DevBlog

While at the MVP Summit in Seattle, I was able to ask Steve Ballmer a question about better support and interaction between MVPs and local Microsoft offices. I didn't blog about this before because much of the Summit was under Non-Disclosure Agreement, but a friend pointed me to a
transcript on the Microsoft web site. Here's the transcript of our exchange (Toby Richards is the General Manager of the MVP program).

QUESTION: More and more often we're being encouraged to engage with the
local offices, but I've identified four things internal at Microsoft that makes
this very difficult to do. The first one is, and before I get to I've
talked to other people around the country, and they seem to have similar issues.
The first is, we have not had MSDN events in Salt Lake for two years. We're told
there's not enough numbers of attendees there. We sold out our Visual Studio
2008 launch faster than most other cities within a thousand mile radius that are
having events. That tells me the numbers exist.

Second of all, I was told by one of our local developer evangelists,
his budget is 25 percent of what it was two years ago. This makes it very
difficult for him to engage with us.

Third is that it seems that the evangelists turnover about every two years,
and this one is going to be more of a thing for Toby. I found out this week,
they do not have access to our MVP profiles, even if we check Microsoft visible,
and I understand that it's a security thing, put another checkbox on there that
it's visible for local offices.

And, finally, when we do find out who these evangelists are, oftentimes
it's like going to an e-mail black hole, we hear nothing back from them.
(Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: Okay, a couple of reactions. If you'd like, I've made notes.
Mostly I think that wasn't a question. That was very good input. I do want to
pushback a little bit just so you understand where we're coming from, and then
I'll tell you what I'm going to do. We did make a conscious choice a couple
three years ago, maybe three or four years ago, to move more of our evangelism,
and more of our MSDN event style activity online, to do more things through kind
of online events, and presentations, and the like. We've gotten a lot more
people to attend net, but it doesn't surprise me that we have I don't
know, a 25 percent budget, no MSDN events in Salt Lake, that strikes me as odd,
too. But we did make the conscious choice. Bad choice in your opinion to move
more online?

QUESTION: No, I think it's good to move more online, but let's keep an eye
on what's happening locally still. That's vitally important.

STEVE BALLMER: Okay. So what I will do, one other comment, if you send
e-mail to somebody who works at Microsoft, and they don't return it, I'm angry.
Feel free any time you're not getting an e-mail response from one of our people,
just forward it to me. (Cheers and applause.) It will help, believe me. You will
help me improve Microsoft, and I bet we can improve the response rates awfully
quickly. I give out my e-mail address often, SteveB, SteveB, SteveB, okay. I do
it all the time. And the truth is, I don't get that much e-mail from customers.
The customers don't waste your time. MVPs don't waste my time. People send
legitimate questions, concerns, ideas. Computers send spam, not human beings, by
and large. And if you're not getting a response, seriously, send me one or two,
I guarantee you things will clear up pretty darned quick.
On your other
comment, what I will do is, I'll step back and kind of take an all up look with
our folks on what we've done in terms of physical evangelism versus virtual
evangelism, and I'll take your input, I'll hear what we're doing, and if I agree
with you I'll give them a little bit of a push, and hopefully we'll get it into
a little bit better place.

QUESTION: Thank you.

STEVE BALLMER: Thank you. (Applause.)

TOBY RICHARDS: I would just add, in terms of the engagement with our sales
crew, that's a huge responsibility of my team, our profiling system has outgrown
its capability, and I told the team, hey, we have a product called MSCRM, maybe
we could start using that. Anyway, we'll take actions. By the way, my e-mail is TobyR@Microsoft.com.

STEVE BALLMER: Say it loudly, Toby. TobyR@Microsoft.com.

You can find the complete transcript of Steve's hour with the MVPs here. We also heard from Ray Ozzie (transcript here).

Labels: MVP

A new VFP 9.0 SP2 help file is now available for download from the VFP home page. One issue that people are running into is that pages don't display or links aren't available in the file. If this happens to you, open Windows Explorer, right-click on the file and select Properties. Then click on Unblock.

Labels: VFP

I got this email today from Vision Pace. While I haven't attended the Boot Camp, I've heard really great things about it.



