I'm back from some much needed time off, and here's an interesting idea that was sitting in my inbox on my return.

Check out the .NET Developer Virtual Conference, October 28 - 30, 2008, online everywhere. The conference is a very reasonable $100 for three days of content, with more than 30 how-to sessions. Julie Yack is the conference chair, and she got the idea after being very impressed with a SQL virtual conference she attended.

The speaker roster includes Ani Babaian, Rob Bagby, Kathleen Dollard, Scott Golightly, Tim Heuer, Ben Hoelting, Tim Huckaby, Dr. Neil Roodyn, Chris Sutton, and David Yack. That's quite some line-up.

Julie also volunteers with INETA, so if you are a member of an INETA user group, ask your user group president to contact Julie for a special discount.

Graham Watson, senior marketing manager at Microsoft has announced that Culminis will be transitioning to a volunteer-based organization, similar to INETA. Culminis is the association of Microsoft IT Pro user groups, sister organization to INETA which is the association of .NET user groups. I have been working with Culminis members for the last several years co-chairing the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd conferences.

As I understand it, Culminis has been receiving funding for staff as well as programs from Microsoft. On the other hand INETA's funding covers programs and minimal paid staff who support volunteers. Graham takes care to point out that Microsoft values user groups highly, and that there are pros and cons to each funding model. That said, Microsoft and Culminis will be working together to move their organization closer to the INETA model. My very best wishes to the Culminis crew through the upcoming transition period.

"The core services will be available to the new volunteer Culminis community and INETA as well as other associations such as PASS," writes Graham. "We think this is particularly advantageous to the community as a whole, as it ensures that Microsoft support is available to all User Groups and not just IT Pro groups."

Got a comment? Graham is really interested in your feedback.

Last week I gave a Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) presentation at the Portland Area .NET Users Group (PADNUG). I figured it's summer, a couple of days ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, I should be prepared to have six people in attendance. But, in truth, it was around to 30. Not bad considering the competition. And it was great group for breaking in my new WF talk with several excellent questions and comments from the audience. And there was general beer drinking and WF merriment at Gustav's afterwards.

A PDF of the slides is available for you to download and enjoy.

Increase and decrease font size from the keyboard. I got tied up in traffic on the way to the talk, which discombobulated me slightly, and I forgot to bump up the font sizes in Visual Studio the way I always do. Thankfully, someone called the small fonts to my attention. As if on queue, Rich Claussen talked me through Sara Ford's Visual Studio Tip #242: "Did you know… You can bind macros to keyboard shortcuts (or how to quickly increase / decrease your text editor font size)?" That totally rocks. Thanks, Rich. Thanks, Sara.

Change font and size of IntelliSense. While I was looking that tip, I ran across an equally awesome tip for presenters on Sara's blog, "How to change the font and font size for Intellisense: Statement Completion, Parameter Info, and Quick Tips." I can see this one will be really handy for presentations where I am using IntelliSense to discover and explore some kind of object model. Nice.

Our story so far... Michael Eaton started it and tagged Sarah Dutkiewicz who in turn tagged Jeff Blankenburg and he turned around and tagged Josh Holms who did the tag thing to Larry Clarkin who so totally tagged Dan Rigby who put the tag on Chad Campbell who played his tagster card on Pete Brown who taggerized Shawn Wildermuth and he tagulated Julie Lerman who tagified Camey Combs and she tagged me. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

How old were you when you first started programming? I was 12 years old and access to computers were damn hard to come by in 1972. There was a PDP-8e in the basement of the math department building at Oregon State University where my father was earning his PhD. As children of a grad student, my brother and then I were allowed to use it. There was also a student-built 60-bit glass storage computer down there, much larger and far less useful as far as I could see.

How did you get started in programming? I played around with both of those computers for a few months, poking my way around some basic concepts of assembly language. Then I got a used copy of the textbook for Basic programming, and a small student account for the CDC-6600 in the new computer center.

What was your first language? I dinked aroudn with the PDP-8e assembly language, but didn't master it, so that doesn't count. That means good old Basic was my first language. Dad finished his PhD and we moved to Bellevue, Washington. After some searching around, my brother and I got a Xerox educational grant for a study group of junior- and senior-high school students to buy Fortran textbooks and some time on Xerox Sigma 9s to hone our skills. Hey, man, don't horde all the Hollerith constants, okay?

