Keith Pleas Blog

Everyone knows about INETA and how it supports public .NET user groups. In fact, according to the counter on the up left corner of the INETA home page, there are currently 522 registered user groups with 196,658 users worldwide.

I just received word that the RSS feed for the Microsoft Architecture Center is now activated!  Just go to the center's home page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/ and look for the red RSS button on the right side.

Ted Neward mentioned an article in CIO Today about customers waiting for Web services. In it, a Forrester Research analyst said that “right now, there is a genuine sense that we are not quite where we need to be with regards to having a complete stack of Web-service standards.” Well...

I try not to over-promote myself (I'm sure there are others who would disagree, perhaps violently <g>) but - in the words of a friend who forwarded me this link, this is like “shooting fish in a barrel”. Kent Tegels posted in his SqlJunkies blog about the upcoming “patterns & practice Summit”, asking “Anybody going? presenting? blogging about? Got Details?”

The new “.NET Architecture Center” just went live about 5 minutes ago on MSDN. I've been working with the team putting it together (including Steve Kirk at MSDN and Harry Pierson of the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team (aka “.NEAT“, which is one of the better plays on the .NET moniker). It's nice to finally see the results of the overhaul, which makes the architecture site consistent with the other major developer centers (developers are already familiar eith the VB and C# dev centers managed by Duncan Mackenzie, who works with Steve).

Wow, do we live in strange times, or what? I just received notification of a “Critical Update” to remove a symbol from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font. Turns out it's to remove a swastika, one of the oldest known symbols. The “Typographica” journal has an interesting thread on this issue. It also made the Business 2.0 “Dumb and dumber moments in tech” list for 2003, so I'm assuming this issue isn't news to many people. But as someone who has managed to avoid all the PC stupidity, I thought I was immune to this stuff. <sigh>

I've been working with the patterns & practices team at Microsoft, and they're almost ready to release a comprehensive performance & scalability guide. This guide collects into one place a huge amount of information and tips covering all aspects of building and running .NET applications. Check out the pre-release at http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/perfscal.

I'm planning FTP's first show in Canada (Toronto, first week of May) and am sitting here wondering if developers “up” there have different interests than those in the US. Offhand, I'm thinking there are more multi-language issues (which is fine, because resource localization in .NET is so darned cool) but is there anything else? Devices? Industrial usage (like RFID tracking tags for mooses)?