Each day at Dev Connections during break a long line formed outside of the mens bathroom... Needless to say that the hallways were packed with a majority of men developers and IT professionals. There were women there, outnumbered by far... If I had to guess it was at least 10 to 1. I have to admit though, there are definate advantages to being a woman IT professional attending a convention with that many people.

I *never* had to wait for a stall in the bathroom and there was always soap in the containers. Can't say soo much for the guys.

I'm working on a project right now that requires programming of a system that iterates through an email inbox and gets the message body of each email message that is in the email. My first attempt called the FindItem property as it appeared to have a "body" property where I could call the body of the email message. Wrong! FindItem is not the correct EWS call to make to get the message body of the text. In order to get the body of an email from EWS 2007 you need to call the GetItem. So if your trying to develop an application that is utilizing the EWS and you need the message body of the email, you might want to check out the MSDN article on "Finding the Message Body", it's an invaluable resource and can save you a few days of head scratching while wondering where the message body is hidden.

MSDN has more information on FindItem:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb435022.aspx

This year I made it to DevConnections in Las Vegas! For the last two days I have been attending courses on various microsoft technologies. Concepts and information pertaining to web, windows and console programming fill these training sessions. I'm not sure how many IT experts and developers are here but the halls of the Mandalay Bay are swarming with hundreds of experts sporting a dangling name tag and a red and black backpack. Nothing says I'm awesome like packing around the exact same backpack as a few thousand of your closest friends all hanging out in the same place.

My favorite speakers, so far are:
Scott Hansellman - I sat in on the 'ADO.NET Data Services - The Zen of RESTfulness and the Art of "Astoria"'. Scott was interesting, informative and kept the audience interested. He was quite funny... Did anyone else notice that the links on his PCs favorites... had pictures of himself??

Miguel Castro - I sat in on the 'Demystifying URL Rewriting and HTTP Modules ad Handlers' course. Notwithstanding the fact that Miguel almost fell off the stage... The class really was interesting. Not only that but he actually seemed like URL rewriting was "exciting". It is always better when your teachers and presentors are actually interested in the information that they are providing.

In other news I have snagged about half of a dozen vendor tees. Oh yeah, now that's uber-awesome.

Adding mentos to diet soda is not a "new idea"... Somehow no matter how many times you do it, there is some sort of excitement that comes along with causing chemical reactions that suddenly explode. To my son, this meant creating a new way to drink soda.

Instead of picking up the can and drinking the soda... Hover over the can, open your mouth up wide, drop the mentos in the can and then drink the soda as fast as you possibly can as it is flying through the air.

It begs the question, does he get his innovation style from me?

A conversation similar to this one occurred during lunch earlier today... The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but you know who you are.

Many know that I have been working with the ADA Coordinator in Juneau, Alaska and the Disability Support Services with the University of Alaska on an ADA Training Pilot Project.

We are approximately 1-year into this project already. We are working on some paperwork processes within the State in order to finalize the pilot project into a State initiative. So far we have had a lot of support on this project from the Governors office, the State ADA task force, the disability community within Alaska as well as many employees within the State.

To help support this initiative I have donated a lot of my spare time in writing technical training guides, including an information book on WCAG 2.0 standards and accessibility checklists. I have been working with many programmers and developers throughout Alaska in order to help them gain information on online accessibility programming.

My mom went sightseeing at Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska. While she was there she got some pictures of a black bear that was found roaming around.

When travelling across the country one sometimes stumbles by some interesting looking bugs. This one was hanging out on our vehicle somewhere in Louisiana.

Occasionally while hiking through the rainforest trails in Juneau, Alaska one will come across really old rusty vehicles. I snapped a picture of this one that sits off the side of the trail.

These are pictures of one of the rivers that follows alongside a hiking trail in Juneau, Alaska. The pictures are pretty, but they do not even start to give justice to how pretty the scenery is.