Ahhh peace and quiet, now I have some time to write another overdue post.

I was able to lure Steve Smith to speak to Vermont .NET with the invitation of a free weekend getaway in Vermont which was extended to his wife Michelle and daughter Ilyana. Unfortunately, Michelle and Ilyana weren't able to come, but Steve did come for the weekend. We tried to get him away from the computer a little. Food worked, including some Ben & Jerry's in downtown Burlington and dinner at two different local restaurants that brew their own beer.

I think it was really good for my husband to see that I am not the only lunatic with the type of work habits that I have and that a lot of time spent on email etc is just part of how things work around here. Steve and I stayed up late working. Steve got to sleep in late - I still had to get up and walk the dog! hee hee

We had a lot of fun, bundled Steve up in the appropriate gear and took him snowshoeing in the Green Mountains (we access the Long Trail from our back yard). I took a look at all of his cotton clothing and scared him into accepting loans of a lot of our technical stuff. Cotton is dangerous to wear winter hiking - read “hypothermia” - just like in programming, it's all about “what if...“. Anyway, Steven, totally inexperienced with this stuff was great. I also was disappointed to see that I have really lost a lot of strength from sitting in front of the computer all of the time. So I have to try to get out more. It's why we live here. It's what I love.

Monday of course was the user group meeting. We just had the ASP.NET Roadshow a few days before (via Live Meeting from Boston!!) so unfortunately a bunch of people had used up their “night out” and there were only 20 people there. Too bad for the others. We also had free pizza that night thanks to DataDirect! (Thanks guys yumm yumm)

Steve drilled into cacheing and focused solely on that. This is a phenomenal presentation if you have an opportunity. Steve has the luxury of focusing on ASP.NET in a way that gives him true expertise. I have been programming with ASP.NET for 2 years and I learned SO much on Monday. Some stuff I may have seen and glazed over before. But this time there is no problem with the lessons sticking. Also he spent some time on Whidbey which is always good for the group. They think I'm some kind of koolaid addict and I'm trying to make sure they understand that it is important to start paying attention to Whidbey now so that they can jump in and leverage the goodness when it arrives.

The other thing that I was really impressed by was Steve's presenting style. I paid attention because I have a lot of talks coming up. Steve is such a natural. It is a huge thing to be talking about something you know so very well. Becasue of that, he is really able to communicate the information. And I think I told him something he never heard before, he has a great “radio” voice.

Amy Sorokas from SAMS/QUE shipped some books for the meeting including of course Steve's co-authored ASP.NET Cookbook. Thanks Amy. They arrived 15 minutes before we left for the meeting. And Steve dragged along an extra HUGE suitcase filled with books and swag to give away.

All of this was possible because Steven was doing an INETA event in Montreal the next night. So we worked things out so that he could come to Vermont also. So I get to say thanks once again to INETA and thanks to Guy Barrette (one of the new Regional Directors) who runs GUVSM in Montreal for helping to coordinate all of this.

Blueberry pancakes on the house for all!

Here's some proof (oh and steve just posted as well with these pics! )

geesh - just when I've got my new server stable and had long talks with Steve Smith about how phenomenal SourceGear Vault is and was about to install my personal edition of Vault and was prepared to be very impressed and then blog about it and then thanks to my millions of readers, SourceGear would get a sudden huge burst of sales...

Eric Sink goes and makes SourceGear Single User a FREE PRODUCT, drops the price of the flagship product and releases a list of all the cool new things in 2.0.

Well!

Now here is just what's so cool, what's so Eric, about all of this.

(my read on this) Their sales are so good, so much more than expected, that they can afford, with volume discounts, to sell the main products for 1/4 of what they were previously. How unAmerican! (kidding)

His post on this is a must read.

I have a sister who is a phenomenal sales person and learned a similar lesson from her. It's in the volume. Then if the price is right, your sales will be so high, that the volume makes up for the “loss“. And there is huge value to having mass quantities of your product out there. Which is probably what will happen now with Vault.

And Eric and his company will be loved and cherished by all of those lone-coders.

Go get em!!!

lest we forget how important our human contacts are...

I'm a day late and a dollar short.

HAPPY 2nd BIRTHDAY to INETA!!!

Bill Evjen says it all in his blog post which will be also in the next newsletter.

What Bill doesn't say is this.

This was Bill's dream. He came up with the idea from his experiences as a user group leader and he pursued making it a reality.

Many people think Microsoft started INETA. Not true. They are merely a sponsor. A wonderful, generous sponsor - but that is all. They do give INETA resources besides financial ones and Eric Ewing definitely needs to be pointed out for the time and energy he puts into INETA which goes above and beyond his job.

