Windows Mobile Device Center RTM

Now that Vista has been publicly launched for the general public, Microsoft have released a number of fixes and updates, including the final version of the Windows Mobile Device Center drivers (x86 and x64 versions).

This is the ActiveSync equivalent for Vista, and I'm pleased to see that unlike most of the other Vista updates, this one does install on RC2.

Calendar cross-publishing concepts « Jon Udell

I have this dream, that one day our calendar that (usually) hangs on the kitchen wall at home will be replaced by an electronic version.

Then I would be able to view our home calendar from work, and using something like Outlook 2007, overlay my work calendar with our home one.

I'd prefer that the home calendar be secure, in that there would be restrictions as to who could view it (eg. I wouldn't want robbers seeing that we're out for the evening!)

Jon Udell outlines how far he's managed to get with sharing calendars between different systems (Outlook and Google in his case).

The final missing piece is to have some kind of flat-screen, light-weight PC that we can hang on the kitchen wall to replace the paper calendar. This is probably the tricky bit, as I'm guessing at the moment this would be pretty expensive.

I think it will happen eventually when components get cheaper, but we're not there yet.

LINQ to SQL talk

I was chatting to Rob last month and mentioned that I'd be interested in doing a talk about LINQ to SQL for the Adelaide SQL User Group.

I thought that Rob might slot me in later in the year, but no! He asked me to present at the February meeting, on Thursday 15th at 12 noon (Register here if you'd like to attend)

I'm conscious that I'm a developer by trade, and this is actually a SQL group where a fair number of attendees are more on the DBA/IT Pro side of the fence. So I'm going to try as much as possible to keep a good balance between showing "developer" code samples and also looking at what is happening on the SQL end.

I had hoped to be able to use the January CTP of Visual Studio "Orcas" to base the presentation on, but after downloading a few gigs worth of .ISO files, I discovered that the LINQ to SQL stuff is basically broken (Broken link, was originally forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1139799&SiteID=1) in that release.

So, I'm back to using the May 2006 CTP which installs on top of Visual Studio 2005.

I've read that there will be a February CTP (Broken link, was originally forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1112535&SiteID=1) of Orcas that should have a working version of LINQ to SQL, but I have no idea if that will be released in time for me to update the talk to take into account the changes since May last year.