The next VFP Boot Camp will be in Kansas City, Missouri, May 12-14, 2008 Registration ends on April 24, 2008 for the highly-acclaimed VFP Boot Camp. This event delivers three jam-packed days of solid, hands-on learning. From the fundamentals of VFP development through the very latest VFP 9.0 features, this boot camp is designed to quickly get your VFP skills up to speed. Attendees will receive a 500 page manual in both print and electronic format. For more information visit http://visionpace.com/developereducation.html or email info@visionpace.com. To register call 888-904-7900.

MVPs from all over the world are meeting today in Remond at the annual MVP Summit. Several Fox MVPs are here and attending several different sessions, not just talking about VFP. Much of what we're told is under Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and can't be discussed here.

However, last night we had the FoxPro Product Team dinner. We were able to meet with Alan Griver, Ken Levy, Calvin Hsia, Richard, Aleksy, and others that have been on the team over the years. It was a great meal and really good to see old Microsoft friends again.

After all the the technical sessions today, we're heading over to the Experience Music Project (EMP) for the MVP party. Tomorrow is the last day of the Summit. It will be executive day and we'll hear from Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer before a farewell lunch.

New updates for VFP are coming from Microsoft. There are not specific dates, because these things are still working their way through the large Microsoft ecosystem, but yag reported today the following two updates:

- Help file has been updated to fix the index problem with the SP help file.

- There was a bug reported that the report toolbar becomes unusable in the new style report preview.

So, what about the other SP2 bugs that have been reported? We discussed some of the more critical bugs in the core with yag, Milind, and Richard. yag could not guarantee that the high priority bugs will be fixed, but he will see what he can do.

I was informed there were some broken links on my updated web site. The Crystal Reports documents were pointing to files on my drive instead of the web site. I've fixed the links and checked they're working.

I've made a facelift to my web site. Some older articles have been removed and all current articles are now in PDF format with new file names. If there is an older article that I removed but you think should be online, let me know.

Labels: UtahDNUG, VS2008

The Code Trip guys shot some video at the Boise Code Camp and it's now online. They talked to me about being a roadie and the MVP program. You'll see that at about 2:27 into the video. For you old Fox guys (aren't us all old?), you may recognize Richard Hundhausen, who is now big into Visual Studio Team System. Anthony Testi, a Fox dev from Oregon was also a speaker there and several Boise Fox devs were in attendance.

Labels: Code Camp, Code Trip, MVP

If you been waiting to get your hands on FoxRockx, you now can. Single issue and yearly subscriptions are available. If you're in the US, Hentzenwerke is handling subscriptions. If you're not in the US, head over to the German FoxPro User Group.

The topic at last night's meeting of the Utah .Net User Group was NUnit. Kelly Anderson did a fantastic job of explaining the basics, then did a couple of deep dives that didn't get NUnit neophites like me lost in details. I should tell you that Kelly is one of the volunteers working on NUnit 3.0, so he has great passion and knowledge on the topic. Here are things I noted, some of them I already knew, but it's good to review:

- Remember the process of Red, Green, Refactor

- You can run NUnit tests inside the Visual Studio IDE using either TestDriven.Net or Resharper. However, Resharper does not support NUnit addins.

- Everytime you get green, check in

- When you do test driven development (test first development), you naturally get low cohesion between your classes, so they're more loosely coupled. When you develop the standard way, you write the code first and tend to get more tightly coupled classes.

- Kelly recommended using nCover to check your testing coverage.

- I asked Kelly about how to add unit tests to code that you inherit and he recommend the book Working Efficiently with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. The author defines legacy code as anything that doesn't have unit tests.

If you weren't there, you missed a great presentation. I've tried to use NUnit, but have not had good success in setting up the tests and getting everything working. After last night's meeting, I feel better prepared to try it again.

Labels: Utah DNUG

Boise Code Camp was fantastic. It was held this past Saturday on the Boise State University campus. They had 500 people register and about 375 showed up. Amazing! I think we had about 100 at the last Utah Code Camp.

My favorite session was "Architecture Fish Bowl". Think of it as a panel discussion where any audience member can get up and join the panel. When someone does that, a current panel member has to sit in the audience. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman moderated. Some things I picked up from the session:

- Architecture does not equal design. Architecture is far more reaching than a single application. The design fits into the architecture.

- One way you can tell you're doing architecture is if there is governance around it.

- The roll of the architect is to provide direction
- I learned a new term, "Refactorbation". It refers to people who just sit around and tidy code.

