Hey ya'll…

 

My wife reminded me that it's time to plan our spring vacation.  Little did I know there would be so much going on around the campus that I can't miss that scheduling our family vacation is becoming quite the adventure in reservations, coordinating schedules, and getting ready.  I'm going to need a vacation just to recover from vacation planning.

 

Are you registered for TechEd 2005 yet?  Make sure you hop up to the registration site before March 11 if you want to enter the VIP sweepstakes - there's a pretty cool prize involved.  For the hardware and device driver folks out there, make sure you register for WinHEC by March 2 to save some serious money. 

 

If you aren't going to be able to join us at one of these hootenanies, there's still a pretty cool way for you to try out Visual Studio 2003, learn how to build Smart Client applications, learn how to use Visual SourceSafe, and many other products.  Come take a look at the "MSDN Virtual Labs".

 

I've been using the hosted labs myself to brush up on some Windows Forms techniques I need to use on a little application I'm writing that will parse Outlook's calendar entries, and chart the amount of time I'm spending based on the category of the entry.  If you've done something like this, let me know.

 

Oh yeah, my day with the WinHEC folks…

 

Last week I joined in the annual stress-testing event: WinHEC content scheduling. It’s an extremely high-tech activity: put a half-dozen opinionated people in a room with a wall chart, colored stickies, caffeine, a couple of laptops, and a wireless connection. It's pretty much like loading up a bunch of 4-yr olds with sugar, and locking them in a car for a six-hour drive.

 

The team was quite cordial and professional as they "negotiated":

 

“Are you nuts? You can’t put Windows Longhorn Graphics at the same time as PCI Express! Trusted Configuration,” said our usually mild-mannered moderator. “In fact, don’t put PCI Express topics anywhere near the graphics topics.”

 

“Then move all of Tuesday around,” said Planner #1. “Because you can’t put the Windows Hardware Error Architecture at the same time as the Server Manageability topics. Isn’t it obvious that they’re related?”

 

..and that was just the beginning of the day…  Luckily, the sugar wore off, and the schedules have been appropriately set.  Next time I get invited to something like this, I'm bringing more protective gear.