This is sorta cool... CellTrack, a Smartphone app that pings back a server regularly to update your nearest cell tower data... effectively tracking your movement from tower to tower.

They hope to start collecting GPS data as well, and couple that with the "timing advance" data (roughly determines the round-trip time of your OTA connection) to triangulate cell tower positions.

It's pretty cool, runs on Audiovox SMT5600 phones (what I have), and is open-source should you feel like tinkering.

Right now there is not a whole lot of features, but some of the applications could be automatically turning on call-forwarding when you arrive at work or home, etc. Currently, there at least is a dynamic image generator that outputs your last 4 position/tower changes:

This really shows how bloody awful my cell coverage is here (drops signal every few minutes).

It does use GPRS to transmit updates though... Hopefully it doesnt kill my data plan limits (I rarely use the data plan from my phone anyways - too slowwww).

Seems to be the "cool" thing to do right now, so here is how my profile came out:

A couple things they left out:

How do you pronounce the word "river"?

1. "ree-vur"
2. "ri-vah"
3. "ri-vur"

How do you pronounce the word "picture"?

1. Exactly as it is spelled.
2. The same as "pitcher".
3. The same as "pitcha".

Which do you tend to say more often"

1. "Eh?"
2. "Huh?"
3. I do not say either word very often.

In a normal conversation, how would you refer to a Nissan XTerra vehicle?

1. A "truck".
2. An "SUV".
3. A "rice-burner".
4. Just a "Nissan XTerra".

How about a Ford F-150 Pickup?

1. A "truck".
2. A "Pickup".
3. A "Pick-Em-Up".
4. A "Ford".
5. Just a "Ford F-150".

Today we got the word from our "man inside", Doug Turnure, that the arrangements have now been made to have the CLR Team deliver some in-depth talks to our user group on Monday, May 2nd. (That's under 3 weeks away for the procrastinators out there!)

Brad Abrams, Kit George, and Claudio Caldato will talk about CLR Internals for about 45 minutes or so, then after a short break they will cover CLR Performance. At the end of the presentations there will be time for Q&A, so be sure to bring your questions!

This will be a fantastic chance to pick the brains of some very sharp people who not only know an awful lot about the CLR - but that actually helped to design and build it.

So send your pets to a boarding house, put your spouse on a plane to visit his/her parents, and make sure to block out Monday, May 2nd on your calendar for this awesome night of complete .NET geekness!

I can't decide which to do. PDC 2005 or Tech-Ed 2005. Both will be well worth attending, but it's hard justifying both (from a cost perspective as well as time).

I suspect PDC will have more "practical" coverage of Framework 2.0, since it will be after the release (fingers crossed). At best, any information picked up at TechEd will be based on Beta 2. However, TechEd is much sooner, and to honest I can use a vacation (even if I spend it at a conference).

But I don't want to learn just about the framework. I also want solid exposure to SQL 2005, Biztalk, Indigo, and the other peices that are important to me (no - avalon is not all that important to me at this point).

I am mostly interested in Architecture (SO and Application) and Advanced Developer topics. I am looking for sessions weighted towards those topics.

Given a choice, which would you choose? And why?

Just in case you might be reading this blog, and didn't already know, next month a few folks from the .NET CLR Team will be the center of attention at the Atlanta C# User Group meeting!

Brad Abrams and krewe will enlighten us with answers to those burning questions like "When is it going to really ship?" and "So, when do you think it will ship?".

There is always some guy that skips the really good user group meetings (usually to watch some mindless sitcom episode that happens to be playing at the time...), and inevitably he regrets it. He ends up hearing from his buddies again and again about how cool the event was, and that it's too bad he missed out. Don't be that guy.

This will be a great meeting - probably our best to date. Even Bill Gates will be here to talk about the impact of the CLR on our industry.

OK, maybe Bill won't be here. But the CLR team will be - and I would rather hear them anyways.

First of all, thank you to everyone who came out tonight to the C# User Group meeting in Atlanta. Paul and I are very pleased with how this group continues to grow.

I am posting the slides and source code from my presentation ".NET Async Programming Demystified" here for download.

This is essentially the same presentation I intent to deliver to the .NET Code Camp next month, although I will need to strip out about a quarter of the slides to keep myself within the alloted time budgets there. I chose to present it to the C# group first, since a large number of our attendees were not able to register for the Code Camp (due to it selling out in only 5 days).

I did make two corrections to my material before posting the slides:

1. I incorrectly stated that each AppDomain has it's own thread pool. This should have been "each Process has it's own thread pool".
2. I forgot to include the third type of Timer object - the System.Timers.Timer. Chalk that one up to lack of sleep, I simply forgot to include it in my outline.

Both of these corrections are reflected in the downloadable files.