- Architects aren't the founatain of all knowledge. They should hold "town meetings" to get the input from other members of their teams.

Richard Hundhausen did a great session on Visual Team System Database Edition. I had never seen this part of Team Suite before, but I'm now convinced it's the only way to do SQL Server database maintenance. You can run tests on your TSQL code, store stored procedures in source control, run code analysis on the TSQL and more.

My third favorite session was one on "Prism", a new package coming out of Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group. Glenn Block, who is on the P&P team was there to show it off and this was the first time Prism had been shown outside of Microsoft. Prism is not a new CAB or part of the Enterprise Library. Prism is designed to manage composite WPF applications. This is where you have a form with a menu, toolbar, and maybe some kind of links on the left-hand side. The main part of the form hosts different plugins that are the main UI. The first public test release is available here.

Other sessions I attended include Service Oriented Architecture and NHibernate. My session on Continuous Integration went very well. I heard great feedback on it after.

The Code Trip crew was there too, shooting video for their site and Channel 9. They asked me about being a Roadie on the bus and about the MVP Program. I'm still waiting for the video to be posted.

Saturday evening, The Code Trip crew sponsored a party at the BSU Hall of Fame. Great food and lots of fun. There were three XBox 360s set up. I tried my hand as a drummer in Rock Band and failed miserably. Not surprising since I'm musically declined.

All in all, Boise Code Camp was fantastic. I'm hoping to make it again next year.

Labels: Boise, Code Camp, The Code Trip

As I write and post this, The Code Trip bus is rolling north on I-15, heading out from Salt Lake City to Boise. This is the same bus that Styx used for their tour.

The guys did a great presentation in SLC on some great new technologies that Microsoft announced at Mix earlier this week in Las Vegas. We saw demos of IE 8, Silverlight 2.0, and Deep Zoom. You can check them out on the Mix site.

After their presentation, we had a geek dinner at Greek Souvlaki (Geek Souvlaki).

We should roll into Boise somewhere between 1 and 2 am, then Code Camp starts promptly at 8:00.

I'll post pictures shortly after I get home Sunday afternoon.

Plan now to attend The Code Trip activities in Salt Lake City. Fresh from MIX, The Code Trip will make its first stop on Friday, March 7 at 3:00 at Franklin Covey. Then join us for dinner at Greek Souvlaki. Perhaps it should be Geek Souvlaki on Friday evening.

Mark your calendars now for the Utah Spring Code Camp. It's set for Saturday, April 26 at Neumont University. Registration is now open at www.utcodecamp.com. I'll be presenting on an as yet, undetermined topic.

Need to support web services and find the VFP doesn't handle WS* extensions, complex types, security and more? Do you need to develop an application that can access the same business logic from the web or the local network? Do you need to support message queuing? How about COM+? Maybe you need to create a loosely-coupled Service-Oriented Architecture but find it can't be done in VFP.

Windows Communication Foundation maybe your answer. It is a .Net technology the intended to replace a slew of technologies with a single, easy-to-use API, that allow much of the configuration to be changed at runtime by editing an XML file.

I've posted a new article, Using Windows Communication Foundation with Visual FoxPro on my web site. The article shows how to get started with WCF and then how to COM-enable the .Net code and use it from VFP. Enjoy!

I will be speaking at the Boise Code Camp on Saturday, March 8. My topic is "Continuous Integration". I'll show how to work with free tools to get CI working in your shop.

I just got this email from Tim Heuer:

“The Code Trip is a 22-city tour being done by the evangelism team at Microsoft. Salt Lake City is one of our first stops immediately following the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. Come join the greater Utah user groups for a discussion on some of the newest Microsoft technologies. Learn what is powering some of the Code Trip systems with WPF and Silverlight. We’ll bring stuff to give away and we’ll find some place to have a geek dinner afterwards for those who would like to join us. If you are doing something great with .NET technologies, we want to hear from you as well! We’re video logging the entire trip and want to give developers a chance to share their story. Come join the groups at Franklin Covey on March 7 from 3-5pm.”

Watch here for more info.

Developers love to steal other people's code. After all, the problem I'm trying to solve right now has probably already been solved by someone else. Why can't I just get their code and plug it in, maybe with some minor changes? If that code has a copyright on it, I can't do that. There are many web sites where people post sample code that you can use. Microsoft has just opened theirs. It's called Code Gallery. I browsed through the gallery. There's already quite a bit there and you can add to it.

