I'm finishing up a new article for asp.netPRO Magazine about some of the controls in the Atlas Control Toolkit and wanted to get the sample code posted so people could see a few of the workarounds I ended up doing.  Overall I really like the toolkit controls.  There are definitely some issues that I encountered that made some things I thought would be simple actually a bit tricky.  It's early though....and I know several of the issues I ran into are already known and being worked on. The sample code demonstrates using the following controls:

I taught an ASP.NET 2.0 programming course this week at Interface Technical Training that went really well....I had a lot of fun. :-) I always enjoy interacting with the people in class and hearing about the different projects they're working on.  I like to do a lot of live "on-the-fly" demos so I promised that I'd get the demos posted.  They can be downloaded here.

On June 15th and 16th I had the opportunity to train 50+ people at Microsoft's Phoenix location on ASP.NET 2.0.  I met some great people and had a lot of fun showing many of the new features in V2.  The live samples I created during the presentation can be downloaded here. If you're going to run the samples make sure you update the connection strings located in the different web.config files (nearly all of the samples point to the standard Northwind sample database).

RedGate (a company with some awesome SQL Server products) is releasing a tool called SQL Prompt that looks phenomenal from what I've seen to this point.  It allows developers to get intellisense as they develop SQL queries within Query Analyzer, SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio .NET 2003, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager and UltraEdit32.  I haven't had a chance to try the beta out a whole lot yet but it looks like the final release will be May 22nd and I'm pretty excited about it since I've always wanted intellisense in these tools as I create different types of queries.  Did I mention that they're releasing it for free? :-)

I'm giving a conference talk on May 18th at Los Alamos, NM about new features in ASP.NET 2.0.  I've never been there (or to Santa Fe) so it should be fun to see that part of state.  The code for the talk demonstrates using Server controls, Validation controls, TableAdapters, data binding with the ObjectDataSource, Master Pages, Themes and more and can be downloaded here.

I taught Microsoft's new .NET Distributed Application Development (intro and advanced) courses this week at Interface Technical Training.  I had a lot of fun and met some great people doing various distributed development projects.  I promised them I'd get the code samples I put together in class on my blog so here they are.  For those that attended....thanks!  I really enjoyed meeting you!

I had a chance to meet with Frank Gocinski who is the Business Development Manager for Microsoft's Mobile Platforms and Michelle McKelvey (a Technology Evangelist) while at the DevConnections conference in Orlando this week.  We talked about some of the different ways to capture "ink" on Tablet PCs...something I haven't played around with to this point.  Julia Lerman (one of my good buddies who also spoke at the conference and introduced me to Frank) wrote an article for CoDe Magazine about ink-enabling Web applications (that issue has several other articles on Table PCs and ink as well) that was really good.  Since I don't have a tablet PC I've never been overly excited about ink-enabled applications but after talking with Julia, Frank, Michelle and some others my mind started racing....and I see the light. :-)  I used to work for a start-up company that built dynamic forms that could capture signatures and Tablet PCs are perfect for that type of activity and the other uses (business and pleasure) are virtually unlimited.

I just returned from speaking at the ASP.NET Connections conference in Orlando which was a lot of fun.  If you haven't ever attended before I highly recommend it.  I had a chance to meet a few other speakers I hadn't met before as well as talk with a lot of conference attendees that were building some cutting-edge ASP.NET applications.  I gave 3 different talks at the conference and promised everyone that I'd add the slides and code....so here it is.