Today was just a pretty lazy vacational day. Went to the beach and later visited a friend of Katja whom she got to know due to her addiction to Everquest. Greg invited us to a great steakhouse in this area and after dinner we went to B&N (+ Starbucks). Even though I'm on vacation, I really had to check out the computer books section there and noticed a very strange thing: not a single Apress book there - no "C# and the .NET Platform", no "C# Guide for the Experienced Programmer" and of course, also no "Advanced .NET Remoting". There's basically only Microsoft Press books on .NET available at this branch ... hmmm ... looks like someone made a deal there.

In the evening - that is, around midnight - we did some laundry and prepared for tomorrow's drive to Key West. Checking the map to realize: it would take us about two days to get from Napels to the Keys and back (and an additional day on the road to go to Orlando where I ought to be next week) resulting in about only 2 days of beach time. It only took as about five seconds to decide against the Keys ("well, it's not going to be our last trip to Florida ...") and in favor of another week in Bonita Springs, Naples and Ft. Myers.

It struck like lightning: there's no decent coffee in the outbacks. No Starbucks. No nothing. Fortunately, there's caffeine in cans available - important straight from Austria where I live. And yes, I'm just so slightly addicted to caffeine ...

After finding caffeine, we went further south-east to Fort Myers and continued - just by chance (err ... "because I like the name") - to Sanibel, a nice islandish land mass right next to Fort Myers. If we weren't to continue to Napels tomorrow and planned to go to Key West later on, Katja and I decided that we would probably have found the best place to stay. At 4 pm the weather was brilliant and water temperature was just like our swimming pool at home (that is, the pool during the hottest summer days - right now snow is falling in Austria).

Oh, and by the way: It's Holiday Inn today. No more experiments in this regard ...

Yes, we did it! We really got up at 4:00. It took as more than one and a half hour to get ready and leave for Boston airport.

After getting lost, finding the way again, returning the rental car and taking the shuttle to the airport we still arrived way to early so that we had to force ourselves to stay awake for another two hours. Both Katja and I however fell asleep right after boarding the plane. Slight advantage: the trip from Boston, MA to Orlando, FL basically took only the duration of an extended nap.

Ok ... let me recap: we left Boston in at about 50 - 60 °F and arrived in Orlando in the 80s. Boy, the weather here rocks! I'm already envious of anyone living in this area. Any software company with a need for a .NET architect and developer in this area? ;-) [sorry folks, no H1B1 yet]

As we are going to meet a friend who lives around Naples, FL we went south-west through the outbacks where we managed to find the something which easily matches the description of worst motel room ever! Both of us have been so tired however, that we couldn't figure out who's about to tell the manager that we wouldn't accept the room ... instead we just fell asleep.

Fine. Today's the day. My first talk in the US. Good signs for all superstitious people: bright, sunny - alas chilly - day again.

Slept until about eight, been in bed until nine, did some final touch-ups of my slides and demos until eleven. Went to the conference.

Heck, I haven't been on the stage for about two months and could hardly remember how great it is. I can only speak for myself, but I get lots of energy from public talks. This was one of the better (maybe the best) audience I ever had. The small size of the conference really allowed for lots of questions. discussions and ad-hoc changes in the samples and topics. Absolutely rocked! Thanks to anyone who's been there.

In my second talk, Mike, Keith, John and I switched the topics rapidly between Remoting Internals (the talks topic) and the pitfalls of threading, late thread detachment and non-existent timeouts. Short story: don't use TcpChannel if you depend on your application working with delegates' .BeginInvoke() calls. Reason: The thread is only detached after the message has been sent to the server and there's no possibility to set a timeout on the TcpChannel. Combine these two and a malicious server which just accepts a socket connection but doesn't read any data from the socket and you end up with applications which won't perform as you'd expect them to do.

After the talk, John and I planned to have a look at his Common Language Aspect Weaver (CLAW). Right when leaving the conference facility, we bumped into Sam Gentile and took him with us.

Lucky us: Sam's a local so he could lead us to some great food before John got the chance to install CLAW on his laptop. He originally planned to install it on mine, but unfortunately it occurred a sudden loss of battery, going from 4 hours of battery power to zero minutes in about 5 seconds after John told me that "I just need to run NGEN /prof System.Windows.Forms.DLL and don't really know what it does ...". Sam's been more brave than me:

I had to leave the party at about 1:00 am, pack my luggage (ok, I admit - Katja packed as I dropped into my bed nearly instantly) and prepare for a short two hours of sleep. Argh ... do you know this feeling of having to set your alarm clock to 4:00 am?

Got up way too early - 7am - to be ready for the first day of WIN-DEV. As this is the first conference I'd speak at in the US, I really wanted to sit in on at least one other talk before doing my talks tomorrow. You'll never know ...

Summary: nice, small conference. Great setting. Great speakers. Bad - that is, really bad - weather.

Spent the evening with preparing the demos for tomorrows talks.

Katja's sick today. Argh.

I basically spent the time with answering some emails, hacking some stuff and later this day met a bunch of DM guys and Wintellectuals at the WIN-DEV speaker dinner. Sushi!

