There are so many cool things to do. My blog has not been updated for a while. I need to play more with Windows CE 6.0. We have the Mobile Connections conference in Las Vegas coming up, for which I still need to create the deck + sample code for my post conference session. I have been promising to create a number of online Windows Mobile related samples for a while now. Some of my friends in the Windows Mobile community even start mailing me, asking if I am still around; if I am working on some new cool Webcasts; or other things that are going on right now. Well, I am still around, but literally drowning in work right now. Let me share two “typical” weeks with you. Last week started of by teaching a custom made Windows CE 5.0 workshop on site for a client. Since driving back and forth was not really an option, I already left on Sunday afternoon and arrived back home on Tuesday night. Wednesday I had a number of important phone calls to make with a number of customers. In parallel I decided to install some new Windows CE related development tools, both on my laptop and my desktop computer. Wednesday night I got together shortly with Jim Wilson to talk about a few upcoming Webcasts on Windows Live, specifically for Mobile Devices. After talking to Jim I studied for a while, trying to understand the whole Live concept further. Thursday night I had a company meeting, being home past midnight. Thursday and Friday were reserved to work on my post conference session for Mobile Connections. That is really when the fun started. Remember what I said earlier. I installed some software on Wednesday. This turned out to be a very valuable lesson and will turn into Maarten’s First Law on preparing for presentations. Never install new software when you are planning to do some real work. I will not bother you what went wrong exactly, because I don’t know if I have to blame two different machines or the company that provided the software for me. However, the end result was that slowly but surely my system was degenerating. Visual Studio 2005 was broken, as was Platform Builder and in the end it turned out that I had some problems with Office as well. So on Thursday I tried to repair everything. I had to redo this a few times, and still did not get a properly working system back. On Friday I decided to do the thing I really hate, simply uninstalling all failing software and reinstalling everything. Uninstalling everything and after that simply installing everything back turned out to be a mistake as well. I still ended up with software that didn’t work properly. So I had to repeat this exercise as well. This time though I was a bit smarter. After uninstalling all those wonderful products I decided to clean up the registry of both my machines as well. Only after that I installed the products again and voila …. This time everything worked properly. Oh, the product that is supposed to work side by side with all those other products is in a far corner right now, not to be touched until after the Mobile Connections conference. All in all this was a waste of two whole days. To make up for the time, I had to work the entire weekend. Let’s move on to the real subject of this column and take a look at the upcoming week. This will be a fun week, teaching a Windows CE 5.0 class. Of course it means 5 more days of not working on my Mobile Connections sessions, but at least at the end of the week I hopefully have 8 more people who are thrilled to be able to use Windows CE 5.0 in real projects. One of the things I definitely pass on to them is Maarten’s First Law on preparing for presentations or other critical activities. I am glad that the amount of Windows CE related work is increasing here in Holland. I feel privileged to be able to teach a lot of cool stuff to new students. However, there should be more time in each and every single day. Anyway, maybe you now understand why DotNETForDevices is so quiet and why responses to emails are sort of slow right now. Things will get better in the future, but right now I am wishing for a time warp. Move me forward to November 13. At that time all my conference work for this year is done, with only one Webcast coming up on November 29^th. Besides that I will teach one more workshop for a client, on performance of the full .NET Framework. After that my calendar seems just very empty. I hope I can keep it that way so I can finally finish the remaining RoadAssistance VB.NET sample code and start some cool new things like the Windows Mobile samples I have been planning for a while.