Welcome Jan Bernards (nee Theule) and the Bernards Family to the world of Blogs. I
look forward to the family insights. I have already been amused by Emily’s potty training
adventures.

The Bernards Family Blog:
LIVING, LOVING, LAUGHING

Daniel Weintraub, a reporter for the Sacramento
Bee has a blog named California
Insider that keeps tabs on what is happening in our state capitol.

Today
he wrote that a recent
column on the state required High School Exit Exam generated a lot of email. His
blog entry comments on one of those emails from a profressor of education at a state
university who opposes the exit exam. I’ll spoil the ending of the blog entry with
the following quote.

The fact that it’s controversial to require students
to speak, read and write English before graduating from high school shows just how
dysfunctional our education system has become.

Read
the entry

The post conference workshops were yesterday. There were only 5 to choose from, and 1 was the workshop I attended last year. The I chose to attend was not something I was super interested in, but it was the best available. The workshop had good material, but after 4 days, I was ready to go home.

Did I mention that I love Santa Barbara airport? All flights were on time and I got home by 10:15p.

Today was a great day at VS Live! San Francisco. The seminars I attended were all pertinent and well presented.

Food today- I finally found a place that serves a Monte Cristo sandwich. The silly thing was invented in San Francisco, but most sites that were returned from my Google search had to do with cigars and cigar stores. Mama’s
On Washington Square serves them up and someone wrote a review that mentioned
the sandwich. It was a long
walk (nearly 2 miles each way), and made all the longer by the enormous crowds in Chinatown. We sometimes had to walk in the street to get by. It was Chinese New Year, so maybe there were more people out than usual. There certainly were more kids than I would have expected to see on a weekday at 1pm. And sad to say, the sandwich was just not that great. It was small, and didn’t have a lot of ‘middle’ (meat, cheese) to it. But the excellent homemade jam compensated nicely. David ordered it as well, but he didn’t care for it at all and ended up only eating half.

I attended a number of seminars today, some were good (What’s New In SQL Server 2005 for Developers, Operator Overloading, Generics and BackgroundWorker in VB.Net) some were not so good (Stored Procedures with CLR in SQL Server 2005) and a couple were great (The ‘My’ Namespace in VB.Net, and Application Frameworks in VB.Net). I was irritated by the CLR SP talk because the speaker, William Vaughn, took up a bunch of time at the beginning telling jokes and relating personal political opinions. Thus, he had to rush through the actual content of his presentation, hold us over time and still not complete his presentation. I had heard he was a good presenter, but it did not show during this session.

2 pieces of information that I took away from the ‘My’ Namespaces presentation that others might be interested in:

1. When you set a VB.Net application to be a single instance application (via Project
   Properties) you can add code to the event handler StartUpNewInstance. You can also
   add code to the event handler HandleUnhandledException. If you add code to either
   of these event handlers (and possibly other new application wide event handlers) you
   must test the code outside of the debugger (Ctrl-F5). If not, the debugger will catch
   the exception before the event is fired.
2. I had heard conflicting reports about the availability of the ‘My’ namespace in C#.
   According to Microsoft, the ‘My’ functionality will only be available in VB.Net.
   According to the speaker, this is because C# does not have a background compiler running
   that can dynamically recompile the information into strongly typed classes. This statement
   was not corrected or countered by the Program Manager in charge the ‘My’ namespaces
   who was in the audience. I expect that the ‘My’ namespace will be so beneficial to
   me, that I will be creating all new projects in VB.Net, instead of C# (which I have
   been using, almost exclusively, for over 2 years).