After a long wait, Microsoft has released the Sedna components for Visual FoxPro. Sedna is a collection of libraries, samples and add-ons to Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2. It contains six components: VistaDialogs4COM, Upsizing Wizard, Data Explorer, NET4COM and MY for VFP and DDEX for VFP. Full source code is also included.

You can download Sedna here.

The release of Sedna completes announced work on VFP from Microsoft. However, there are a number of issues with SP2 and lots of requests from the community for an SP3. Hopefully Microsoft will listen.

VisionPace is holding another VFP Boot Camp! If you're just getting into VFP, this is a great place to get going quickly. While I've never attended one, I've heard good things about it.

The next VFP Boot Camp will be in Kansas City, Missouri, February
25-27, 2008

Registration ends on February 6, 2008 for the highly-acclaimed VFP
Boot Camp. This event delivers three jam-packed days of solid,
hands-on learning. From the fundamentals of VFP development through
the very latest VFP 9.0 features, this boot camp is designed to
quickly get your VFP skills up to speed. Attendees will receive a 500
page manual in both print and electronic format.

For more information visit
http://visionpace.com/developereducation.html or email
info@visionpace.com. To register call 888-904-7900.

Last month, Rich Schummer blogged about a new FoxPro magazine called FoxRockx that will begin publishing this quarter. I thought I'd add a bit of trivia about where the name came from.

As you may know, FoxPro history has several tools that were enhancements to existing ones, and each tool added an X to the name, Genscrn became GenscrnX, GenMenu became GenMenuX, Builder became BuilderX. Even the community run VFPX on CodePlex uses this name ends in X concept.

But that's not where FoxRockx came from. It was a typo, an accident. While at the German DevCon in November, Rainer approached several speakers to discuss the idea of starting a new magazine. We were sitting in the lobby of the conference hotel, brainstorming names and I was typing them into a search engine to see what URLs were available. I meant to type FoxRocks, but hit the X by accident. Just about all of us agreed that it was the perfect name, considering the history of ending things in X.

Voila...a magazine title is born.

Microsoft is gearing up to launch Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008. The official world wide launch is February 27 in Los Angeles, but local launch events will be happening through May. For Salt Lake City, the launch event will be May 20 at the downtown Radisson. Register here.

If you're in the Salt Lake City area this Thursday, we'll be doing a Visual Studio Installfest for the .Net User Group. We have a VERY limited number of copies of Visual Studio 2008 Professional that we're giving away. Bring your laptop and sit down to start installing. Watch www.utahdnug.org for details.

Many of you FoxPro developers will remember Robert Green. I first met him a couple of years before he joined Microsoft. He was here in Utah this week visiting friends and we managed to get together on Thursday for skiing at Park City. Temperatures were cold with highs in the single digits, but we had a great time.

For the past five or so years, Microsoft's MVP program has been led by Sean O'Driscoll. During this time, Sean has lead the program to new heights with higher visibility both inside and outside Microsoft. The value that MVPs get from the program, and in turn the value that MVPs can give to the community, has increased tremendously. Frankly, I think we will be hard pressed to thank Sean enough for his passionate support of the program.

Today I received news that Sean has decided to leave Microsoft. It is bittersweet because of his efforts in the program. At the same time, Sean will be forming his own company to help promote the use of social communities. His last day at Microsoft has not been determined nor has his replacement been named, but he will have very big shoes to fill.

Sean, I wish you the best of luck in your new endeavors.

As Microsoft is preparing Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1, it has announced an early release of Office 2007 SP1 that contains dozens of fixes. You can download it now.

Visual Studio 2008, formerly codenamed Orcas is done. MSDN Subscribers, download the bits while they're still fresh.

I first heard of Martin Fowler several years ago at Whilfest in Milwaukee when I attended a session on Refactoring. The session material was based on Martin Fowler's book of the same name. This past summer, I finally got around to reading a book that been on my list for at least two years, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. Holy crap! Why did I wait so long. This book has lots of great information about creating large enterprise systems. However, many of the topics are applicable to smaller applications. There are chapters on web presentation, session state, distribution, domain logic, data source architecture, three just on object-relational mapping and behavior, and lots, lots more. This book should be required reading for anyone developing anything more than small, simple systems. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Business Objects has released Crystal Reports 2008 with some exciting new features such as support for embedded Flash. However, the use of CR2008 for thousands of users is not possible because the RDC component has been removed. If you aren't familiar with the RDC, it is the COM server that you use from COM-based tools such as Visual FoxPro and VB6. IMO, this is a very poor business decision from BO. So, if you're using Crystal Reports with your VFP or VB6 apps, don't bother with Crystal Reports 2008.