What was the first real program you wrote? The first program that I got paid for, if that makes it real, was in college. I wrote a pretty large simulation of the effects of Saturn's moons on its rings for a physics professor. That was in C.

What languages have you used since you started programming? Basic, Fortran, C, Pascal, C++, Forth, IA (x86) assembler, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and XSLT. I've experimented with a dozen others, stuff like Cω, Haskell, and F#.

What was your first professional programming gig? I took a year off from college in 1979 and landed a job with a small time-sharing firm, doing custom programming as well as operating a few PDP-11/70s. I remember working on several small projects, one of them was tracking oil well shareholders and productions. Another was running statistics on horse races.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming? Absolutely yes. Without a moment's hesitation.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? Cultivate a passion for learning. Everything in software development changes all the time. If you don't love learning new stuff all the time, you are in for a rough ride.

What's the most fun you've ever had... programming? Gosh, that is a tough one. Once I wrote a call-graph profiler for a language that didn't have one, and used it to analyze and boost performance about eight-fold. The combination of writing the tool and applying it was totally cool.

Who are you calling out?  Friends, please forgive me: Scott Hanselman, Sam Gentile, Adam Kinney, Jesus Rodriguez, and Pat Helland.

This week Microsoft named my employer, Fiserv, as winner of the Global ISV Line of Business Partner of the Year for 2008. According to Microsoft's press release, the awards "honor Microsoft Registered, Microsoft Certified and Microsoft Gold Certified partners that delivered exemplary solutions for their customers during the past year."

Allison L. Watson, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft said, "The Partner of the Year Awards recognize the incredible innovation and value that Microsoft partners are delivering to our customers. The winners and finalists [...] have helped raise the standard for delivery of customer solutions and support. It is a privilege to recognize their work in designing and deploying exemplary customer solutions built on Microsoft technologies."

Fiserv's press release observes that our company is the only financial services partner to win this award. President and CEO, Jeffrey Yabuki, stated "We are honored to have been chosen by Microsoft as the first financial services partner to receive this global award. t is our mission to deliver differentiated technology solutions which help our clients achieve best-in-class results. We will continue to find innovative ways to extend our partnership with Microsoft to deliver value to Fiserv's clients today, and into the future."

Examples cited of these solutions led off with "Fiserv's next generation of the Voyager online banking product from Corillian, [which] leverages Web 2.0 features, including Microsoft .NET 3.5 ASP.NET, and enables banks to offer a differentiated and improved user experience to grow their online customer base and improve customer satisfaction." In case you lost your scorecard, Corillian was acquired by CheckFree in June 2007, and they, in turn, were acquired by Fiserv in December 2007.

Thanks to everyone at Fiserv and Microsoft who helped make this award possible!

Winners and finalists will be honored at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, July 7 - 10, 2008. (Houston in July?) The guest speaker at the conference is 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of Garmeen Bank, banker to the poor.

I've been a fan of Edward Tufte since I first pulled his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information down off the shelf at Powell's Books and peered inside. Tufte has been termed by The New York Times "the Leonardo da Vinci of data," and four beautiful and powerful books have won 40 awards. A professor emeritus at Yale, he taught statistical evidence, information design, and interface design.

Tufte presents a one-day course "Presenting Data and Information" in a number of cities throughout the world each year. Not only is his topic fascinating, and his content the very best, but his masterful presentation and delivery are spellbinding. I am fortunate to have taken his class twice: the second time I got even more out of it than the first. He is that good.

Tufte is presenting his class in Portland at the Portland Art Museum on Wednesday, July 16, 2008. Register early, his classes often fill up quickly

Other cities on his speaking schedule this year include Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

The day-long course includes all four of Tufte's books, and the class's overall structure guides you through some of the major topics in each book. That's makes the $380 fee a great value and worthwhile investment.

Expand your mind. Change how you think about, design, and present information.

My brother is looking to hire someone with a pilot's license (need not be current) and general purpose database and computer skills. He works at a large aerospace company in Seattle. Interested? Click the E-mail link and let me know.

