This morning as hinted at by Scoble, Microsoft unveiled the official product name for the "Longhorn" , to be known now as Windows Vista™ not to be confused with the Vista Window Company of Warren, Ohio. The official announcement included a a video which included Tablet Pc's, Smart Phones, and multi-display devices.

The Windows Vista site also announces that beta1 targeted at developers and IT professionals will be available by August 3rd, 2005.

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"Geeks understand market competition about as well as men understand women."

Eric Sink has a very interesting post comparing competition in the software industry to games.

This seems to be a common topic lately. Just last night, Jim "I'm getting a blog soon, honest" Duffy was recommending the book "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What To Do About It" by Michael E. Gerber. I haven't taken a look at it yet, but I guess it's main take away is that just becuase you understand the technical work behind a business doesn't imply that the person understands that kind of business.

I think that in many ways, more so than ever, you need to either be jack of many trades, or have the right people in place to bring the required skills to table. I've had many conversations recently about the gaps that seem to be growing with developers understanding systems, and systems people not understanding networks, and nobody really understanding the business model behind it all that makes it possible.

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A PDC countdown banner? Who can resist a countdown banner! This is even cooler than being linked by Scoble!

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Amanda Murphy shares some excellent points on SharePoint and features that would make a difference in future version, and hints at a new SharePoint related site for the community. Interested!

Amanda is one of the great people I met at TechEd. Smart cookie!

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Finally.... I've been able to spend some much anticipated time with Indigo this weekend, although much of it came in place of sleep. As previously mentioned, one of my summer goals was to spend some quality time getting to know WSE (2&3) and Indigo. So far I'm digging it. It makes sense.

I noticed David Pallman's "Programming Indigo : Code Name for the Unified Framework for Building Service-Oriented Applications on the Microsoft Windows Platform Beta Edition" book on the shelf at the book store the other day and decided it was as good as place as any to get the ball rolling. This seems like an excellent book. Accurate, thorough, without any of the pre-release crap you often find in early books. The sample code even compiles!

I also spent some time on some blogs that are new and old to my reading list which I'll include here to remember (In no specific order):

Loosely Coupled Thinking http://blogs.msdn.com/jevdemon/default.aspx

Martin Gudgin http://pluralsight.com/blogs/mgudgin/

Christian Weyer http://weblogs.asp.net/cweyer/

Jelle Druyts http://jelle.druyts.net/default.aspx

Clemens Vasters http://staff.newtelligence.net/clemensv/default.aspx

Matevz Gacnik http://www.request-response.com/blog/default.aspx

Mike Taulty http://mtaulty.com/blog/

K. Scott Allen http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/default.aspx

And now, with the time reaching 1:10 pm and the temperature at a lovely 88°F it's time for me to head down to the pool for Kris and Ernie's pre-wedding pool party. Congrats to them both!  

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Starting July 25th, you can spend 5 days in a row learning from our favorite Developer Community Champion Glen Gordon as he hosts a series of webcasts on creating mobile web applications with ASP.NET. If you've ever heard Glen talk about mobile devices, you know that it's a passion of his and that the dude knows his stuff. I can't wait. Check Glen's blog for details and get your mobile ass signed up!

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Robert Scoble and Jeff Sandquist interview Steve Ballmer on Channel 9 [Video Here]. [Transcript Here]

My favorite quote from the interview is:

"I’d say the same thing to our developer customers as I would say to our employees. There has never been a better opportunity than today to make a real difference in the world. The next 10 years are going to be as exciting in computing and information technology as the last 10." - Steve Ballmer

Call me crazy, but I believe that!

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For a limited time only, Microsoft Learning is offering Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Web Applications with Visual Studio.NET, a 17-hour self-paced online training course, for free ($349.00 value). More Info Here!

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New Download on Microsoft.com: Microsoft Tablet PC TIP Update

Info on the Tablet PC TIP update to fix the memory leak bug as posted on What Is New

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[Info as posted on ipattern.com]

FREE Portal Development mini-Code Camp covering SharePoint, DotNetNuke and Portal Framework ASP.NET 2.0

When: August 20th, 2005

Where: Microsoft Office in Charlotte, NC

Overview of the event

Theme: Web Portal Application development with Microsoft technologies.  Sponsorship by Microsoft and my company, Faith Interactive.

Web Portals are not new to the scene, but enterprise adoptions to our technologies on a larger scale are just now beginning to take place. Microsoft has a number of products and technologies on the market to empower users to build web portals. SharePoint (SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services) technologies are one of these products. The SharePoint community has grown and embraced the open-source nature of developing these products. One product that will be demonstrated was developed by Jan Tielen. His product is called SmartPart Web Part. Microsoft doesn’t provide official support but thousands of developers have embraced the development of SharePoint portals through the use of it.

In areas where SharePoint products fall short, for example ease of UI customization through skins and custom login mechanize, open-source DotNetNuke portal is a great solution. I will be sharing from my production experience (1) why I choose this product for large portal implementation in big corporations and (2) the lessons learned from my experiences. 

Technology will never become stagnant and we can predict that the next version of ASP.NET 2.0 is just around the corner. It will include Portal Framework out-of-the box. The ability to code today in such a way that allows a smooth migration path is very important, so we will be examining the newer features of Web Parts framework and the best choices of technologies available today in order to escape the headache of a complete rewrite of portals.

Yes, the cost of the event is completely free and the quality can be likened to that of TechEd or VSLive.

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After what seems like an eternity away, I am finally back at my desk for a few weeks. My wife calculated for me that I was only home for 8 days during the month of June. No wonder my desk seems so foreign. June included the Microsoft TechEd in Orlando and some quality “face time” at the head office. Both were a bit of a shock after spending the end of May on a sail boat. But now, back to business….

So much has been happening on the .Net front it’s hard to keep up with it all. My self-inflicted summer learning project is some quality time with both WSE and Indigo, two somewhat related technologies that I intend to know well. It’s hard to imagine writing an application that doesn’t involve communicating over a network these days.

I’m a big believer in continuous learning. I have an incredible desire to know the how and why of things, especially relating to technology. This effort to learn has introduced me to some pretty amazing people over the years. There are so many incredibly smart people out there with a passion to both learn and share what they have learned. These are the people to surround yourself with.

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