Last week, it was time for a well-deserved skiing vacation [vacation, defined: no computer (and related stuff like books), no radio, no television, and of course no Internet cafe]. As always [always, defined: nineteen times], this Austrian's winter destination is France - 3 Vallees, Meribel, Mottaret.

The heading of this post is motivated by the weather situtation we encountered, which can be described only as le ciel bleu. After six days of skiing we decided to call it a day (so to speak) and head home a day early (a good decision as it turned out on Saturday, which totalled 100+km of traffic standstill in Austria thanks to Easter holidays) - no one any longer able to put up with the prospect of yet another day of sun and blue sky. 71,000 (alti)meters downhill is sufficient anyways.

And now for some photos to prove my point:

Left-hand side: Verdon and Vizelle gondolalifts.

Mont de la Challe.

Saulire, looking in the direction of Mont de la Chambre and 3 Marches.

You can find the P-I's blog here. Not dev-centric, which is good for a change.

Another AppDev training CD has hit the download center: this time, it is the ISO image of the Developing Applications in Visual C# .NET (CD1) training course. Note that in contrast to Exploring ASP.NET 2.0 Using Visual C# 2005, this courseware is for Visual Studio .NET 2003. Download

Carsten and I just returned from a Web Developer Meeting of the .NET Developers Association. For us, building forty is just a block away, so we decided to sit in on Michael Stiefel's talk on SOA. You can download the presentation and source code here.

Michael (who still remembered me from a book publishing summit waaay back) recommended that we (as in all attendees) check out the Metropolis Webcasts: Pat Helland relates the evolution of technology architectures to the evolution of city planning and shows us how far we have yet to go.

• Metropolis : Envisioning the Service-Oriented Enterprise (Part 1) In this part, Pat introduces the Metropolis analogy.
• Metropolis : Envisioning the Service-Oriented Enterprise (Part 2) In this part, Pat introduces the concept of services.
• Metropolis : Envisioning the Service-Oriented Enterprise (Part 3) In this part, Pat describes the guidance provided by the Metropolis analogy

The Microsoft Architect Journal also has an article on Metropolis.

From the description: This presentation is an overview of best practices and issues with the usage of exceptions, and different issues surrounding memory management including the IDisposable pattern, finalizers, memorypressure, HandleCollector, and why the using statement (Using in VB) is your friend! It's an excellent overview of some fundamental exception and memory management topics.

By Brad Abrams, so download it now.

After dinner yesterday, we decided to go to B&N which happened to be nearby. Well, I left with two more books to read: The .NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security and Open Source .NET Development: Programming with NAnt, NUnit, NDoc, and More. The former is by Keith Brown, and contains all those things you usually don't find C# samples for easily: for example, to how to modify ACLs - and much, much more.

The second one (by Brian Nantz) on OS tools for .NET development will be a reference for me on the various tools that we do use today, as well as others that we are likely to evaluate. It also contains a brief section (roughly a page) on #develop, which I happen to be the PM for. I would like to set the record straight on a couple of things though:

• #ziplib is only used to zip the help index XML files
• #cvslib hasn't been a part of the distribution for a couple of years now. However, it played an extremely vital role in #develop's gestation: the GUI for #cvslib was a prototype for the addin system we later used in #develop.
• Magic Library - in May last year (Fidalgo Beta 1), it was entirely replaced by the DockPanel Suite. Before that, we already had replaced portions of the Magic widgets with Lutz' CommandBar for .NET.

Thursday afternoon, we (Bill, Carsten, Chris, Colin, Eric, Jagadish and me) went to Building 7. I decided to post one foto only - the sign will tip you off what happened inside.