Not only is it their 20th anniversary issue, but it also represents a milestone for me!

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I had a great time at the Edge East conference in Boston over the last few days. I was able to meet some people I know via emails, blogs etc. This includes Philly area D.E. Stan Spotts - who i hope is feeling better, Atlanta D.E. Doug Turnure and Raj Das from Magenic. I also unexpectedly got to catch up with Andrew Duthie. Best of all was seeing all my New England pals  - some of the user group leaders that I konw and others, like Robert Hurlbut. I also enjoyed seeing Michael Stiefel's talk on SOA and WSE2.0. He and I consulted in advance so that our talks didn't overlap. I got to focus soley on the security fundamentals - all concept no code! That talk is becoming my raison d'etre these days!

There were some fantastic session, including the workshops and Ari Bixhorn did a super job of the keynote. Though the keynote was the same focus as the keynote that he did with Eric Rudder at VSLive, he really made it his own at this show. It's always entertaining to get a chance to catch up with Ari!

Thom Robbins got me to actually sit down to do a Hands on Lab with Whitehorse, but I didn't get too far as I was having too much fun chatting with Jim Murphy and Tim Ewald from Mindreef which was right by the HOL area. I got to hear about some interesting features that are upcoming in their already awesome product. I think those guys are going to do a group road trip to speak at VTdotNET after this summer. That will be a blast. What great luck for the user group!

The Cabanas (sponsored by INETA, no less <g>) last night were great. I ended up in the VB room with Carl Franklin and Markus Egger. People asked awesome questions. It seems that STILL the #1 most difficult new concept for VB6 devs coming into .NET is delegates. (it was mine as well...)

I went over this morning for a bit and sat in an amazing (and entertaining) workshop called "Security, the new reality" doen by Patrick Hynds and Duane LaFlotte of Critical Sites. It is a REALLY good thing that these guys are not on the wrong side of the law when it comes to hacking website. I pity any hacker that tries to get into their sites.

All in all it was a great show. Thanks especially to Derek Ferguson and Grisha Davida!!

And I can't complain about the very clear weather for driving to Boston and back either!

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KDP, financial invesment firm in Montpelier is looking for some with good web skills for a 3 month project. The job is listed in detail in Seven Days (www.sevendaysvt.com) but not on their website. Email kdpjobs@kdpyield.com for more info. (Sorry - I have to leave soon and can't just type in the whole job description.)

Posted from BLInk!

Efficiency Vermont is looking for someone to do desktop support.

More info here: http://www.efficiencyvermont.org/index.cfm?L1=9&L2=366&sub=res

Posted from BLInk!

Congrats to Scott Cate and company on a killer feature of EasySearchASP.NET. The tool lets you incorporate a search engine very easily right into your own website. But the new feature is "hints". It is REALLY cool. You can see it best right on the EasySearchASP.NET site by searching for something on that site. On the home page is a search box. Just go start typing in it.....

Cool, huh?

You don't have to rely on visitors knowing how to use google's site:www.mysite.com parameter to search your website.

I like it. But the hints is super duper slick.

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There's no AT&T/Cingular where I live.

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I always love to see this!!

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Rick Strahl is the victim of a stupid pet trick on the Acrobat Reader 7 install...

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I loved meeting Shawn finally at the WMA conference in San Francisco. While we chatted at the Varnish Gallery (where the Tablet party was being held - excellent choice, by the way, Elliot!) I let him know that I had started pestering my MVP leads (plural because I refer to my current and my former) that he should be an MVP, maybe C#. Although he is known for many tablet pc development articles, he is a whiz bang developer and I'm always impressed by his wealth  (and depth) of knowledge in responding to many questions on the Developmentor list that I am a voyeur on. Well, I guess we can say "great minds think alike" - because he told me that it's a little late for MVP since he had just committed to swallowing the red pill. He is going to work at Microsoft and will have a very very cool job - as the PM on the team responsible for integrating Tablet PC platform into Avalon and WinFX.

Although I'm a little embarrassed (though highly flattered) by something he says in this post, I need to link to it anyway so you can read more...

Congrats Shawn!

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I heard this dialog in a conversation:

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer) : "developers just don't understand BizTalk:

.NET Developer: "yeah, but why should I? BizTalk is for IT Pros"

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer): "See, that's because you don't understand BizTalk"

I could have very easily been the developer in that conversation, and it's true, I don't understand it at all. Unfortunately, I'll have to leave it to the BizTalk guru for now.

