Earlier, I mentioned the list of speakers for DevCon East.  Chris Sells tells me that all except Tim Ewald are tentative at this point.  Still, I'll hold to my earlier comments: if you're doing web services, sign up.  I learned so much last time, my head hurt for days afterward (of course, picking up a sinus infection in OR didn't help either ;-).  Seriously, this one looks to be as good as the last.

It makes me want to get back onto my de-railed idea of a book, that would have a title like "Advanced .NET Project Management" and would heavily leverage NAnt and many other tools. It makes me want to get back onto my de-railed idea of a book, that would have a title like "Advanced .NET Project Management" and would heavily leverage NAnt and many other tools. [Brad Wilson]

Yeah, the .NET community badly needs this. Java developers have books like "Java Tools for Extreme Programming" and Steve Loughran's upcoming book on Ant. I'd recommend that even .NET developers not using Java at all read the first book (can't comment on Steve's, haven't read it yet). The interesting thing to me is that with SOAP, you should be able to use some of the Java tools, even if there isn't a .NET port; HttpUnit, for instance.

There's also lots of MS specific things to cover; from the mundane (how to use the version number in AssemblyInfo.[cs|vb]) to the truly complex. Then there's some things that are maybe out of scope of what Brad's talking about. One thing that's really confusing to me is using WMI to manage applications. For instance, I'd like to be able to turn our logging code on and off remotely. It seems like WMI is the way to do this, but I haven't figured out how.

I mentioned Steve Loughran, he's speaking at DevCon East. At my work, we've been going through deployment hell the last few weeks. He had several key recommendations that I didn't take seriously enough: put up a server health page, completely automate your deployment, log everything and make sure you can turn that on and off dynamically. These three things would have saved a ton of time during our deployment, now we're scrambling to put those in place. If you plan on deploying a web service, don't miss this talk.

Anybody have a suggestion on what they would like to hear me talk on? [Sam Ruby]

Not a sexy topic, but based on the attendance at the last DevCon, and given that this is Chris' shindig, most people at the conference will be coming from the MS world. I'd say that an intro to Apache Axis and a walkthrough of building Web Services with it might be a good idea. You could compare & contrast with .NET's implementation, give an idea of the tradeoffs involved, show what it takes to build & deploy a Web Service. (n.b. I've worked with Apache SOAP 2.2 a bit, haven't had a chance to use Axis yet. Apache SOAP 2.2 generates some really clumsy proxy code, IMO. Hope Axis does this better.)

The other topic might be to expand on the ideas in Neurotransmitters a bit. I'm sure Andy Gray will cover some of this ground again, but it seems like this is pretty fertile ground; no doubt room enough for 2 speakers.