Earlier today the website went live and registrations started. What is a “Day of .NET”? And why is it happening in Cleveland? A “Day of .NET” is, as the Day of .NET website says, “a one-day conference on all things .NET organized by developers for developers.” And that last part is why it’s happening in Cleveland. A number of us have frankly been tired of nothing happening in the Cleveland/North East Ohio area, and decided to take the bull by the horns as it were.

One of the themes we’re trying to push is that Day of .NET is .NET centric, but not .NET exclusive. So we’re hoping to bring a few speakers from other worlds (Java, Ruby, Python, etc) and learn from them. As well as explore a number of the exciting new things coming out of Microsoft these days (like the DLR, Silverlight, et. al.).

Interested in speaking? Contact speakers@clevelanddodn.org. Want to sponsor or know someone who would want to sponsor? We got lot’s of logo space to fill up, just contact sponsors@clevelanddodn.org. Most of all, get to www.clevelanddodn.org and register!

A little late, I know, but I finally got some time to put my thoughts into place.  First I want to send out my congratulations to Jim Holmes, Brian Prince, Jason Gilmore, Jason Follas, Dianne Marsh, Jeff Blakenburg, Josh Holmes, and John Hopkins for putting on ANOTHER wonderful event.  I went into CodeMash ‘08 with very high expectations based on last years spectacular event, and the group did not disappoint.  A quick thank you to the CodeMash sponsors for helping those folks do that job!  Your loyalty to the development community will not be forgotten by this developer.

It was kicked off by a very insightful panel on how to "sell" yourself and your ideals to clients and/or colleagues.  Then were the two days of sessions which were again some of the most insightful and educational I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending.

The keynotes were five star once again, with Scott Hanselman, Neal Ford, and Brian Geotz all doing an outstanding job.

I strongly urge everyone to go listen to Chris Woodruff’s CodeMash Podcasts, as well as checkout the CodeMash site for slide decks and session audio.

Of course the other half the conference occurs after the sessions are long over and deep into the night.  I had great conversations with folks like Joe O’Brien (who is a way bigger twitter addict then me, Keith) , Jay Wren, and Steven Harman that I am still digesting over. 

Let the countdown to CodeMash 2009 begin!

Peter DeBetta posted a while back with a function to take a hex string and convert it to varbinary It has a couple of slight issues, the biggest of which is it can’t handle an odd number of hex digits. Below is my replacement, because it’s using bigints the upper limit isn’t as high, but it’s good enough for most things:

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.HexStrToVarBinary(@hexstr varchar(8000))
RETURNS varbinary(8000)
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @hex char(1), @i int, @place bigint, @a bigint
    SET @i = LEN(@hexstr) 

    set @place = convert(bigint,1)
    SET @a = convert(bigint, 0)

    WHILE (@i > 0 AND (substring(@hexstr, @i, 1) like ‘[0-9A-Fa-f]’))
     BEGIN
        SET @hex = SUBSTRING(@hexstr, @i, 1)
        SET @a = @a +
    convert(bigint, CASE WHEN @hex LIKE ‘[0-9]’
         THEN CAST(@hex as int)
         ELSE CAST(ASCII(UPPER(@hex))-55 as int) end * @place)
    set @place = @place * convert(bigint,16)
        SET @i = @i - 1

     END 

    RETURN convert(varbinary(8000),@a)
END
GO

Scott Guthrie just made an exciting post, starting with .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 the .NET libraries will have source available!  This is quite the boon to developers, the ability to drill down to source level while debugging should lead to more accurate code.  Of course there could be a downside, namely developers coding around implementation details rather then the exposed methods.  But regardless this is a very cool move by Microsoft.  It’s being released under the Microsoft Reference License which doesn’t give you a whole lot of rights (none really, other then to look at the source), but it’s something.  Considering how important the framework is to Microsoft this is a bold move.  For a truly permissive license check out Mono, here’s hoping there’s no “patent/copyright” pollution there either…