Start of WIN-DEV Week.

When a week starts as shown in the following photo (taken right from my hotel room), can anything go wrong?

Bright, sunny day. Unfortunately also quite chilly here in New England. Feels like home ...

Stayed at Sam's. Thanks again, Sam!

After lunch, Katja and I left for some more leaves and checked into the conference hotel in Nashua. Not too many new discoveries today, apart from the fact that the conference hotel is supposed to look like an ancient European castle. Hey folks, we have the real things around in Austria and I can tell you that a castle's walls are supposed to be at least 5 feet thick - also there's just a very small number of ancient castles with A/Cs. Technology wasn't that great 500 years ago ;-)

Katja and I have been at Sam's and together with his family went up to White Mountains for some foliage peeping.

Sam and me. Who is who?

Katja 

After returning back to Sam's (where we were stayed for the night. Thanks Sam!), watching Matrix and sending the Girls - Katja and Sue - to bed, Sam and I got the chance to dig into Rotor until about 2 am. The GC really is a beast ...

Tough, tough, tough ... this conference isn't going to give me any break.

After spending a great day with quite a number of interesting talks, the bloggers went out for dinner:

I hope that this conference was as much fun for you as it was for me. It was great to finally meet y'all! See you at the next DevCon!.

First and foremost: This conference was tough! It basically was about eight or nine talks a day, with very short breaks in between. Content, content, content! Count on me for next year's DevCon. (BTW. I won't blog any of the talks as Brian Jepson already does a great job on this.)

So ... whom did we meet? Lots of great people, speakers, authors, bloggers & non-bloggers. I got the chance to shoot some photos (A-Z):

Alexis Smirnov

Brian Graf

Greg Reinacker

Matt Croydon

Peter Drayton

Today we could be found attending Sam's talk at the Boston .NET User Group where we met Brian and Jesse.

If anyone's wondering: That's Katja sitting next to Jesse. I could snag this photo even though I've been heavily involved in Sam's talk, after which - despite my greatest efforts - I've been dubbed the "Worst Slide Monkey Ever". Ok, it wasn't that bad until Sam called on me to "show me the IDL" and after cranking up some .Hs and .CPPs I had to admit that I never worked with VC++ before ;-)

After Sam's talk and especially after waiting in the Microsoft building's ground floor for about 40 minutes (Note to self: never go down a keycard driven elevator at 8 pm. You won't get up again.) we continued to the Web Service DevCon's hotel, had dinner and mentally prepared ourselves for the upcoming conference.

Today Katja and I have been to the New England Aquarium in Boston.

If you ever happen to spend some time in this area and are somehow interested in maritim life - and not just the one you'll get at Legal Sea Foods - I really recommend going there. Hey, we also met some of Tux' relatives there.

As this was basically our last day in Boston, we had to spend some time in geek's paradise: MIT. At the MIT museum, I just had to take the following picture for all our emacs loving friends.

Not too much has been going on today. I basically sat at my computer completing all the slides for yet another upcoming conference in Germany. The good thing is that I've now completed the slide submissions for all of this year's conferences.

News from Boston: Great weather around!

We had a perfect day for our planned walk today. Katja and I started around noon, went downtown by underground and had breakfast in the city (Starbucks!). Minutes later, we could be found on a taxi ride back to our hotel because I've forgotten to take my Microdrive out of my laptop the day before. Hey, I don't photograph because I'm on vacation - I'm on vacation because I want to take photos. So, after a USD 35.- taxi fare we finally started to walk the freedom trail at around 2:00 pm.

The trail starts in Boston Common, continues to the State House, to the city's first burying grounds, the Old South Meeting House ("This is the place where the Boston Tea Party started ...").

It continues through the financial district on to the Old State House and through the beautiful Boston North End.

After crossing the Charles River to Charlestown, the trail ends at the Bunker Hill Monument and U.S.S. Constitution.

Did you know that you can go up the monument and look out of the windows on top of it? 294 stairs lead up to a really great view of Boston. (Unfortunately, the windows aren't clean so you can't really take any great photos up there).

Ok, now for something completely different:

Things I Particularily Like About Eating In the US

* Service. Service is just so much better in the US than it is in Europe. In Austria, it could happen that you enter a restaurant, seat yourself at a table and wait for 30 minutes until the waiter finally notices you. Waiters normally get a flat payment in Austria so they don't really care about how the customer perceives their service; they just don't depend on tip or such.

* Free soda refills. Ok, that's it. In Austria, in Restaurants you'll pay about USD 2.5 for a single small glass (200 ml or 0.05 gallons or 0.21 quarts or 6.8 fl oz, whichever unit suits you best ;)) of Coke. You want another one? Fine, that's USD 2.5.

* Different kinds of food. Apart from the service, the US also really rocks in terms of different kinds of food. US, Thai, Indian, Greek, Italian, ... everything's there. On the same street. Right next door to each other.

