Vermont.NET's next meeting is on Threading in .NET. Ali Aghareza, our local .net internals guru and a blogger is speaking at our Monday Aug 9th meeting. Meeting details at www.vtdotnet.org. Ali is a Sr. Systems Programmer at Green Mountain Power.

Then next month, we will be diving into HTTP Handler's with a not-so-local plumber, Michele Leroux Bustamante who is coming to Vermont.NET thanks to INETA.

yup! Peter Provost - totally an architecture kinda guy, is joining the PAG group at Microsoft. This is the team responsible for patterns & Practices  and more.

Peter & his wife JUST had a baby 3 weeks ago so you can imagine what this means to move. I've already seen a few sniffly blogs from some Denver folks who are going to miss him.

He sounds excited so hearty congratulations!

Many people linked to Jeff Maurone's blog post about the MS intern event at Bill Gates' house (including myself). Mike Flasko, who was on the Imagine Cup Canada winning team was also there and has this to report about his experience.

Thom Robbins, the local D.E. for New England, has been putting together some awesome events. He is starting to coordinate a 2nd Code Camp and now he and Boston .NET User Group leader, Chris Pels, have put together an event for Oct. 6th that is styled after the cabanas at TechEd.

I was just thinking about the first time I really *got* streaming. I couldn't get past the idea of something like a SQLDataReader being a container or a fileStream being a container. Finally one day it just clicked - it's a pipe. I remember last spring and summer when I gave a Streaming in .NET talk a number of times, I was very reliant on using my hands to describe this to attendees.

But truly, if you ever have a hard time explaining it to someone who just doesn't get it ... and that's really only because it is very different from what they may have experienced so far as a developer ... use the pipe image. Describe the stream as the pipe that the data is flowing through. Worked for me.

I have called myself, very specifically, a “.NET developer” for a few years and not a “VB developer”. Why? Because I  program to the CLR using the VB language. I think that I may use one or two things from the Visual Basic namespace. Heck, I even use the ol' Int32 and System.Environment.NewLine just so that I know I can translate my code or skills to C# if and when the need arises.

WHat happens after Microsoft takes away the word (or whatever you call this moniker) “.NET” from our tools? What do I call myself then? I've already gone from being a “.NET MVP” to a “VB MVP” since they shifted the buckets for MVPs and that's the best one for me of the options. They all seem too separate. If I was an ASP.NET MVP then does that ignore all of my work doing WindowsForms? As a VB MVP, you wouldn't know that I actually program in .NET ...since this also incorporates VB6 developers who may not have made the shift.

I like being a “.NET developer”. It speaks to the *many* areas of .NET that I work in.

I have heard the prediction of the demise of VB from the mouths of some *very* believable sources (not at Microsoft).  These are people who are so immured in the internals of .NET that from their perspective it just may not make sense to have multiple languages. However from a practical perspective (i.e. the fact that there are just millions of developers using VB) it just makes no sense to *let* VB go away. There has been some loud vocalization of this in some recent Microsoft employee weblogs.

For example, here (Sean Gephardt) and here (Somasegar)  Somasegar is a Corporate VP of the developer division....I'll believe him! And you gotta love this quote “When I’m with VB developers, I hear things like “all the samples are in C#”, and when I’m with C# developers, I hear “VB At the Movies, the VB Power Pack – what about us?” I guess we must be doing something right.”)

Jeff Richter has the same sentiment about his tablets as I do. Like me, he has the Acer C110 and the Toshiba M200. He seems to prefer the Acer for it's size and has designated it as his travel machine, but prefers the power of the M200 which he will use when not travelling.

I dunno - the picture seems to be named “Tablet Dudes” - hey! I'm even wearing PINK for goodness sake. Three of the folks in the pic are from the Tablet Team, the rest are us students.

I had never met Neil Roodyn (aka Dr. Neil) before the DevLab. A super nice (and oh my god smart) guy. Here's his take on the devlab I attended last week.

By the way “Dr. Neil” is not just some marketing moniker - he holds a PhD!

I have seen a few blogs that list some of the people at the devlab. Here is the full list. I'm going around the room in my memory since everyone seemed to stay in the same seats the whole time.

Martin Shoemaker who wins the prize for coming up with the most awesome ideas for improving mobile hardware.Martin is an INETA speaker and also author of TabletUML.
Jeff Richter, John Robbins and Charles Petzold (they sat together the whole time - there was a little glow coming from that part of the room)
Carl Franklin (Carl, dude, you're not in the photo)
Markus Eggers Markus has written a bunch of Tablet stuff already in his Code Magazine.
Larry O'Brien who always wore the coolest shirts. Larry has written a bunch of Tablet articles for DevX like this one.
Jon Box  already a .NetCF guru, now he's going to be a true Mobile programming guru!
Billy Hollis  - poor Billy, lower case “L“s are the most difficult letters for the hand writing recognition to pick up when you aren't using cursive hand writing
Me
Dr. Neil Roodyn
Paul Yao (author of the first official published book on Windows programming)
Carl Prothman (INETA speaker and user group leader of .NETDA in Redmond)

It was a thrill and an honor to be part of this group.

I just happened to come across this post from Michael Gartenberg from November 2003!

“Julia Lerman's notes from the PDC written on her Tablet PC. There's no way I could have linked to her yellow pad. Such is the power of pen based computing.”

read about it here!!

