Tech Ed 2005 Webcasts

Recently, Microsoft released a series of pre-recorded webcast from Tech Ed 2005 in Orlando, Florida. The pre-recorded material is more suitable for people living in a very different time zone from United States, like me in Singapore. I don't need to wake up very early in the morning to join a live webcast broadcasted from US. The available webcasts are assorted selection of hands-on preview of the upcoming VS.NET 2005. Although we can discover ourself with Beta2 products, watching the experts can give us a more complete picture of what features are available and how they link together.

I found watching webcast is a fun way to learn. It could not replace the experience of attending a live event by yourself where you have the opportunity to interact with the speakers, feel what other people are feeling (interesting, boring, sleepy, etc.) and of-course enjoy the snacks provided. :) With webcasts, you can skip the boring parts and just jump to the one you are interested. It is kind of attending a zipped-version of presentation.

Link to Tech Ed 2005 Webcasts

My seat is secured

My seat for Bill Gates Live conference is finally secured :) This afternoon, I received an email from the organizer, stating that my registration is confirmed. An admission pass will be mailed to me, which I need to bring on the day of conference along with my photo id. I believe the security will be beefed up on that day, considering the popularity of Bill Gates.

Bill Gates Live

Bill Gates will visit us in Singapore for an hour talk held at Suntec Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre on Friday, 1 July. I am so eager to see him in person. Everyone who wants to attend must fill a registration form online. At the very bottom of the form, there is a tough question: "If you had to ask a question to Bill Gates during the Bill Gates Live Seminar, what would the question be?"

Wow... the author must have watched 'Contact' movie the night before. In the movie, a question like this was asked: "If you had to ask a question to the alien, what would the question be?" Similar huh?

Finger crossed I can get a seat as the demand for this free seminar seem to be overwhelming :(

AJAX DropDownList

Just recently, I published a new article in CodeProject about implementation of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) in a dropdownlist.

AJAX DropDownList is a custom control, inherited from System.Web.UI.WebControls.DropDownList. What differs this control from the normal DropDownList is the ability to fetch data asynchronously in the background without requiring any postbacks. Thus, an AJAX DropDownList can be dynamically populated from the client side using Javascript. Moreover, AJAX DropDownList implements Observer pattern to 'listen' to the change event of another AJAX DropDownList, and to 'broadcast' its change event to the other AJAX DropDownLists. This feature allows us to create a group of dependent dropdownlists, where a change in the first dropdownlist will trigger change on the second dropdownlist, and subsequently trigger change on the third dropdownlist, and so on...

Please read the article in Code Project for more details.