I am currently attending the DevReach conference in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I got up at 5 in the morning and jumped on a plane to meet the rest of the Falafels at headquarters. It was a long day. The airline had lost my luggage and I had been up for 8 hours before even getting to the office. We worked all day and headed out for dinner after that. I was exhausted. That all changed when I realized how I was going to get back to my hotel. I was going to take the company car:

Wow!  I was told so many times that Visual Studio 2008 will ship in 2007, well it does not sound like that is a possibility anymore.

Microsoft released a new date, February 27th 20008 to release Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008

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With the demands of new major consulting projects, preparing for ActiveFocus 2007 Q3 and 300% increase in the company's training business this year, Falafel is hiring!

We are looking for:

• Sharepoint Experts
• ASP.NET 2.0 Developer
• .NET Architect
• 2 Technical Writers

If you want to join a dynamic team, fun company to work for, excellent atmosphere, full benefits and work with the best on the latest and greatest of technologies worldwide, send us your resume at jobs@falafel.com

I often find myself having to upload data in Excel files into temp tables in SQL Server in order to do ad hoc updates or comparisons. Users will commonly submit an Excel file containing data to verify, insert, update or what not. I know there is a way to have SQL Server read data directly form Excel, so finally I got round to trying that out to make these ad hoc tasks easier. Here is how you do it:

San Jose, CA – September 17th 2007 - Software Architect Steve Trefethen passed his first Microsoft certification exam last week to become the latest Falafel team member to be Microsoft Certified. “I am very excited to see the entire falafel team Microsoft certified again” said Lino Tadros, President & CEO of Falafel Software “Steve, is a high caliber Architect and I look forward to seeing him continue to pass the Microsoft certification exams to reach the highest level of their certifications.”

Here is an interesting thing I noted the other day. I have an ASP.Net 2.0 application, and in one of the forms, I store the search criteria that you enter on that page in an instance of my ScheduleSearchCriteria class:

San Jose, CA - September 14th 2007 - Falafel Software is excited to announce the first update to ActiveFocus 2007 Q2, which adds a much asked for filtering capability to most of the columns in the main artifact grids, and a rewrite of the discussion component, designed to make project and artifact level discussions even easier to use. The release also includes some bug fixes and minor changes, see the release notes here for more details. A free one-user trial version of the new release is available for immediate download from the Falafel community site and Falafel’s demo site is also running the new version. You can take if for a spin at www.activefocus.net/afdemo. Our hosted sites are upgraded to the new version as of today. Please check our roadmap here for details of the next release scheduled for Q3.

I found the following blog post on programming.reddit.com:

http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/09/05/C+30+And+LINQ+Misunderstandings.aspx

I also recommend these blogs on functional programming in C# 3.0 by the same author:

http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/12/Practical+Functional+C+Part+I.aspx

http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/13/Practical+Functional+C+Part+II.aspx

http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/16/Practical+Functional+C+Part+III+Loops+Are+Evil.aspx

http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/29/Practical+Functional+C+Part+IV+Think+In+ResultSets.aspx

This is really good stuff that any C# programmer can benefit from