Caught Up (Finally!)

I’ve been swamped with work in recent months, much of it revolving around ASP.NET AJAX. This week I finished updating all the ASP.NET AJAX code samples, labs, and whitepapers that Wintellect built for Microsoft for RTM. Along the way, I discovered a bug in the ASP.NET AJAX January Futures CTP that resulted from a bug in the tool that Microsoft uses to generate the release versions of the Microsoft AJAX Library JavaScript files. Microsoft is soon going to release a new CTP with bug fixes. Until then, if any of your xml-script behaves strangely, set ScriptMode=”Debug” on the page’s ScriptManager control and the problem will probably go away.

Keep your eye on this blog for news about when the ASP.NET AJAX content we built will be available to the public.

Now that ASP.NET AJAX is fully baked, I’m turning my attention to the next big thing in Web programming: WPF/E. I built a set of slides and samples this week that I’ll be using to introduce people to WPF/E in coming months. WPF/E is cool, and some of the samples in the SDK are just amazing. Finally the Web is becoming a place where it’s fun to be a programmer.

This Sunday I leave for China to spend a couple of weeks at the Microsoft offices in Beijing and Shanghai. Then I’m home for a week and off to London for DevWeek, where I’ll be doing lots of talks on ASP.NET AJAX and WPF/E. Soon after I return from London, I start a two-week swing through Europe to get people pumped up about ASP.NET AJAX and WPF/E. After that comes Devscovery in Denver and New York City and MIX in Las Vegas. Then comes TechEd, a return trip to India, and a trip or two to Redmond. This may be the first time ever I hit 100,000 miles on Delta before June. 🙂

The really cool thing is that for the first time in months, I’m basically caught up on my work. I still have a keynote to write and a column that’s due in two weeks, but I feel like a bird that’s been let out of its cage. Maybe it’s time to build a new model airplane…