My friend Patrick Cauldwell will be talking on The Code Is The Easy Part on June 12, 2008 at 7 PM at OGI in Portland. His talk addresses of continuous integration in theory and practice. The talk is free and open to the public, please register at the above link.

The Code Is The Easy Part
Patrick Cauldwell
Sponsored by Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN)
OGI School of Science and Engineering, Wilson Clark Center
6:00 PM networking and pizza, 7:00 PM seminar

Patrick is also the recent author of Code Leader: Using People, Tools, and Processes to Build Successful Software on Wrox Press. To get a sense of where the book goes, read Patrick's post This I believe... the developer edition. Scott Hanselman wrote the forward to Code Leader and blogged some comments on the book.

With the TechEd 2008 Developers conference next week, Microsoft has announced the agenda for PDC 2008 including sessions and unsessions (don't ask questions, just go there.) PDC 2008 happens October 27-30, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. There is an early-bird registration discount of $200 until August 15, off of the full conference price of $2,395 USD.

Start making plans now.

Microsoft DreamSpark is a program for students at accredited colleges and universities in 11 countries to get free copies of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Microsoft Expression Studio, Windows Server 2003 and the XNA Game Studio.

Get started with DreamSpark today and spark your own dream.

DreamSpark is hosted on Channel 8, Microsoft's site specifically for students. It is a sister to Channel 9 and Channel 10. There are some great resources, as well as serious fun to be had on these websites.

Here is a blog from a US student who is studying in Chengdu, China, the provincial capital city near the epicenter of the massive earthquake on May 12. He's in an exchange program between the University of Washington and Sichuan University. His first-hand accounts of what is happening there add an interesting perspective that complements what we hear in the news.

He has also helped create China Earthquake Aid (CEA) at chinaearthquakeaid.org for collecting donations to deliver aid to the communities most affected by the disaster. They are working through the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students, and the University of Washington Combined Fund Drive. Visit their website to find out how you can help.

This weekend I was one of the judges at the Oregon Game Project Challenge 1.0 (OGPC). This state-wide competition had teams of high school students presenting games they had created using GameMaker around this year's theme of energy. The competition was held at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, and sponsored by the TechStart Education Foundation in affiliation with the Oregon University System.

The range of work we saw was amazing, and some of it was simply astounding. The competition was arranged in five categories — programming, user experience, presentation, research and development, and teamwork — with trophies awarded to the top two teams in each category, plus first- and second-prize champion awards. The first-place champion award winner was PHRED (Philomath High Robotics Engineering Division) which scored very well across the categories. As their team name belies, they also competed in the Oregon regional FIRST Robotics Competition. They took home two awards from that competition, and a flier announcing the OGPC 1.0 competition. Way to go, Philomath!

The judges were divided into panels, with different panels judging the technical and presentation categories. With 21 teams attending (there were a few no-shows), each panel saw about one-third of the teams. After judging the teams, all of the judges gathered to deliberate. The challenge here, as head judge Chris Brooks put it, was to try to bring some objectivity into a highly subjective process. It was hard to level-set the judging, and absolutely fascinating listening to what the judges had to say about the teams they saw. We made some difficult decisions, and I was really satisfied with the final results.

Great job to all of the teams who took part, and to everyone who made OGPC 1.0 come together in a few short months. I am looking forward to seeing next year's competition.

If your TechEd 2008 plans include arriving the day before the conference, then there's a party with your name on it.

For the TechEd Developers 2008 conference, get down with Party With Palermo: TechEd 2008 Developers Edition on Monday, 2 June 2008. This is the pre-conference party that started it all, hosted by affable MVP Jeffrey Palermo. Visit the website and submit your name so they know you are coming. I'll be there.

For the TechEd IT Professionals 2008 conference, say hello to Party with the Pros: The IT Pro Party on Monday, 9 June 2008. Your sponsoring host is Doug Spindler of Pacific IT Pros, and independent nonprofit association. Visit the website and request a Golden Ticket if you want to get in.

Both parties will be held at the fabulous Glo Lounge, just blocks away from the conference venue.

And if you are with a corporation or organization that wants to be seen, there are sponsorship opportunities available for both of these high-profile, high-visibility shin-digs.

Time sure has a way of creeping up on you when you're not looking. This Friday, 2 May 2008, is the last change to save $200 on TechEd 2008 conference registration.

