We've just finished Day One of "" our community-run free online conference for developers who love the .NET development platform and open source!

The Conference Platform

It seems funny to call the software our conference runs on a "platform" as that sounds very "enterprisey" and official. In the past we've done and with sponsors who helped pay for things. We used Channel 9 and had a studio and streamed either from Seattle or using Live Meeting.

However, this year we wanted to do it on the cheap and more distributed. We wanted speakers from ALL over in all time zones. How cheap? About USD$10ish we figure. I'll get a complete bill later, but we basically wanted to scale up, do the talks and scale down.

is working on something interesting that combines C#, NuGet, Roslyn (the new "compiler as a service") and his love of text editors and scripts. Now, with help from Justin Rusbatch () and Filip Wojcieszyn () they are having all kinds of fun...using C# as a scripting language.

I've been getting a LOT of Blog Comment Spam lately, just in the at two weeks. I run all my comments through the , and I pay for it. However, this particular flavor of spam has been making it through consistently. It has a pattern, through, and I'd been trying to figure it out when this LARGE comment showed up.

Apparently while they were messing about trying to spam me, they posted their entire source template.

I'm embedding it below as a Gist, rather than copy/pasting it into my blog engine. It's so spammy, I'd hate to get delisted from Google looking rather like a splog.

Note .

One fellow says

"I used to do comment spam and this is not the most advanced one."

Really? Does one put Comment Spammer on their resume?

Another comment says that we're hating on spammers. We should embrace them because:

I talked about last week when I added jQuery lazy loading to . Next, I (in fact, they should have always been together!). Now, I'm moving all my show images to the Azure CDN. There's been ~370 shows, and if someone visits the archives page and scrolls around it's about 8 megs of pics.

I use Two-Factor Authentication for my Google Apps account and I use the Google Authenticator application on my iPhone to generate the second factor.

Microsoft Accounts (formerly Live Accounts) just launched Two-Factor Auth and you should set it up now. That means SkyDrive, Outlook.com/Hotmail as well as the Windows Azure Dashboard can now be fronted by two-factor auth.

If you already use two-factor for Google, you can ADD your Microsoft account to the Google Authenticator application on your Android or iPhone. That means I can use one Authenticator application for all accounts which is extremely convenient.

The process for setting up two step authentication on a Microsoft account is:

I talked about last week when I added jQuery lazy loading to . I wanted to avoid paying any unnecessary bandwidth costs. The result was great and I'll be under my bandwidth this month.

I'm continuing to look for ways to optimize and pinch pennies in the cloud. I realized recently that while my Website was running in the West US Azure datacenter, the database (managed by ) was running in North Central US. This means I was paying for the bandwidth of my database calls. Not to mention, it was slower, not the best idea, plus I was calling into a SQL Server over the open internet (although I had opened the firewall to do so).

A few days ago, I visited the Xamarin.com website and noticed this. The word "Pricing" looks like "Prioing."

It's not an illusion. It looks wrong in Google Chrome. See this zoomed-in shot.

Here's the same menu in IE. Note the subtle"bites" that have been taken out of the g and s, but the c is OK. The hinting is OK, but the font is somehow "wrong."

It's lovely, isn't it. It's the Windows 8 on-screen keyboard, except I don't need or want to see it. I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch and it already has a keyboard. I will never ever want to use the Windows 8 touch keyboard. Unfortunately there is no checkbox or "just turn it off" way to disable the keyboard with a supported option.

However, there is a way to effectively disable the keyboard by stopping the service that controls it.

I have a "whenever I get around to doing it" . Why a newsletter? I dunno. It seems more personal somehow. Fight me.

You can . You can sign up here or just wait and get them later on the blog, which . Email folks get it first!

Here's the MOST RECENT newsletter, delay-posted as I do.

Hi Interfriends,

Thanks again for signing up for this experiment. Here's some interesting things I've come upon this week. If you forwarded this (or if it was forwarded to you) a reminder: You can sign up at and the .

My buddy Damian and I both recently bought the Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch. It's got Intel SpeedStep technology so it changes the CPU speed dynamically based on load. These two laptops of ours are identical. However, here's Damian's Task Manager when mostly idle.

Here's mine.

What the heck is going on? His CPU is reporting 0.60 GHz of a potential speed of 2GHz, indicating that the chip has chilled out. Mine is reporting "full speed ahead!" at a speed that it doesn't even support, 2.49GHz!

We went around and around on this for a while until we realized that I had turned on Hyper-V Virtualization for Windows Phone Development and my Ubuntu VM. He hadn't.

I’ve long said . Sometimes "got here"-debugging is a great tool. I tend to use System.Diagnostics.Trace a lot in my code. Then I'll use or to get more insight.

Lately though, I've been and have been wanting to get at trace data, sometimes at the .

I'll do this to deploy (or deploy from Visual Studio):

There's no other explanation. It must be a tradition like the .

There's a new web conference happening in Vegas next month and you should join us. John Papa, myself and our friends pulled in the speakers from a combination of invitations and submitted talks. It's called and I hope to see you there.

My friends and I miss the old Mix conference and the great fun of web conferences in Vegas generally. So we talked to Richard Campbell and some friends and made our own show. (This is not a Microsoft show, to be clear)