Here, Doug Seven (did you know Doug swallowed the red pill) explains in his words what CodeZone is all about. Much easier to digest and comprehend than the marketing speak.

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have a client who has crazy wonderful ideas about what they would like their software to do. They don't go by any rules of "what software should do". I told them from the beginning "just dream...I'll let you know what I can and can't make happen."

Sometimes these ideas are really hard to implement, sometimes not so bad. It's really gratifying when I get emails that say "this works great! I love it!!!"

http://www.AcehAid.org

...which would it be?

Lately, this thought has popped into my head every time I read a new post from Elizabeth Grigg's blog.

But of course, I would probably go into some type of withdrawal shock if I couldn't "blog surf" like I do frequently throughout the day. And I would stop being constantly challenged to learn a gazillion new things about programming which is the result of reading (or scanning or surfing or whatever) such a great variety of different blogs.

But Beth's blog is definitely a stop and smell the roses kind of thing...kind of like having the t.v. channel stuck on PBS.

http://www.AcehAid.org

What does it mean to Sponsor a Vermont.NET meeting?

What you do: Pay for the pizza and soda

What you get:

• Get your company logo on the homepage of our website (www.vtdotnet.org) during the time of promoting the meeting (and afterwards sometimes if I don't update for the next meeting right away)
• Get your company  logo and thanks to you in all emails that go out to our lists that are geared towards promoting the meetings. We have a member list of 200 members, as well as a meeting announcement list that is those 200 + 100 more. That's 300 people who have explicitly asked to receive these emails!
• Get your logo on our THANK YOU slide that is in the powerpoint deck that plays during the meeting "warm up" and that I review at the beginning of my meeting. More info on this...
• If you would like, we can have literature about your products available to attendees.
• Our undying gratitude.

Take a look at the upcoming meeting schedule. Where there is not an INETA Sponsored event (note the logo below the speaker's name), we can use a pizza/soda sponsor. Our meetings can have anywhere from 20 - 40 attendees though we have had 50 on a few occasions, so the cost of sponsorship varies.

I can't believe it took me three years to think of blogging for pizza for my user group!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Reading Jerry Delany's post about attending the Atlanta.NET meeting and a comment he made at the end about attending the Atlanta C# meetings because they are more advanced made me think of a problem I have been pondering lately with my user group , Vermont.NET, that is not uncommon.

We have been meeting for 3 years now - since Feb 2002. There are plenty of pepole in the group who have come frequently to meetings since the beginning and they are many who are pretty advanced. Yet we still have new people coming into the meeting all of the time. Of course, this is a microcosm of the whole programming community and not a new problem. I don't want to have to choose between sating the more advanced .NET programmers and ignoring the needs of those who are just moving to .NET.

What we are talking about (and I am waiting for someone in the group to grab this project and run with it...) is having a pre-meeting presentation that is more for beginners and then let the regular presentation continue to engage those who are interested in more advanced topics. There are many groups who do this so we can certainly learn from them. My idea is to have the beginner talks be done by user group members, which has so many advantages.

How is your user group dealing with the widening gap between .NET newbies and .NET pros?

update: I emailed Chris Pels who runs the Boston.NET User group and has been doing a 2-part meeting for two years. We will have an article on this in the April INETA Newsletter. If you aren't signed up for the newsletter (which you can do from the home page), they are archived at www.ineta.org/newsletters.

http://www.AcehAid.org

very cute!

http://www.AcehAid.org

An aftershock - 3 months after. 8.2 earthquake in the SAME spot as before. Hits at midnight, everyone of course fears another tsunami. Banda Aceh is the target again. Horror. Waiting to hear back from the folks in Bali...will post anything I hear...

update - you all probably know from the news, the earthquake has done a lot of damage in places (high death toll on the island Nias) but at this point, the fear of a tsunami has faded. Thank god. It is now morning there. Got word from folks in southern Indonesia who are awaiting contact with their aid workers in Aceh Province...

http://www.AcehAid.org

“Winter weather advisory in effect from 5 AM EST to 11 AM EST Monday.
Flood watch in effect from Monday afternoon to Tuesday afternoon "...

:-(

http://www.AcehAid.org

Kate Gregory notes that the speakers list (check the dropdown) on the TechEd site is filling in. She also already did the Brian count. There are (just guessing by names) 8 Brians and 11 women, so maybe the ration (I decided to leave that typo in tact since it made me laugh) is increasing? This has become fondly known as the Brian Factor.

What is nice to see is that after the early indication that a lot of the 3rd party (aka Non-Microsoft) speakers who are frequent TechEd speakers were not on the roster, it seems to have improved. I see lots of people that I know are not MS employees on the list. That's good for the community I think. PDC is the all Microsoft event. So an apparent reduction for TEchEd had (understandably) ruffled some feathers and egos.

http://www.AcehAid.org

It's starting to become a pattern

I "lost" my Pocket PC at DevTeach in Montreal. I think I accidentally left it behind in the hotel room and it was never to be seen again - or something like that.

After spending 45 minutes showing the very nice young waitress at the New York Sports Grill who is attending art school my TabletPC and letting her play with it, I managed to leave the stylus behind. Someone probably just picked it up thinking it was a cheapo pen. By the time I was getting ready to board the plane and realized I didn't have my stylus, the restaurant was all closed up. That's the $32 stylus that handily fits right into my tablet. Darn! Luckily I have a beautiful Wacom Executive pen.

