If you live in northern Vermont and you have any interest in SQL Server, you'll want to attend tonight's VTSQL meeting. It's their official SQL Server 2008 Launch event, with gobs of swag provided by Microsoft and pizza sponsored by MyWebGrocer.com. Laura Blood and Roman Rehak "will be giving an overview of some of the most interesting new features arriving with SQL Server 2008.  We can’t cover everything, but hope to provide you with some insights on what new functionality you can look forward to."

6pm to 8pm at Competitive Computing.
354 Mountain View Drive
Colchester, VT 05446

More info and directions at www.VTSQL.org.

Last night was one of the smallest meetings that we have had for VTdotNET in a long time - could it have been the 90 degree temps? The fact that schools out around the area and folks are on vacation? Well, they missed out because we had a blast.

Carl Lorentson from Renaissance Info Systems, shared a bunch of .NET Tips & Tricks. One of them solves a problem that I have had for a long time using WIndows Forms which is a very specific scenario (his matches mine) when the designer won't open up. I have to write another blog post about that, stay tuned! He also showed some great ways he has used reflection to solve problems and gotten over the fear of extending controls. A very cool custom control he showed was a combobox that knows how to display data that is no longer part of the drop down list. In other words, if Vermont ceded from the U.S., you would still be able to see "VT" in an address display, even though Vermont was no longer in the drop down list as a selectable option.

After Carl, we got super geeky as Nick Fessel, from Cooper Controls, showed us not only how the System.IO.SerialPort class works, not only how to program an app that talks to a controller, but how to program a controller! In 20+ years of programming, I have never seen anything like this before We even got the old red & Green lights and numeric displays on teh controller. We talked a bit about Robotics Studio (something else I need to blog about because a few recent events has this high in my mind). What was funny was that Nick told us that he had actually programmed the lighting in the room where we were having our meeting. The old "clap on clap off" joke was repeated throughout the rest of the meeting.

During the day, since I have been in a bit of a funk and am having a hard time focusing on my work, I baked cupcakes. But those are a dangerous thing to have laying around the house. Therefore, I brought half of them to the meeting and everyone got a cupcake. There were some new folks at the meeting, and I assured them that this does not happen at every meeting!

So it was really fun to have a small VERY geeky meeting and also to see VTdotNET members be willing to share what they are doing at work or some of the challenges they have overcome. I really hope we can have more meetings like this in the future (including cupcakes, of course!)

Thanks again to Champlain College's Department of Software Engineering for covering our room fees for the summer, to Infragistics for a NETAdvantage raffle, to JetBrains for a ReSharper Raffle and to APress for a bunch of books we raffled off as well.

Michale de la Maza follows up his popular C# day events with a VB.NET day at the Microsoft office on Tuesday May 27th.

Join us for a relaxed, no cost introduction to VB.NET programming. By engaging in participatory activities, you will learn some of the most common and powerful features of the VB.NET language. This day is not lecture-based. There will be fewer than 60 minutes of lecture material -- almost all of the time will be spent on participant-guided activities. Everyone who attends will learn what interests them at their own pace in a relaxed, tension-free environment with an experienced VB.NET developer and trainer available to answer questions.

RSVPs are required and details are here.

The online registration system for Microsoft events is currently broken (or just acting really flakey).

If you are trying to register for Thursday’s free, full-day, Bob & Chris & Jim Roadshow , try the online registration first here:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032378634&culture=en-US

If that doesn’t work, you can register by phone

Call the event system directly (877.673.8368) and use the event ID 1032378634.

For more information and details about the event, see Chris’ blog post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2008/05/02/the-roadshow-rides-again-may-june-edition.aspx

If you are trying to register for a different one of these Roadshow events, just get the EVentID from Chris' blog.

If you are trying to register for other Microsoft events the phone # should be the same, but you'll need to know the EventID of the event you are trying to register for.

Colorado man, author and MS Regional Directory, David Yack, is in Vermont to present at the VTdotNET meeting tonight, thanks to INETA.

He'll be speaking on a topic we have NEVER had in our 6 years at the user group: VSTO. THen off to NJ tomorrow to talk about Silverlight 2.0.

