Friday, September 12, 2003

Are you happy Scott? Scott Hanselman recently wrote an article about the difference between friends and acquaintances where he mentioned me.  Of course he also browbeat me about the fact that I hadn't posted anything recently on my blog. The last non-blogging stretch I had was due to Radio melting down but this time around I just have been insanely busy for the last couple of months. Scott I have frequently asked myself the same question.  I frequently confuse the two terms calling acquaintances friends quite often. Friendship is a two way thing.  While I would have no problem at all with any of the acquaintances I call friends crashing at my place (if that is the criteria) I can't say that the feeling would be mutual. Not a problem for me. Still call them friends and my door is still open.  Scott you are of course welcome to crash at my place anytime. It is almost at an end however and I am looking forward to getting back to normal.  I sit right now in a Hotel room in Orlando preparing for an all day workshop I am giving tomorrow on "Best Practices for Enterprise Development" with Rockford Lhotka. As I sit here preparing I can't help but remember a talk Scott, Bill Evjen and I had just today about the content at most conferences. Bill had just finished an intro to Web Services talk that was so well received it suprised him. He couldn't believe that almost three years after the release of the first .NET Web Services stack that folks were still interested in the basics. I then mentioned that I was doing a workshop tomorrow that was all new to me and quite honestly a new type of workshop for VSLive! which tends to be focused on very pragmatic code based talks. It is a talk that is really focused not on code but on the other things that need to go into a project to make it successful.  It is really pretty basic blocking and tackling but come to find out is the most popular workshop so far based on registrations! Just goes to show that what I find interesting isn't necessarily what my attendees will find interesting.  I think speakers get caught in a trap of creating content that they think their peers will find impressive instead of looking at the conference attendees and determining what is useful to them. Let's face it.  Most speakers wouldn't be at the conference if they weren't speaking.  They aren't the intended audience.  What do you think? Hopefully this will not be my last post in a long while.  I have been doing quite a bit of Compact Framework development that has really given me a new perspective on .NET.  I really need to write down some of my experiences and hope to do so over the next couple of weeks.  First I have to finish my last conference of the season, Guided Design .SUMMIT on campus at Microsoft October 1-3.  3:14:49 PM