If you're just waking up and smelling the coffee, due to the popularity of this conference in recent years, this year TechEd is two separate conferences on two subsequent weeks. TechEd Developers 2008 is 3–6 June 2008, and TechEd IT Professionals 2008 is 10–13 June 2008, both in Orlando, Florida, USA.

I am looking forward to the new split-week format. The last few TechEds have so large it's been easy to feel lost in the vast sea of attendees. While I am certain that this year won't exactly be intimate, it will be more approachable and on the whole a better experience for all concerned.

Join in the fun at BarCamp Portland 2008 this weekend. It is a free developer event for people to share and learn from each other. The content is determined by the attendees at the event. Friday evening is a kickoff reception, session planning and networking. Saturday and Sunday are the real-deal BarCamp sessions.

All activities are at CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand, Portland, OR, 97214. Be sure to register at Upcoming.

The new, redesigned INETA website launched and it is well worth checking out. INETA is the world-wide association of .NET user groups, and the new website makes it even easier to find local user groups, locate speakers in the Speakers Bureau, watch INETA Live videos, and much more.

I have been involved in a number of ways with INETA since 2002. In fact, Bob Goodearl and I co-chair the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd Developers 2008 on behalf of the .NET community under the auspices of INETA. They are good folks.

Kudos to everyone who's devoted time and effort to the site redesign — ineta.org is looking good!

I attended the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle and Redmond, Washington last week. Great technology and it is always nice to mingle with 1,700 of my closest übernerd friends. Monday and Thursday we were all together in Seattle's WSCTC for keynotes, general meetings, and Open Spaces sessions. That formed the crunchy outer shell around the dense chewy inner nougat of breakout sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday held at various locations on the Redmond campus.

I attended the Connected Systems Division (CSD) track, where the first session answered one question on everyone's mind, "can we blog/twitter/podcast/text/talk about the track sessions?" There were several answers: no, no, no, no, and no. Okay, we are allowed to say that we were at the MVP Summit in the CSD track, and that we talked about Oslo. And that's it. Here goes:

I went to the MVP Summit and attended the CSD track. We talked about Oslo. It was cool.

Now what else can I talk about? Great Party with Palermo on Sunday evening. On Monday, Sean O'Driscoll, who will be leaving Microsoft shortly, gave a great speech about community. I liked the Open Spaces sessions on Monday afternoon, they were fairly similar in nature to Birds-of-a-Feather sessions that I help run at TechEd and PDC, so I was right at home. Michelle Laroux Bustamante led a WCF discussion, and Roman Kiss talked about his WCF null channel on Code Project. It was great to catch up with Roman on several issues during the Summit. Monday evening I I geeked it up with Sam Gentile and other folks from Neudesic, and then I ducked out of the reception to work on the TechEd BOF sessions.

At Tuesday night's CSD dinner I had the pleasure of dining with Don Box, and then discussing deployment woes and aspirations with Sasha. I was so engrossed in the conversation I didn't realized everyone else had left the restaurant, and sprinted back to the shuttle bus just in time. Wednesday night was the attendee party at the EMP, where I had some fun sharing around my new light-up juggling balls. Lots of geeks juggle.

Thursday we heard keynote sessions and Q&A with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzy and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. Ozzy's keynote was interesting, but I personally felt it missed the mark on being inspiring. In fairness, MVPs are a tough crowd.  Ballmer, by contrast, is a dynamic character on and off the stage, and had some good answers to tough questions. Thursday afternoon I was back on campus for some follow-up CSD sessions about some very exciting technology.

Thursday evening I met up with Australian Regional Director Adam Cogan and we had dinner and discussed versioning for services. Adam was asking all the right questions. How come we don't have any of the right answers? And why aren't they baked into the platform?

Friday the Summit was over, but I had some meetings on campus. While waiting for a public transit bus from Seattle to Redmond, I got an added bonus to my trip: Pat Helland walked up an introduced himself. As luck would have it, that's his daily commute bus. We had a great conversation on the ride in.

All in all, it was a great geek week.

I will be presenting a talk at PDX WebFoot this Saturday, April 12, 2008 that covers virtually every feature introduced in C# 2.0 and 3.0.