Many many people have come together to make this happen. Hundreds of volunteers, user group leaders that have joined INETA (478 and counting) from all over the world. And the speakers who are so generous with their time. Though they get a small honorarium for their speaking engagements, it does not come close to paying for their valuable time. Perhaps one or two hours of it. But certainly not for what is generally a few days of travel. Making INETA happen is not a small thing. Because of many people's passions, it has become practically a part-time job (volunteer) for many of us and we wouldn't have it any other way. (Though some of our spouses probably feel differently...)

Thanks to everyone who makes INETA happen and thanks to INETA for giving me a place to fulfill my obsessions! And thanks to all of our spouses/partners who put up with us.

The Vermont .NET User Group also celebrates it's 2nd year anniversary this month. That's a whole 'nother story!

Most of us think of google love as a link to our blog. Today (day before Valentine's Day) I noticed a new type of google love.

Definitely brightened my day.

BTW - you're also getting a peek at I prioritize my favorite links in I.E. I really ought to push the ski related links to the front!

http://www.kstati.com/tabula/archive/2004/02/13/1172.aspx

This article sparked an incredible discussion among a number of women developers that are at the top of their game in our development community. Many of them have, like me, been programming for 20 or more years. Most of them (unlike me) also have kids. Definitely check it out if you have any interest. It's not about programmers, but about business in general.

Hmmm now which category does this belong in?

I have the alpha of next version of the Tablet PC O/S on my little Acer - it's called Lonestar.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with it but did a bit more yesterday when I was testing the deployment of my client app.

There are two things that I want to ooh aah about.

First is the handwriting recognition. It's completely amazing. Not only does it recognize total chicken scrawl (this will be good for the healthcare market, eh?) but the fact that there is inference built in just blows me away. Plus it has a lot of cool new features. Example: recognizing one word at a time as you write. If it is confused it will show you options based on it's best guess and then you select that word. And I believe it then stores that choice in a dictionary, much like a lexicon when you use voice recognition software. I did a TON of voice related stuff (text to voice, actually) a few years ago and boy was that challenging.

The other thing that I found interesting is a new use of the TIP (that's the Tablet PC Input Panel - where you write and it recognizes). Infragistics was out of the gate VERY early with this (and has added a lot more functionality), but the TIP now pops up automatically when I select a text input box - even in my grid. Because I am using the Infragistics Ink enabled tools, I am not sure at this point what Lonestar is doing on it's own or what is being done by the Infragistics tools. I'll have to play with that.

I haven't touched the new SDK yet, but first thing I'll be playing with when I do is the ink-enabled web controls!! www.inklog.com (an experiment by Arin Goldberg on the tablet team which I think he whipped together in one day) uses this. But you can only see the output, not how they are doing the input.

No need to be jealous - Microsoft IS looking for more commercial tablet application developers to join the alpha program! Check Tabula PC's blog here for more info (and follow his link to the lonestar FAQ that Chris deHerrera is doing...)

With all the buzz about Newfoundlands because of Josh winning the Westminster Kennel Club show, I am going to add a little google juice to probably the most wonderful book on Newfoundlands ever written....

Amazon has it listed as out of print, but it's not true. It *was* out of print and selling for over $300 a copy on EBay, so my parents were given the printing rights by the original publisher, Henry Holt, and have republished the book. It's for sale in a lot of stores and websites or you can buy it directly from Blue Heaven Publishing or Katie's Bumpers websites.

In the Company of Newfies by Rhoda Lerman

Josh Josh Josh Josh Newfoundland Newfoundland Newfoundland Newfoundland Westminster Westminster Westminster Westminster

Get your ASPNetPro's email newsletter yet? Here's what's in it:

anyone notice the cool new fade effects on ASPAdvice.com? Oooh aaah.

I still have a pile of VS2002 60 day demo dvds to give away at my user group. Still haven't known of any for the current version.

Greg Robinson bemoans the fact that his magazines are collecting dust on the shelves since he needs to stay focused on .NET development right now and he is seeing to much focus on Longhorn. If you consider that many developers haven't even made the leap to .NET and most of those that have are busy working away in .NET up to their eyeballs and still need plenty of information. Not sure which mags he is talking about, but I too have noticed more and more articles on VERY future stuff which I don't have quite as much time to focus on these days. What percentage of subscribers are really ready for all of that?

Extracted from here:

My problem with many n-tier examples is that while they are getting better at separating the logical tiers, there is nothing about how to separate the tiers physically.  It can't be done easily, because everything is coupled with the web.config file. 

In this essay which questions why it seems people are not leveraging .NET to do real scalable enterprise apps, Sam reinforces a point that he has made often and states again in his comments on this post . Too many developers pick up Visual Studio.NET and kind of start where they left off, without looking to see what's new in there. They get stuck on the IDE improvements or the server controls and don't look deeper to the stuff that lets you build really awesome applications. Even if you are like me and not in a situation where you are building huge apps, you can still use your smaller apps as a playground for learning how to use these things and STILL realize a great benefit, not only to your skills and understanding of .net, but the applications will benefit. Sam seems to be mourning the fact that people are once again writing client/server apps because this is what the IDE wizards create and also that there are too many samples out there that demonstrate code without middle tiers. Joel Semeniuk talked about this exact same problem this morningin Trivial Samples? How about Patterns? 

