Another excellent year at TechEd!  After all these years, I still enjoy the lengthy, opinionated and inebriated conversations over technologies, implementations, products, etc.

I did make it to a few interesting sessions and spoke to a few 'official' types about various things ASP.Net MVC, Velocity, Unity, Oslo, etc...  The presentation I actually enjoyed the most was Andrew Connell's 'Don't be a Tool...' SharePoint dev talk...really good stuff from an outstanding presenter.  I was just happy to hear someone actually tell developers to be developers again and quit whining...this could turn in to a <rant/>...I'll stop now.

As usual, the most interesting stuff happens after hours ;-P  Every year I say I'm going to capture more evidence, but I always forget to take pictures...here's the few I ended up with this year.  It was great to see all my old friends and meet quite a few new ones.  I love all of you nerds.  Big props to the Fl crew for organizing the ]inbetween[ event.  And oh, btw, before I forget....SHAREPOINT NATION!!!

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@alanstevens has organized a Meetup of tweeps, twitters and the like...see you there...

Info/links on Allan's Blog

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When:
Thursday, April 10th 6:30pm

Speaker: Alan Stevens
Alan Stevens is a passionate and experienced software developer living in Knoxville, TN. Alan has had a lifelong love affair with technologies of all sorts. He became a software developer with the creation of his first application, because there was nobody around to do it for him. Life hasn't been the same since. Alan regularly speaks at industry conferences and user groups.  Alan is the President of the East Tennessee .NET Users Group.  When Alan is not playing with his kids, enjoying a fine cigar, singing or playing his acoustic guitar, he occasionally updates his blog at http://netcave.org..

Meeting Location:
3 Lakeview Place, 22 Century Blvd.
Suite 140
Nashville, Tennessee  37214
Map

See http://www.nashdotnet.org/ for more info

May 1st

Register --> MS Launch Event - Heroes Happen

The Nashville Visual Studio .NET User Group Leadership will be staffing the INETA booth, so stop by for a visit.  I'll be there...and you should all buy me drinks afterwards! ;-)

ArcReady Event: Architecting for Scalable and Usable Web Applications

Tuesday, May 20, 2008 9:00 AM - Tuesday, May 20, 2008 11:45 AM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 8:45 AM

Microsoft Corporation

2555 Meridian Blvd, Suite 300
Franklin Tennessee 37067
United States

Register Online

Here's a simple twitter.com api wrapper.  Should be easy to use and self-explanatory.  Set a ref, create an instance of the TwitterWrapper class, and go...

I should be posting the metaweblog/twitter WM5/6 client soon.  I couldn't find one that would support BlogEngine.NET.

I think this has been up for a while and I'm just late to discover it.

websequencediagrams.com 

Props to Steve Hanov for this...I also get annoyed using Visio for UML.  If you suffer the same irritation be sure to grab "Visio Stencil and Template for UML 2.0" provided forever-ago by the infamous Pavel Hruby, Ph.D.

I just had a conversation with a friend and this came up...too funny!  The CEO of Google definitely has the best quote concerning WEB 3.0.

"Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and I think you've just invented Web 3.0. ..."  -Eric Schmidt

Wikipedia - Web 3.0