Over the next several months there will likely be a severe shortage of blog posts here at ScottOnWriting.NET. My wife and I are taking a bit of a sabbatical this summer and doing a lot of traveling and hiking. During this stretch - from about now until late September - my ASP.NET work will be curtailed to only include writing my weekly article for 4GuysFromRolla.com and my monthly Toolbox column for MSDN Magazine. Seeing as I try to keep this blog's focus on technology, .NET, and writing, I don't anticipate much content will be added here until our return. Any trip-related blogging will be done on my personal blog site, ScottOnLife.com. The most recent entry, The Upcoming Summer of Travel, provides more detail on our trip, for those interested.
On a slightly related note... when I first started this blog back on July 2, 2003 (see the first post), I used Scott Watermasysk's .Text blogging software. Since then, .Text has turned into a much more feature-rich and mature product called Community Server, which also includes features like galleries, forums, and so forth. However, I've stuck with .Text throughout these years, mostly because .Text worked. Updating was a low priority and work kept me busy. Anywho, as I started winding down my writing and consulting gigs in anticipation of our travels, I ended up with some free time on my hands and decided to convert ScottOnLife, which was also running the same antequated version of .Text, to the latest and greatest version of Community Server. I've still got some rough edges to work out, like ensuring that the old .Text links still work and don't 404, but overall the transition went fairly smoothly. But once those get resolved my plan is to upgrade ScottOnWriting.NET, too. I am a little doubtful that this will happen prior to the start of our trips, but I write it here to sort of make sure I make this conversion when we get back in September/October. :-)
Finally, I get a lot of emails from people asking when the next set of tutorials will be published in my Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 series. There are currently 57 tutorials published online at www.asp.net, but I have written 75 in total. Those will appear on the site over time, based on the availability/schedule of the folks maintaining the www.asp.net website. I have been told to expect the next batch within one to two weeks, but nothing more specific. Wish I could provide a more definitive timeline. In any event, you can always subscribe to the tutorial series's RSS feed so that you will know when new tutorials are published.
See you in September!