I had a great trip to South Bend, Indiana, this week, on an INETA gig to speak to the Michiana .NET Users Group as I blogged about here. The travel was hellacious--44 hours port to port round trip from Fairbanks--but it was a fun meeting and a nice trip to reminisce.
The user group meeting was interesting. .NET is alive and well in Michiana! There are some people doing some very cool apps in .NET. They let me blather on for two hours about exceptions, even though I offered to stop after 75 or 80 minutes. As promised, I stayed away from the basic stuff and probed a lot of interesting features, side effects, security issues, and other interesting tidbits about exceptions. No one nodded off and no one threw any rotten fruit, so I guess I didn't bore or offend anyone too badly!
You can download all the code I showed here, along with my PowerPoint slide with the references and the notes I used.
I flew all Monday night and arrived early Tuesday morning. After a long nap at the hotel, I drove around for a bit and saw Notre Dame and found two of the places I lived while I went to school there. I was amazed to find the then-120 year old farmhouse I lived in north of Mishawaka still there, now home to a law firm and antique store. It used to be completely surrounded by farmland, and still mostly is other than a large strip mall kitty-corner across the intersection.
After the meeting and a nice drink with Eric at a local pub, I went back to Notre Dame and walked around. I went to the site of Holy Cross Hall, the residence hall I onced lived, which is now just a grassy knoll above one of the lakes. The grotto was totally amazing...I calculated that there were around 3,000 candles lit, way more than I had ever seen by orders of magnitude. That confused me a bit until I noticed a picture of John Paul II on the wall. Well, duh! Of course people at N.D. would be deeply affected by his death, even weeks later!
Another great INETA trip, but it's so nice to be home!