VTdotNET member Zachary Kent has set the date for the first Vermont Code Brew. It will be February 2nd from 6-8pm.

Zach has created a Yahoo Group to help manage this.

Group name: VTCodeBrew
Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VTCodeBrew
Group email address: VTCodeBrew@yahoogroups.com

The first meeting will be at his office so except Root Beer not Draft Beer!!

He's getting the knack of the blog world since his first Yahoo group post points to Bill Evjen's Code Brew post and Robert Hurlbut's Boston Code Brew post!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Just an FYI - PCConnection has a rebate up until 1/31 for a 128MB thumbdrive ($4.95 after rebate) and a 128MB SD card ($1.95 after rebate)! (plus shipping)

http://www.AcehAid.org

I just went through an interesting process with Michael Stiefel who is also presenting on WSE2.0 at the Web Edge conference.

What we are doing is basically a part one and part two talk.

His talk, "Securing Service-Oriented Architecture with Microsoft's WSE 2.0" is a more advanced version of my part two though it covers a lot of the same ground.

So after talking back and forth about it, I finally decided that I can just literally remove the 2nd half of my presentation. It was hard to do. All of my hard work at trying to learn this stuff so I can explain it - gone. My nature is to want to stay in the room for the entire day and tell people every single thing I know about a topic. But our allotted time is only 50 minutes! So this was the realistic approach. At least Michael's talk is at the end of the day, so he actually can go long if he needs to. I added the subtitle "laying the groundwork".

For all of us very independent people I think it's a good exercise to do something like this. Hopefully it will help me in the future where I always feel like I am being remiss if I am not telling every single detail of my topic.

http://www.AcehAid.org

One of the groups that is intimately involved with Aceh Aid at IDEP is the local surf guides from Sumatran Surfariis.

Okay - yes they are adorable and hunky young guys, but that's not my point. They are part of the amazing effort that is being made in Sumatra. They have been writing about what they are doing and seeing and it's really interesting reading. Right here.

http://www.AcehAid.org

There is  a LOT going on around the Web Services Edge East Conference that is in Boston from Feb 15 - 17th.

Right now there is still a $300 discount available until Jan 21st.

15% discount to MSDN Subscribers (that's on the registration page).

There are a TON of special events that are free.

So, you can register for FREE to get an EXPO Pass (normally $50, but free courtesy of Microsoft) which also gets you into the Keynote (Ari Bixhorn from MS and Matt Ackley from EBay are doing keynotes).

Or you can register for that and the FREE tutorials.

All of the above is detailed on the registration page.

The INETA Sponsored Cabana night is free and requires no registration.

If you are in the Boston area, you should DEFINITELY at least take advantage of all of the free events going on!! Stay tuned for more details about the INETA Cabana night (Wed 2/16 6pm - 8pm).

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have a new client that I am doing some mentoring for. I think that I love this more than any other form of billable work.My mentoring clients are mostly companies that are just now getting started with .NET, so with my nearly 3 years of .NET experience and a bizarre memory of many resources ("oh yeah, I remember there was an article on that by so and so last summer"), I can really help VB6 developers leapfrog past a lot of their learning curves for the specific tasks they need to do (including planning and architecting the program).  I really really enjoy doing this. Getting paid for it almost feels like a bonus.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Awesome, thans Sofwaremaker for checking this out!

I am very excited to update to dasBlog 1.7. I know that Omar and Scott and their team have been working their butts off on it!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Lora reports that there are 4 tablet pc's being given away at the Windows Anywhere conference, which is co-located with VSLive in SF Feb 7-10.

The first tablet will be given away at the pre-con.

The second at the end of the first day of sessions (Tuesday)

The thrid at the end of the 2nd day of sessions (Wednesday)

The last at the post-con.

Collect raffle tickets at each of the sessions (including mine, on Wednesday morning!)

Very cool.

http://www.AcehAid.org

They just don't work for me.

Next idea: Rich has made me a mini-white board that is on the wall right next to me.

Next time I get an email or a phone call of something I am saying "yes, I'll do that" I can just write it down on the white board.

We'll see how this latest attempt pans out.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Update 2/10/05: The auction raised an amazing $10,138!!!
Thanks to everyone who bid and helped us promote it.
We will hopefully be having another one soon.