But if that's not diverse enough, he's locked in his hotel room wrapping up a book on CRM. Go David! I've conspired with his wife, Julie, to be sure that he does get downtown to go buy some Lake Champlain Chocolates for his wife. We Julie's know how to stick together!

Special thanks to Infragistics and JetBrains for their monthly raffles and to Goodrich (yes, that Goodrich) Vergennes for sponsoring the cost of the meeting space.

Don't pencil it in; ink it in!

May 22nd at Vermont Technical College in Williston from 9am to 4pm.

You may notice that May 22nd is on a THursday. I will put money on the fact that Chris scheduled this so that he can go to Bove's. THe last few times he hit town at the beginning of the week, but Bove's is closed on Sundays and Mondays and I think I heard the sobs all the way down here in Huntington. Thankfully, he discovered The Skinny Pancake down by the water front and is now a fan of that resto, too!

Read more details about the roadshow on Chris' blog!

Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and founder of the GNU Project (http://www.gnu.org/), will be speaking in the Burlington area on April 17 and 18.

  o  Thursday, April 17, 4:30 p.m., St. Michael's College; "Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks"

  o  Friday, April 18, 9:30 a.m., Champlain College; "The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System"

GNU is "free software" and a different concept from open source software. Per the GNU Web site...

=====

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

    * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

    * The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

    * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

    * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

=====

The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.  Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

To our right is Code Camp 9 in Waltham April 5-6.

To our left is the first Code Camp in Albany, Tech Valley Code Camp, April 19th. I'll be on a plane to Orlando that day for DevConnections.

Code Camp 9 has a beautiful new logo created by Bryan Philips.

Chris Bowen reports that the session for the April 5-6 Code Camp are filling up and the registrations are as well. At last count there are 40 sessions submitted.

Deadline for abstract submission is March 24th.

There is an introductory track this year which is a great opportunity for people who are new to presenting to do a session. In addition, Chalk Talks are a fabulous way to lead a conversation about something that you are interested in wtihout having to do the work of preparing a session and demos or worry about standing in front of an audience giving  presentation.

Submit sessions and register at www.TheDevCommunity.org.

Last fall, I presented a 3 hour workshop at DevConnections, comparing and contrasting ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework's LINQ to Entities, Object Services and EntityClient as well as comparing LINQ to Entities to Entity SQL, then providing recommendations for when one makes sense over the others in various scenarios. It was a really fun session to present.

It was a little daunting to pull together, though, because even Microsoft hadn't provided this guidance at that point beyond "LINQ to SQL is for RAD and EF is for the Enterprise". There were a few great forum comments by Mike Pizzo which were helpful.

Coincidentally, (definitely coincidence, I'm not trying to suggest otherwise) Diego Vega, a PM on the EF team, wrote a great post on the the API part of the topic three days after I did the session. And then followed it up in December with a post about LINQ to Entities vs Entity SQL. I laughed that it was in response to a question by John Papa and emailed John to say "geeze, man, you were at the conference, and you were a speaker. You could have come to my workshop for free!" John had presented two great intro sessions on Entity Framework as part of the Data Access track.

So, I am presenting this as a shorter talk at Vermont.NET tomorrow night. We'll see how short. I may just have someone lock the doors when I get started.

I'll be doing this session again in May at DevTeach and June at TEchEd. I expect it to evolve by June.

Now that the Team System's Unit Testing tools are built in to VS2008 Pro, many of us will finally get a chance to take a look at it.

Luckily I know some VSTS experts who aren't too far away and we have Sarah Cameron coming down from Montreal to teach us all about how to use the built-in Unit Testing in VS2008 on Monday. We have a bunch of NUnit users in the group and they are also curious about how the Microsoft version stacks up. Interestingly this session is drawing out a lot of people who have never been to a VTdotNET meeting before! Go Sarah!

Read more at www.vtdotnet.org!

