I certainly don’t. Most of the time. Lately I’ve been spending time working with Team Build to automate the builds of a few of our applications and I’ve discovered that way too many apps deploy themselves into the GAC. Discovered isn’t the right word, I’ve known for awhile that all of our 3rd party controls go into the GAC, but I didn’t realize how big of a pain it was going to be.

The Chicago .NET Users Group put together A Day of .NET Conference that took place over the weekend. It seems to be similar to the Code Camps that I keep hearing about. Overall, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the event and the turnout was better than I expected. (I jokingly asked Brian Scott on the way in to the building “How many people you think will be here?

Eric Sink is one smart mother. With all of the complaining, bitching, and moaning about not getting Team System for free, Eric is the first person I saw that pointed out that you really don’t get anything for “free” with MSDN. All that software you get is so you can develop against it, not that you can use it how please because you happen to be a developer. Let me explain:

I was reading Slashdot today and on of the posts was “Making Money Using Open Source Software?” where GamblerZG asks how you can make money creating Free software. Yes, it is possible. Because the FOSS people use “free” differently than you or I do. You see just because something is free, doesn’t mean it is Free. This is a distinction that people in the open source world make by referring to things as “free (as in beer)” or “Free (as in speech)” (Yes, for some reason they always capitalize the “Free (as in speech)”.

Sometimes when building a page, I find that I need to group controls together so I can show/hide them at the same time, or perform a similar action on all of them. Most of the time I can put them in a panel and just show/hide the panel. Other times though the controls are located on various sections of the page that I can’t put in a panel because the panel would affect more controls than I want.

[UPDATE: Apparently my memory was not as good as I first thought. :) It wasn’t a Tandy machine at all. It was manufactured by VTech. ] This “Why did you become a programmer” meme was traveling around the blogosphere a while ago, and as I read the stories that others posted I made a note to myself that I should post my story. I forgot about it until we started swapping stories at the Chicago .