you continually have a sense that it’s just about over.

I took in a couple sessions, one on building “good looking” user interfaces with WPF and one on using REST, RSS and POX with WCF. The best part of the latter talk was that the speaker, Clemens Vasters, showed off newtellivision, an application he’d built using the technologies discussed in the talk plus Media Center.

“newtellivision is a framework and application for accessing live streaming television remotely. The use-case I had in mind building this is quite simple and is closely related to my current (and the new) job and the perspective of moving to the U.S. some time later this year: I want access to my local, German TV channels whenever I am traveling and I also want access to those channels when I've moved to Seattle. That's most important for two types of programs: sports and news. I care a lot more about Bundesliga football than for Major League baseball.”

I also sat in on Paul Ballard’s BOF entitled “Can AJAX/Atlas Do This? Comparing AJAX and Smart Client User Experiences”. I’ve spoken out on my feelings on this topic before and I was vocal about it at the BOF as well. The primary argument against smart clients still seems to be deployment. Not the deployment of the smart client applications themselves but the deployment of the .NET Framework. Many people there indicated that process to get the approval to install a new version of the framework and then to actually do the deployment can take several months. At least I see a steady growth in awareness that smart clients are a viable choice again and a push from developers to get to be able to use them in the enterprise.

Like all days, the last day of the conference ended with a couple pints. This time at Cheers, or at least that bar that is below the sign that the TV show made famous.

Tags: [TechEd06]

TechEd Days 3 and 4

windsor — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 16:04:00 GMT

Day 2
I forgot one notable event on Day 2. That was the live recording of .NET Rocks! which was held over lunch. Carl and Richard interviewed Gert Drapers and Cameron Skinner on the newly announced Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (formerly known as “Data Dude”). I don’t work in this area but from the discussions at the recording as well as at the VSTS party that evening it seems that the product is a good start but it may have some maturing to do.

Day 3
Day 3 started late (mostly because Day 2 ended late), I didn’t get to the conference center until just before noon. I skipped lunch so I could spend some time doing Hands-On Labs. I think these are the hidden gems of conferences like TechEd or PDC, particularly when it comes to future technologies. Everything was already setup for me to try out WinFx, LINQ, VSTS for Database Professionals, SharePoint 2007, Office 12, and so on. These are particularly good as a follow-up to a breakout session.

In between the two sessions I caught in the afternoon (including Beat Schwegler’s excellent talk on “Architecting Applications for a Service-Oriented World”) I managed to torment D’Arcy Lussier a little bit. You see, D’Arcy has been a little bitter about missing TechEd so I thought I’d add fuel to the fire by emailing him some shots of the biggest attraction at the conference, the magic snack tables. While he was impressed with the “high carb, high sugar, high fat chocolate bar goodness”, he was not so impressed by the “freaking bucket of fruit”. Some people do eat healthy and even perform this odd ritual called exercise at some place called the gym.

I spent the evening catching up on email and blog reading until about 9:00pm when the RubyCLR Bird’s of a Feather (BOF) session (run by John Lam and Scott Hanselman) started. The way they hosted the event - with Scott taking on the TV talk show host role and John acting as in the guest - worked exceptionally well. The discussion helped me grok more of who John see’s as the initial target market for this product and how it can build some initial momentum.

After the BOF a bunch of the ObjectSharpees headed out for some beer and pool. We dragged along Mario Cardinal and Guy Barette as well as a few other people we met on the shuttle to the hotel. I had a long conversation with Mario about architecture and what he’s doing with the Visual Studio Talk Show (sort of the French .NET Rocks!). In my opinion, conversations and networking opportunities like these are really what makes the conference valuable.

Day 4
Day 4 was mostly about networking. I hung around the blue area in the Technical Learning Center (TLC) and walked the expo hall. I did catch an excellent session on application security given by Jesper Johansson in the afternoon.

The evening was spent in Faneuil Hall. It began with some nice Prime Rib at Durgin Park (established before you were born) and finished with the .NET Influencer’s party at Ned Devine’s Irish Pub. Note to Jean-Luc: next time leave the laptop at home.

Tags: [TechEd06]

VB or C#? ASMX or WCF? WinForms or WPF? Ruby or Iron Python??????

windsor — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 18:33:00 GMT

Questions, questions, questions. I know the new technology I'm seeing here at TechEd is going to lead to a bunch of questions in the form of: Should I use X or Y?

We have some leagcy questions:

Should I use VB or C#?
Should I use Business Objects or DataSets?
Should I build Windows apps or Web sites?

With the emerging technologies shown here at TechEd these questions get more complex and new questions emerge:

Should I use VB, C#, Iron Python or RubyCLR?
Should I build Windows apps, Web sites or Office/SharePoint apps?
Should I use ASMX Web Services or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)?
Should I use Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)?
Are mobile devices and the .NET Compact Framework ready for enterprise applications?
Where does Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) fit in?
and so on...

I've been overwhelmed trying to keep up with the new developer technology I've been seeing and I wanted to prepare you for the same.

