Every few years I find that there are pieces (sometimes big ones) that I have not played with or encounted on a customer project and it tends to freak me out a bit. We have now arrived at that point in the cycle yet again! Expression, SilverLight, WPF and the like are all technologies that you will likely never see me present upon, but in the aftermath of MIX 08 and whole WideOpen Web movement I just have to dive in deeper and see what the implications are for the parts of the technology that I do use daily. I think this is a key survival trait for me and I encourage everyone to reach down into that free time (you are still sleeping right?) and get a grip. The good news is that great blogs and podcasts are making this much easier then ten years ago. I promise to report what I find here and might even ask a non-rhetorical question or two ;)

I have finally confirmed the final dates for the Egypt Developers Conference which is held every year in Cairo. This year it is in Mid April and again I will be speaking. I really look forward to this event and for a short time I was afraid that the dates would move to a week where I couldn't attend, but I now know that this is not the case. This week I have to solidify which sessions I will present and am thinking about doing a session on commercial software development (as opposed to business software development) on the new Software Architects track. Last year I made the mistake of re-presenting session from previous years at the request of some very well intentioned people who were running the show, but I will not make that same mistake again. See you in Cairo!

A very good friend of mine reminded me that I have this blog that I have been neglecting and I must say that he is right. It is easy to fall out of a habit even one so important and I think in my case it has been that I always want to write really interesting things. The problem is that really interesting things is a really high bar and is almost always a matter of perspective. Consider this the warning shot that I plan to come back to this blog and write about all aspects of technology and software development. Security when I have something to say, but overall there is alot left unsaid in the name of keeping the blog on topic.

Someone in my office just forwarded me a link to a video that has Scott Guthrie talking about ASP.Net.  Not very unexpected, but the video turns out to be set inside Halo thanks to the crew a Red vs. Blue and it fabulous.

I don't know what site it was originally hosted on, but if you remotely like Halo, or ASP.Net or Scott or anything remotely cool and / or entertaining, check it out!

Red vs. Blue themed ASP.Net ad featuring Scott Guthrie

StrangeLoop has finally announced their AppScaler device!

Richard Campbell told me about his involvement in StrangeLoop a while ago and I have been dying to tell people about it, but until now it has been confidential.

Basically the AppScaler takes a web farms major headaches and lifts them into the loadbalancer and out of the way of your developers.  It really is a cool strategy because it gives sites real performance gains over hosting Session State on a state server or in a database along with a whole host of other performance enhancing and bandwidth saving features.

Check out the recent article at NetWorkWorld.com about it.