Xperimentality

Well the first night of the .NET University in Birmingham was last night.  It went well.  I presented on WPF last night and, while the presentation itself was ok, I had some demo problems!  I am always overly critical of my own presentations and was not real pleased with it last night, but most everyone seemed to say that it went well other than the demo gremlins that seemed to be attacking me!

Doug Turnure was going to present on Window Workflow last night but was very sick (hope you get better soon, Doug), so Mark Berry came over from Atlanta to give the Workflow presentation.  We were real appreciative of him coming over at the last minute.

Tonight, Jeff Barnes is going to present on WCF and Eric Ray is going to present on CardSpace.  It should be a great night.  I'll post how everything went and hopefully get some pictures up.

You know how you use something for a long time but you just never bother to use one of its functions or features?  Then when you finally do, you wonder why you had not done it earlier.  Well today I closed a web site I was updating and laziness forced me to try out one of the features in Firefox 2.0.

I know there have been add-ons that allow you to recover from a crash or just re-open a closed tab, but I never really tried any of them.  I knew that Firefox 2.0 had incorporated this feature into their history menu, but today was the first time I used it.  Ahhhh, the joy of discovering new ways to recover from my own mistakes.

So I accidentally closed the tab I was working on and did not want to have to retype the address for a new tab.  So I tried out the "Recently Closed Tabs" submenu of the History menu.  What a great tool!  I mean, I close tabs all the time by accident.  And sometimes I am not even sure where I was when I closed it!  Now I have a new favorite feature and it can be found in the recently closed tabs!

We have put up some more information about the .NET University in Birmingham, Alabama this Monday and Tuesday evening.  You can read a little more about it at the Birmingham .NET User Group site.  Or if you want to register, you can click here.

Remember, you must register and attend all 4 session to get your free t-shirt and certificate.  As an added bonus, we will be giving away a Zune after the last presentation on Tuesday thanks to Doug Turnure!

We have confirmed the date, time, and location for a .NET University in Birmingham, Alabama.  On December 11 and 12 from 6PM to 8PM we will be presenting a .NET University.  It will take place at the new auditorium in the new Building 3 of the Southern Progress Campus at 2100 Lakeshore Drive.  As soon as we get the link set up for registration, I will post it here.

The purpose of .NET University is to provide a quick and easy way to get an overview of the new features in .NET 3.0, as well as provide materials for the community to re-present to other technical audiences.

I have been meaning to mention that I won the 8th place prize in October from Community Credit. The 8th place prize is a really cool lightening disc for lack of a better term.  You can see a picture of one here.  If you have not visited Community Credit yet, check it out!

I posted a new book review on Digital Photography Hacks. While it might not seem like much of a technology book, developing for the web does mean occasionally being a photographer.  I am often asked to take new photos or do post processing on existing photos for use as images for a website.  I assume many others are in the same situation.  Anything that helps me take better digital photography, makes me a better web developer.  As a UI developer, graphics is of great interest to me.  So you will see more reviews on books dealing with photography, Photoshop, and graphics in the near future.  Click here to read the review.

Well I don't know if I am late to the game on this or not but Jeff just brought to my attention that the Mix '07 dates and location have been announced.  It looks like it is going to be at the Venetian in Las Vegas again April 30 - May 02!  For anyone who was not able to attend last year, the event was excellent.  A ton of great information!  I hope I will be able to go again this year!  Looks like registration is going to begin sometime in January!