Date: 02/11/08 Speaker: Sarah Cameron (InCycle Software ) -- Location: VT Tech, Williston Campus Topic: Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2008 VS2008 Pro now includes the Unit Testing features that were previously only available in the VSTS sku. Sarah Cameron, a Visual Studio Team System expert from InCycle Software (www.incyclesoftware.com), will demonstrate how to use and really benefit from Unit Testing in VS2008 using this built in tool.. Speaker Bio: Sarah Cameron is a consultant specializing in Visual Studio Team System, with experience on projects from inception to delivery following well-defined software processes. Sarah has been working as a consultant for Incycle Software (www.incyclesoftware.com) a Montreal based firm specializing in Team System consulting services. She has been assisting ISVs and larger corporations successfully plan and deploy Visual Studio Team System. She may be contacted at sarah.cameron@incyclesoftware.com

Burlington geeks from the itty bitty little market that can get 120 peope to who up at an MSDN event , will have to plan a road trip if they want to attend an official Launch event for VS2008, SQL SErver 2008 and Windows 2008 Server. There will be one in Boston on March 18 and one in Albany on May 23.

However, we will have two INETA/Microsoft/PASS sponsored launch events through the VTdotNET and VTSQL. VTSQL will have a "SQL Sever 2008 launch party" meeting on April 7th and VTdotNET's VS2008 Launch will be on April 14th. While we can't promise a copy of all three products to every attendee, hopefully we'll have licenses to give away. Fortunately, in December we were extremely lucky to have a VS2008 Install Fest where over 40 licenses to VS2008 Pro were given away to Vermont.NET User Group members, thanks to Chris Bowen.

The date's been picked for the next New England Code Camp!

More details to come - watch Chris Bowen's blog!

This weeks Seven Days features Vermont's Tech businesses and the Vermont 3.0 Tech/Creative Career Jam that is happening on Saturday (Jan 26) in Burlington. There are 50 companies that are registered as exhibitors for the career portion of this - most of them are looking for some type of technical workers - engineers, programmers and more. There was only space for 50 and there's a long list of companies that are begging to get in as well.

The issue talks to a number of these companies and also surveys the state of the industry and career opportunities.

So if you aren't local and can't pick up Seven Days in print, you can read all of these articles in the paper.

Seven Days home

Seven Days TechBiz Issue starting point

Jeff McWherter and his very cool wife (what a lucky geek he is!) have come from Lansing, Michigan to Vermont with hopes of ice climbing and so that Jeff can speak at the VTdotNET group. Unfortunately we lost all of our snow in the last week (though it's finally snowing again) and the good ice for climbing is a little hard to find right now. Our neighbor, a rock climber, made some calls last night and hooked them up with some good insider info on where there's some good ice. I told Jeff he can't do that until AFTER he has spoken to the user group. Not that I want him to whack that brainy skull of his in half AFTER the user gruop presentation either!

When I spoke in Michigan this summer, Jeff came to my presentation both nights. It was the same talk , well at least the same title: Intro to Entity Framework, two nights in a row. He witnessed that the two talks were completely different from one night to the next.

We took them to a great local brew pub last night (BobCat Cafe in Bristol, VT). I will see if it's possible to get a photo of Jeff without a glass of beer in his hand.

Definitely looking forward to tonight's presentation!!

We also are fortunate to have gobs of swag. The magazines (CoDE and aspNET Pro) have been piling up for two months (they always seem to arrive the day after the meeting). We got lots of books sent at Christmas time and I always seem to have a bunch of Infragistics .NET Advantage licenses to give away now.

Additionanlly, we have a sponsor taking care of the whole meeting's expenses- room fee and pizza - tekSystems. Thanks!!

According to Chris Bowen's blog, there will be a TechNet and MSDN event in Burlington on February 26th.

The afternoon MSDN event will be two sessions covering:

MSDN:  "Explore IIS7, ASP.NET and Tackle Web Security"

Check out the latest coding solutions with like-minded developers at MSDN Events. Witness the evolution of IIS and see why IIS7 is our most extensible, manageable and secure Web platform on record. You'll learn how to extend application services - including membership, role management and navigation - from ASP.NET and how to consume them from a wide variety of clients. As a special bonus, we're also tackling the biggest security risks and clueing you in to the top counter measures available for Websites and Web applications of all kinds. Don't miss these free, live sessions that are really on your wavelength.

