I'm attending the MSDN Developer Conference at the Westin Galleria on Monday, Jan. 26, which is sort of a mini-pdc covering topics in the areas of Azure Services Platform for Cloud Computing, Client and Presentation, and Tools, Languages and Framework.

My top sessions choices are:

• ASP.NET and JQuery
• Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Services
• A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
• ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap

Hopefully one of my colleagues can attend Building Business-Focused Applications Using Silverlight 2 and share the experience because I have an interest in learning silverlight after my brief, poor experience developing an mp3 music player in flash for Jessica Clemmon's site.

I've spent quite a lot of time thinking of ideas for the Microsoft Dare To Dream Different Challenge, promoting use of the .NET Micro Framework for embedded devices.

The cool thing about this contest is that to enter you just need to have a cool idea which could be implemented using microprocessor-driven embedded software.

I spread the word about this thing quite extensively, but unfortunately I didn't find many people looking to join together as a team.  It was frusterating for me was trying to settle on an idea -- I kept thinking, "well that's good but there's got to be an even more killer idea".  Thus, procrastination set it, and I didn't even decide on my submission until hours before the due date!  In the end, I went with my concept for a real-time universal speech translator.  The thought had occured to me after playing with text-to-speach web apps, and babelfish, that you could really mash these things up in a web service and end up with a system that could take digital speech and perform audio-text-text-audio, translating one spoken language to another.  A few searches revealed that this had already been investigated, and Cisco is even looking at turning it into a product.  But, sometimes you just have to pick an idea and go with it, so I did.  I submitted it to the hobbiest category, as I'm just in it for fun on this one.  Jenni helped by making this cool diagram of the universal translator.

Other ideas included an automated bar, with tubes connected to a relay-driven pump system that can automatically mix drinks based on a pre-programmed recipe.  You could even enhance it by the "bartender" to input the contents of each bottle, and connecting to a database of drinks recipes to get a customized list.  Some people have build this already.

I also considered doing an enhanced version of trivial pursuit, where questions could be customized based on players skillsets, but got stuck on the details.

I'm curious now to see what the other entrants came up with.  They announce the round 2 finalists on Jan. 15.

I'm gearing up to attend the 2007 devconnection asp.net conference at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

I tried to select sessions that would best expose me to technologies and techniques that my team can use to build better web applications; unfortunately, a few of the ones I wanted ran concurrently.

I have seen Scott Hasselman and Miguel Castro speak at the Dallas .net Users Group, and I'm looking forward to seeing some well-known gurus like Scott Guthrie and Dino Esposito.

Here are the sessions I picked.