Here's a handy trick for whipping C# using declarations into shape. Visual Studio 2008 will remove unused using declarations, or sort them, or both in one shot. Here's how.

In Visual Studio 2008, open a .cs file. Right-click anywhere in the block of using declarations at the top of the file and select Organize Usings. Now you can select Remove Unused Usings, Sort Usings, or Remove and Sort which does both.

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 grabbed a taxi in Seattle the other day, and asked my driver my customary question, "Where are you from?"

"Ah," he said, "now that is a very interesting question. Maybe you mean, 'where do I come from first?' is that it?" Well, sure, that's a good place to start. "Very well, how about if I answer your question with a question?" I didn't know there was going to be a test on this ride or I might have studied up. "What was the first country to recognize the sovereignty of the United States?" OMG, today's quiz subject is US history.

Thinking, thinking. I remembered that Benjamin Franklin was off in France somewhere around that time. Maybe he secured French recognition of the newly minted United States. "France," I confidently declared.

"Nope. I'll give you a hint. Do you want a hint from classical music or classic rock?"

Let's go for classic rock.

"Crosby, Stills and Nash sang a song called Marrakesh Express, so what country is Marrakech in?"

"Morocco." Whew! I know that by luck: there's a Moroccan restaurant in Portland named Marrakesh. "Really, Morocco?"

"Yes, in 1777!" Cool, I did not know that. I don't think that I even knew that once and then forgot it. But Morocco? Really?

Yes, Morocco really was the first country to recognize the independence of the United States of America, with references cited.

We arrived at my destination and I paid my driver and thanked him for the history lesson. And we didn't get to where else he was from.

Now I've got some reading to do.

Compensable, adjective: that which can be compensated. Yes, it really is a word. I was under the mistaken impression that I had to say compensatable, but that's not even a word. So WS-BusinessActivity describes compensable activities.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer, used his April 8 keynote address at RSA Conference 2008 to introduce End to End Trust, a Microsoft initiative built on authenticating identities and securing Web-based transactions and communications.

"We don't want this to be interpreted as a Microsoft play. We're saying that these are the concepts that we generally support and we've put them together in this white paper and we're asking the industry to talk about it...”

— George Stathakopoulos, general manager of security response, Microsoft, quoted in eWeek article

Craig Mundie's End to End Trust keynote address from the conference is available as webcast or transcript. Microsoft's press release provides an overview, and a related eWeek article frames the issue for a broader audience. The real goods, including the cornerstone whitepaper, are at www.microsoft.com/endtoendtrust.

For those attending the Microsoft MVP Summit, here's some late breaking news. Patrick Smacchia (C# MVP) has a talk on NDepend that's a new addition to the schedule. It will be 5PM, Wednesday, 16 April 2008 in the MSCC. The session highlights new features of NDepend, including integration with code coverage metrics from NCover or VSTS.

If you aren't aware of NDepend, it a freaking amazing code analysis tool. It generates seriously deep code metrics, and provides tools for analyzing and visualizing the results. In the Documentation section of the website you can find a pdf "placemat" for understanding the code metrics which I created with help from Scott Hanselman and Patrick Cauldwell.

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!