Register for the MSDN event at www.msdnevents.com

The morning TechNet event is also about security:

Although I wasn't able to be in Vermont on Thursday for the Bob & Chris Roadshow or the VS2008 Installfest, I have gotten emails from Chris Bowen and others letting me know that it was a great success. Over 40 people showed up for the installfest, and I learned from Dave Burke's blog that they also had TWO XB0X 360's set up for folks to play with.

Larry Keyes blogged his extensive notes from the day.

Sorry to have missed it.

What I really enjoyed reading was Dave Burke's epiphany about VS2008. The sessions from Bob & Chris really made things click for him and he's ready to get in bed wiht VS2008. I was thinking about that becasue he said he's seen LINQ 4 times before, but not until Thursday did he finally get to his AHA! moment with it. I believe this may have a lot to do with the fact that it's finished, it's deployed and in hand, rather than seeing very early bits (we've had 3 LINQ talks at VTdotNET in the last 1 1/2 years).

Thanks  (humongous thanks) to Chris Bowen for pulling off getting Vermont on the list for the installfest. It will be an "add-on" to the Roadshow day.

From his blog: (read the details carefully.. priority goes to registered attendees of the roadshow...)

Burlington (Williston), VT
December 6th, 4:15 to 6:00 PM
Vermont Technical College, 201 Lawrence Place, Room 401, Williston, VT
In partnership with the Vermont .NET User Group

Like Rochester, we're running this InstallFest in the same room as the Roadshow event that day.  Stay with us from 4:15 until 6:00 and enjoy some food, camaraderie, and gaming.

Priority for giveaways will be given to everyone who attends (not just registers for) the Burlington Roadshow event.  Remaining materials are available, while they last, to any walk-ins.

Partnering with area user groups, we're offering attendees a chance to install the release version Visual Studio 2008, enjoy some food, conversation, and gaming!  Since the packaged product hasn't been released yet, here's what will happen:

• Bring your laptops (or heck, a desktop!) and your festive selves
• Grab a DVD with the Visual Studio 2008 Pro Trial Edition bits
• Install and be happy
• Play some Halo 3 or Guitar Hero, munch on some food, chat with people
• Go home and enjoy VS2008
• ...wait...
• When the packaged product ships, you'll get a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional in the mail!  (Which will *not* require a reinstall of the trial version.)

As an added incentive to get VS2008 installed that evening, we're giving away T-shirts and raffling off a new 8GB Zune among the people who get VS2008 on their machines!

"Free Sounds Good!  So, Where?  When?  How Do I Sign Up?"

You may notice that the events are generally on our MSDN Roadshow days (except for Waltham, where the Roadshow will be the following day.)  That's of course no coincidence, we'd like to take advantage of our passing through various areas in the northeast to run these special events. 

Each event has its own timing, registration, and logistics, detailed below.

As you can guess, we have limited quantities of giveaways (and "free" always draws a crowd) so we can't guarantee everyone will walk away with something.

Camey blogs that they are having a VS2008 install fest (with VS2008 being supplied by Microsoft) at the South Sound .NET User Group in December. I immediately emailed our D.E. asking if we can do that at VTdotNET, but unfortunately, he doesn't have enough licenses to go around (not his fault) so that leaves out our little teeny tiny itty bitty market. I know he tried to get more, so there's not much we can do. WHat a gift that would have been for our user group members!

But on a good note, we are getting a full day of the Bob & Chris Roadshow, where we will be tortured and tempted with all of the goodness of VS2008. (grin) SIgn up here! (It's Thursday, Dec 6, all day at Vermont Tech College in Williston.)

When the official launch happens in late February (and we'll aim for doing this at our March meeting) hopefully we'll get a bunch of licenses to give away as we did with the VS2005 launch a few years ago.

I'm hopping in the car to drive the 4 hours to Boston forthe sold-out REMIX which started this morning. I'll be there all day tomorrow and will be giving a talk on Astoria tomorrow afternoon.

For you locals, the Vermont.NET user group is having a special type of meeting tonight  - a PubClub! We'll (without me  - so You'll) be meeting at RiRa's in downtown Burlington. Check the website www.vtdotnet.org for details.

