I have been noticing the ads for Disc Stakka in MSDN Magazine and it got me thinking. Disc Stakka is  something like a jukebox that you can put 100 dvds in and somehow it's got some built in knowledge of MSDN Subscriptions. It's pretty big - for all of those discs.

Wouldn't it be cool if they could make read only thumb drives (when they get cheap enough) to distribute MSDN subscriptions on? I don't mean the magazine, I mean all of the software in a subscription. The thumbdrives are getting up to 2 GB now. Eventually they will become consumables like DVDs are now --  a lot cheaper and maybe more cost effective than producing and shipping the dvd's every month.

Of course, I am not a hardware geek, so this could already exist and I wouldn't even know it. 

http://www.AcehAid.org

From Andrew Conrad's post about DataSets and Null values:

[because the features are currently broken], the DataSet behavior WRT to nullable types will either be changed or not supported for RTM of VS 2005.  However, it is very probable that it will be supported some time in the future.

see my previous post about Nullable Types and ADO.NET 2.0 to see why this interests me..

 

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The BOFS are live! INETA will once again be sponsoring and managing the Birds of a Feather sessions at TechEd 2005. This year we are being helped by Culminis, who works with IT Pro groups. Stuart Celarier is our supreme BOFologist* as he is heading up the entire effort of organizing them.

So you can start submitting sessions and voting, too!

Remember the key concept of the BOF's - these are NOT presentations, they are discussions that are led by one or more people. Everyone who attends the BOF is invited to participate in the discussion. Don't even think of asking for a projector to show your powerpoints.

*coined by Dave Noderer

http://www.AcehAid.org

I saw via The Daily Grind that there is a new service pack for WSE 2.0, though without installing it to see the change doc, I didn't know what was in it. Of course, WSE FAQ has all the details!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Actually - not much of a story here as many of the non-Microsoft.NET speakers that I know who usually speak at TechEd are not speaking at the 2005 event. Only a small handful got accepted. And among those,  in some cases, their abstracts weren't chosen. Instead, they are being asked to deliver Microsoft directed content. Even though there are plenty of developer tracks and sessions, there is still a buzz going around that TechEd is really heavy ITPro this year. But it seems only that people are whispering it to each other in dark alleys.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Jackie Goldstein is featured in DevSource's next ".NET Rock Star" Profile. Being a VB guy, Jackie is asked the obvious question about the language issues. Jackie has been programming for a long time, and Devsource came up with some great questions that expose us to some of the breadth of his experience. Read it here!

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Well, it almost came to fisticuffs at the Web Services Edge conference when I asked Thom Robbins, who is the New England Developer Evengelist for Microsoft, if he could come to Vermont.NET and give us the wonderful Visual Studio 2005 overview presentation that I was watching Doug Turnure, the Atlanta area D.E., do during one of the workshops.

The battle was because, well, as we all now, Vermont is a really nice place to visit! Especially in May. Doug said "I'll do it! I'll do it!" (His wife loves Vermont) But I guess Thom won since Vermont *is* his territory and I haven't had him speak at the group in a while.

When we started the user group I probably could have filled up 2 years of our schedule just from inviting Russ Fustino (back when he was ours - boo hoo hoo), Joe Stagner and Thom who are always very happy to come to Burlington. It's too bad that the MSDN events are not coming here any more, but those are expensive to put on, whereas it's not a big deal for those guys to buzz up here (they don't mind the drive in their nice cars) and do an overnight or visit clients.

I guess we'll have to find some other excuse for Doug to come to Vermont.

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Many people are talking/writing about Richard Grime's farewell article especially about his comments about VB not being the true .net language. Boy, the advertisers over on that website must be happy campers!! 

I only want to respond to one point that he made - about the fact that VB is in .NET only for marketing purposes.

I was very happy to learn .NET first with a familiar language and syntax. I had plenty of learning curves to attack as it was. If VB.NET didn't exist, there is a very good chance that I would have stopped programming. I'm not kidding or exaggerating.

I was pissed that Microsoft had pullen the proverbial rug out from under me and sent me tumbling from being a very advanced programmer to feeling like a beginner again. This was preventing me at first from seeing the great advantages that .NET was going to give me as a developer. Sure VB has evolved, but still it was familiar. Everything else was different. It would have been a much bigger struggle for me to learn .NET if it was 100% new. In fact, I was *so* mad, that I bought JBuilder. I figured if I had to start from scratch again and use semi-colons, wtf - I may as well use Java and forget about Microsoft. (Remember, this was also the same time we were hearing all about Hailstorm and Microsoft taking over the world with it.) I had already gone through a big learning curve in moving from FoxPro to VB, when FoxPro became Visual FoxPro. Big learning curve... big pardigm shift... so I figured it was a good time to totally switch. I did NOT want to go through that again.

But after a few months of mucking around (I edited that word for google) with jBuilder, I looked at .NET again and realized that because of VB.NET, the learning curve was not going to be as bad as I had thought. At least I didn't have to relearn 100% of the syntax. VB.NET gave me an anchor into .NET.