Tags: [TechEd06]

TechEd Days 1 and 2

windsor — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 23:38:00 GMT

Day 1
My trek to TechEd started early, I left for the airport at 4:00am on Sunday for my flight to Boston. Fellow ObjectSharpees Barry and Dave were also on the flight, I guess they don't value sleep either. The good news was that I had plenty of time to get to my hotel, check my bags, and head on over to the MVP event that started at 10:00.

The MVP event was very well attended. I think they said that there were 200 or 300 MVPs registered. I was only able to stay for Sean O’Driscoll’s “keynote” talk and a bit of lunch but it was good to catch up with some people that I only see at events like this.

I left lunch about 12:45 to head down to Fenway Park to catch the Red Sox and Rangers game. This was a great baseball experience, that park has so much atmosphere and history. Even with its quirks (small seats and the poles that always seem to obscure your view) it's a great place to watch a ball game. An added bonus was a really tight game that was culminated by a three-run, walk-off homer by Red Sox DH, David Ortiz.

When I left the game I headed back to the conference center for the keynote but I was so tired (I’d only had an hours sleep the night before) that I left after 30 minutes to go crash at the hotel. I was there long enough to see one of the guest appearances by Mary Lynn Rajskub who plays Chloe O’Brien on the TV show 24.

Day 2
Day 2 started with a disappointing session. Well, the session was fine - it was just poorly titled. I thought it was related to SOA but it was actually on developing effective user interfaces with AJAX. This is an all too common issue with conferences, people make a decision on what session to see solely based on the title not the abstract. It mostly my fault for being lazy, my only excuse that it was early in the morning.

I finished the official conference day watching my colleague, John Lam, doing his talk on the RubyCLR. John is an amazing speaker and although I’ve heard this material and seen similar demos before, I thoroughly enjoyed the talk.

Sandwiched in between the “AJAX Incident” and the Ruby talk I caught a session and did some stuff in the Technical Learning Center (TLC) on SharePoint (the 2007 version looks like it is going to totally kick ass) and Office. There’s already lots of hype around SharePoint but I think it’s nothing compared to what we’re going to see next year. I also had a really good discussion about abstractions and whether they help or hurt developers with Bruce Johnson and members of the WCF team.

Dave, Barry and I left the conference center and headed over to the VSTS Influencers Event. Most of the time there was spent talking with members of the Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals (formerly known as “Data Dude”) Team. Interesting stuff but mostly out of the area I live in.

The day ended going for another beer or two (did I really need more beer?) with Dave around Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. It’s a cool place to walk around, it sort of reminds me of Sparks Street mall in Ottawa. Most of the pubs (and there were lots of pubs) weren’t that busy but I’m sure it’s amazing on a Friday night in the summer.

Tags: [TechEd06]

Rob Windsor at Tech-Ed in Boston Next Week!

windsor — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:06:00 GMT

It seems that everyone who's someone is posting their Agenda for next week so I'm going to follow suit. You'll see I'm double booked Monday night and I have been known to change my intended schedule on a whim (particularly when drinks are involved) so I make no guarantees that I'll actually be at any of these events.

Sunday, 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM: MVP Engagement Tour: I'll only be at this event in the morning. I have other plans for the afternoon (see below).

Sunday, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM: Fenway Park: I'll be watching the Red Sox play the Rangers in Section 23 Row 15. Drop by and say Hi (oh, and bring me a Sam Adams will ya?)

Monday, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM: Exhibit Hall Reception: I'm double booked with the Mega User Group meeting (see below). Booth Babes and free drinks will be likely tip the scale in this direction.

Monday, 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM: New England Mega User Group Meeting: Wide-ranging discussion with a panel of nationally-recognized experts on Microsoft development technologies.

Wednesday, 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM: Microsoft Influencer Appreciation Party

Thursday, 6:30 PM - 13:00 PM: Attendee Party - Train Concert at Fenway Park: Fenway two times in four days. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the lead signer's wife, Amber.

Otherwise I'll be wandering the exhibit hall, doing hands-on labs, catching WinFx sessions, or hanging out in near proximity to the magic snack tables and power for my laptop.

Tags: [TechEd06]

Fenway Baby!!!!

windsor — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 17:09:00 GMT

When I registered for TechEd I meant to go online and see if the Red Sox were in town, and if they were, grab me a pair of tickets. I'm a big baseball fan and Fenway Park is one of the two remaining classic parks in the game (the other is Wrigley Field in Chicago). It turns out they have a series against the Texas Rangers that ends the day I planed to arrive, after that they go on the road.

Anyway, I just got around to booking this weekend, I should have done it earlier. I couldn't get a pair of tickets, just this single with an obstructed view - but I don't care - I'm going to Fenway baby!

If you're going to TechEd are probably saying, "Uh Rob, the attendee party is at Fenway Park, you'll be going anyway."

I know - and it's not the same. I can see the real Fenway experience now (my apologies to James Earl Jones and the writers of Field of Dreams for the remainder of this post), I'll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. I'll find my obstucted view seat way up behind one of the baselines, where someone sat when they were a child and watched Bucky Dent homer over the Monster to knock the Sox out of the playoffs. I'll watch the game, and it'll be as if I've dipped myself in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, I'll have to brush them away from my face.

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. The world has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Ohhhhhhhh, I will go. I will most definitely go.