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Isn't that the way Hallmark worked it out?

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Robert Hurlbut is going to come to Vermont.NET for our April 11th meeting and teach us about TDD, Unit Testing and using NUnit.

Really I know we all just need to read Dr. Neil's Extreme .NET.

But I like the idea of having someone explain it to me.

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The 2/16 meeting of VTSDA features a membership roundtable discussion on Business Development & Sales. This is a lunch time meeting at the Ethan Allen Club in downtown Burlington. Please see the website for details as well as how to rsvp (important to do so they can pre-order enough lunches).

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When I wrote my blogging application, I had a few learning curves to get over: new ideas for tablet UI, working with blogger and metablog apis, learning how to ftp in the background. But the most challenging thing I had to deal with was coding with XMLRPC for lack of samples. What was out there was in C# so I ended up also doing a LOT of C# coding which was the most I had ever done at that point.

Dave Burke just went through the XMLRPC learning curve as well, but he did something very smart (and very kind). He posted his code, which gets some more sample code out there. Here it is.

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oh darn. I was thinking it would be fun to listen live and hang out on the IRC channel but it's not good timing for me. Not when we got a foot of new fluff overnight! We have to go out on our snowshoes and pack all of our trails back down for skiing.

 

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I don't use my tablet on an everyday basis and I am hardly a tablet power user. I am a programmer who is curious about the tablet as a way to extend my user's relationship with their applications.*

However, for mass market ink appeal, I don't understand why Josh Einstein's extension to Outlook isn't getting people more excited. Everyone uses Outlook (please don't take that literally). The market is already there. This may not be the killer app that will drive people to purchase tablets, but once they are using them, they should be damned glad to have a tool like this.

Eventually people won't be choosing between tablet and not tablet. They'll just be buying their mobile pc and one of the common features will be ink. And don't forget, another will be speech recognition. Believe me, Josh is thinking about this too!

*If you have ever had to do tech support for your applications, you probably know why "relationship" is an appropriate term here.

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I just realized that the box sitting in the corner of my office which came while I was out west was filled with copies of the Mar/April 2005 issue of Code Magazine. EPS is kind enough to send issues to Vermont.NET. (We also get mags from ASPNetPro)

In this issue is my first .NET article that has been printed on paper - not just online. I did have a few FoxPro articles in FoxPro advisor many years ago.

The article is "Creating Debugger Visualizers with Visual Studio 2005" a very cool and underplayed feature in the next version of VS.NET. You may have noticed that I have written quite a few blog posts on this topic in the past so it was fun to formalize it as well as to update it for some of the nice changes that were made as of the November CTP bits.

The article has all samples in both VB and C# because of the big differences between creating attributes, inheriting objects, etc in the two languages. In fact, as far as I know, these are the first VB samples for debugger visualizers in print. Even the MSDN Library still only has C#.

There were two articles written on this previously - Scott Nonneberg wrote one on MSDN Online based on Beta 1, and Morgan Skinner included visualizers in this early article which based on pre-Beta 1 bits.

I was hoping to get a chance to drill into this and a few other of the new debugger display attributes at TechEd but it looks like that won't be happening. I see only 29 developer specific topics in all of TechEd2005 and it's not one of them.

Anyway, I hope the article is useful to many. There are also articles in there by Juval Lowy, Deborah Kurata and Dino Esposito as well as a few others. It's nice to be in such fine company.

My second in print .NET article is coming very soon - though in a different magazine.

Thanks again Rodman!

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here is a  reminder of the "before" on Steve Smith's blog.

And just go right to www.ASPAlliance.com for the "after". Very nice design.

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Very cool to see Robert in mainstream media!!

The author mentions tablet pc's in passing:

[At NEC,] Mr Scoble's area of expertise was tablet PCs—laptop computers that allow users to handwrite their notes, and that have been mostly a dud, both then and now.

Sad to see that in the same article since Robert is such a huge tablet pc enthusiast and evangelist.

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yes, we (that's YOU, the .net community) have raised

$10,138

for Aceh Aid at IDEP to help with their phenomenal relief efforts in Sumatra.

Thanks to everyone who participated, consultants and bidders.

We are not going to list the winners for reasons of privacy.

Stay tuned for more auctions....

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