US Food/Drink I Can Live Without

* US Coffee. Sorry folks, that's just not how it's supposed to be. I live on espressos and normally start my day with a triple one and I can tell you: coffee's supposed to be black, not near-transparent. But let me put this in the right context: Starbucks rules! They saved my life or something like this. (But hey, did you know that you can get a triple espresso and not just a double one at Starbucks in Europe? ;-) )

Summary: Katja and I really like it around here. Too bad that it's just two more days of hanging around in Boston before the conferences start ... I already get used to doing nothing ;). On the other hand, I'm also really looking forward to meeting y'all!

Welcome folks to a new day of Boston travel reporting!

Today weather was great in the Boston suburbs. I however had to spend most of the day with finishing my slides for an upcoming German conference. I can tell you, I really know a lot more about the Rotor JIT compiler than I did a week ago. Hey, wanna know one of the most important sequences which ever get emitted by the JIT?

is TransparentProxy? (Compare pointers to method tables)
0083A0B2  cmp  eax,7FF6000Ch

If not --> local (0083A0C3)
0083A0B7  jne  0083A0C3

CRemotingServices::CheckForContextMatch?
0083A0B9  mov  eax,dword ptr [ecx+8]
0083A0BC  call dword ptr [ecx+14h]

If not --> remote (0083A0C9)
0083A0BF  test eax,eax
0083A0C1  jne  0083A0C9

0083A0C3  pop eax
0083A0C4  jmp  06D40394    ' local call
0083A0C9  jmp  000A293C    ' remote call

and of course the following helper, which is called from somewhere after 000A293C

ARG_SLOT __stdcall CTPMethodTable::OnCall(TPMethodFrame *pFrame, Thread *pThrd, ARG_SLOT *pReturn)
{
   ...
   pSig = InitMessageData(&msgData, pFrame, &pModule);
   ...
   // get the RealProxy from the TransparentProxy
   firstParameter = (OBJECTREF)(Object*)pThisPointer-> GetPtrOffset(s_dwRPOffset);
   // Get the address of PrivateInvoke in managed code
   pTarget = (const void *) CRemotingServices::MDofPrivateInvoke()->GetMethodEntryPoint();
   ...
   CallTarget(pTarget, (LPVOID)OBJECTREFToObject(firstParameter), (LPVOID)&msgData, (LPVOID)callType);
   ...
}

For anyone wondering: that was the Remoting thunk which makes TransparentProxy possible. If you want to know more about it, you'd however have to attend my conference session at the upcoming .NET One Conference in Germany ;-).

Ok ... now let's forget about work for a short while. I just returned back from Dinner with Sam Gentile and his wife.

We had a great time eating Italian food and hanging around at some coffee shops and on Harvard Square (obviously, we've not been the only one having fun there as you can see below). There's really a lot more about each one than what can be seen on the blogs. I'm really looking forward to meeting him again at the DevCon and to join him later next week leaf peeping in NH.

All in all, I really had a great day. Thanks again, Sam, for taking the time to drive down to Boston.

Plans for tomorrow: If the weather allows, Katja and I will walk the freedom trail in Boston. Let's learn about US history!

Looks like it's going to be a nice day in Boston again

Update: No it isn't ;-)

Today Katja and I became masters in getting lost. After picking up the rental car we managed to get lost for the first time when going from Boston to Somerville (don't laugh!) and the second time when looking for an indian restaurant which is shown on a ("non scale") hand-drawn map in the hotel's guest service directory. Lesson learnt today: look up the address before you leave for the restaurant.

Apart from this, the weather turned considerably more What-Europeans-Expect-Of-Boston-In-October-style by hitting 45°F. So, instead of walking around in the city, Katja decided to become ill and stay in bed for most of the day [1] and I worked on the slides for the upcoming .NET One conference in Germany which will take place about a week after our return from the US. She's already a little bit better now and according to weather.com it should get a little warmer again so we're looking forward in the most optimistic way. We plan on checking out the "Freedom Trail" in Bostom as soon as the weather allows for it.

Also, there's something great planned for next week. First, we plan on checking out Cape Cod this weekend or early next week, then we're going to meet Sam and Brian (and maybe Peter) at the .NET User Group of Boston on wednesday and we're looking forward to checking out the foliage and scenics of New Hampshire after the Dev Con. Dilip & Sam: thanks for the tips & links!

[1] After we watched Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within instead of having breakfast.

Today's been our first day in Boston. This city rocks!

The weather was brilliant ("today is going to be one of the ten best days in the year") and Katja and I spent quite some time sitting in Boston Common and doing exactly nothing (apart from her getting slightly sunburnt). We later walked round the financial district and continued with doing exactly nothing (apart from me taking the occasional photo). What a relaxing day ;)

Later this evening we met Miguel and his girlfriend who took us out for dinner. Let me tell you just one thing: if you like seafood and ever come to Boston, you really have to check out "Legal Sea Food" in Prudential Center (and two other locations). This restaurant really is great.

I'm currently staying with my girlfriend in Somerville, near Boston, MA. Our flight was great, weather is brilliant. The only hard part is having a steak in the evening when your body thinks it's 2 a.m.

Ok folks, this weblog will be non-technical for the next five weeks. I'm just going to write it as a travel diary with a very specific audience: "me in one, two and five years". This also means that I'll back-date some posts to match the "real" dates.