By Soul Solutions on Wednesday, 3 September 2008

Day 2 of TechEd NZ was pretty busy. For some reason at events we seem to present on the last session or near the end of the day so usually nobody knows who we are. Because I spoke at the Girl Geek Dinner on Monday night things were really different today. I ran into lots of people that had been at the dinner and had lots of good conversations which was very cool.

Went to a bunch of sessions today. Scott Hanselman’s lunch session on making your blog suck less was really good..but it was only 30 mins…I just wish I had seen the 2 hour version John got to see at the blogger's dinner.  Unfortunately I haven’t worked out how to be in two places at once yet.

Tomorrow we’re doing our session. We’ve got a lunch time spot competing against the Mobility Smackdown AND the marketplace prize giveaways for all the exhibitors so we may end up with a very small audience.

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By Soul Solutions on Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Today was a big day..Opening day – Keynote, lots of Scott Hanselman talks, Ask the Experts, and of course the Girl Geek Dinner.

The NZ keynote started with current and opposition parties talking about their broadband plan which were both well prepared and presented (and i’m not usually into watching political speeches). I must admit I was expecting to see a cool Live Mesh demo so was a little disappointed :(

I went to a bunch of sessions a couple of the “big ticket” ones -  MVC and Astoria – Scott Hanselman – both were well attended and went over very well.

Also went to Software as a Service – Anna Liu – I’ve not seen Anna present before and it surprises me because she is a REALLY good presenter.

I kept ending up in the marketplace and playing Read More »

By Soul Solutions on Monday, 1 September 2008

Got up early for a MVP breakfast. Was good to meet a few of the local MVPs and Microsoft staff and of course catch up with Rose and Nick. Then we skipped out in the morning as it was a really nice day to check out the sky tower. It’s the tallest building in Southern hemisphere and has an awesome view. John made good use of my camera so there’ll be some pics coming soon.

Then it was off to Code Camp NZ. Good to see they made use of the international speakers for Teched like Scott Hanselman and Jonas.

Tonight there was a speaker dinner were I got to meet the Amanda, Brenda and Johanna who are all presenting at the Girl Geek Dinner on Monday night.

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By Soul Solutions on Monday, 1 September 2008

We flew out to New Zealand this morning. First flight on Pacific Blue. Somehow we got stuck at the back of the plane surrounded by families with small children and were seated in front of a family with a child that enjoyed throwing things, kicking the seat and smacking my head. There wasn’t any in-flight entertainment so good time to try to sleep. So it wasn’t the most enjoyable of flights.

First thing I noticed here was petrol is close to $2/litre!

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By Soul Solutions on Thursday, 21 August 2008

After a long wait and no news the very cool Photosynth was released today for you to build your own synth. There is a great (40min) video on channel 10.

Here is some interesting links I found so far:

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By Soul Solutions on Thursday, 21 August 2008

The HDView team at Microsoft have just released an update to their tools that allows you to export your giga-pixel images as a Silverlight Deep Zoom application directly from Photoshop CS3.

The tools can be downloaded from here:

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By Soul Solutions on Wednesday, 13 August 2008

We decided to be different and go to Tech Ed New Zealand this year.  We’re doing a couple of presentations at Tech.Ed NZ if you want to check them out.

WEB217 – The Live Highlights Package – 3/9/2008 – 1:40-2:10pm

GEN101 – Virtually There – Girl Geek Dinner – 1/9/2008 8:00-10:00pm

Abstracts are below:

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By Soul Solutions on Sunday, 10 August 2008

My second set of videos for the Virtual Earth ASP.NET control went up today. This time we look at server side clustering. If your interested in getting a really large amount of data in the control you should check it out over at liveside.net.

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By Soul Solutions on Tuesday, 5 August 2008

I was alerted on twitter today that a giant screen is being erected in the city, the guess is to feed us sport crazy Australian’s with some Olympic goodness. Anyway I thought, ha I don’t need no big screen, I know that MSNBC is doing something special this year. They are giving you the ability to control your own Olympic viewing experience using the power of Silverlight at http://www.nbcolympics.com

But then today disaster, I hit this screen on their control:

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By Soul Solutions on Sunday, 3 August 2008

Released on Monday the new ASP.NET Virtual Earth control is very cool. I’ve spent the weekend sharing some of my knowledge of the control. Get the full set of 8 videos from LiveSide: http://tinyurl.com/veasp

The sample site is fully downloadable and shows the final outcome from the videos:

http://veasp.soulsolutions.com.au

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