The annual geekfest, the Software Development Network Conference 2008 is being held on the 6th and 7th of October at the Leeuwenhorst in Noordwijkerhout (close to Amsterdam).

The list of speakers and sessions has been published and the Early Bird discount applies until August 16th. So sign up now.

After last years success, three user groups in the Netherlands are again coordinating their efforts to create the 2nd Dutch Code Camp.

Interested in speaking or attending? Sign up here.

Chris Bowen and and a group of volunteers is putting together the TENTH Boston Code Camp. Call for speakers is out right now. So go ahead and volunteer to speak at this great event!

Tomorrow night I'll be the guest speaker at the BAND (Bangor Area .NET Developers user group). I'll be talking about Workflow Foundation.

Workflow Foundation (WF) is one of the pilars of .NET 3. If you think WF is an end user tool then you’re wrong. It is a framework targeted at software developers that want to embed workflow into their custom applications. This session will explore the WF basics and focus on implementing State Machine Workflows, how to use the workflow runtime and where Windows Communication Foundation fits in the whole picture.

Sign up here.

I use a VirtualPC environment for all my software development work, usually using a unique environment for every customer. This eats up the drive space in my laptop pretty darn quick. So after reading about running a VirtualPC image from a USB Flash Drive I decided to give it a try. I purchased a 32GB memory stick and plugged it in.

After a little experimenting I can now confirm it runs the VirtualPC nice and fast. But writing data to the disk and reading at the same time is horrendously slow. So you need to do two things:

a) Make sure the .vmc file is NOT located on the flash drive

b) Enable UndoDisks

These two steps will create a temporary file on your harddisk, in the folder where the .vmc is located. This means that while using the drive you only read from the flash drive, but never write.

When you shut down the VPC you can choose to commit the changes to the flash drive, this may take a little while, so only do it when you have time to wait for it to complete.

I usually choose 'Save State' which allows me to restart the VPC where I left off.

If you're using the xsd.exe tool to generate C# code from an XML Schema you'll find that an attribute defined as an integer is generated into a string field.

The reason is listed on MSDN:

The xs:integer type is specified as a number with no upper or lower bound on its size. For this reason, neither XML serialization nor validation map it to the System.Int32 type. Instead, XML serialization maps the xs:integer to a string while validation maps it to the Decimal type that is much larger than any of the integer types in the .NET Framework.

Ted Neward offers a very good description of what a Software Architect is:

"an architect is not like a construction architect, but more like the conductor of a band or symphony. Yes, the band could play without him, but at the end of the day, the band plays better with one guy coordinating the whole thing. The larger the band, the more necessary a conductor becomes. Sometimes the conductor is the same thing as the composer (and perhaps that's the most accurate analogous way to view this), in which case it's his "vision" of how the music in his head should come out in real life, and his job is to lead the performers into contributing towards that vision. Each performer has their own skills, freedom to interpret, and so on, but within the larger vision of the work."