I left my handy little retractable ethernet cable behind while at Code Camp. That was one my MVP Lead gave to me last year and it is a great thing to have.

I "lost" my laptop mouse at DevConnections. I'm 98% sure I left it in my room on the desk when I went downstairs.

Lucky for me I had some MVP bucks left so I just went ahead and replaced the last two items. I try try try to look behind me whenever I leave a room where I have stuff. Really I do. I have another pocketpc but I don't even use it.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have posted the powerpoint for the C# for VB Programmers session that I gave at Visual Studio Connections earlier this week. They are located on this page: www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx.

The disclaimer I gave at the start of this talk is that I am a VB programmer mostly, and not a C# programmer. The presentation is to help VB programmers with some of the very common mistakes that we make when working in C#. I am in no way a C# expert. In fact, one person who attended this talk, while marking that my "knowledge of the topic" was not "excellent" on the eval, did comment that my lack of expertise in C# actually made the presentation more useful. Spot on, baby!

http://www.AcehAid.org

(writing in lower case in honor of my subject: casey).

casey has a fun post which a list of pros, cons and moots about writing for msdn online.

out of his, i will pick one from each category that i agree or disagree with

pro: getting paid (no brainer)

con: waiting for the article to go live. as you may have noticed, i have nothing on msdn online, though i *have* actually written three articles and am working on a 4th. Though, heck, that's nothing compared to print!

moot: he lists the due diligence paperwork as moot. eliot, did you hear that? hahahaha. I'd definitely put the paperwork in the con list! though, since the paperwork makes getting paid possible, perhaps that's how it balances out to a moot for casey.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Ahh - Malek is finally going public with his big news!

http://www.AcehAid.org

And why do I, a person who can do no more with  C++ than spell it, care? Because if I'm lucky, Kate will be speaking at C++ Connections which is part of the DevConnections conference in the fall. I'm speaking at the VS Connections and ASP.NET Connections shows.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I've been perusing the awesome list of BOFs submitted, but there is something that is nagging me about it. I think of the BOFs as a way for community people who don't normally get the opportunity to present at conferences (or who may not want to present!) a chance to lead a discussion about a topic near and dear to their hearts. So far, most of the submissions are from a lot of Microsoft people and some rock stars from the community.

But this does not mean that you need to be a 'Softie or a well-known .NET person or an MVP or anything special to submit a BOF. Don't be shy! Step up to the plate! The submission deadline ends in a few more weeks! That seems a little early, but it is tied into TechEd's planning schedule.

Remember that the BOFs are not presentations and there will be no projectors. It is just a planned discussion and whoever submits it merely leads the discussion.

The BOF site is hosted by TechEd, but the whole BOF organization is being run by INETA (thanksk to the great efforts of Stuart Celarier) and Culminis.

http://www.AcehAid.org

casey chesnut, the e.e. cummings of our developer community, has written a cool article on converting windows journal notes to xml, svg and onenote. that is pretty handy sh*t to be able to do. since I have never used svg and one note, i think it's time I looked into this. and who better to learn from!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am starting to realize that this tighter integration of ADO.NET and SQL Server means that I am going to have to get much more knowledgeable about SQL Server. I have been (to coin a great book title) a "reluctant DBA" for a long long time. But now that we can do things like BulkCopy in ADO.NET 2.0, something I have NEVER done in SQL and know nothing about, I am in danger of crossing lines that I don't know even exist. I had a long talk about this with Gert Drapers while I was at DevConnections. Just with the Bulk Copy alone, I have to be mindful of record locking etc etc. I would never have known that and created problems by misusing the bulk copy class in ADO.NET 2.0.

Gert also told me something that made me happy happy happy. As I have been learning and teaching about ADO.NET 2.0, I find myself having to list (or point to) many caveats with MARS since it is on by default. I have wished it would be off by default and Gert tells me that by RTM it will be. That is a good thing. Here is a great MARS FAQ post by Angel Saenz-Badillos of the ADO.NET team.

http://www.AcehAid.org

(by way of Loren Heiny)

VBInk (with links, a blog and forums) - focuses on doing tabletpc development with VB. I'm not sure if I personally think it's necessary to get so granular - since the concepts are all the same, but it does make it easier if you are more experienced in VB and want to focus on what you are learning in the Tablet SDK. I know that when I first did the Hands on Labs and they were in C# (now there are VB versions), I actually thought that the delegate I set up to create an event handler for one of the ink events was (gulp) part of the tablet API code! (I know better now - but that's what happens when you pile learning curves one on top of another...)

A little digging around (why was this necessary?) points all of this back to Stein & Associates and there are real people's names on that site: Dan and Kimberley. It would be nice if they were a little more transparent on the VBInk site so we know who it is that is actually doing this site. That's the whole point of having community... so that we can have personal relationships with each other. (hint hint )

http://www.AcehAid.org

For those that attended my afternoon workshop at ASP.NET Connections on Sunday, thanks so much for coming. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy teaching that particular session and I hope everyone got a lot out of it. I know from talking to a bunch of you that you did!!

I have posted the powerpoint for this 3 hour talk on my website on the presentations page. It isn't much different than what you have in the printed book. Look for the ppt link under the session entitled "Web Services Security for Dummies with WSE2".

I will post the code from the demos shortly. [update: these have been posted on 3/26]

http://www.AcehAid.org

Larry and his wife live in Hawaii. For a reason. This is an amazing story!!

http://www.AcehAid.org