Last Friday I flew to Colorado Springs and participated in the community launch event for SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and Windows Server 2008. It was a lot of fun and Julie Yack made sure it was fun. She took the "Heroes Happen Here" theme seriously and had the speakers and volunteers dressed up with t-shirts or red capes. I spoke on SOA. I decided to post my slide deck here so anyone who wanted it can view it. I have to admit I showed the first few slides and then dropped into demos before showing the resource slides at the end.

This is a followup to my post last week. I just checked and I moved up in the NCAA rankings. I guessed half of the teams in the final 4 correctly. Next week I guess I will finally find out if I was lucky or one of the teams I didn't pick wins.

On the OOXML front things are looking up as well. According to the article at http://www.itnews.com.au/News/72970,the-votes-are-in-on-ooxml.aspx the results of the vote are not yet public but an informal poling shows that OOXML will pass. I have been really busy and haven't had time to digest all the feedback but there are numerous articles and e-mails floating around about how Microsoft or someone opposed to OOXML strong armed someone into voting one way or another. I wasn't there and with a few exceptions don't know the people personally so I don't know how reliable the accounts are and how much of what they are reporting comes from their own personal bias. I have to say that is disappointing but not that unexpected. All anyone has to do is look at the political process here to see examples of name calling, mud slinging, and down right lies used to make one person look better than another. I suppose that each side in this discussion/debate is passionate enough to resort to those same means to get what they want.

In the end the idealist in me would like to see everyone be able to decide on a single specification but the pragmatist says "if you ask 10 people their opinion on a topic you will get 12 different opinions" so we will not be likely to see any single specification satisfy everyone. For now it looks like we will have an official specification to work from and to make changes to as they are discovered and voted on through the change procedure.

While you are watching the NCAA basketball tournament and wondering if Davidson is going to win again or end their Cinderella story there is another "contest" going on. Actually it is a vote and not maybe not as dramatic as the NCAA tournament but possibly more important. I can tell you that I didn't fare to well in my predictions on basketball (sinking to the bottom of the brakets on ESPN) but if Open Office XML (OOXML) fails to be ratified we might see Microsoft having to change the file formats for the next version of Office. If, on the other hand, it is accepted as a standard that will mean that anyone ca write file viewers and other tools that interoperate with Office. I know that I love using Foxit for reading PDF files. It seems to load faster and it doesn't prompt me to download updates all of the time. I could see others taking the specification and writing viewers for PowerPoint that don't take up as much memory on my machine but that would be 100% compatible so I don't have to worry about fonts or animations not looking correct.

Even more important would be the possiblity of getting a competitor to Word and Excel that includes the "basic" functionality that we all use without some of the fancier or more esoteric features that you don't even know how to use.

Come on and admit it, you really want to know what it would be like to write the next software that will be the "killer app" for the desktop and this gives you a chance to try :)

After the considerable amount of press over Microsofts bid to buy Yahoo, the rejection by Yahoo, and then the announcement that Microsoft was going to continue to try to take over Yahoo it seems that Yahoo has been doing everything in its power to be unattractive to Microsoft. First there was the changes in the benefits package that would mean Microsoft would be paying out for a long time for former Yahoo employees. Today I read that Yahoo has joined the OpenSocial group. When the initiative was formed Microsoft didn't seem impressed since they have a programming model for Live already and OpenSocial was more of an idea for bringing the different ways of writing gadgets, portlets, blocks, or whatever they are called for social networking sites under a common API. If Yahoo is successful in implementing some of OpenSocial before the takeover it would require more work on Microsoft's part to change the technology and bring them under the Live programming model. Of course Microsoft could also just decide to support OpenSocial and leverage that technology but I haven't seen and couldn't find anything official in Live Search saying Microsoft will support OpenSocial. One thing is for sure, this is an interesting time for all of us as companies struggle with the tension between protecting their income streams and making sure their products interoperate with other products.

Come join the Utah County .NET Users Group this Wednesday, March 18 as we discuss the different data access technologies that Microsoft has. We will be looking at ADO.NET, LINQ, the Entity Framework, and others. Bring your questions and we will try to answer them.

UCNUG meets at the NuSkin NOC at 1175 S 350 E, Provo, UT. We will start at 6:00 and the pizza and drinks will be sponsored by TEKsystems.

April 26th 2008
Neumont University
Salt Lake City, UT 
Code Camp is a one day free training for all developers of any technologies to attend and learn from their peers.  We are looking for Speakers to present at this event.  All topics are open for discussion and all formats.  The sessions would be 45 Minutes long with a 10-15 minute QA time at the end of the session ( total 1 hour).  This will be an all day event we plan to go from 9:00-5:00.  You don't need to be present the whole day but we would love to have you around for questions from users or to see the other great content of the code camp. 
We are looking for 100-150 people to attend the code camp.  We will have 3 tracks running all throughout the day (3 sessions going on at once).  There might be a chance to do your presentation twice depending on demand. 
You must bring your own notebook for your presentation. There will be a room on site for speaker prep during the day of the Code Camp.
Any code samples you show should be made available for download from Code Camp web site.  (http://www.utcodecamp.com/)
We are not covering travel or expenses for speakers, but you will receive a great big THANK YOU.  A Cool Polo Shirt also!
If you're interested please submit a session title, abstract, and bio Email to pwright@medicity.com
Please put Code Camp Speaker In the subject.

I was just looking to set up an appointment for Monday and noticed that it was showing Mountain and Pacific time as being 2 hours apart. I know that is wrong so I dug into the problem a little bit more thinking I had found a bug in Outlook. It turns out it is just user error. When I added Pacific time as the second time zone I forgot to check the box that tells Outlook to automatically update for daylight savings time. Mountain time was correctly taking into account the change to Daylight savings on Monday but because I hadn't told Outlook to update the Pacific time zone it was still showing standard time. Once I checked the box and closed the dialog they were only 1 hour apart. This once again proves that computers are no smarter than the people running them.

Today I logged on to a government web site to fill out some forms. I was expecting this and was happy to see a post card with my customer id and a reminder to go to the web site. I was horrified when I was asked for the customer id or my social security number and my birth date to authenticate me. My social security number is not something that I give out but I am relatively free with my birth date as it seems to be pretty harmless to give out. Of course anyone could read the postcard and have that information. The page that displayed after I authenticated had my social security number, birth date, address, phone numbers including cell phone, and height, weight, hair and eye color. It seems this would be very useful to someone engaging in identity fraud.

I guess I will have to figure out who is the correct person to report the problem to and hope they fix it before I have to fill out the forms next year.