Over the winter, I had a great excuse to dive into the Whidbey BCL as I had a presentation to do for the Edge East Conference in Boston in February. I spent a huge amount of time going back and forth between the .NET 1.1 reference library comparing it to the reference library in the PDC bits. I did lots of experiments, watched Kit George's PDC presentation so often that I'd no that voice *anywhere* . There was minimal information out there at the time. Practically the only thing anyone had written about was Generics (and those articles and book chapters were really helpful to me as well.)

I reworked the deck against the May bits of Whidbey for DevTeach in June - about a week before the Beta1 was released. I have uploaded that version of the deck. It is my attempt at a hit list of what's new in the base classes. Many thanks to Kit George for clarifying things as well as making some great suggestions and feeding me some widely unknown tidbits every once in a while. Also thanks to Krzysztof Cwalina for some awesome posts on his weblog. Oh - and to Scott Cate and Scott Watermasysk for being my first guinea pigs on this talk over a live meeting in February.

Here it is...it's 1.1 MB

As noted in a prior post, Ahmed AboutTaleb from the BCL Team just put up an official list of what's new on the BCLTeam blog the other day.

Well I guess the cat's out of the bag. I got to spend 3 days hanging out with some of the most amazing people in our industry and to make it even BETTER , we spent the whole time playing with and learning about TabletPC's and how to write apps for them. And to make it even better, Arin Goldberg and Frank Gocinski brought in one after the other legendary Microsoft researcher to talk to us about the work they are doing around mobile development. Talk about nerd heaven! And it was hot & sunny the whole time - unusual for Seattle. Robert Scoble was invited to join us on a Lake Washington cruise and he mentioned that here. Perhaps I'll upload some of my photos. But here's one for a teaser.... me sandwiched between a rocket scientist and a true software legend.

because Rory really needs some link love (not!) - nah - just can't help myself... here

Steve has lots of new interesting information to share, just not about ASP.NET right now. His weblog is becoming a great resource for people who are headed to IRAQ. Michelle also puts incredible information there for families.

I cannot believe the temperatures he is reporting. The forecast there ranges from 95 to 130 degrees! 130 degrees!!!

I was trying to understand why  I was being told that the implementation of iXMLSerializable in DataTable and DataSet in 2.0 is responsible for all of the xml goodies (readxml/write/etc and of course all the webservices stuff) when DataSet in 1.0 and 1.1 does not even implement iXMLSerializable, yet still manages to do all of these things.

I know about the difference between using the binary formatter and the soap formatter, but I never worried about what was going on deeper down when datasets were “magically” serialized for me by ASMX.

After reassuring myself by looking at the DataSet Class documentation for 1.1 and seeing for sure that it implements iSerializable but not iXMLSerializable, I found this little goodie:

Dataset.iXMLSerializable.ReadXML Method  (This member supports the .NET Framework infrastructure and is not intended to be used directly from your code.)

and realized that it MUST be in there, just buried/hidden. So I kept digging and digging .

I found the answer in the June 2004 MSDN article: “New Features for Web Service Developers in Beta 1 of the .NET Framework 2.0“ by Elliot Rapp,Yasser Shohoud and Matt Tavis.

“The IXmlSerializable interface has been in the .NET Framework since version 1.0, but was not intended for general usage. This interface was designed specifically for System.Data.DataSet to enable custom serialization control and was marked for internal use to discourage its usage. Full support for IXmlSerializable in ASP.NET Web services has been introduced in the .NET Framework 2.0 in direct response to customer feedback for scenarios that require more control of the schema and wire format.”

So it was basically hidden from view.  Now, hopefully I'll be able to sleep so I'm off to bed.

I seem to make a point of sharing my .NET discoveries with the concept of “heh, if *I* can do this, so can you!” That is the point of why I am doing a WSE2 talk at DevConnections though I am hardly an expert. Michele LePlumber Bustamante is also doing a WSE2 talk at this conference, but she is doing something much deeper. Hopefully hers will be scheduled *after* mine.

My talk will really be for people who think it's all too scary and wouldn't even try to use it. The point is that you can at least leverage SOME of WSE2 and make some improvements (especially on the security end) to your apps even if you don't really understand plumbing or all of that WS-* specification stuff. (“You know like rockets and lasers and stuff” - sorry ... family joke).

One thing that I learned from talking with Michele and also asking Don Box at TechEd (I should rephrase that, one of the many things...) was that WSE2 is now easy enough to get yourself into trouble. I.E. you don't have to be a plumber to implement some of it's functions, but you'll need to call a plumber if you have a leak. This is another part of my mission with the talk - to make sure dummies like myself know where they should tread and where they should not and when to call in a pro!

All this talk of plumbing makes me think of this funny item in the Duluth Trading Co. catalog that Rich and I got a good giggle from...

I'm getting a LOT of “virus detected in email” messages this morning. Even a few that NAV said it couldn't clean and had to quarantine. I updated virus definitions yesterday and have no outstanding windows updates so I can only cross my fingers.

http://blogs.ineta.org

Jeff Julian has spun off all of the INETA volunteer bloggers from Geekswithblogs.net onto the INETA website. This works in much the same was as the filter from weblogs.asp.net to blogs.msdn.com.

Since there were already a bunch of INETA related people on geekswithblogs.net you will find a host of bloggers already. This is not an INETA info only blog - it is the blogs of the INETA volunteers and of course, these are all super blogs. Bill Evjen is currently heading up the count with the most posts with Jeff and Amy Sorokas leading right behind!

If you are an INETA volunteer and would like a blog, just contact Jeff. The info is at the top of the blogs.ineta.org page.