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1/23 9AM EST: WE WILL BE LIVE - GO HERE FOR DETAILS and LINK!

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[I will put the start date here the moment we are able to and then I will put the link to the auction right here when it goes live, so if you are interested in the auction, bookmark this post!!]

PLEASE SEE STEPHEN FORTE'S BLOG POST REGARDING DETAILS OF THE 30 CONSULTANTS AND UPDATED DETAILS ON HOW THE AUCTION WILL FUNCTION.

30 of the top trainers and consultants in the .NET community will be auctioning off one hour each of their consulting time in a big EBay auction that will start sometime in the next few days (or early next week). Watch this space (and those of the auction items <g> for the date to be announced.

The auction is to benefit Aceh Aid at IDEP who is doing amazing disaster recovery work in Aceh Province Sumatra. All of the money goes DIRECTLY to helping the victims since Aceh Aid at IDEP is a local organization in Sumatra.

You can learn more about what they are doing from the above link, by reading Susi Johnston's weblog or by filtering on Asia in my own blog. This is the group that Keith Pleas and I have been working with so closely since the Tsunami disaster hit.

Who is in this auction?

Lots of INETA speakers, Regional Directors and Wintellects!!

From Wintellect: Jeffery Richter, John Robbins and Jeff Prosise

A slew of amazingly brilliant RDs: Michele Leroux Bustamante, Jonathan Goodyear, Andrew Brust, Richard Campbell , Kimberly Tripp, Adam Cogan ,Malek Kummou , Jackie Goldstein, Goskin Bakir, Hector M Obregon , Patrick Hynds , Fernando Guerrero , Kate Gregory , Joel Semeniuk , Scott Hanselman , Barry Gervin , Clemens Vasters , Jorge Oblitas , Stephen Forte, John Lam, Edgar Sánchez, Thomas Lee, J. Michael Palermo IV, Vishwas Lele

And if that's not enough, a few more brilliant stars: Deborah Kurata, Ted Neward and Kathleen Dollard 

This is a wonderful contribution by these people and demonstrates what I love so much about this community.

So open up your hearts (to enable Aceh Aid at IDEP continue with their phenomenal and necessary work - it is still a horror story in Sumatra and we cannot let up), open up your minds (to having access to some of the most talented .NET programmer consultants in the world) and warm up those credit cards!

Also, since there are many more wonderful and brilliant people in our community that I am sure will want to do this too (we just had to limit ourselves for this first one) I hope that we can do more of these in the near future!

How this will work

This will be ONE BIG FAT auction. The top 25 bidders will win. Bids start at $100. The auction will last 10 days. Unlike a typical "multi-item" auction, where the winners would pay the amount of the lowest winning bid, in THIS auction, the TOP bidder will get first pick of consultants and then on down the line. You will pay your winning bid directly to Aceh Aid at IDEP's PayPal account: acehaid@tides.org.

Due Diligence

Online Donations are made via PayPal donation to acehaid@tides.org. The Tides Foundation is a US-based 501c3 non-profit, permitting tax-deductible contributions and supported by many corporate matching programs. PayPal takes most credit cards. For people who cannot use PayPal , there are other ways to make the payment. Money can be wired directly to Aceh Aid at IDEP or (for the 501c3 payment) checks can be mailed to Tides or money wired directly to them. So don't worry about not being able to participate. If you can do any of these 4 options, BID BID BID!!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

This is just a reminder

Tomorrow's meeting of VTSDA will feature a  panel of software business owners and marketing experts discussing effective marketing for our businesses.

The meeting is from 11:45 - 2:00 at the Ethan Allen Club in downtown Burlington.

See the VTSDA website for more details.

http://www.AcehAid.org

We all know that John Robbins, Jeff Prosise and Jeffrey Richter are .NET Rock Stars. But now it's official!

I also want to commend the author, Esther Schindler, on a great set of questions.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Digital Bridges is a program at Middlebury College and they are putting on a full day workshop wtih professionals from many different businesses that either do business on the web or provide infrastructure. Sounds interesting.

