sad day in bicycle racing. Patani won the tour in 98. We love his wicked cool persona that earned him his nickname.

I have a really hard time remembering this so I am bookmarking it here

http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/

(and adding it to my links bar in i.e.)

Since System.Data does not fit into the scope of my BCL talk and I LOVE ADO.NET and LOVE some of the new things in System.Data, I thought I would point them out here quickly for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

Lucky me. I got my hands on a PDC DVD without having to shell out the $$ or join another ISV program. One of my user group members joined and somehow ended up with 2 conference DVD's and was kind enough to give me one. Granted this stuff is on the web, but it's really hard to go back and forth when you are trying to view a session online. Thanks Rich!!

I followed the trail from Simon Fell's post questioning WinFS then followed it to Robert Scoble's response and then Dare Obasanjo's response to that as well as a bunch of discussion in his comments. And I wanted to add my 2 cents.

I agree with Dare that Microsoft keeps using the “organizing my pictures“ example and that is not satisfying. And I smile at his reference to Hailstorm. Hailstorm terrified me. It was the reason I spent 3 months playing with JBuilder before I came crawling back to .NET. I saw Hailstorm as some kind of James Bond movie plot to take over the world. But I digress. Back to WinFS.

From a very narrow view, here is an example of what I am hoping for:

In Outlook I have appointments, emails and notes. I would like to be able to see all notes emails and appointments that are related. Naturally, in a folder oriented world, I wanted to be able to drag my notes into the same folders where my emails are organized. I can't. When Outlook 2003 came out it was the first thing I looked for. (Maybe it's there and I haven't found it yet... Kase??) Of course there are CATEGORIES that I could use - but as everyone is pointing out as a big issue with WinFS - I don't want to use them! It's too much work. I can't categorize a folder so I would have to categorize every email that is of interested. No thanks. I just want to drag my note into the darned email folder and be finished.

Somehow, I have this idea (is this a fantasy?) that WinFS will make this easier (or enable programmers to make this easier for end-users), i can “categorize/meta tag“ my stuff with the ease of dragging and dropping into a folder and stuff can be emails, outlook notes, some documents, blog posts, etc.

That's what I got excited about when I saw WinFS at PDC. Of course, I didn't stop and think about how I was going to get lazy (well, busy) me to do whatever is necessary (creating the meta tags) to make all of this work.

Thanks to Chris Anderson, I was pointed to Michael Earl's great post on something that I know *I* go through a lot and surely many of us do all of the time.

He talks about the Purist architects “cringes when you design a UI with business logic in it” vs. the Realist  who “has an acute awareness of the importance of puritanism, but also knows that the business is in the business to make money, not to pay for "perfect" software systems.”

Michael also states: “While neither of these two behavioral patterns is wrong, I believe that there exists a shiny bright place halfway between them where a good architect, engineer, or developer should strive to reside. “

Not 10 minutes ago I posted an email on the aspnet-architecture (AspAdvice) list asking a question that exposes my own struggle between these two bents.

The worst part of this for me is that a) I work alone and b) I'm a Libra (known for extensive self-debating).

 here here (or is that hear hear?). I really don't know why Peter Blum is not more well known.

Rick Strahl is trying to figure out why google et alia are not digging things out of his West Wind message boards. Here are the details. Any ideas?

Rory Blyth thinks his tablet pc needs wings.

Not true - it just needs Lonestar.

I can now write in www.thedatafarm.com and get just that not www . thedatafarm . com like before. Same with email addresses - no problem with blah@blahblah.com

Sorry dude, but when I hear “it's got wings!” I can't help but think of this.

I was re-reading the email from the new aspnetPro editor and noticed that in his praise of Elden Nelson's work with ASPNetPro, Jerry says that Elden

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

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