Nick Parker, Microsoft MVP and all around good guy and pirate (Arghhhh!), has put together a XPath Debugging Visualizer that some of you may find useful. Worth checking out and possibly adding to your toolkit.

The Twin Cities .NET User Group will be celebrating it's 50th meeting on Thursday, May 4th! What an amazing run it has been. Special thanks to Farhan Muhammad, our .NET User Group leader and community big timer. Without Farhan, the Twin Cities User Group would not be on of the biggest, best, and most active user groups in the country.

To show what a great job Farhan is doing, the 50th anniversary meeting should totally rock with folks from Dow Jones Labs will be talking about their web site. The official blurb...

Topic: Real world AJAX Enabled Web 2.0 Solution for the Financial Market
Over the past 6 months Dow Jones Labs has been working on aggressive AJAX based Web 2.0 powered products to bring financial news and tools to any website in the world. Check out www.marketwatch.com and watch the stock information update real-time with the market without any user input. Make sure to try it when the stock market is open.

This presentation will include real-world examples of financial applications created as mash-ups, and a deep dive into the grab bag of technologies powering it. We'll explore LiveQuotes which uses a thin-client Javascript library along with a asynchronous threadless web solution to drive over 10,000 requests per second all day, everyday. Much more than a simple display technology, LiveQuotes is in reality a distributed publish-subscribe data distribution model at Internet scale. Technologies covered: C#, .Net 2.0, DHTML, CSS, AJAX, JSON, SOAP, EBML.

REGISTER TODAY!

HDC 2005 totally rocked and 2006 is sure to be bigger and better. HDC will be expecting ~600 attendees this year, and if its anything like last year, it will sell out early. Here is the official blurb...

In it's 3rd year, HDC06 is the largest independent annual professional Microsoft development conference in the nation, organized by user groups, and focused on .NET development and other emerging Microsoft technologies. HDC provides regional developers the opportunity to experience sessions usually reserved for Tech-Ed and PDC at a much lower cost while retaining the same nationally known presenters. Over 2 days, 23 sessions, 2 tracks, and several networking opportunities, HDC06 is where you’re find top knowledge experts that can prepare you for next level development.

REGISTER TODAY!!!

I can't wait to get more info about Live Drive. I would be more than willing to pay some fee each month to store things I never want to lose stored in the cloud. Amazon's S3 was interesting to me, but I am hoping Live Drive will provide a tightly integrated solution with the way I use Windows today, which is what I am really looking for.

Now let me preface this rant by saying I have truly enjoyed working at Microsoft for 10 years, and I appreciate the thought that went behind the 10yr Anniversary Gift I received. But having said that....

COME ON!!! I mean, seriously, look at this thing. To give you a better idea of what we are talking about, this hunk of glass (or sorry, designer crystal according to the packaging) stands about 18" tall and weighs at least 10 pounds. Seriously, I worked up a sweat caring it from my mail slot to my desk. And look at it - what the hell is it besides a shard of glass with my name laser etched on the base. Sure, the thought is nice, but really, do they seriously think anyone wants this thing.

Oh, I know there are the ego maniacs among us that like to decorate their cube or office with every little award, trinket, certification, etc. that they have ever received. That "kind" of worker would just love to add something like this to their collection. But for the rest of us, we just acknowledge the fact those "kind of people" really have poor decorating taste and no other interests in life besides work. Why else would you decorate your office/cube, where you spend a good part of your life, reminding you about nothing but WORK!?!?! You are already at WORK! Do you really need to reminder yourself of more WORK!?!!? WOW! For the rest of us, that award stuff is at best a dust collector, at worst, something you hope to be able to scratch the writing off of and sell for a buck at the next garage sale.

Which brings me to my point... why do companies give crap like this to their employees? I don't want a hunk of glass (though the Microsoft logo'ed static free cleaning hankie that came with it has turned out to be totally wicked at cleaning the display on my Palm Treo! - Rock On! Seriously, the thing came with its own logo'ed cleaning hankie - WTF?). That thing, considering it is supposedly by some famous artist and is limited edition, had to have cost $50 to $100 bucks. So why not give me a Best Buy gift certficate, or a gift certificate to a nice place for dinner, or maybe just cold, hard cash! Trust me, I would think much more often and much more fondly about my last ten years at Microsoft every time I listed to some CDs or watched a video that I had purchased at Best Buy with my 10 year anniversary gift certficate.

A great article that covers the nitty-gritty of working with Master Pages and some of the cool things you can do with them (dynamic master pages anyone?).

A nice collection of tips for doing some useful things in your .NET app.

This May, the Iowa .NET User Group will be celebrating their two year anniversary. Huge props to Eric, Javier, Nick, Levi, et al. for doing a great job in building a great user group in Des Moines. If you haven't gone, sign up today and get out to a meeting!

A good article covering some of the new things to be found in WPF. Worth a read if you want a quick overview of why WPF is better than GDI+/WinForms.

Rocky Lhotka has a post about his recent reading. Some very good stuff on here. Vinge is a good one for sure though is less impressed with Deepness in the Sky than some of his other stuff. Reynolds, in my book, was a bit of a disappoinment. His writing and story telling is excellent, but he finished his series with what I call the "gee, and then a miracle happened" ending. I won't go into specifics, but when you can wrap up a multi-volume epic in about five pages, you know he was looking for a cheap way out. Maybe that is the biggest challenge of these huge epic tales - how to you end them without taking forever as well.

I would also throw out Peter Hamilton as a great author. His Reality Dysfunction series was astonishing despite its "miracle" ending. I just started his newest series that begins with the book "Pandora's Star" and am totally digging it. Hamilton is worth a read for sure.