I’ve posted the Slides and Demo code on SkyDrive. 

Enjoy!

Obama’s official web site has this "tax calculator". It’s pretty self explanatory.

I have no problem helping people out. I’m a big believer in giving others opportunity and especially a hand up in life. I’ve already talked about some of the groups that I donate to. Obama’s plan takes the heart and soul out of charity, and turns in to a dry, soul-less, forced government program.

Here’s the complete report referenced in that clip.

Council For Citizens Against Government Waste, non-partisan, watch dog group. Each year they tabulate their Congressional Ratings, evaluating how each member of Congress measures up on key tax and spending votes. (Low rating = wasteful spender)

I’ll just come out and say it. I don’t trust Obama with my money. I give to a lot of charities. I’ve been on staff with non-profit organizations, churches and mission trips that relied on the generosity and donations of others. that being said, governments makes a lousy charities.

As a Christian I believe that we will be held accountable for how we steward the resources that God trusts us with. I’m very careful when choosing organizations that I give money to. I look at things like overhead, oversight and effectiveness. That’s why I don’t give donations to groups like the United Way - they aren’t a charity, they are a charity clearing house…pure overhead. I prefer to donate directly to groups like the Boy Scouts of America, Hope International, Student Venture,  the Goads and my local church.

I keep hearing about the top 5% and the bottom 95% of tax payers in this election. Here’s the problem: There is an economic quality to these numbers, Obama keeps using them as pure quantitative numbers.

Let me explain: Let’s say that I was in a scuffle with a person, and I came back all beat up saying "wow, that person really worked me over, he beat and punched over 60% of my body!". You would ask, what did you do to the other guy? "Not much, I barely touched 5% of his body (quantitative), all I did was decapitate him. (qualitative)." You see, by attacking the top 5% of tax payers, Obama is attacking the head, the heart and the drivers of our economy.

That’s a bad investment.

Next Wednesday (November 5th, 2008) I’ll be heading down to College Station, TX for INETA to present at the Texas A&M University .NET User Group’s lunch time meeting.

   I’ll either be presenting on "Developer Designer Zen – Bringing two worlds together" or "Dependency Injection with Silverlight (A Silverlight Tale of Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and the Strategy Pattern) "

It looks like the User Group as a list server (dotnet@listserv.tamu.edu) set up so that you can participate in the User Group conversation.

I’m looking forward to meeting the .NET developers at Texas A&M and then afterwards I’m planning on meeting up with some friends from Always Creative, then it’s off to my first visit to the Improving Rural Sourcing Development Center that’s based in College Station.

If you’re in the area be sure to drop by!

+

VS Live, the largest independent professional developer conference on Microsoft technologies, is coming to Dallas December 8th - 11, 2008!. I’ve been given a special registration code that I can offer to you that will save you $300 off of your registration at the next VS Live Dallas.

Register now with code: SPJEN to save $300!

I’ll be speaking on

• Better Application Design with Practical Loosely Coupling
• ASP.NET AJAX with Visual Studio 2008
• Custom Client Side Extenders with ASP.NET AJAX and Visual Studio 2008

See you there!

"Abortion is a foundational issue; it is not an issue like housing policy or the price of foreign oil. It always involves the intentional killing of an innocent life, and it is always, grievously wrong." - Archbishop of Denver Charles Chaput

When I voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin I thought that it was important to recognize the historic gravity of this election and stated that I would soon post on the issues that prompted me to not support Barack Obama. the first issue being Life.

Obama is Wrong on Life

I have heard from many well meaning friends that this is just one issue. That is true, but the pursuit of life is so fundamental to America, the sanctity of life to crucial to having a culture of life, protection of the most helpless and innocent of any of us is so fundamental to who we are as a people and especially as a people that will be held accountable to God for how we vote. Yes, I am a Christian - and I don’t apologize for that.

I think that the catholic Archbishop of Denver put it best:

If we claim to be Catholic, then American Catholics, including public officials who describe themselves as Catholic, need to act accordingly. We need to put an end to Roe and the industry of permissive abortion it enables. Otherwise all of us - from senators and members of Congress, to Catholic laypeople in the pews - fail not only as believers and disciples, but also as citizens.

