I had such a good time this week at Tech Ed Developers! I really enjoyed delivering my talk to a PACKED room (148 evaluations and apparently 155 chairs, how's that for interest in C++) as well as participating in the DotNetRocks panel on agility. This is my room, during my tech check (love that yellow highlight):

A week for me of old friends and new faces, and general good moods all around. And from what I read in the blogs, a week of real interest in C++ and especially C++/CLI.  Steve has a roundup over on the VC++ team blog. Bruno van Dooren, a C++ MVP, blogged all the talks and even though he said some overly flattering things about me I will still give you a link to his blog. Don't worry, my head still fits through normal-sized doors.

Here I am with Arfa, the eleven year old (look at the poise! And she's incredibly well spoken in English, her SECOND language) who has two Microsoft Certifications already. She actually did a demo in the keynote and when I complimented her on how she did, she turned it around and complimented me on how I handled panel duties at the Girl Geek Dinner. (Stress-wise, I had the way easier gig.) Keep your eye on her, she's going places.

Kate

Spotted in the speaker room in Barcelona:

That's right, donuts entirely coated in decent chocolate. Mmmmmmm.

For those keeping track, the MVP shoes are in this speaker room also. They follow me around

Kate

Here I am at my second Tech Ed in three weeks and ready for a great time. The RDs already had a great dinner Monday night, and Tuesday is Girl Geek night. I've picked up an extra session, too, a panel discussion Wednesday afternoon:

DEVPD01 .NET Rocks! Talks Agile Development!

Carl Franklin , Richard Campbell , Stephen Forte , Roy Osherove , Kate Gregory

Wed Nov 8 15:15 - 16:30 Room 116

Enjoy a live audience recording of .NET Rocks as Carl and Richard bring together a group of serious thinkers on agile development for a no-holds barred debate on what works and what doesn’t in the world of agile. Bring yourselves and your questions to the panel and help create a future episode of .NET Rocks!

Kate

Tim Sneath has a neat trick: how to launch something "Run As Administrator" without right-clicking it and selecting from the context menu. And no, I don't mean use the ContextMenu key on your extended keyboard.

"Simply press Ctrl+Shift+Enter from the search bar on the start menu with a selected application, and that triggers elevation."

This is part of a series of useful tips you should probably read.

Kate

How much story can you pack into six words? Apparently Hemingway wrote "For sale, baby shoes.  Never used." Aaaawww, so sad.  But for true pathos, how about the sad laments of cast-off programming languages? Who says "They’ll come crawling back. You’ll see!" or "I was it once! What happened?" Let me try my own for C++ right now:

Unmanaged APIs everywhere. It Just Works.

What do you think?

Kate

http://msdn.microsoft.com/canada/liveforyou/

Every Tuesday in November, at noon Eastern, you can tune in and learn about Windows Live while it's still in beta. Search, Virtual Earth, Gadgets, and Messenger Bots are the four topics. This is a presentation of MSDN Canada.

Sign up and watch!

Kate

I've been using Windows since the beginning. And I use the system icon in the upper left quite a lot, mostly to close things, and especially when the window is off the screen a bit so the X isn't available. In Vista, it looks like that icon/button is gone, but it isn't. Just click where it should be:

Double-click to close the window, or do any of the things you would otherwise do on that menu. Isn't that cool?

Kate

Lots of C++ content in this talk with Soma on Channel 9. I spoke to Charles about this interview and he told me he really didn't know where it was going to go when it started, and it didn't need any editing, which is unusual for a VP. Soma also blogged it.