I normally don't read PC World and PC Magazine, but usually pick them up at the airport when I travel. I usually find something new or great reviews in them. Once again, I was not disappointed. The best tip I found was in PC World. They referenced a utility that will stop the automatic reboots after running Windows Update.

Now, I know I can configure Windows Update to manually run, but I like the auto download, installation, and notification. What I don't like is being forced to reboot when I'm in the middle of work. The utility is supposed to stop that. The web site says it's for XP, SP2. I've installed it on Vista, but I didn't get it on until after yesterday's updates, so I'll have to wait a month to see if it works.

Download Auto Reboot Remover here.

The German DevCon ended last Saturday. I had two sessions, Windows Communication Foundation with Visual FoxPro and Windows Presentation Foundation with Visual FoxPro. Saturday night we had the annual Speaker's Dinner. In the past Rainer had such exotic foods as giraffe, zebra, sprinbock, and other things. This year did not disappoint.

Sunday was goose dinner at the home of Hans and Gabby Lochman. They are great hosts and the food and conversation was great. Sunday evening I had a late dinner with Andy and Marcia.

Monday morning breakfast was again with Andy and Marcia. They left for the airport shortly after and I went back to my room and napped. About 11:00 I took the streetcar to downtown Frankfurt for some sourvenir shopping, then returned back to the hotel about 3:00.

Rainer picked me up early in the evening and we made the 30 mile drive to his new home. Rainer and Kirsten have a fabulous home in the German countryside. Kirsten made apple pancakes for dinner. I then enjoyed hearing Kirsten's boys play coronet and guitar and I entertained them with a magic trick. After the boys were in bed, there was good conversation with us adults. About 10:00, Kirsten drove me back to the hotel.

I left Frankfurt mid-day Tuesday, filled with great memories and good technical information. It was great to see old friends again and make new ones. The German DevCon is a unique event and one you should not miss. I hope to be back again next year.

In the next session, Andy continued his discussion of design patterns. He covered some more complicated patterns, but again backed each up with real, usable examples. The patterns he convered are: facade, factory, memento, decorator, wrapper, and hook operations. When I get home, I will definately read Andy's white papers and add some of his information to the design patterns topics on my personal wiki.

Andy Kramek is doing two sessions on Design Patterns. I've studied Design Patterns for sometime and have seen several conference presentations on this topic. Andy always has excellent sessions and I was looking forward to this one. As I expected, he did not disappoint. In fact, he did the best job of explaining Design Patterns that I've ever seen. Instead of trying to cover many different patterns, he concentrated on a handful, bridge, strategy, chain of responsibility, mediator, decorator, and wrapper. He presented each one in order, defined what they do, then showed a very clear and simple example of how the pattern is used. He then talked about pros and cons of the pattern. Part is coming up and I am looking forward to it.

This morning I sat through a session on WPF presented by Uwe Habermann and Venelina Jordanova. It was supposed to be another German session. All the slides were in German and Uwe spoke German, but Venelina spoke in English.

They had in interesting approach to using WPF from VFP. They had data and business rules all in VFP and all the UI in WPF. The WPF form would interact with a VFP COM object that handles passing data to/from the form.

My WPF session tomorrow takes a different approach. I show how to mix WPF with VFP or create an ActiveX to host WPF on a VFP form.

I will definately look closer at Uwe and Venelina's code when I get home.

FoxPro is alive and well!!!!

And running in .Net!!!!!

And in SQL Server 2005!!!!

And on the Pocket PC!!!!

And on Linux!!!!

Don't believe me? Check out Gunieu. This a a cool, cool project being developed by Christof Wallenhaupt (sp). Imagine writing VFP code using the VFP IDE, then compiling it into .Net and running it on one of the above platforms. That's what Guineu does for you.

I sat throught Christof's session on Guineu this afternoon. He presented it in German, so if I get something wrong from my translation of the slides and demos, I'm sure he'll correct me. (All the German I know I learned from watching Hogan's Hero's on TV.)

