I left at 3:30 to head down to Sacramento for the user group meeting. I got the agenda for the meeting very last minute, but the topic was LINQ, so I had to go. The presenter was Doug Holland, a C# MVP working for Intel. He admitted up front that he hadn't done too much work with LINQ, but the session went well regardless. It started off with some things that C# 2.0 does, then went on to 3.0, and how it all came together to make LINQ possible. The format of the talk was almost entirely in the IDE, I think there were three slides. I've always liked that format. I don't know why I always make my talks so PowerPoint heavy.

After the meeting, I stuck around with the presenter and a few other attendees and talked about computer stuff for another 45 minutes. From what I heard, Intel seems like an interesting place to work. Richard was pointing out all kinds of jobs listed from Intel, and all of the developer positions he showed me were .NET.

After the meeting, I headed back to Chico to see the new Die Hard movie. I got to the theater around 11:30 for the midnight showing, where my brother and Steven were holding seats. The movie was incredible. I got up to hit the restroom after McClane took out Mai, and rushed back to find that the fight had been far from over, and they were somehow in an SUV, hanging in an elevator shaft.

I found it very funny that while I had absolutely no problem with the fights, car chases, and the killing of a helicopter with a car, but I kept thinking things like "They wouldn't get reception in the server room" and "If the phone system was knocked out, how does OnStar still work?"

I had a great time at ReMIX07. It would have been better if I had read the agenda a little closer, though. I got to the campus where it was being held at 7:00 after a wrong turn that cost me a bit of time. Had to wait until they let us up at 7:30, and as I was looking through the schedule, I found out that the event proper didn't start until 9:00. That's nearly two hours of sleep I could have had. Luckily, they had a barista on site who dispensed free espresso based drinks.

The keynote was great, and prompted me to write down that I need to have cool videos like they have for my presentations. They give you a good look at what can be done with the software without taking up too much time, and really help to whet the appetite.

Between Expression Studio and Silverlight, which uses Expression heavily, I was most excited to get home and try out Expression Media Converter. I ran immediately into a problem caused by the fact that I am running Windows Vista Business N, which doesn't come with Windows Media Player 11 installed by default. Apparently, this wasn't taken into account, because I got a hard crash. It was pretty tough to submit a bug, too. I had just spoken with one of the PMs for Expression, but I didn't get his email, and the page I would submit a bug for on any other part of the studio was missing an option for Expression Media. I ended up posting something in a discussion board for it. Hope they get it.

Even after I got everything up and running, I was having trouble with the videos I was trying to convert. I think it had more to do with the videos, as I had quite a bit of trouble with some of the other encoders I had tried in the past, like Gordian Knot. The only thing I can get to work with them is Sony Vegas, which I guess makes sense, seeing as the videos are coming from a Sony HDD camcorder. Once I've got the videos converted over to VC-1, I can drop them into Media Encoder, and everything works from there. I embedded the video into a player, which required a second conversion, but then I swapped out the double encoded file for the video I got out of Sony Vegas, and everything worked great. I tried to post it to this site, but I don't have full control. I'm still working on it, though, so we'll see how it turns out.

While I was working on all this, I came across an article on streaming video to the Xbox 360, since they just picked up support for more formats. I set up the sharing, and was able to open a couple of the files I did in Vegas no problem. I'll have to set up the 360 in my bedroom with the projector.

I got into the Popfly Alpha a little while ago, but when I tried to use the addin for Visual Studio, it wouldn't connect to the server. I did some looking around on the web, and found out that they had a server problem following an upgrade. I just checked this morning, and it's back up, so hopefully, I'll be able to a Popfly gadget to the page soon. I'll let you know how it goes.

Seems like I've been going down to the bay area more and more often lately, and every time I wait in line to pay the toll, I tell myself I'll sign up for one of the FasTrak passes. Well, I called and left myself a voice mail so I would remember this time, and just finished signing up. They said it will take from 5-7 days, so I won't get it in time for my trip Friday, but I'm sure I'll be down again before long.

I just got back from San Francisco, where I attended a talk given by three of the program managers of the .NET CLR team. I got a lot of insight into some of the tools I had used in my winforms development. I've really learned so much since I left my previous application development project and returned to school. Sometimes I wish I could go back and take care of the problems I had encountered and didn't know how to address at the time.

The talk started off with a bit on garbage collection by Claudio Caldato. To be honest, I had no idea how it worked before the talk. I had never had a problem with it, so I'd never gone into it. Turns out, a lot has been done to allow developer control over GC. I meant to ask after the session, but the only problem I've experienced that I think might have been helped with better control over garbage collection was working with unmanaged assemblies through com interop. I got his card though, so I might contact him about it if I don't see him on Friday at ReMIX.

I learned loads about NGEN from Surupa Biswas, and why I got a lot of speed out of it where others might not have. Turns out I avoided a lot of potential problems without even knowing they were there. I was writing my code with separate DLLs, then combining them with ILMerge to make deployment easier and increase run-time. Turns out this was helping in that with a single executable, I wasn't seeing code page collisions like I might have if I had kept them separate. I also learned of a potential problem with what I was doing if it gets deployed to Vista, which hadn't been released at the time, so you can't blame me.

The highlight of the talk had to be what I saw on the steps being taken to simplify threading, presented by Judd Hall. I used threads primarily to keep things responsive, and didn't go deep in to optimization or multi-processor coding. Even the simple threading I was doing was rather difficult to grasp, and I'm not totally sure that I was using the concepts such as anonymous delegates like I should have been. Some of the upcoming things like LINQ, PLINQ, and the ease of adding parallel processing to code are very exciting.

Overall, I really enjoyed the event, and I even won a book, to boot. Gotta love events where they give out free stuff. Which reminds me, I really need to start going after sponsors for my events.

If you look over to the left of my page, there should be a list of events coming up that I have been watching. My next step is to get my feet wet with PopFly, create an iCal feed, and a calendar control to consume it. Ideally, filtering by location and distance would be nice.

I went over to my older brother's house in Fort Bragg to go diving for abalone Thursday and Friday with my dad and younger brother. We planned on getting a camping spot over by the beach so we could make the low tide around 6:00 AM. My brother tried to get us a spot, but everything was full, since this was going to be the lowest tide of the year. We decided to crash at his place instead, and since we no longer needed to set up camp, we had enough time to go get some crabs. We ended up with six crabs, and three abalones a piece. Mine are the small ones on the right.

I've got a lot of stuff I'm working towards right now, so I'm just going to list them off for future reference.

SCUBA certification
Learn to roller blade
MCPD certification
.NET User Group web site
Timeline application
Silicon Valley Code Camp
Compile a cookbook with video
Laptop or tablet
Patch hole in the wall
Check on insurance for next school year

The last MSDN event I went to down in San Francisco, I met up with Anand Iyer, who recommended that I attend MIX07. I went home, went to register, and found out that it was too late. They had booked solid. I learned a few things at Code Camp in Portland shortly thereafter that got me really wanting to learn more about Silverlight, and a recent talk at the Sacramento .NET User Group by Scott Stanfield of Vertigo made me regret missing the MIX event even more. I read on Anand's blog that they are hosting an event down in Mountain View called ReMIX07, with much of the content of the original.

More information here: http://www.undertheradarblog.com/remix07.html