Yesterday I flew to D.C. on the first leg of a 17-day trip. I’m home for 12 hours this weekend, then fly to London for DevWeek and go straight from there to Paris for a few days of consulting. John and Jeffrey will be with me in London, and Jeffrey and I are going to Paris together. It’s a lot of travel, but it’ll be nice to be traveling with pals instead of traveling alone.
I’m teaching an ASP.NET 1.1 class this week in Visual Studio 2003. Now that I’ve worked almost exclusively with VS 2005 for several months,VS 2003 feels really old and clunky. I hate the way it manages Web projects. And even simple stuff like running a particular page on a multipage site requires way too many clicks. I can’t wait to chuck VS 2003 for good and teach classes from VS 2005. For me, the day Whidbey ships can’t come any too soon.
I just finished a crash effort to rewrite Wintellect’s 5-day ASP.NET course. I’ve had a bunch of changes in mind for months, but just now freed up the time to make them. I’m worn out, but it’s gratifying to have the revamped course materials ready for this week’s class. I made several structural changes, rewrote several labs and built some brand new ones (including one that teaches students how to use Microsoft’s Application Center Test to perf-test Web apps), and went to a new slide format which is soon to become our company standard. So far, so good. I’m sure I’ll come home with a list minor tweaks that need to be made. That’ll give me something to do on the plane to London.
I’m reading Michael Crichton’s new book State of Fear. It’s a terrific book. I stayed up way too late last night because I couldn’t put it down. At the same time, I’m trying to limit how much of it I read each night because I don’t want it to end. THAT’s the sign of a good book!