Whirlwind Tour of C# 2.0 and 3.0
Stuart Celarier — 2:30 – 3:30 pm 

Microsoft has been working hard on changing how we write and think about code for years. Many .NET developers today still work with C# 1.0 — or use newer versions but don't use many of the new features. C# 3.0 has been released, so let's look at what's changed. In this lightning fast session we'll cover virtually every new feature of C# added since 2003. That way you can make smart decisions about which technologies to pursue without getting lost or overwhelmed. Fasten your seatbelts, we're going for a ride!

PDX WebFoot is part of The Code Trip. It is free and open to the public. Please register through Upcoming.

The event runs from 1:00 pm to 7:00 pm, including dinner, and is located at OGI's Wilson Clark Center, 20000 NW Walker Road, Beaverton, Oregon. Other presenters include Adam Kinney, Walt Ritscher, Eric Mork, Kelly White, and the Code Trip Crew. They will be presenting and drilling into a load insanely great Silverlight goodness from the MIX08 Conference.

I hope to see some of you there!

The InnoTech 2008 conference is here in Portland, Oregon, April 16 – 17, 2008, at the Oregon Convention Center. There are a lot of events included in the conference or associated with it. You may be particularly interested in two of those events.

The Developers track runs on Wednesday, April 16, and Thursday, April 17, and features ten sessions. A number of my friends and colleagues are presenting:

• Erik Mork, Silverlight 2: How Web Applications will be Made
• Andrew Hay, Understanding LINQ
• Patrick Cauldwell, The Code Is the Easy Part
• Michael Lynch, Patterns for Separating UI Code from Business Logic
• Travis Illig, Unit Testing with TypeMock

And the other sessions look great, too. A big hand to my fellow SAO Development SIG committee member, Mark Lawler, for putting the track together.

The Open Source Summit runs on Thursday, April 17. One of the many things that I really respect about the open source community is their creativity when it comes to presentations and conferences. The Open In Oregon Lightning Talks session features seven snapshot 'lightning talks' by an outstanding panel of presenters. Nice.

InnoTech 2008 is presented by the Software Association of Oregon and EasyStreet Online Services.

I am delighted and honored to receive Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 2008 Award for Connected System Developer. This is my third consecutive year receiving the MVP award. Thank you to the folks in Microsoft's MVP program and Connected Systems Division for this award.

Microsoft's Connected Systems Division owns the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), CardSpace, and BizTalk Server (BTS) technologies. BTS gains a new focus and considerable prominence in Project Oslo.

Thanks so much, I really appreciate this award.

If you are ever attending a BOF session and the moderator is pitching a product or delivering a presentation, call him or her on it...

Hunter in Roanoke, Virginia, has a few blog posts about Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions at the TechEd 2008 conferences. I love the humorously title of his post "Birds of a Vendor?" where he asks a great question:

A quick look through the Birds of a Feather voting area (for the IT Pro Conference) shows a lot of sessions that appear to be sponsored by vendors. I wonder if they will turn into a sustained marketing pitch.

Absolutely not!

I posted a reply in the comments. Here's one part that I want to share with everyone attending BOF:

I absolutely agree with you, and we have heard loud and clear from past conferences, that BOFs are not appropriate for marketing products or services. Nor are they presentations or lectures. We communicate that to all of our moderators. Okay, sometimes those old presentation and marketing habits are hard to break, and that’s where you, the good old community, come in. If you are ever attending a BOF session and the moderator is pitching a product or delivering a presentation, call him or her on it. Be polite, but be firm. You can say that all of you came to discuss the subject together, and you’d like to hear what other people in the room think about the subject. [More...]

And a minor technical correction: vendors don't sponsor the BOF sessions they moderate. They volunteer just like the rest of the moderators and hosts.

Proposals for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are accepted through Wednesday, April 2, and voting continues through Monday, April 7, 2008. Use these links to propose a BOF session for TechEd Developer 2008 or TechEd IT Professional 2008.

I keep getting asked this question, so I bet others are asking as well.

Yes, the dates for PDC08 have been announced: 27 – 30 October 2008 in Los Angeles, California. Save the date, and clear the time with your boss, spouse, entourage coordinator, indoor Ultimate Frisbee league, and anyone else who normally has a lock on your coordinates.

