So, my flight got delayed yesterday.

I finished my WCF Master class in New London, CT on Friday night, had drinks with some people from class and went back to my hotel room. My flight left PVD on Saturday; I was due home to The Wife by 9:45pm.

I had a connection in Chicago with a 90 minute layover. No problem, right? Pbbbfffftttt.....

My flight out of PVD was delayed twice which put it over the limit for catching the last flight to PDX out of Chicago. So, I rebook for a flight out of PVD on Sunday, patted myself on the back for getting a 24 hour T-Mobile internet access for $10 and found a nearby hotel (that wasn't full) using my laptop, wi-fi and my Treo. How was this done back in the day?

So here I sit. 6:42am on Sunday. At my gate; waiting for the boarding call in 60 minutes. The flight before mine just boarded for Orlando. They called for the preboard and I swear nearly half the plane was full before Group A ever got to walk down the tunnel - lots of families with small children. Ha! I guess that's Orlando for you.

I've never been, but I'm told that famous people line the streets in Hollywood. You can go to lunch, look over at a corner booth and see big actor chowing down on a roast beef sandwich.

On Tuesday, I got to hang out with Carl Franklin at Hanafin's Irish Pub. He had just finished a recording a DotNetRocks session with some super stars and sat down with my WCF classmate and me for a beer. I've been listening to his shows for years so it was a real treat to chat it up in person.

Then, today (Thursday), I'm eating my roast beef sandwich at Steve & Cheri's Brooklyn Style Deli when I look over and see none other than Geoff Maciolek chowing down on a delicious deli treat about 3 feet from our table. I wasn't quite sure at first, but then we started murmuring about code and databases at our table and Geoff couldn't resist chiming in with a comment; then I was absolutely sure. It went something like this:

Geoff: Ah, spaghetti code

Me: Hey, you're Geoff Maciolek!

Geoff: Thats me! (ok, he didn't really say that, but that's what I think in my head because he's says it at the end of so many DNR shows... he just kind of stares and looks incredulous because a total stranger said his name)

Me: I know you from DNR and Mondays!

Geoff: Yeah, I'm over there with Carl...

We exchange a few more pleasentries and chat for a minute, then Geoff leaves the deli and I go back to the afternoon session of the WCF Master class - happier than a pup with two peters.

I leave this town Saturday. What are the chances that I'll be filling up my rental car at the gas station and see Karen drive by with Richard in the passenger seat and Mark running after them down the street, screaming profanities with a stream of toilet paper trailing out of his pants?

Who are you?

Wow. Sitting in WCF Master class.

16 (excellent developer) dudes. No ladies here.

Here's the link to my slide deck and code that I presented at the Portland Code Camp. Organizing this content and presenting it was a ton of fun and great way to dive into WCF and CardSpace. My laptop had some problems chatting with the projector (guess it wasn't using WS-* protocols) so my backup plan of toting my own projector around all day proved worthwhile. I did have to run a bit and scraped a message level encryption demo and all of the OpenID demo due to time constraints. :(

Jason Mauer recorded the session though, so I'm curious to see how well it looks from the tripod.

Now I'm on the east coast and 8:30am comes a little earlier in the morning here than it does on the west coast. Its the first break in the Master WCF class with Brian Noyes and we've already had one Carl Franklin siting. Booya!! I'm hoping I can get a tour of Pwop Studios sometime this week while I'm in New London.

I had a need attach a JavaScript function to the window.onload event today; I was fairly constrained in what I could do. This was an existing system and I couldn't go mucking around in anything I pleased.

Simon Willison came to the rescue with an excellent blog post on just what I needed - a way to register functions for window.onload that wouldn't trample those who came before me. Simon's code is brilliant!

function addLoadEvent(func) 
{ 
   var oldonload = window.onload;

   if (typeof window.onload != 'function') 
   { 
      window.onload = func; 
   } 
   else 
   {
      window.onload = 
         function() 
         { 
            if (oldonload) 
            { 
               oldonload();
            }

            func();
         } 
   } 
} 

addLoadEvent(nameOfSomeFunctionToRunOnPageLoad); 
addLoadEvent( function(){ /* more code */ } );

The PDX Code Camp is next weekend, May 19th and 20th. I've been preparing a talk on how to create and use X.509 certificates. Developers need this technology for local testing of plain old ASP.Net sites, Web Services Enhancements (WSE) or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) code.

