Back from the Honeymoon

My wife and I got back from our honeymoon this weekend. After 13 days of absolutely no computers, no cell phones, no email, and no Internet, I came home to 6,000+ spams. Joy.

The trip was really enjoyable, neither of us had been out of the northwestern hemisphere, so our trip to Europe was most enjoyed. In fact, we were in Amsterdam from June 22nd through June 25th, which coincidentally coincided with TechEd Europe 2004. And no, neither of us are big enough dorks to go to TechEd on our honeymoon. In any event, it was fun to try to pick out what folks wandering around the city were TechEd attendees.

It's good to be back, though, to sleep in our own bed. To use a computer and catch up on email. To see our dog. And on and on. But at the same time I don't know if I'm 100% yet ready to jump back into the swing of things. The trip was very restful and enjoyable, and now I feel a bit spoiled.

In an attempt to keep this entry remotely on topic, I wanted to point out that the cover story in the latest issue of asp.net PRO is an article of mine on displaying content from an RSS syndication feed on an ASP.NET Web site. In the article, which you can read here if you're an asp.net PRO subscriber, I show how to use the XPathNavigator class in the System.Xml namespace to programmatically read and display the contents of an RSS feed in an ASP.NET Web page. I then talk about RssFeed, an open-source compiled server control I created to display RSS feeds on ASP.NET Web pages. In the upcoming August issue of asp.net PRO, I'll have another article on RSS - this next one will illustrate how to syndicate content according to the RSS standard.

And finally, before I close, in case anyone has not yet heard about Beta 1, or the Express versions of Visual Studio 2005, you can learn more at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/ and http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/.