I am not writing gigantic enterprise apps, yet everything I write for my clients, I write with some type of scalabilty in mind. I have one client that has gone from 15 to 100+ employees in the last 6 years and I think in another 5 they will have operations around the country. Everything that I write for them now, I try to build with that in mind. Even though I fear it will all be legacy code by then... Sometimes I know that what I am doing is overkill. Often I even don't charge them for some of the extra work I do on their apps that is possibly more for the sake of my education. Reading what Sam says definitely reinforces my justification for this.

Sam and I think very differently and work differently (if he's reading this, he probably just spit out his coffee). He writes big, I write small. I often get something different out of what he is writing than what his main point is (which tends to make him nutty - especially when I then go write about it in public...). But even I have slowly evolved my own methods as I have gotten deeper into .NET. In the past, yes, I too started out by seeing what's new in the IDE. I have, in the last 2 years though, learned a LOT about .NET and am working with a lot of pieces of this that always seem terribly daunting at first. BUt I know that by learning them and using them I am taking advantage of what .NET is all about.

Sam knows .NET from the bottom up, not the top down (in my mind) - take heed of his message. It was Sam that inspired me to really want to more than a developer using .NET but to be a .NET developer.

After Rich and I returned from a dog show (where I took these pics of Theo), I looked at our poor 10 year old Newfie, Tasha and realized she looked like a bear. So she got a day of beauty. First we gave her a big haircut (okay, a hack job). Her hair was probably 6 or 7 inches long!!

Here she is standing in front of the cupboard where her cookies are after the first part of her torture. This is SHORT hair!

The best part of the day for her was the ride in the car to the place where we can give her a bath.  She LOVES to go in the car.

Then there was the bath.

Lucky for us, we don't have to clean up the mess!

She's such a good girl! Afterwards, it took most of the day and night for her to dry off enough to comb her out. Now she's all beautiful again and smells good too!

My folks got two new puppies from France this summer, Celeste and Theo. They are actually 2nd generation puppies from their own kennel. Their mother, Rudy, who lives in France, is  a Blue Heaven doggie. Celeste and Theo are now 9 months old. Theo was with my mother and another one of her dogs, Bumper (2 yrs old) in Saratoga 2 weekends ago for a dog show. Rich and I went down. I haven't seen Theo since he was about 3 months. I am in love but I can't have him. He is very big already for his age (140 lbs) but incredibly balanced which is highly unusual. Here are some pictures of Theo and two with Bumper in my mom's hotel room. I love these and they are fun to look at so I hope they brighten up someone's day. Lots more pics here.

I can subscribe to some dasBlos rss feeds in Sharpreader but not to my own (for testing purposes) and not to a few others (eg. Damir Tomicic). Is anyone subscribing to my feed in SharpReader successfully? The rss looks fine in a plain old browser.

I have been using reflection for a while to open up forms dynamically and have been past the form properties and form methods hurdle for quite some time. I just had to raise an event from my form that is being loaded dynamically. A quick article by Dino Esposito on VB2theMax made it relatively easy to add this little bit of functionality into my .net quiver. Since I am doing it a bit differently (using a form, rather than a class) here is how I did it. This isn't my exact code, since I have stripped out some other trickery that I don't want to get in the way of what I am trying to show here.

Dim asmAssemblyContainingForm As [Assembly] = [Assembly].LoadFrom(“AssemblyContainingForm.DLL“)

Dim TypeToLoad As Type = asmAssemblyContainingForm.GetType(“assemblynamespace.formclassName")

Dim GenericInstance As Object

GenericInstance = Activator.CreateInstance(TypeToLoad)

Dim f As Form = CType(GenericInstance, Form)

'//here is the event setup

Dim frmEventUpdateTree As System.Reflection.EventInfo

'//“TreeSourceChanged“ is the name of the event being raised from my form

frmEventUpdateTree = TypeToLoad.GetEvent("TreeSourceChanged")

Dim frmDel As [Delegate] = [Delegate].CreateDelegate(frmEventUpdateTree.EventHandlerType, Me, "SetGetNewTreeTrue")

frmEventUpdateTree.AddEventHandler(f, frmDel)

Geeze - first it's someone on www.Geekswithblogs.net experimenting with a p_rn (don't want google) rss feed yesterday. Now this afternoon, just coincidentally I get this in my aggregator. I'm not offended or anything, it just seemed kinda funny. I didn't circle Patch your.... on purpose...