Here's more info on the event.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am doing this talk at Visual Studio Connections on an inspiration from my painful experiences of diving into C# on occasion. There are a bunch of things that bite me over and over since I don't use C# consistently enough. I also remember spending about 1/2  hour trying to figure out how to say "OR" in C#. Lots of syntax things like how to construct IF may not seem hard, but if you have been doing it a different way for 5 or 6 years, it really is hard to sort out brackets here, parens there, brackets sometime, not others. And all of the problems that cause compile time errors that are not picked up by intellisense are huge pain points as well, especially when the compile time error message isn't really telling you what the problem is. Sure there are extensive books on the differences, but I am just going to try to point out the things that a VB6 dev probably uses the most frequently and the most naturally, and try to ease some of the pain of the transition. This isn't so much for the purpose of converting VB developers to C#, but being sure that folks are at least somewhat fluent in C# even if they go the route of VB when they make the move to .NET. This talk will actually be pretty much the same as if I were doing it VB.NET vs. C# as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Strategies for Winning Government Contracts - Practical Tips and Hands on Help for Small Business

Wed Jan 26

8:30 am to 4 pm

Capitol Plaza Hotel, Montepelier, VT.

More info

brochure (hang it by the water cooler!

http://www.AcehAid.org

lucky us!!! Rob Howard is coming to Vermont.NET on February 21st. We are getting a Black Belt ASP.NET Tips & Tricks talk. This is happening thanks to INETA as Rob is an INETA speaker.

I had tricked Rob into coming here with the promise of some fun snowboarding at near by Sugarbush, but unfortunately he had to change his plans and is now doing a quick overnight trip. This also means that we couldn't schedule him with other "nearby" groups - such as Montreal (2 hrs away) or Boston area (3.5 - 4 hours).

http://www.AcehAid.org

Why being stubborn is good when you are a programmer

I agree. Though actually I have always said I am stubborn and lazy. Stubborn is the "I will NOT let the computer win" part, and lazy is the part the makes me not want to write the same code over and over again. We all know that it takes more time to write reusable code than to just whip out some code to solve a particular problem. But it's worth it to make it reusable so you don't have to do it again. Or to write code that will automate more processes. Etc. Lazy, I say.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Thom Robbins should be very proud of his Code Camp idea that he started last May. Not only are Code Camps starting to pop up around the country, but here is one proposed for down under.

http://www.AcehAid.org

From Chris Pels' blog:

The IRS has enacted a new law which allows individuals to deduct contributions to recognized charitable organizations for Tsunami relief on your 2004 tax return even if you make the donation through 1.31.2005. Usually those contributions would have to be made by 12.31.2004. Read the IRS guidelines on what determines if an organization would qualify before making your donation. This is a great opportunity to help so many people in need and qualify for a deduction as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Perhaps, it's true (and hopefully just momentary...)

I have LOST MY MIND!

this works just fine:

Dim conn As SqlClient.SqlConnection = New SqlClient.SqlConnection("server=myserver;Trusted_Connection=True;Database=pubs")

Dim cmd As SqlClient.SqlCommand = New SqlClient.SqlCommand("select * from authors", conn)

Dim da As New SqlDataAdapter(cmd)

Dim ds As New DataSet

da.Fill(ds)

Dim ds2 As New DataSet

Dim t As DataTable = ds.Tables(0).Copy

ds2.Tables.Add(t)

what happened to the “DataTable belongs to another dataset“ exception? Was it only in 1.0 and I just never tried it again with 1.1? I know I struggled with this forever a long time ago.

oh do I need a vacation.

Rather than just searching for workarounds or whining about this problem in my blog, I have submitted a suggestion in the Product Feedback Center. If you think this will help you, go vote on it. If you think this is a stupid idea, go vote on it.

Problem Statement:	Opened by Julie Lerman on 2005-01-16 at 11:53:05     In .net 1.1 we had to find workarounds to get a copy of a DataTable that is part of one DataSet into another DataSet. Many devs wasted a lot of time with Copy and Clone thinking there *must* be a way. In .NET 2.0 it looks like the best way to do this now is with CreateDataReader, Load into new DataTable then add DataTable to DataSet.
Proposed Solution:	Create DataTable method that will create a new DataTable that does NOT have the connection to the parent DataSet? Either a method or a parameter of Copy? Thanks.

http://www.AcehAid.org