No, no other details have been announced yet. I think that Microsoft focused on  TechEd 2008 at the moment.

But you can subscribe to the PDC event RSS feed so that updates are delivered straight to you.

Get your hands on slides, code samples, and whatnots from the Boise Code Camp 2008 sessions. My session just points back to posts on this blog: no surprises there. That is all.

The Portland Adobe Developer User Group is hosting Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, on Thursday, 20 March 2008 at 6:00 PM, speaking on "What's Possible in a Post-Web 2.0 World?" at PCC Sylvania, Library Room 112. Networking begins at 5:30 PM.

Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new ideas built on Web Services. You will also learn how others, empowered by technology advances—known as “Web Scale Computing”—created businesses that weren’t practical until recently... (More...)

Amazon has done phenomenal things with Amazon Web Services (AWS), so this ought to be great.

See the Upcoming Meetings for the Portland Adobe Developer User Group for additional details.

Slides are now available from the talk I gave with Jason Mauer, The (Re-)emergence of Declarative Programming, at Software Association of Oregon Development SIG on February 21, 2008.

The session explored declarative programming and its history, then examined recent interest in declarative styles of programming, particularly on Microsoft platforms, and what forces are driving the resurgence of declarative programming.

Join the SAO Social Network site (if you're not already a member), and go to the DevSIG group to access the slides.

Proposals have been coming in for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at TechEd Developer 2008. Take a look at the ones we've received so far, and vote for your favorites.

And now is the time to submit a BOF proposal of your own. As I've said, this is a great way to get involved in the professional development community and connect with people who share your passion about some aspect of technology, community, or careers. I hear that moderating a BOF session also looks good on resumes.

Do it today so other people can vote for your session!

Well it's eight o'clock in Boise, Idaho.
I'll find my limo driver. Mister, take us to the show.
— What's Your Name, Lynyrd Skynyrd

Flying in to Boise means getting to see the beautiful surrounding mountains from the air. Boise is situated in a valley basin with mountains all around it. With the winter snow on them they are simply stunning. And the view from the ground isn't bad either.

I got in Friday in time for the presenter party with food, drink, familiar faces, and an agile exercise of replacing the schedule in the attendee packs. Scott Hanselman was in the house, fresh in from MIX08, with his laptop out on the bar evangelizing to the bartender. It was a nice, warm welcome to town.

Boise Code Camp had all appearances of a great success. Scuttlebutt has it that the final attendance at the door was around 375. Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle! Boise has just raised the bar for code camps in the northwest. You guys rock.

My talk, The New Programming Model — C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5, was well received. I had 300 slides and a ten minute demo in 60 minutes, and not a single bullet point anywhere. Okay, some slides only had one or three words on them. I got some great feedback on the talk, thanks campers!

I am not going to post my slides since the format leans so heavily on the delivery. And even compressed that is a pretty hefty download. Instead, I am announcing here that I'll be working with a friend at Microsoft to record the session as a series of short videos for your nerd viewing pleasure. We plan to get the first ones in the can this week, and we may need another week or two on production and working out hosting. Watch the blog for details.

In the meantime, here are some great starting points for digging deeper into C# 2.0 and 3.0 features.

• What’s New in the C# 2.0 Language and Compiler, MSDN Library
• Overview of C# 3.0, MSDN Library
• Create Elegant Code With Anonymous Methods, Iterators, And Partial Classes, Juval Löwy, MSDN Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 3

Inspiration for the presentation format came from Dick Hardt's keynote address at OSCON 2005 on Identity 2.0; and he, in turn, was inspired by the lectures of law prof  Lawrence Lessig.

I enjoyed the other sessions that I went to at camp. I am only disappointed that the laws of physics prevented me from being in two sessions at the same time. Mark Miller of Devexpress got crazy passionate about creating great UX for two solid hours, but I had to duck out after the first one to go give my talk.

The afters party was a nice affair, and we toured the fabled and swank Code Trip bus. So that's how rock stars tour! I'll be meeting up with the Code Trip crew again when they hit Portland on April 10 for the PADNUG MIX-A-LOT, and then as they make wind up their tour in Seattle for the Microsoft MVP Summit.

