October 2007 Entries

Tulsa TechFest: Unable To Present

I would like to apologize for those who wanted to attend my presentation on Software Factories at Tulsa TechFest, but unfortunately due to technical difficulties, I missed my stand-by flight into Tulsa.  When I spoke with the nice people at American Airlines they couldn't guarantee me making into Tulsa into sometime late this evening. However, for those of you wanting my slides, you can download them from the link at the bottom of this post.  Also, as I mentioned on my HDC post, I will be doing a webcast series on the Software Factories on Code To Live.

posted @ Friday, October 19, 2007 2:17 PM | Feedback (611)

MS Popfly and Yahoo Pipes Comparison

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the opening of Popfly beta to public use.  One of the first things that I thought about Popfly is how are other people out there (both technical and non-technical) are going to use it.  I've been looking at Yahoo! Pipes for a while and thought it was a pretty cool way to gather information.  To me the one thing it lacked was the presentation of the information (what good is the info if I can't get to it effectively?).  So last night I decided to do a little video that compares both Popfly and Yahoo! Pipes trying to "solve" the same...

posted @ Friday, October 19, 2007 1:52 PM | Feedback (612)

Tulsa TechFest -- Stuck in Des Moines

Well, unfortunately, I couldn't make my standby flight to Tulsa this evening, so I'm stuck in Des Moines for the evening.  Not a bad thing being stuck at home, though.  I'm confirmed for a flight at 6:30 AM tomorrow to Dallas/Tulsa.  From the looks of it, I will be arriving at 12:30 PM..30 minutes before my talk so I'm not sure how that's going to work. I contacted David Walker already and gave him a heads up to see if could switch my time with somebody else.  Hopefully things can work out for both parties. Oh, the joys of traveling...

posted @ Thursday, October 18, 2007 8:09 PM | Feedback (611)

Software Factories at Heartland Developer Conference

First, to all of you that attended my HDC presentation on Software Factories, THANK YOU!  I hope that as promised, the "Ah, Ha!" factor was high.  Also, I would like to apologize for the issues I ran into with the VPC and the demos.  I had tried the demo before with only two VS2005 instances running and had no issues with it...Apparently, four instances of VS2005 running concurrently is too much for VPC. Right after my presentation, I confirmed with Steve Loethen, a co-host of Code To Live, about coming up with the webcast series on Software Factories. I still to work out...

posted @ Thursday, October 18, 2007 8:01 PM | Feedback (613)

Microsoft Releases Popfly Public Beta

Today Microsoft is announcing that Popfly will be going into public beta.  So for those you that had requested to sign up for the beta, no worries!  You can automatically login without a hassle! (Pretty sweet, huh?) And for those of you that haven't signed up or don't know anything about it, just to go http://popfly.com and login with Passport. Here's a brief description of what Popfly: It's a Silverlight 1.0 application to create a really slick UI that allows you to use drag-and-drop tools to build some cool things.  It also includes support for Vista Sidebar and Live Gadgets.  For those...

posted @ Thursday, October 18, 2007 6:45 PM | Feedback (564)

Pre HDC: Omaha Geek Dinner

So, I'll be in Omaha at around 6 PM on Wednesday, so I was wondering who's up for dinner (a geeky one at that)? Fellow speaker and MVP, Tim Rayburn, asked the same question earlier last week. I thought about doing dinner then going to the pre-conference party and hangin' out.  If you're interested in joining me and Tim, either post a comment or email me at javier-at-lozanotek-dot-com  (replace the -at- and -dot- accordingly... ;-) ).  

posted @ Monday, October 15, 2007 11:20 AM | Feedback (580)

No Pain, No Gain

I apologize for not being "active" on blogging for the past four weeks.  Back in September 9th, I started a wellness program here in Des Moines, called Farrell's Extreme Bodyshaping (FXB).  The program is Monday through Saturday for 10 weeks.  You heard right, 6 days a week for 10 weeks...  The program is laid out as follows: Kickboxing (cardio) 3 times per week for 45 minutes. Punches:  jabs, hooks, cross punches, upper-cuts. Knees: high, medium, low and side. ...

posted @ Sunday, October 7, 2007 9:11 PM | Feedback (611)

Source Code for .NET Framework Libraries Released

That's right, you heard it!  Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman have both talked about it (Scott even has a podcast on it).  Microsoft will release the source code & debug symbols for debugging purposes for the following .NET libraries under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL): Base Class Libraries ASP.NET Windows Forms ADO.NET XML WPF They plan on adding more libraries in the months to come, such as WCF, Workflow, LINQ. I'm not sure about you, but this IS HUGE!  Way to go, MS!  Taking...

posted @ Wednesday, October 3, 2007 12:35 PM | Feedback (611)