Last week at our Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup, Roy Kim gave us a demonstration of his tabulas.com online service and community. This is a project Roy starting two years ago as a way to share online journals with a few of his friends. He still refers to it as a little network of bloggers. Ya, little, he currently has almost 57,000 registered users. Roy has built a great site with many features that large, heavily funded sites do not have. What does Roy say has contributed most to his success? Adding features users want. I think sites like Microsoft Spaces could learn a lot from his approach! Great job Roy!

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This weekend I had a wonderful time at the Code Camp III event organized by Thom Robins in Boston. I traveled up to get some ideas for our Code Camp being held in Raleigh, NC on Saturday April 9, and to give a presentation on developing Tabled PC software.

I had a lot of fun preparing for my session which I am also going to be presenting in Raleigh and at the Atlanta Code Camp in May. Attendance for my session which was in the first time slot Sunday morning was a little lower than I had hoped, but since it snowed all day Saturday we were happy that the event was able to continue on Sunday. (I don't expect snow to be an issue at my next events)

The entire event was excellent. Thom and has helpers did a fantastic job of organizing and hosting the event. I think attendance for the two days was over 500 people. I enjoyed talking to a wide variety of people on an even wider variety of topics. There were a wide variety of speakers including some well known speakers, and some not some well knowns that had equally good, and at times even better real world information to share.

Martin Shoemaker presented two other sessions relating to the Tablet PC that were very enjoyable. Martin has done some great work with tablets on things like his TabletUML software. Martin definitely sparked some ideas for me that I hope to reciprocate back in the future.

Raj Das shared some great information on work he has been doing in Smart Client development. I'm hoping to convince him to join us at the Raleigh Code Camp in April.

Saturday night we were able to meet up with some of the speakers in the hotel lounge for some continued conversations. I really enjoyed seeing Don Demsak (DonXML) again (And thanks for the ride!) as well is having an opportunity to talk with Julie Lerman.

If you have never been to a Code Camp event, I strongly encourage you to attend an event in your area, or make your way to one away from home. They are a great mix of sharing of ideas, insights, and how-to's mixed with incredibly valuable networking with others in the .Net development community. It's value truly comes from being presented by the community to the community.

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Tonight, Wednesday March 2, the Triangle Dot Net User Group is holding a special meeting to hear Brad Abrams, Lead Program Manager, Common Language Runtime Team speak. If you're anywhere in the area and do anythign with .Net, this is a must attend event!  Ok, now go tell a friend.

Effective .NET Framework based development: Exception Handling and Memory Management
by Brad Abrams

Effective .NET Framework based development: Exception Handing and Memory Management

5:45-7:15pm: This talk will drill demystify two areas that cause many problems for C# and VB.NET developers. Correctly handling errors via exceptions and recovering gracefully when they occur is a deceptively simple problem. We will discuss time-tested guidelines for raising and handling exceptions and discuss changes for the soon to be release .NET Framework 2.0 product. The second topic is how to effectively deal with memory management in the CLR. We will take a look at how the automatic memory manager in the CLR really works and why it works that way and discuss best practices for writing code in that world. We will also touch on some new features coming in .NET Framework 2.0 in this area.

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