Drewby

Currently, the training kit contains six hands-on labs, made up of the following technologies:

1. ADO.NET Data Services
2. ADO.NET Entity Framework
3. ASP.NET AJAX History
4. ASP.NET Dynamic Data
5. ASP.NET MVC
6. ASP.NET Silverlight controls

Instead of waiting until the kit was completely finished and perfectly polished, we’ve decided to be more agile with our release cycle and get iterations to the public quicker so that we can get feedback and change the direction of our content if necessary. Future versions of the kit will contain presentations, demo scripts, screencasts, and any other valuable resource we can possibly find!

My role is changing a bit here at Microsoft (more on that later) and moving forward, Jonathan, Jason Olson and I will be working together on Visual Studio and .NET evangelism. He's really put together some great content in this training kit!

Scott Hanselman wrote a post about how to make a community event great. I think the suggestions are great, but his reference to cold pizza struck a nerve for me. It reminded me of the evangelist wish list I had when I was a Developer Evangelist in the field (in other words, before I got a "desk job").

I thought Microsoft should hire more evangelists. And it wasn't about reducing my workload. Rather, I wanted these new evangelists to compliment my position as a DE (everything needs to be shortened into an acronym at MS, uh, Microsoft):

Food Evangelist (FE)- You will go before us and let the world know that there is more to life than pizza. Nothing was as bad for a DE than to eat pizza 3-4 times in a week. Pizza for lunch events, pizza for evening events, pizza, pizza, pizza. Scott has some great suggestions for alternatives in his post.

Driving Evangelist (DrE) - You have an important role, responsible for teaching people who drive on the same roads as the DEs that there are two (or more) lanes on the freeway. The left lane is for passing, the right lane is for cruising (flip this if you are from one of those countries). If you look in front of you and there is a clear road, and behind you is a mile long line of traffic, this is probably a good indication that you should be in the right lane.

Airline Evangelist (AirE) - similar to the Driving Evangelist, the airline evangelist will spend their time at airports, spreading a few simple messages. For the airline passenger, you are not the only one trying to get somewhere ontime today - sit down and shut up. For the flight crew, I may not be flying in first class, but I'm also not luggage - if I pay five more dollars will you at least share the same courteousy you do with the people up front.

Social Evangelist (SE) - we all need you. Enough said.

A short simple list to make the world that much better. What other evangelists are needed out there?

Just in case you haven't subscribed to my IIS blog, here are some recent posts.

• Windows Server 2008 for ASP.NET Developers - Why should ASP.NET developers care about Windows Server 2008?
• Interview for PodcastStudio on IIS7 - I did an interview with Jeff Julian and John Alexander on PodcastStudio.net/
• Great Screencast on IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI - Scott Hanselman did a great screencast on IIS7 and PHP.

Also, if you are interested in IIS7, you may be interested in a couple other posts from the IIS team:

• Mike's IIS7 Modules - what's coming next - Mike is updating his IIS7 modules and the list looks very interesting.
• Using LINQ with Microsoft.Web.Administration - this is a really cool application of the new IIS API's using LINQ.
• IIS FastCGI and PHP: What you absolutely need to know to host PHP applications on IIS 6 and IIS 7 - Mike does a great job of sorting out what exactly you need to host PHP applications on Windows.

As least two people (Mike and Dave) have asked me to do this now, so I figured I should cooperate. I have a Blackjack that is the best phone I've had in a long while. I don't do a lot with my phone other than the included applications, but I need those applications to work reliably, and they do on the Blackberry.:

• I use it to make phone calls - duh! :)
• I use my calendar and email way too often. I'm addicted to a constant email fix.
• I use Live Search Mobile quite a bit. This is a great program for me, especially having moved to a new area of the country.
• I make use of the Internet Sharing application to get an Internet connection on the road.

Someday, I'll take the time to add more applications. For now, I'm keeping it simple.

So many people have done this already, I'll tag just two people - Steve Loethen and Josh Holmes. Steve and Josh are the gadget guys from my old team and it's always interesting finding out what their latest device/software is.

What's on your phone?

It only took the movers 7 hours to pack our whole house and now its 4 hours into moving day and the house is just about loaded into the truck. Here we go!