Dahlin Family

Archive for September, 2007

Alison and I went out fishing on the Mississippi River tonight with a co-worker of hers and her husband.  It was a nice night, caught a few Smallmouth.  I caught a nice pair in the 19″ range.  Fun fun.

Our big oak was blown down in the storm yesterday.    On the way down it took out another nice tree right in the middle of our backyard.  Looks like I’ll be spending all weekend cleaning this mess up.

I finally launched the site I have been working on for the past month.  I think it turned out pretty nice.  It is for someone running for State Representative.  Everything you want to know about him you can find on his site .   The entire site is all custom.  It’s built with .NET and a SQL Server backend.  It is pretty nice for him, I made it so he can edit everything through and admin section.  Check the site out: http://www.joshuabehling.com

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Minnesota Developers Conference down in Bloomingtion.  I’ve been busy since then, but have been meaning to write a post on it, since it was worth it.

I thought the conference was great, it was put on by ilm service.
It started off with the keynote speaker, Craig Knighton from 3M.  He had some interesting things to say about 3M with the development with RFID tags.  He also displayed some cool things 3M is working on with WPF.  One cool thing he gave a quick into to was Microsoft’s Surface. WOW, this is some awesome stuff that is just on the horizon.  Have you seen Minority Report?

 After the keynote we attended 4 different presentations.   There were 4 different ones so one had to choose which one they wanted to go to the most.  I wish I could have seen them all, but…  

The first presentation I went to was on LINQ, Language Integrated Query, put on by Doug Nelson.  This was in the .NET 3.0 track.  Very cool, I can definitely see myself using this in the future if not sooner.  Doug did a great job presenting this.  He had a good demonstration on how to use it.

I also attended another presentation by Doug on Silverlight formerly WPF/E.  I had heard a lot about Silverlight before going to this but never really saw it in use.  He put together a great presentation on how you can use this.

The other two presentations that I attended were on Ajax and WCF.   The Ajax presentation was good, however I knew most of it already.  The WCF, Windows Communication Foundation, presentation was pretty much inapplicable to me.  Currently I would have no reason to know this.  I skipped out about half way through and went over to the Expression Web Designer presentation where it was good, but again, I knew all of it.

So in in retrospect overall I thought the conference was good, the two presentations by Doug Nelson were great.  I just happened to be familiar with two presentations that I attended and one, well, I had no reason to attend it.

Anyways, one cool thing is they have all the presentations available for download at: http://mdc.ilmservice.com/download.aspx. If you weren’t able to attend, I am sure you can still learn a lot by just checking out the downloads.

 I hope to attend it next year.
 

Last week I basically completed the site I was working on over the summer.  Turned out to be a bit of a bigger project than I anticipated, but it was fun.  I even got a gift card to Sportsman’s Warehouse out of the deal .  Thanks SCAVC!

Thanks Albers for help with the design, my original attempt was ok, but pretty shabby.  He was able to whip something together for it in a night.  Why can’t programmers design?

With this site on the verge of completion I’ve started working on another site with Albers for someone local running for State Representative.  Albers already has the design basically done and I have a lot of the programming done.  Just need to add a few more things to it.  Once we get it live I’ll post the link.

Oh, the link for the site I just finished: SCAVC