Thanks to Laura Blood, Tom Cooley and Rob Hale for coordinating and leading the three discussion topics.

On January 26, 2008, the VT Software Developers Alliance, CEDO, Champlain College, Seven Days, VSAC, the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce and GBIC, along with many other partners is hosting an all day "Creative/Technology Career Jam" at the Lake & College Building on the Waterfront. We are hoping to attract at least 30 employers to set up booths and meet with high school, college students and adults to discuss the growing need for qualified technical employees.

This event will include food, music, and keynote and educational seminars presented by respected technology professionals, well known in their fields. Booth spaces will be $150 for 20 or less employees and $350 for more than 20 employees with limited space available. There will also be sponsorship opportunities. The rate sheet is not yet available, but please contact Bruce Seifer of CEDO (bseifer@ci.burlington.vt.us) or Patrick Martell with vtSDA (patrick@vtsda.org) if you are interested.

Russ Fustino used to be our little secret when he worked out of the Microsoft New England office. He was well loved by Burlington, VT developers who looked forward to his Russ' Toolshed events. A full day of free training that was before MSDN events existed!

But there's more to Russ' legacy. It was Russ who inspired us to start our user group, VTdotNEt, and it was Russ who pointed his finger at me when he looked around the room to see who might actually take on the challenge.

Then a dark day came and Russ moved to Florida. There was audible moaning and snivelling to be heard all over the Champlain Valley.

Happily, we have been very lucky over the years to have Joe Stagner, Thom Robbins, Susan Wisowaty, Chris Bowen and Bob Familiar come to town.

But next month Russ is coming back!

I wonder if anyone told him that Nectar's has new owners? Well, let's keep that part quiet because they still serve gravy fries and have local bands playing every night. Hasn't changed that much.

On Nov 12th, Russ will be presenting at the VTdotNET User Group Meeting and on Nov 13th he will be doing a full day MSDN Event in Burlington.

You can find out more about the meeting at www.vtdotnet.org.

You can find out more about the MSDN event as well as register at www.msdnevents.com.

And one more thing, Nov 12th is Russ' birthday. I vote for wrapping up the meeting as soon as we can and heading down to his favorite watering hole on the planet (that would be Nectar's)  and try to see if we can convince him to return for good.

Are you sitting? Buckled in?

Yes it's true. It was just announced. Microsoft is releasing source for .NET binaries and letting us debug into it as well!

Read more here!

[A New DevLife Post]

By way of the Burlington Free Press

James Martin, who Computerworld Magazine once ranked as the fourth most influential individual in the world of computer science, will talk tonight at Green Mountain College.

More info here: http://www.greenmtn.edu/gmcjournal/index.asp

Boy am I excited about this.

Timothy Ng is on the VB team and wrote the recent MSDN Magazine article on Lambda Expressions for VB developers. I understood lambdas better than ever after reading the article ... finally something from the VB perspective.

His two talks are:

LINQ-ing your data
In this session, I will explore how LINQ will change the way you think about data in your applications. In particular, I will explore how LINQ provides a higher abstraction for accessing your data, provides a common abstraction across data domains, and allows for simplified data transformations. I will focus on LINQ to XML as the transformation technology, and the various XML features that are available in VB.

LINQ from the Ground Up
In this session, I will explore the fundamentals of LINQ by examining how the various language features (such as extension methods, type inference, lambda expressions, and anonymous types) form the foundation for LINQ. I will share some of the experiences that the VB compiler team had while building LINQ, in hopes that it will help you build your applications on LINQ. Examples will be in VB, but this talk applies to C# folks who are interested in learning how the fundamentals work as well. All language concepts apply to both VB and C#.

I sure wish I was seeing these before I do my LINQ talk in San Diego on Tuesday!

Richard Hale Shaw will be doing some pretty cool LINQ talks too which will be a C# focus.

