If you give presentations then you might be interested in a new free tool from Sysinternals called Zoomit.

Zoomit allows you to zoom an area of the screen and to draw on it. The zooming facility is similar to the Windows magnify utility and the same effect you can get from the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. The drawing facility is similar to the effect that you can get in the PowerPoint viewer with the rather important difference that you can draw on anything and not just PowerPoint slides. Overuse of the zooming facility can be a bit irritating for the audience but this still looks like an excellent tool.

Monday: One of the great features of TechEd is the chance to network with old friends and to make face to face contact with people who you’ve only met previously online. This evening’s Expo Hall Reception didn’t disappoint. Imagine my surprise when walking round the corner came the whole Source Fource Squad.

From left to right: Visual Studio Guy, MSDN Webcast Guy, SQL Server Gal and Virtual Labs Guy.

They didn’t actually say anything but they sure are great guys and gal and they can wave as well as anyone. The highlight was doing a high five with MSDN Webcast Guy. TechEd doesn’t get much better than this.

I’m delighted to say that I’m here in Boston at TechEd 2006. Today is Sunday, the pre-conference day. The highlight for me was seeing a demo of Raven, a third party add-on for Visual Studio Team System. 5 years in development, Raven reads specs and requirements in English text and writes activity diagrams from them. This is clever in its own right but it maintains a link between the text that it reads and the constructs which it creates from the text so you can click on a part of an activity diagram and the paragraph that it was formed from is highlighted. One of the particularly clever tricks is that it performs analysis on the text and finds mistakes in the spec - missing end points of conditionals, changes in terminology etc..

The "If You’re Ever Going To Strike Me Down With Your Holy Wrath, Lord, Then Now Would Be A Good Time" award has to go to Mary Lynn Rajskub (alias Chloe O’Brien of "24" fame). You’ve got to feel sorry for her. The keynote this evening was a series of demos of Microsoft’s latest releases held together with a filmed spoof on "24" which was renamed "4" where the time span of each of the 4 episodes was 4 minutes instead of 24 episodes of 1 hour. Chloe O’Brien came on after the first 4 minute clip and did a comedy duet with Bob Muglia. Poor Chloe. It didn’t work. The silences during the pauses after the jokes were populated only by the sound of some far away coyote (or maybe it was her bank manager howling with glee). Her other appearances throughout the keynote were better received but it really didn’t help that she was noticeably reading from the auto-cue hanging down just above the centre of the audience. I don’t think Chloe will be putting TechEd 2006 on her resume.

Chloe doing much better when she went solo

The bizarrest moment of the day occurred on the bus back from the conference centre to the hotel. The bus driver was from Hartford and didn’t know Boston and got lost because Boston isn’t based on the grid system. The idea that someone would get lost on a journey of 1.5 miles because they were confused because the roads weren’t straight seemed quite funny to me. The best bit was when the driver took one speculative turn too many and went down a road with a complete U turn. The bus couldn’t do the U turn and couldn’t reverse back up. After asking one driver to move their parked car the driver resorted to asking people walking down the street if they knew who owned the parked cars and would they mind moving them. I bailed. The last I saw of The Bus From Route 4 and its helpless captives was when it was trapped between a bollard and a parked car. Maybe they’re still there now. Perhaps I should call someone. Thank you, Bus Driver From Hartford, I smiled all the way back to my hotel. I even laughed out loud.

Phil Winstanley has uploaded a collection of DDD3 photos here. Thanks, Phil.

The final draft of Chapter 11, Custom Cultures of .NET Internationalization has now been uploaded.

This chapter covers creating Custom Cultures in the .NET Framework 2.0 in depth. The updated version contains a number of updates and new sections since the chapter was first written over a year ago.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone saying that they didn’t enjoy DDD3 (or any DDD). Someone is doing something right here because this one left everyone that I spoke to in the 400 (approx) -strong crowd very content.

Every session that I attended had people standing at the back. The Ask The Experts panel was the only part which didn’t appear to get the use that the combined knowledge of so many experts warranted. Here’s a techet of experts looking for an attendee to ask a question:-

(Left to right: Guy Smith-Ferrier, Daniel Fisher, Ian Cooper, Michael Willers, Dave Sussman).

The star of the day for me had to be Richard Fennell. He was first up and gave a session on Unit Testing GUIs. He started the session by saying that he’d been given 6 minutes to prepare his session because Tim Haughton, the original speaker, had dropped out at the last minute. Richard wasn’t joking when he said he had 6 minutes - this really was the amount of notice he had to give this session. It’s true that he had started preparing this session a few months ago but he stopped when Tim Haughton’s session was voted for above his. I don’t know how many of you have prepared sessions before but 6 minutes is not enough time to even think about what you’re doing let alone prepare (even if you do have a half-prepared session to base it on). Richard Fennell definately deserves a huge pat on the back for stepping in at the last (6) minute.

Well done to all again. Hope to see you at DDD4.