MSDN Event for ASP.NET

Today I attended a free MSDN Event for ASP.NET 2.0. What an INCREDIBLY COOL product. I am blown away and really looking forward to the release. I know a lot of folks who build web pages like to type everything in. That’s soooo not me. I am the queen of copy/paste and drag-and-drop. I prefer to spend my time solving the big problems and not worrying about figuring out stuff someone else has already figured out. For someone like me the latest release of ASP.NET is a dream come true. Lots of controls that can be dragged onto forms, Intellisense that almost writes the code for me and some really cool integration with different types of data stores. Very exciting. After today’s session I’m actually thinking about renewing my MSDN subscription so that I can get the final releases (and patches).

I am also looking forward to building an ASP.NET sample for the Digipede Network. As you know from my previous posts I’m heavy into Excel samples right now, but I hope to get that finished up soon. I am also hoping to put some AJAX into my ASP.NET sample. I suspect that AJAX and the Digipede Network can make some really cool things happen.

The other thing I got out of today’s MSDN Event is the realization that the world has changed. What??!?!? Yea, I’m of the old school where you have to do it alone. No guts no glory. Well, that’s just wrong. I realized today that if I were to do my career over I would attend every technical event I could, I would join all the user groups, write more, and give presentations. I would also have stayed in school as long as I could. I kept meaning to get my Masters but...life just happens and the next thing I knew I’ve got no time. With software development work being off shored we American engineers have to find ways to distinguish ourselves. Knowing how hard it was for me to find work I can’t believe that the people who identify up and coming careers listed computer programmers. (I just searched for the article and couldn’t find it...)

So advice for the young and fresh....never stop learning, always share, and make a lot of friends.

Here are some links from the event:

Bay.NET User Group
San Francisco Networking Technologies Users Group
Anand Iyer's Blog