Before I learned that Tim was coming, I was already excited about the Code Camp speaker roster. This will be the first time that Jesse Liberty and Fritz Onion (who are "local" in about the same way that I am local... well, I guess Fritz's drive is even longer than mine). Jesse recently started working for Microsoft (see? I managed not to say "swallowed the red pill"!) and he is "da man" at Microsoft on Silverlight. Fritz is a true ASP.NET plumber who amazed us all with his book Essential ASP.NET in the .NET 1.0 days and again with the updated version for ASP.NET 2.0, because it explained HOW ASP.NET actually worked and he continues to spelunk on our behalves.

There are already almost 40 sessions listed with tons of amazing expertise on display.

I'll be doing a talk on Astoria, a session on using Entity Framework in multi-tiered apps (and getting a little nervous that nobody seems to be doing an Intro to entity framework session) and a session on ASP.NET Databinding with LINQ.

When Vermont.NET does not have a sponsor to cover the cost of pizza & soda, the attendees pay for their own - $5 each. This was the case at Monday's meeting. Additionally, we were doing a fundrasing raffle for the first time ever, using a license to Infragistics NetAdvantage that was donated by Infragistics. The raffle was $5. There were about 25 people at the meeting.

Usually, collecting the money is a subtle thing that happens in the background and I have not even had to do it in years as another user group member has been grabbing the cash on my behalf. But I was doing it on Monday and wouldn't you know it, but everyone had 20's. Nobody seemed to have change. In over 5 years and 70 meetings, this has never happened before. It took a good 15 minutes or more to get it all sorted out. While I'm laughing about it now, it was totally chatoic and embarrassing at the time. We had a bunch of new attendees and our speaker, Mark Mullin (who helped come up with change for a 20) from New Hampshire. I could only imagine what they were thinking!

So my lesson? I guess from now on, I'll just have to add in "20's not accepted".

The Burlington stop of the Bob & Chris Roadhow is this coming Monday, sept 10th.

In addition to a day of great (and free) training on

• Dynamic Languages
• Silverlight
• Developer Productivity Tips & Tricks for VS2005 & VS2008
• Understanding Service Oriented software

(and a free lunch )

Bob & chris will have passes to attend REMIX Boston (Oct 8/9th) for free as well as a trunk full of the MS Press book "Introducing LINQ".

More info and sign up for Monday's event here.

And just a note, VTdotNET's monthly meeting will be Sept 17th. See more details on www.vtdotnet.org.

Another one of the "satellite" MIX07 events will take place in Boston in early October - REMIX07 Boston.

Brad Abrams will be doing the keynotes. I see Rocky Lhotka and Jeff Prosise doing talks too. The Eastern Region D.E.s who have organized this have also brought in some "local talent". Luckily people like Fritz Onion (Maine) and Richard Hale Shaw (Boston) are part of our local talent! Additionally, they have allowed me a session on Astoria and I see fellow use group leaders Bill Wolff, Andy Beaulieu doing talks on WPF and Silverlight, respectively.

This is a two day event with 7 session slots and each session has 5 talks to choose from. Not quite as stressful as the number of talks to select from at MIX07 in Las Vegas, but enough to make you have to think pretty hard!

It's only $299 for a registration fee. And it is also pretty easy to figure out how to attend for a lot less (or even free).

read more on Chris Bowen's blog

Just for fun, Vermont.NET will have our October 8th meeting at RiRa's in downtown Burlington.

No powerpoints, no projector, no screen.

Bring your laptop. We'll come up with a topic for discussion in advance.

Chris Bowen has posted the agenda for the full day of free training aka "Bob & Chris' MSDN Roadshow" that will make Burlington it's first whistlestop on Sept 10th.

The day's topics are:

1. Coding in a Dynamic World
2. Practical Silverlight
3. Developer Productivity Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008
4. Software as a Service, Software + Services, Service with a Smile, Can I Get Some Service, Where is the Waiter?

More details about the day, the topics and registering are here on Chris' blog.

Also, don't forget to sign up for Code Camp 8: Rise of the Silverlight Surfer on the weekend of Sept 29/30. Submit abstracts for sessions or chalk talks and register. More details here...