The Windows SDK and Visual Studio.Net have some good tools for helping developers use certificates. I'll show some certificate basics, common examples of certs in action and tools that help us along the way. My goal is to get the session attendees comfortable with creating & installing certificates on their local machine in a variety of code scenarios - that seems like a reasonable task for a 60 minute presentation and 15 minutes of Q & A.

Just for fun, I worked on a local checkout of DotNetOpenID and implemented SSL for the authentication steps. A lot of the other code in the presentation is based on the excellent examples from Michele Leroux Bustamante. She does a great job of providing info on these topics for the developer community.

I have to leave for New London, CT on Sunday so I can only attend one day of this developer event. Normally, that would suck big time, but I'm also gearing up for a week long IDesign WCF Master Class at Carl Franklins house. When it rains, it pours!

Wow! This is a pleasant surprize. The DotNetNuke site posted one of the sites we built in their showcase. It has a handsome number of stars lit up in the rating field too! The Los Angeles site is nice, but I think one of the other sites gets my vote for favorite. This is a partial list of the sites, including thumbnail images.

In 2006, Pop Art built new sites for SelecTruck dealers located all over the United States. about 24 sites in all; we did one for Pluto too (the moon er... object) since we built up so much steam. The sites share the same backend components, connect to a content syndication service as well as hosting their own unique content. Each site has a custom skin that promotes the ideals of the given dealership.

A great job by the entire team!

There are tons of blog entries like this one explaining how to get intellisense for WPF/e using the February 2007 CTP. The SDK for that release has a file named wpfe.xsd and you drop it into your VS.Net schema folder here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas

I'm using the Silverlight 1.1 alpha bits, and the 1.1 SDK doesn't have a file named wpfe.xsd, so I was baffled for a minute. The Silverlight 1.1 SDK is laid out quite differently and comes in a handy zip file instead of a chunky MSI file like its predecessor.

Perhaps its just too early on a Sunday morning, but it took me a few minutes to realize that (A) the 1.1 SDK does have a file named Silverlight.xsd and (2) dropping Silverlight.xsd into my VS.Net schema folder does the trick. I'm going back to bed.

Hey, did you ever have a booger on your nose and walk around for a while before anyone told you about it? Maybe no one told you about it at all?

That's how I feel right now.

For some reason, I had Trackbacks enabled in my blogging software. So idiots all over the Internet were taking pot shots at my blog and adding their links to posts on my site without my explicit knowledge. I had barnacles all over the damn place. Damn!!!!

Shame on me.

I've disabled this cool feature on my site now. Furthermore, I've deleted all of the existing trackback data so the links to unscrupulous websites have been removed. I don't think there are ways to make evil links to my site now, outside of going through the steps to leave a comment. I suppose time will tell if I'm right.

Frankly, I'm surprized the search engines even ranked my site with all of these crap links on it. I ought to have paid more attention to who was reading/linking to my blog when it started getting popular.

I'd disable comments, but (a) I like getting them and (2) Scott Vandehey would say it isn't really a blog then.

 I'm gearing up for my week-long excursion to New London, Connecticut in late May for some Windows Communication Foundation training at Carl Franklin's house. This is going to be awesome. Brian Noyse is teaching it. Here's a nifty fact from Brian's profile:

Brian got started with programming to stimulate his brain while flying F-14 Tomcats in the Navy, graduating from Top Gun and U.S. Naval Test Pilot School.

In preparation for the class, I selected WCF Step by Step by John Sharp from MS Press. This is a solid book that nicely augments the podcast with MLB that I've easily listened to over twenty times. Its so cool to pick up new things every time I listen to it on my Treo.

I've been listening to Carl and Richard's podcasts for a while now - literally years I suppose. I heard that Carl is moving his public ILT training over to Mark Dunn's place in Atlanta to make space for more podcast studios. So this sounded like one of the last opportunities to catch a flight to the east coast, albeit the nearby Radisson, for good reason.

Now that its early May and MLB's book is out, I suspect I'll head over to Powell's someday soon pick up a copy of Learning WCF: A Hands On Guide. I have a layover in Chicago and only so much battery life. Have you ever tried to find an outlet at O'Hare to recharge? WTF!?!?!?!