No, not the cat. The next version of Small Business Server. Here’s a few Q&A’s including a little tidbit about certifications.

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I’d like to change the theme here (this one makes me want to hurl) but I can’t find one that is compatible (or looks good) with the syntax highlighter plugin.

Anybody (all 1 or 2 of you) have a suggestion?

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They posted the full agenda for the VSLive San Francisco conference over here. Lots of good content but, of course, the price went up.

Again.

It’s amazing how someone can say “only $2100 (that’s a savings of $695 off the regular price) and you get a free copy of Visual Studio 2008″ with a straight face.

Most developers that would be interested in this type of conference probably have MSDN subscriptions so they already have VS 2008 (or at least already have access to it if they haven’t downloaded it yet.)

Last year’s conferences were about $1700 dollars. If the price went up $400 dollars ($1100 if you don’t register by Dec 31st) just how “free” is the free copy of VS 2008?

If I say “no thanks, I don’t need another copy of VS 2008″ can I take a few hundred off the price of the conference? Didn’t think so.

And let’s not even mention the few nights at the conference hotel (at $225 per night.) That’s why I’ve usually gone to the New York conference. I can commute there. Unfortunately I lose a lot of networking time that way.

I wonder how long it will be before the whining about declining attendance begins.

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…and a few non-C# blogs courtesy of the folks at DevTopics.

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So I thought I would do a post or two about the latest project I’ve been working on. It’s a management dashboard (a first for me) deployed via ClickOnce (another first) and uses a “non-traditional” user interface (another first.)

In 2005 I was in Boston for TechEd and saw a presentation on an application that Microsoft developed for the CommonwealthBank of Australia. This was the first real SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) application that I had seen and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of Smart Client apps. So this management dashboard is my attempt to leverage some of the things I saw in this app (there’s an entire MSDN case study page dedicated to the bank’s app, aka ‘CommSee.’)

Along the way I thought I would also post about the Virtual Server rig I built to test (and learn about) the ClickOnce deployment. The client’s infrastructure runs on five servers, two of which run as a fault-tolerant mirrored pair and I’m using the Virtual Server rig to replicate that infrastructure in the lab.

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