Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Hardy Heron

Firefox 3 is smoking fast on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). I’ve been testing with Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Google Reader and they all are visibly faster. You can expand a large message thread in Gmail in a couple of seconds now instead of the painfully long lag time that happened in FF2 or IE7.

I have IE 8 beta 1 on my laptop and so many core sites that I use render so poorly that it is not really viable at this point.  The word is out that its JavaScript speed will be much faster.  I hope to see them on par with each other soon.

2008 Product Launch – Des Moines

I’m in Mike Benkovich’s session at the Des Moines launch event. The room is almost completely filled up here at the Iowa Events Center. Looks like lots of people are getting to reconnect and learn about some of the new VS 2008 features.

Jeff Brand is in the back here getting ready for his session right after Mike’s. Should be a good afternoon.

Register for Iowa Code Camp

We have over 100 people registered for the code camp, and that happened with very little marketing. We are getting ready to do a round of emails to let people know more of what it is about. We should see the numbers come up quite a bit from there.

If you are interested you should register on the home page to let us know you want to attend. Just go to IowaCodeCamp.com if you want to find any other information about the code camp.

Hope to see you all (20 or 30 of you who read this) at the Iowa Code Camp.

ALT.Net Functional Programming

I got to sit in Dustin Campbell’s Functional Programming session and really enjoyed it.  I’m starting to wrap my mind around what makes something functional programming. Next step is to download the bits and test it out.

ILT MOC and E-Learning

Yesterday I was talking with an ex-MSL employee about Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) and E-Learning. During our discussion the suggestion came up that ILT MOC doesn’t have to be really well presented (as opposed to E-Learning) because a good trainer/MCT can create a good experience regardless of the quality of the courseware.  With E-Learning what a student sees and hears in the course is their full experience so it has to shine(which I don’t think E-Learning achieves and it has struggled accordingly).

My take on this – I suspect that this opinion isn’t a spoken one at MSL, but can imagine that this attitude is prevalent regardless.  Labs are typically marginally relevant, they hit the right topic generally, but frequently don’t illustrate the concepts well.  Next Gen MOC seems to be stripping much out of the actual printed courseware and pushing it onto the CD. Personally I’m 10 times more likely to look at a book as opposed to loading up book CD content. 5 years down the road the CD might be a better choice if screen readers are more common.

So I agree that the MCT/trainer is 90% of the experience, but I don’t think that should ever be an excuse for producing less than excellent courseware.

Alt.Net – Choosing Sessions

I had my first Open Space session building experience. It felt a bit chaotic, but was really remarkable in how it worked out. We actually get to pick the topics that we want to hear. The topics look great. There are at least 2-3 that I want to be in for each timeslot.

I got to see my first fishbowl with Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler, Jeffrey Palermo, Scott Bellware and many others. It could have used 6 chairs instead of 4, but it was fast moving and intelligent. It also gives you many different viewpoints which is great.

Jeffrey Palermo did some videos of some of the opening sessions if you want to see what it looked like.

I’m off to get some sleep so I’m ready for tomorrow.

Alt.Net – Friday Afternoon

I made it to Seattle around noon and had lunch with Roy Osherove, Adam Tybor, Sergio, Ian Cooper and Tim.  We had some interesting conversations from mocking to mobile phones (until Roy said he was tired of that talk) to firing practices in the UK.

It was good to put some faces to blogs I have been reading for a quite awhile.

Alt.Net

I’m heading up to Alt.Net in Seattle tomorrow morning to listen and learn. Other Iowans at Alt.Net are Tim Barcz and Nick Parker.

Wubi and Ubuntu 8.04

The Ubuntu 8.04 release (Hardy Heron) is imminent and it looks like there is a new option for installation called Wubi which will let you install Ubuntu like a Windows app but still get the full Ubuntu OS. I haven’t tried it yet, but am looking forward to experimenting with it. 

You can, of course, still install it on its own partition, but it gives an easier method to test for Windows users.

Twin Cities Code Camp MVC Session

Thanks to everyone who attended my ASP.Net MVC session. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you get the opportunity to try out what the MVC framework has to offer. The slides have a lot more information than what I was able to get through in my talk. The project is still very young, but has so much potential.

Please leave comments here and let me know what you thought of the session. I’m trying to constantly improve it to make it the right fit.

More ASP.Net MVC Slides.