I still do most of my coding with VB.NET, though I am getting more and more comfortable working with C# when I need to, and there are things about C# that I really like, but not enough for me to switch to it as my predominant language. I am just more proficient in VB. That's really all there is to it. I don't care if it's marketing or whatever the reason is. If .NET had only been only C#, there is a good chance that I would not have been willing to start ALL over again after 18 years of programming. Maybe I would have just stopped programming, taken back up my long lost love of being a potter, spent more time cycling and skiing - you know, had a life. That sounds pretty dramatic, but it is not exaggerated as I truly was pretty close to walking away from it all. Of course, there was that mortgage to worry about.... As it is, I have never worked as hard in my life as I have since .NET came out. I used to work about 30 hours a week and bill most of them. The rest of my time was spent bicycling, skiing and hiking. Now I work about 80 hours a week and bill about 30 of them. Not having VB would probably have made it more than I was willing to do.

As for VB.NET not being VB... I have no problem with it. I am a .NET programmer, and I use the VB language to write my .NET applications. I am no longer a VB6 programmer.

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Three cheers for Josh Trupin's MSDN Magazine editorial on the invention of words by geeks that then get echoed in the technical community. His great examples are my own pet peeve, "performant", as in "this method is more performant" meaning "this method gives you better performance". I have struggled with this word as well. I know it's not real, but it just feels more efficient - probably a C# invention. Another gem is the tongue twisting "canonicalize" which someone at Microsoft derived from canonical, not realizing that the word they were searching for is "canonize".  Anyone that is writing or presenting should definitely read this editorial. Or anyone interested in English. Or anyone who just wants to read something funny.

Posted from BLInk!

This was waiting for me when I returned from my latest trip this week

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEngage is aimed at unemployed or underemployed developers. Connie Marthinsen, who runs the big .NET user group in that area  - TRINUG (hey, how did they get Brad Abrams as a speaker for March??? ) and is our INETA liaison for North and South Carolina is heavily involved in setting this event up. (She is also involved with the upcoming Raleigh NC Code Camp) TechEngage Boot Camp is a very interesting concept. You can read more here.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Gregory Consulting is one of the top small .NET consulting firms in Canada and Kate is an incredible person to learn from ...not only about programming but this is a woman who has become a true mentor for me. They are looking for an experienced, roll up your sleeves and get to work, developer. Check it out...

Posted from BLInk!

Well, Duncan's are hard shoes to fill, but I am happy to see that Brad McCabe, formerly of Infragistics, has landed in this footwear. I know a LOT of people who were interested in the job of being the content manager for the VB Dev Center, but all too stubborn to move to Seattle. Congrats to Brad and to MSDN for nabbing him!

Posted from BLInk!

If you are interested in debugging, this should be a great chat - with the debugger team...

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Now that Omar has turned me on to the perfect earphones for flying, I think it's time to buy either an MP3 or IPOD. I want to listen to dotNetRocks of course, maybe some podcasts and some of my own music cd's. If you know that I'm a Libra, you know how hard it is for me to make decisions. Feel free to comment!

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I didn't realize I had to do a 1099-Misc for someone I subbed last year, but it isn't as hard as I thought.

You have to have real paper forms from the IRS (or your accountant, or the business supply store) because they are red. These are the ones you send to the IRS. The black copies go to the Vendor.

Quickbooks can print them out if you have it set up properly. I had to mark this vendor as a 1099 vendor and then in Preferences/Tax I had to associate the "Nonemployee compensation" box with the account I used to pay the vendor from - in my case "Subcontract: Programming".

You also need the vendors tax-id. That could be a SS# or an EIN. If you want to be official, you can have them fill out a W-9 that you can download from the www.irs.gov website and give that to you.

Don't forget that you need a red 1096 as well. It is basically the "cover sheet" for the 1099's that you submit to the IRS.

Remember - I am not an accountant, just another business owner. This is only basic heads up info, but check with your accountant first!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

If you have been following the saga of Rob Howard trying to get to Vermont for our 6pm meeting where he was our INETA speaker... Rob was stuck in Chicago waiting for a flight that kept being delayed and delayed. We finally decided he should turn around and go back to Dallas. I think we made the right call!

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I realize that I have started referring to the high level policy files you create by clicking on the check boxes in WSE2 Config Settings Tool as “click click policies”. I think I'm going to coin that phrase for myself!

Jerry Dennany sums up his experience with working with WSE2 for a while.

I have to agree with much of what he is saying which is why I have been working hard to try to digest as much as I can and spit it out for other developers to save them some of the pain of learning how to leverage WSE2 beyond just clicking a few checkmarks in the config tool.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Boo hoo

Rob Howard's flight from Chicago was delayed again so as there was no point in him arriving very late and then flying out tomorrow morning, I sent him home to Texas and 85 degree weather.

After a quick concensus of those who rsvp'd, many people said they weren't going to come now (no star, icchy weather, and half of Vermont has some bug anyway - but they *were* going to come if Rob had made it...) so we have cancelled the Vermont.NET meeting.

Rob and I are both very sorry.

http://www.AcehAid.org