George Tsiokos’ blog

I’ve always wanted to go to the PDC, i’ve just never been in the position to go. For example, for the 2000 Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), I was an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida working as a professor’s assistant, making just enough money to pay the bills. I visited the Orlando Convention Center on the last day of the PDC and picked up the first public release of .NET and Visual Studio .NET on four CDs. It was great! I was able to teach myself .NET and c# from the Tech Preview CDs and MSDN online. It was then that I realized how important the PDC was to software developers.

I had a scheduling problem with the 2003 PDC – you could imagine my surprise when I found out it conflicted with my honeymoon. I realized that I had to push my employer (for two years) to budget for training for the next PDC. My work paid off – In January of 2005, my supervisor informed me that I was going to the PDC. Unfortunately, in May, I accepted a position with another company.

I had a great time at the Florida Code Camp 2005. The Indigo presentation was awesome – I’d really like to see some more details on the new Windows Activation Service that Indigo supports for application hosting. I was also particularly impressed with Visual Studio Team System’s ability to get the analyst, architect, developer, and server administrators to collaborate. I can’t wait to see if it works!

SQLite was the topic at the last ONETUG meeting here in Orlando, FL. I was surprised to find that SQLite was exactly what I was looking for in a client-side database - slim and easy to deploy. There’s also an ADO.NET data provider open-source project where they provide everything you need to use SQLite inside you .NET application. Personally, I was able to modify one of my applications to use it in less than thirty minutes and found both the database and ADO.NET provider to be extremely useful and fast!