After you install Guineu from the .ZIP file, simply DO GuineuIDE.exe. Currently, Christof has implemented about 70 commands, pver 150 functions, and 13 classes.

This is very, very cool stuff. Go check it out.

After Doug's Vista session, the room filled again for the keynote, "Visual FoxPro 9 and Beyond", presented by yag. Wait! Didn't Microsoft end VFP development? What is this "Beyond" stuff?

Before Alan got started, he talked about Rainer and gave him the Visual FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award. Well done and deserved, Rainer!

Now yag moved onto the meat of the keynote. First, review of the announcement earlier this year. No more development on core VFP. SP2 has been released. Sedna will be released soon. VFPX shared source. The "Beyond" is the community support from VFPX and the upcoming Sedna release.

Unfortunately, Alan had a hard drive failure and could not show his demos.

The conference kicked off this morning with Rainer's welcome. Then, Doug Hennig had the first session, Developing Applications for Vista. He recommends not turning off UAC (I agree). Doug spent quite a bit of time discussing virtulization of program files, user files, and registry values. He showed where to save program data so that it can be found later...and not virtualized.

Even opening files in the FFC causes virtualization, even if you don't save the file. The problem comes when you install SP2. If you previously opened the file, it was virtualized. Then install SP2. If you try to use FFC files, you'll get the old virtualized copy of the file. So, you need to delete the files from the virtualization area after installing SP2. There are lots more issues regarding virtulization. You should refer to Dougs posts (search the web) to find out what you need to do.

The RUN command in VFP does not support elevation, so you can't use it in Vista. The solution is to use ShellExecute with "RunAs" instead.

Installing a program has special needs. If the words "setup" or "update" appead in the name, Vista assumes it will require elevation. If the installer does any user-specifc tasks, it will run for the wrong user (ie the administrator) rather than the standard user. If you also allow the user to launch the application after setup has run, the app will run as administrator. You may need to rethink some of your install process. You may need to handle updates differently because standard users can't write to Program Files.

There are some issues with VFP 9.0 on Vista. The best solution is to upgrade to VFP 9.0, SP2.

After Doug spent lots of time talking about Vista issues and how to overcome them, he spent some time talking about how to take advantage of new Vista features.

The first is to use Segoe font rather than MS Sans Serif. I've said for many years that you should avould MS Sans Serif as it doesn't scale well.

Don't use GETFILE() or MESSAGEBOX(), but instead use VistaDialogs4COM that ships as part of Sedna. This gives the Vista dialogs and your application looks better.

Vista uses higher resolution icons. You need to be able to create and use icons up to 256x256 and .png files.

Windows Search is built into many Vista dialogs. Windows Search has an OLEDB Provider and Sedna has a test bench to help you get started and test Windows Search.

Even if you're not using Vista today, your customers will be, so you need to start testing with Vista and you need to do this today.

Last night at 9:00, the speakers gathered in the conference area of the hotel for a welcome buffet and get together. Rainer Becker, the conference organizer, welcomed us to the conference and gave us last minute news. Jim Booth, who had been scheduled to speak could not make it. In addition, yag had to leave early. This required some last minute schedule changes. We then had the first of many large meals. The German DevCon is known for it's fabulous food and last night's buffet was no exception. My first time here (two years ago), I remarked to Rainer that I couldn't go home because after eating all the food I was over the airlines weight limit.

I'm sitting in the lobby of the Lindner Congress Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany where the German FoxPro DevCon starts tomorrow. It was an uneventful, but long flight (16 hours...18 if you count from when I got to the airport in Salt Lake City). After I arrived, I had lunch with Steven Black, Rick Schummer, Doug Hennig, and yag. I hope to be able to report here daily on what's happening, but in years past the Internet access hasn't bee so great. So far, it seems better this year.

I meant to post this earlier, but last Saturday I spoke at the Utah Code Camp. It was a great day of technical sessions. My presentaiton was on Continuous Integration and I've received some feedback that is was a great session. Yay! My session is the most downloaded of all the ones from the conference. Watch for the next Utah Code Camp next spring. If you sign up at www.utcodecamp.com, you'll get notified about it.

... we have Cathy Pountney. Cathy is now blogging at cathypountney.blogspot.com. Welcome to the blogosphere.