The Irish Microsoft Technology Conference will be taking place on 3rd and 4th April in Dublin at the Cineworld Cinema Complex on Parnell St. It looks like it could be an interesting event tas here are over 40 sessions organised and it's be billed as a mini TechEd.

You can get more details form the web site http://imtc.firstport.ie

It's being organised by Irish Dev  they have loads of other events scheduled this year in a range of technologies, you can check these out here.

This is a really cool new feature in Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to debug into framework code, all you have to do is follow a few simple steps.

1. Start Visual Studio and select Tools -> Options

2. In the options dialog select Debugging -> General

3. There are two settings you need to change in here. Firstly ensure the “Enable Just My Code (Managed only)” tick box is NOT selected.

4. Secondly ensure that the “Enable source server support” IS selected.

5. Still in the options dialog box select Debugging -> Symbols, here you need to tell Visual Studio where it can find the pdb files and where it should store these on your computer.



6. Click the new location button and specify the URL http://referencesource.microsoft.com/symbols as the symbol location and select a location on your computer where the pdb files will be cached by clicking the "Browse" button.

Now you can debug into the .NET framework code as you need. You can watch a video on how to do this by Daniel Moth on Channel9, or checkout Shawn Burke’s Blog.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! are holding a conference for the .NET community in Galway's Instatute of Technology on 3rd May 2008. The agenda includes some intersting topics and icludes speakers from TechNet and DevWeek.

Full details can be found at their web site dddireland.com, registrater via Microsoft's events site.

Recently I worked on a windows application using WPF. Part of this application need to store a small amount of data, the geek in me would’ve loved to use LINQ to SQL, SQL Server 2008 etc. However this was a simple windows application used by a single user, therefore I selected object serialization as the storage mechanism. This may not be the most impressive technology but it was the simplest. My argument is that while having the latest technology on your CV is good, in my opinion it is as important to show you have the ability to choose the right tools for the right job. Using a technology wrongly should be as alarming as not using it at all.

 

Check out Martin Fowler's Bliki post on PreferDesignSkills, it follows a similar line of thought.

 

I'd be interested in any comments on this.

Here's an interesting site from Microsoft with webcats on various topics based around improving your skills and improving your career.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-ca/bb872393.aspx