I hope to post on Financial Stewardship, Individual Rights, Religious Freedom and Corruption soon!

There is no question that the presidential election this year is truly historic. If one side wins, we’ll have the first black president of the United State, and on the other side we’d have the first woman vice-president of the United States. Historic. No matter what.

When is was announced that Barack Obama was in the race, my initial response was excitement. The first person that I ever voted for in a presidential election was Alan Keys. Alan Keys is a very smart, well spoken, conservative - I loved his ideas, direction and passion. He also happens to be black.

When I first heard that Barack Obama was running, I didn’t know anything about him, all I knew was that he was black and a viable candidate for president. I’m slightly ashamed to admit this because I literally knew nothing of the man, nothing of the content of his character, nothing of his ideas, dreams or passions. I only knew the color of his skin - and I was going to vote for Barack Obama because he was black… and that would have been racist of me.

My prayer is that the people of this great country of ours will have moved past looking at a person’s skin… (even in that person’s favor) and begin to evaluate people by the content of their character.

How do you pick a president?

After examining whatever I could find on Barack Obama I am convinced that once a person has examined the man’s beliefs, ideas, and the direction that he wants to take our country - that would be bad for everyone.

Life | Financial Stewardship | Individual Rights | Religious Freedom | Corruption
My goal is to cover these issues in the next couple of days - hopefully before November 4th!

Looks like Microsoft just announced their plans to support OpenID via Live ID at the Microsoft PDC conference. Now, I’m not *cough* saying that I said they should do this way back in March *cough* or anything… but I will say that I still think that this is a great idea! Now that LiveID will support OpenID and since we can already use CardSpace with OpenID… here’s to hoping that the world (wide web) will be a better place without Usernames and Passwords every where I go!

Public Service Announcement: Friends don’t let friends use passwords on the Internet.

For those of you keeping track… that’s 2 world changing ideas down, 7 more to go, but I think that the first 2 are the most important anyway.   

As a side note: I love community driven events like this! the .NET community literally, and nearly spontaneously launched NOT AT PDC Sunday night, and it looks live and active by Monday morning. Great work every one! (especially @RachelAppel and @ChrisLove)

OK, so now anyone "attending" NotAtPDC can also check out the other PDC’s keynote this morning as it will be streamed over the Internet too. (thanks for participating Microsoft! )

Other upcoming events that you should sign up for

The AgileDotNet Conference is a 1 day conference being put on by Microsoft, Improving Enterprises and the Dallas C# SIG dealing with bringing agile methodologies to .NET developers and especially dealing with the challenges of implementing an agile process in an enterprise environment. It’s gonna be awesome. Check out this video, then go sign up! (oh yeah, did I mention that it’s free!)

 
This one will cost you$100 USD, but this content looks like it’ll will be well worth it! Microsoft is putting on a "traveling road show" covering a lot of the topics that are coming out of "the other PDC" this week. Check out their tour schedule and you’ll see that there is probably one coming to a city near you!

Hope to "see" you there!

It looks like this was just posted over at CommunityCast.tv

After the Tulsa TechFest this year we went around and asked several attendees and speakers what Agile Development was to them… then we asked some of the non-attendees that happened to be in the area. Here are some of the responses.

Awesome! I’ve been working with Todd, and the team from Improving and from Microsoft to do some of the initial planning and web site work. I’m very excited about this 1 day conference. If you’ve been struggling to embrace a more agile methodology with your team, or if you thought that being agile meant that you had to use Java and only open source tools, then the AgileDotNet Conference is for you!

From the site:

an exciting one-day event to bring together the world of Microsoft .NET development with the world of Agile methods. Designed for both those experienced with Agile techniques and for those new to them, attendees can expect interesting presentations based on real-world experience

Plus, it looks like there will be a full Development Track, Business/Project Manager’s Track and a Requirements Gathering and QA Track… so everyone on your team should be covered!

Sign up now for the AgileDotNet Conference 2008! See you there!