A great big note of appreciation goes to this year's camp director, David Starr, and to his personal support team and lovely wife, Eleanor Starr. Thanks also to Chris Brandsma, chief session wrangler, and Richard Hundhausen for fine hospitality. Congratulations to everyone on a superlative code camp!

If you're going to TechEd Developer 2008, June 3–6, then the time is now to propose a Birds-of-a-Feather session for the conference.

Get involved

I volunteer with INETA as co-chair of the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd Developers 2008, and I encourage you to get involved and give back to the professional community by leading a Birds-of-a-Feather session. "Birds of a what?" I hear you ask.

Okay, imagine you're at a conference with, say, about 10,000 of your closest geek buddies. And you know that somewhere among the teaming multitudes there must be two or three dozen people who share your passion about that special topic that is near and dear to your heart. How do you find each other, connect, and exchange ideas? You hold a Birds-of-a-Feather session, that's how.

A Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session is an open discussion, not a presentation or lecture. No slides or demos allowed. Let's just sit down and talk. And after many hours of conference breakout sessions with talking heads in darkened rooms, it is truly refreshing to turn the lights on and talk together as peers.

BOF sessions are community driven. The topics are proposed by you, selected by you, moderated by you, and attended by you — you the conference attendees, you the professional community. BOFs are about what you want to discuss, separate from the conference agenda and sponsors.

This is your chance to facilitate a discussion with others at the conference who share your passion about your topic. You don't need to be a recognized expert or rock star, just have an understanding and keen interest in the topic, and be willing to moderate a session. Moderating a BOF is also a great way to get your name out in the community.

Critical acclaim

Over the past several years, INETA, Culminis (our sister organization on the IT Professional side of the house), and the entire community have stepped forward to make the BOF sessions a valuable and vital part of TechEd. And Microsoft has matched our enthusiasm with their commitment. BoF sessions now run concurrent with the conference breakout sessions throughout the day. Microsoft hosts an All-BOF evening catered with food and drink and plenty of BOF sessions. And BOF sessions have been integrated in the conference materials and online scheduling system. Last year, hundreds of people participated in the BOFs. Together we have achieved great things.

Jon Flanders of Pluralsight rates Birds-of-a-Feather sessions among the three best things at TechEd last year.

Get involved now!

These essential conversations cannot happen without you proposing and leading BOFs that are important to you.

Please propose a Birds-of-a-Feather session for TechEd Developers 2008. We are seeking your BoF proposals by March 19, 2008.

Yes, there are two TechEd North America 2008 conferences

If you haven't heard, Microsoft is dividing the immensely popular TechEd into two separate conferences — TechEd Developers , June 3–6, 2008, and TechEd IT Professionals, June 10–13, 2008 — in Orlando, Florida. Here are some links to help you find your way to the BOFs in each conference

TechEd Developer, June 3–6, 2008 — Conference home | TechEd Community Page | BOF Proposals | BOF Community Sponsor is INETA

TechEd IT Professional, June 10–13, 2008 — Conference home | TechEd Community Page | BOF Proposals | BOF Community Sponsor is Culminis

I've got my tickets in hand and I am heading to beautiful Idaho this Saturday, 8 March 2008, for Boise Code Camp 2008. I attended last year's edition, and it was a first-class event all the way. This year there will be 63 sessions (including mine) and 46 presenters, along with lunch and dinner packed in a day. And like code camps everywhere, it is always free. If you are anywhere near the area, it is not too late to register to attend.

My session, a Lawrence Lessig-style romp through everything new in C#, is at 3:30 PM.

The New Programming Model — C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5

Microsoft has been working hard on changing how we write and think about code for years. Many .NET developers today still work with C# 1.0 on .NET 1.1 — or use newer versions but don't know about or use many of the new features. C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 have been released, so let's look at what's changed. In this lightning-fast session we'll cover virtually every new feature of C# and the CLR added since 2003. That way you can make smart decisions about which technologies to pursue without getting lost or feeling overwhelmed. Fasten your seatbelts, we're going for a ride!

The day concludes with a party with the Code Trip crew. I met Jason last night for microbrews and he was filling my head with all the cool stuff they've got going on with the trip and the bus. They're picking up the bus in Las Vegas tomorrow, winging through Salt Lake City, and will be in Boise on Saturday. I want a stem to stern tour of this magic bus.