It's the end of the 2008, and I will be celebrating the new year with Kitty and some friends from work tonight. Although this is a time for fun, I feel it's important to look back and analyze what I've done and identify areas of improvement.

Here is what I have accomplished this year:

1) Ran Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild
2) Presented at 13 events.

It may not look like much, but doing all of that takes a good amount of energy. Running a user group is a constant process with many surprises that crop up each month. You have to email members about meetings, arrange speakers, arrange sponsors, and facilitate the meetings to ensure things run smoothly. Presenting requires a lot of preparation and travel to places like Miami or Boston on your own dime.

However, I feel like I could have done more. I didn't blog as much as I would have liked. I was off and on in the forums. I didn't write many book reviews. I didn't present in as many places as I could have. I didn't maintain my Community Credit account (costing me stupid prizes).

Although I don't make resolutions, I do want to look back at 2009 and be more amazed at my accomplishments than I am looking back at 2008. So, that is my personal goal this year: contribute more to the community than I did the year before. I want to blog more, present more, and answer more questions. Most importantly, I want to grow the developer community in Columbia, SC.

We are currently in Performance testing with an enterprise solution made with .NET 2.0 and C#. For the record, it consumes several Java services and interfaces with a few other third party systems. When we first set up the performance site, we were using three load balanced web servers and three load-= balanced service servers using ssl between each hope. This turned out to cause a significant performance hit, and to get around it ssl was turned off between the service load balancer and the service servers. The load balancer is hardware based and can handle the certificate itself.

Unfortunately, this caused a little problem:

It appears that the load balancer doesn't handle the <wsa:To> header which causes the application to fail. Since the application is deployed to multiple environments and the services could possibly be consumed by other applications, the solution is to assign the following attribute to every service: [SoapActor("*")].

I'm leaving for Atlanta tonight to attend MDC tomorrow. I will also attend the Influencer Reception after the conference. My goal is to soak up as much information about Azure Services and Live Mesh that I can and attend C# 4.0 presentations to get pointers for my own presentation that I will be giving at user groups.

Here's my planned schedule:

10:15-11:30 The Future of Managed Languages: C# and Visual Basic
12:30-1:45 Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Service
2:00-3:15 A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services 
3:30-4:45 ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap 
6:00-??? Influencer Reception
 

In a prior post, I claimed that MSBuild parses a file in order. Further testing shows this is only partially true.

MSBuild loads the project file and any imported files. The imported files are inlined; imagine if the imported file was copied and pasted where the import element is defined. Then, all PropertyGroups are parsed in order. After that, ItemGroups are parsed in order. This means you cannot define a property, use it as metadata in an item, then redefine the property later.

It doesn't matter whether or not you define properties and items above or below a target, the target will use them.

When you first attempt to create a Silverlight project in Visual Studio 2008, you may be surprised to find there is no project template for it. To get it, you will need to install the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Be sure to install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 before installing the Silverlight tools.

After the toolset is installed, you can will find the Silverlight project templates under the C# and VB.NET categories.