Last night I was lucky enough to attend my first Phoenix .NET User Group meeting and enjoyed it.  Microsoft is nice enough to let them use a room in their Phoenix office and gave away a keyboard/mouse set, a web cam, and a few books.

Tim Rayburn started it off with an Intro to WCF Services and for a guy who has barely touched these, it was very informative.  Tim did an excellent job presenting and made it easy to follow along.

Rob Paveza followed up with a discussion on a new Facebook API that he has developed.  I worked with Rob at Terralever and know that he does an awesome job whenever he has the chance to run wild in code and from the looks of it, this isn’t any different.  It’s not released as of yet but it will be found here by the end of the week so check it out.

Thanks to Scott Cate and Rob Bagby for helping out with this.  I hope to check out a few more of these in the future.

Yesterday I ran into an issue when I was debugging a web application that I was building. It was debugging but as soon as I installed the “Not So” RAD Controls on my machine and restarted Visual Studio, I was lucky enough to receive this error every time I wanted to debug and step through my application:

Debugging Failed Because Integrated Windows Authentication Is Not Enabled iis 7

I wasn’t sure if it was the “Not So” RAD Controls or something else. So I went to Google and did a search for my error and came across this page. Very helpful as apparently at that time, my computer realized that I needed that patch. Weird but it worked so if you run across this, get the hotfix from Microsoft.

This is just funny. Very sarcastic view of the Microsoft Surface.

A few hours ago, Microsoft announced a new product called Surface and I am amazed at its capabilities. Basically it is a interactive table top that in the demo videos had me in awe. By the touch of a finger to its interactive display, users are able to map out routes on a map by just touching the places they want to travel to. They are able to look at photos and movies but simply touching them and dragging them around the screen. They can even be resized.

But the best feature I saw was its ability to interact with other devices and items placed on its surface. Someone could set his/her camera down on the screen and it know what it was and showed thumbnail images from the camera that could be saved onto the Surface or dragged into a phone or other portable storage device. They also had an example of two people placing their Zunes (it’s Microsoft remember) onto the Surface and they were given the ability to share songs with each other simply by dragging the songs over from one Zune to the other.

Another favorite feature was one that I would really love to use. The example had the Surface set up at a restaurant and the menu was interactive so you could order anything you wanted whenever you wanted just by the touch of your finger. Also interesting was when a drink is placed on the Surface, it recognizes that and circles the drink and gives little messages such as “Getting Thirsty?”. Cute and people will love it. But the part that got me was that users are able to place their credit/debit cards on the table and drag what they want to pay for on each card and have that taken care of for them without the hassle of having to give the waiter 4 different cards.

The Surface’s ability to know what is placed onto its surface is amazing and I would love to see one of these in person. According to the web site, it will be available this Winter. I see a lot of uses for this and think that this is one of the best ideas that Microsoft has introduced in quite a long time. I personally see this is something that will become a part of daily live much like the iPod’s have today.