“A Technical Community – How Do We Get There From Here?”
Dean Kamen
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
5:00 – 6:20 p.m.
Davis Auditorium
Medical Education Building on the University of Vermont Campus

Dean Kamen, an inventor and entrepreneur and an inspiring speaker, will address a serious issue facing society.

How can we attract the next generation to fields of Science and Technology? Society as a whole needs to start promoting careers in Science and Engineering to our youth.

We live in a technical world. Vermont, like many other states, is having a difficult time attracting and retaining a technical work force, which is essential for the growth of local businesses. If Vermont is to have a high quality of life 20 years from now, we need more skilled scientists and engineers, with a broad vision of the society we want to create.

Also - VT Science Teacher of the Year awards

MORE INFORMATION HERE

New England Code Camp 8

Rise of the Silverlight Surfer

Saturday & Sunday, Sept 29-30 in Waltham, MA

It's free, it's fun and it is filled with great information!

If you have a story to tell, come tell it! You can do a regular presentation or a lead a chalk talk discussion. Prior experience not required!

Submit a talk or register as an attendee.

This is a FUN weekend and we should plan to have an big carpool from Vermont this time!

Read all about it here on Chris Bowen's weblog.

Thanks again to Richard Hale Shaw for driving up to Burlington on Monday (even a flat tire didn't stop him) to give VTdotNETters a very in-depth perspective on LINQ. Rather than just open up VS2008 and start pounding out LINQ queries, Richard spent most of the time building up our understanding of the underlying technology that makes LINQ possible. Custom Iterators, anonymous methods and generics. Then when he showed us LINQ, it made perfect sense.

I know that when I talk about "that which is returned by a LINQ query", I have a hard time saying "it's an iEnumerable" or "an iQueryable". Most people don't get what that means. Richard made it easy to understand by his initial desicription of an iEnumerable being a collection with only the enumerator exposed, so the only thing you can do to the collection is iterate over it. That will help me a lot when I do future talks about LINQ and Entity Framework (which is three of my four talks at DevConnections this fall).

In addition to Richard's generosity with his time and knowledge, big thanks to go telerik who made this meeting possible, covering Richard's travel expenses and our pizza, and providing raffles and lots of fun t-shirts. We also had a few great raffles, thanks to CodeZone.

Although I was wearing my new telerik "Geekette" t-shirt, there were only 2 other gals at the meeting. So when we were down to only one Geekette shirt at the end, I was surprised. Rather than take the regular guy t-shirts, the guys were taking the girlie shirts for their wives, girlfriends and daughters. Awesome!

Watch out for a gaggle of geekettes wandering around Burlington for the rest of this summer.

Unfortunately, we'll have to reschedule Rob Daigneau's Aug. 13th presentation on WCF. We're both bummed, but we'll get him back in the fall, for sure!

However, we lucked out because we were able to get Richard Hale Shaw to "fill in". Richard is one of the top instructors in the country and lives in Boston, so he is going to come up to present to Vermont.NET for our August meeting.

As if that wasn't enough, telerik has generously offered to sponsor this meeting. They will be covering Richard's T&E as well as our pizza. Rumor has it that there is a big pile of telerik's famously fun t-shirts on their way to Vermont as well along with software licenses!

Thanks to telerik, to Richard and also to Rob (who *really* wants to come, it just didn't work out this month)!

Definitely get August 13th on your calendar.

Stay tuned to the VTdotNET website for more details as we waiting on a topic from Richard.

Finally, I get to share Entity Framework with my own user group (in Burlington, VT)! Yay.

When: Monday, July 9th, 6-8:30pm

Where: Champlain College, Hauke Building Room 005 (375 Maple Street, Burlington, VT)

More info at www.vtdotnet.org

Of course, I'm spending all of my time futzing with the new bits that just got released earlier this week.

Not only do I have a cool technology to show off but we've got awesome raffles from Infragistics (a license to NetAdvantage) and from Code Zone (a fingerprint reader, Vista Ultimate license, a book from MSPress (Visual C# 2005: The Language) and some more of the fun GEEK mugs.

rspv@vtodtnet.org for pizza ($5 for pizza & soda - no sponsor this month).

Thanks to the Software Engineering Department at Champlain College for sponsoring the cost of the room all summer.