After my class got cancelled I decided to take a weeks leave. I spend the week with my wife and we were able to complete some activities and tasks which had been outstanding for some time. We also got the opportunity to take the dogs to the beach.

Tech-Ed Online contains video interviews with key speakers and visitors of Tech-Ed. Currently the South African interviews are available for download from the MSDN site. This year quite a few of the local bloggers and community members featured in these interview.

On Saturday 23 August 2008, Michelle and I had our wedding at Illovo Africa Lodge. The weather turned out great, all the guests arrived on time and the whole day was better then either of us expected. After all the stress and planning, the 6 week lead time we had to prepare everything turned out great.

Microsoft has released new versions of two awesome development tools. FxCop allows for code analysis to be done on already compiled .Net assemblies while StyleCop analysis your code during development with full Visual Studio integration.

After being engaged for almost 3 years Michelle and I are finally tying the knot on Saturday, 23 August. She has done and amazing job in planning the wedding in under 8 weeks, and with less then 4 days to go the last minute rush is about to start.

During a recent career evening held at my offices, the question came to mind about the misconception created to students about success in the IT Industry. Althought there is a few success stories, the impression is somehow created that success happens early in the industry with the least amount of effort. Does the fact that successful individuals always talk at these events the reason for this perception?

Jeff Atwood has opened up the private beta for StackOverflow.com and I am extremely impressed by what they achieved. The new site is developed in ASP.Net Mvc with a host of features in the beta which makes the site extremely easy to use. The content is also proving to be valuable and accurate.

At Tech-Ed 2008 I had the opportunity of presenting a talk on Developing for Windows Mobile targeting the new and extensive feature list in Windows Mobile 6.1. This was my first official talk for Microsoft and I was extremely satisfied with the outcome and thankful for the opportunity.

Hosting Community Lounge at Tech-Ed is no simple task, and a few people from the industry and the community deserves a huge amount of credit with their help and assistance at the lounge this year.

DevDays 2008 was a huge success and I was extremely glad to have the support of so many people at the community lounge. It was a busy 3 days with more people then we ever imagined but the exposure was amazing.