A Blog for Graymad

Last week, I was fortunate enough to get to spend some time in Redmond with one of the product teams, hearing about upcoming stuff. I won't tease you by hinting at what it was, and saying I can't talk about it. I'll just say...if you're a developer using .NET, or planning to use .NET, or interested in finding out about .NET, you need to go to the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) this year. This year's PDC boasts information on Yukon (the next version of SQL Server), Longhorn (the next version of Windows), and most importantly for developers, Whidbey (the next version of Visual Studio). The preliminary agenda for this year's PDC shows the variety of topics to be covered.

Scott Mitchell wrote an entry about the economics of book writing, and none other than Tim O'Reilly dropped by to comment on the issue:

Looks like I may yet get my T1, after considerable waiting:

My thanks to the Capital Area .NET User Group for their attentiveness and good questions at my talk this past Tuesday. I would have posted this earlier, but I'm still having problems with my DSL, and unfortunately, the T1 looks like it's going to take longer than expected (not to mention the fact that my local ILEC, Verizon, wants to charge me $600 in construction charges just to get the line set up).

Just a reminder (and a test of Scott's BlogErt tool) that I will be giving a talk on creating a custom ASP.NET login control at the Capital Area .NET User Group on Tuesday night. Details can be found on my web site, as well as on the Capital Area .NET User Group site.

I've finally gotten so sick and tired of the reliability (or lack thereof) of DSL that I've just ordered a fractional T1 line from Speakeasy. DISCLAIMER: the previous link is a referral link...I don't have my line installed yet, so I can't speak to their line quality, but the pre-install service has been the best I've ever seen. If you want to see what Speakeasy has to offer without the referral, that's cool, too.

After having gone through a complete DSL outage described here, my ISP was able to get the line back up in a couple of days. Unfortunately, since the line came back up (apparently my local telco had either cut or disconnected the line about a mile away from my house), it's been bouncing (dropping and reconnecting) erratically. This has been going on for days, and my ISP doesn't seem to have done a whole lot about it. Now the line is completely dead. So I called them up today, and got a nice person on the phone who asked me to disconnect and reconnect the line, and then to power-cycle the router (for only the bazillionth time), just like every other time I've called. Then they got Covad on the phone, and had me do yet another cycle of disconnect/reconnect/power-cycle.

With all due respect, I think that Robert is overreacting just a bit, on several fronts: