Cave Markings

I'm excited to be speaking at Memphis Day of .Net 2007 next weekend.  I'm a former student at Memphis State... er, I mean University of Memphis, where the event is taking place.  This will be a bit of a homecoming.

I'll be talking about VSX, and getting into more detail than I have previously.  I've been digging deep into the Visual Studio 2008 SDK as work ramps up on VFP Studio.  Now that I have a better understanding, I'll be able to show how to create and access services in the shell.  Here's the session description:

VSX: Xtreme Xtensibility with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell and the Managed Package Framework

During this session we will look at ways to extend Visual Studio 2008 using the VS 2008 SDK. We will build extensions using the Managed Package Framework that access the same APIs that the Visual Studio team uses. We will explore the opportunities for distributing tools as packages to users without Visual Studio installed. Finally, we will examine the new possibilities for developing commercial software on top of the Visual Studio platform leveraging the Visual Studio 2008 Shell Isolated Mode.

Check out the rest of the sessions here.  It looks like a great lineup.  I hope to see you there!

++Alan

Last night at our monthly meeting of ETNUG, Jeff Prosise walked us through the basics of Silverlight and demonstrated some of the potential of this new web platform.  I had read plenty of blog posts about Silverlight, but this was the first demo from scratch that I had seen.

Jeff is a Knoxville area resident, and a model airplane buff.  He showed a Silverlight streaming video of his new model jet that he's learning to fly.  Who knew you needed a license to fly a model airplane.  His initial demo was of a video website that he called "Foo Tube."

Jeff showed us his MyComix site and his implementation of the Game of Life, Silverlife.  He also walked us through starting a new Silverlight project in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.  Jeff is no fan of JavaScript, to put it mildly, and he was particularly excited to show the use of C# for code behind Silverlight events.

While I was disappointed that he didn't get into the dynamic language runtime in detail, Jeff talked for a solid ninety content-packed minutes.  I always enjoy watching Jeff present on any topic, but he was particularly excited about the possibilities enabled by Silverlight.

Jeff's enthusiasm definitely rubbed off on me.  I can't wait to explore the next release of Silverlight 1.1 which Jeff said will be available "Real Soon Now."  I am especially interested in using the DLR with Linq in a Silverlight app.

Cheers,

++Alan

I have a SanDisk cruzer thumb drive and I love it... except for one thing.  Whenever it is plugged into a new PC, it autoruns and installs an application called U3 without asking.

Fortunately, Rick Borup pointed me to the U3 uninstall tool.  You have to confirm you want the tool multiple times, but when they let you download the tool, it works as advertised.