It is sure great to know that Casey has used his brains instead of his brawn to win a ticket to PDC 2005. This dude is one who constantly churns out amazing stuff.

Besides his contributions to putting WS-Security Specifications on the .NET Compact Framework via cfWse2, he is actively going into Artifical Intelligence, Tablet Speech Technologies, DirectX Programming and other stuff that mere mortals like me wouldnt even go near.

On top of that, he has the sense to get his priorities right by promising to take PDC Booth Babe pictures on his blog and creating a category for it. Now, you cannot ask for a better geek.

Since this is my first PDC as well, I am just as interested to catch those booth babes in PDC and I will be sure to post them here as well. One of the interesting comments on Casey's blog has me ROTFL and I take the liberty to re-produce it here:

"Past experience has taught me that anything MSFT has better booth babes than just about any open source convention. The diference is that at open source conventions many times the booths are staffed by the ones writing the technology and at MSFT ones it's just some babe hired by a corporation to put tits on a product.(cont.)

And of course I'm with the rest of the guys - Mmmmmmmm Boothbabes....*drool*"

I hope to be able to catch you there, Mr Brains and Brawn.

Besides the BOF which I may be moderating, I am also involved in the Ask-The-Experts (ATE) sessions in PDC 2005. This time around, I will be placed in the APAC regional table, where I hope I can meet up with a lot of customers or like-minded people from my region and hopefully answer some questions based on my expertise with issues with regards to Web Services (SOAP), Security-Interoperability, Indigo (or I prefer to call it the ServiceModel, not WCF) and the likes.

So, you are from APAC and are going to be at the PDC, I hope to see you at my table.

On the back of this, from Paul Fallon's space here, Max Feingold has a real good summary on Whats New with WS-AT, WS-BA and WS-C.

Should make for some good reading on my looooooooong flight to LAX via the Pacific Route.

My topic submission has been approved for a "Birds of a Feather" discussion in PDC 2005.

Topic: Distributed Atomic Transactions - Wishful Thinking?

Discussion Synopsis:
Web Services, via SOAP, is the preferred choice of doing wide-reaching distributed communications today. However, one of the few factors that has hindered its adoption in the enterprise today is its lack of ability to handle transactions between remote un-trusted (independent) boundaries. There are two schools of thought today with regards to transactions --- The Atomic Way or The Compensating Way which pretty much takes out the atomicity of ACID. Indigo supports WS-AT via Microsoft DTC. Will this be widely adopted in the enterprise collaboration space? Or are we living in Fool's Paradise?
--- William Tay, Softwaremaker.NET

This topic of discussion is something I have not been able to get much of during the Indigo Ascends and TechED Asia I have done and I am hoping to get much more off the original deep thinkers out there (Hey, Jim --- Will you be there?)

If you are interested in attending this discussion, please vote for it here.

Quick Brief:
A “Birds of a Feather” session is a one-hour open, moderated discussion on a topic of interest to the Microsoft PDC05 conference attendees.

The Birds of a Feather sessions at the Microsoft PDC05 are chaired by INETA (International .NET Association), the premier .NET developer user group associations.

Each Birds of a Feather session is an opportunity for attendees to continue the technical conversation of the conference, meet with others that have common geographical or industry interests and exchange ideas on a variety of topics. Birds of a Feather sessions are conducted during the evening on Monday (September 12), Tuesday (September 13) and Thursday (September 15). The sessions are located in the overflow rooms at the PDC.

My MSN status says: Hollywood Bound ... which I am.

I just spoke to some Microsofties in Redmond and they say that no matter what --- you must NOT miss any of Anders Hejlsberg's sessions.

It is not as easy as slotting them in, there are way more than 200 sessions and I have already booked what I could slot in my already-packed schedule. I dont even think I have more than 20 sessions in the 4 days I am there.

But it looks like I have to make some room for Anders in this:

The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework: An Overview
Speaker(s): Anders Hejlsberg
Session Level(s): 300
Session Type(s): Breakout
Track(s): Tools & Languages

Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains can have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. The future "Orcas" release of Visual Studio aims to unify the programming models through integrated query capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative API for manipulating and querying XML. This session introduces each of these areas and walks through how they are related.

It will also be a good time to catch up with some of the folks I have been working and in touch with at this event. If not, I would have to catch them in Redmond where I'll be there at the end of September.

These should be fun times and I am trying to pack as much travelling as I can before I become grounded in November.

If you are one of the few who are in Microsoft TechED Asia 2005 in Singapore and you are looking for William Tay's blog so you can win some prize --- This is NOT his blog.

Good Luck !

OMG !!! I think this is the hardest I have ever laughed ever for a long long long time.

It just brought tears to my eyes.

To-Do List

...
Task 579: Upgrade to dasBlog 1.8.5223
Task 580: Make more money
...

Features worth the upgrading effort

• All the security features + Anti-Spam + Syndication features
• Ability to pre- and post-date entries
• Permalinks based on Title and Date optional (Just check the urlTitle of any of my blog posts and you will see what I mean)
• More++ can be found at Mr Scott ComputerZen's site of treasures

I have also removed all those useless referrals ...

I just broke the piggie, took what has been accumulated in there for the last 2 years. Add that to the bank I just robbed and therefore it looks like I will be there.