A free ticket to PDC05 just by blogging, you say? Try and stop me!

Apart from the obvious reasons why I think I should attend the PDC (me being a consultant and blogger, focused on pretty much all things Microsoft, and .NET more specifically, which basically means I help sell your platform, e.g. by developing widely distributed end-to-end sample applications on .NET 2.0 Beta 2, for which I require all the information I can get as soon as I can get it, in order for me to generate money for your company and ultimately your paycheck, dear judge - think about that for a minute, I'm doing you a favor here dammit, so giving me a ticket is the least you can do... but I digress), here's the real deal:

• I'm from Belgium, where, as you may or may not know, we make incredible chocolates and fantastic beer. I'll take as much with me as I can smuggle through customs, and throw a party for all you Channel 9'ers out there.
• I was at PDC03 but forgot my undies after the most excellent "Women Who Code" BOF session, so I really need to get back and pick them up before they start to tear down the L.A. Convention Center on grounds of "asbestos smell".
• I tipped my cab to wait for me at LAX when I flew out, and I'm anxious to see if he's still there.
• I didn't get to show my weewee to Don Box at any conference yet, and I feel I'm just as entitled to show off my manlyhood as Rory is.
• I'm planning on speaking at PDC07, so I'd like to check out the locations of all the electric outlets for my talk's setup. You don't expect me to fly out just to do that, do you?
• I'm also planning on speaking at PDC05, but unlike last time, I'll try to wait until the guy with the mic has finished his talk.
• My boss just bought a Porsche (really) so now he can't afford to buy me a ticket anymore. Do you think it's fair that I'm a victim of his mid-life crisis? (Hi Peter! Good thing my annual review is just over, eh?)
• I missed the gig by the Band On The Runtime at the Standard Hotel last time, but I've been preparing a replacement Channel 9 drummer (sorry 'bout that Carl).
• Despite popular belief (and the picture on my site), I'm actually a gorgeous young female with perfect measures, an IQ of 0x9D and a higher libido than the average rabbit on viagra. Where do you want to meet up?

Right, that should do. See you there!

Very, very cool: Fixing the IExtenderProvider in Visual Studio's ASP.NET designer.

The fact that Extenders Providers don't work in ASP.NET has been bothering me for a very long time, and this article shows a way how to fix that once and for all. And all it needs is an extra attribute on your IExtenderProvider class. Sweet!

In case you're wondering: extenders aren't supported in ASP.NET because the team didn't really see a scenario for it. Mainly because they're mostly used to hook into control events and that just doesn't really happen as much on ASP.NET like in WinForms.

But you could still do useful things with it (translation and data binding jump to mind) so I was really bummed about that. I talked to Scott Guthrie about it on the PDC03, explained a few reasons why I'd use them and he agreed I had a good point but it was unlikely that they would actually implement it.

Yes! It seems there'll be a PDC again in 2005 (via Scoble)! The new PDC05 site is already up although there's not a lot of content yet (meaning there's no content yet, apart from the date (and the fact that it's announced of course (which is most important))). In fact the news is so hot they didn't even have the time to update the PDC03 logo yet ;-)

Oh, I so wanna go again, last year's PDC was a blast... I'm already marking that week as busy in my agenda, wink wink :-)

Since Whidbey/VS2005 should be old news by then, I'm assuming this one will be all about Indigo and Avalon, and of course Longhorn (or what's left of it anyway), and they'll probably have some yet unrevealed tricks up their sleave as well. Bring it on!