It's a tough choice - Pablo Casto (if you read my blog, then by now you should know that Pablo is the PM on the ADO.NET Team) explains...

http://www.AcehAid.org

Microsoft has put SQL Server 2005 on their virtual labs site. YOu can actually go play with it without having to find an extra computer to install it on!

http://msdn.demoservers.com/login.aspx?group=sql2005

http://www.AcehAid.org

Happy news from my friend Mario Cardinal in Montreal who has been awarded MVP for Solutions Architect. Mario came to VTdotNET in January to teach us about Enterprise Services Applications Blocks before they were even released. He had done so much research just based on the documentation with no code available. Mario has a French .NET talk show called BlaBladotNET. I have never listened to it of course because my french is pretty limited! Congrats Mario!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I saw Paschal's MVP post and the follow up conversation about it. I have been mulling this over and decided to comment on it as well. When I read the post I thought that Paschal was asking "what about Ireland?" and throwing caution to the wind regarding how he is perceived. To me, that matches up pretty well with his claim that he doesn't want to be an MVP. His message, as I read it, was "not even one MVP in all of Ireland? Hello?". And he said it even if it meant that, by making a stink about it, he looked, well, like a bit of a stinker.

I understand that message. I have been known to ping MVP leads about some people from Vermont that I wanted to make sure they were aware of. I was delighted to meet up with another Vermont geek at the MVP summit last year! And this is just a little state, not an entire country.

One of the issues for the MVP leads is that people need to get on their radar in order to be considered. Sometimes it takes someone else to make that happen. And even then, there are generally more qualified people than the numbers they are allowed to award to.

So, Paschal and I have different methods. I happen to know some of the leads so I can leverage those connections. He has his blog which definitely gets read, so that's the route he takes. How about use the blog a little further - like have a category: "People I think should be on the MVP radar" - or something like that.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Our next Vermont.NET meeting is Monday, April 11th. Robert Hurlbut is driving up from New Hampshire to teach us about Test Driven Development, Unit Testing and NUnit. I am really looking forward to this. I also managed to get a few copies of Dr. Neil Roodyn's Extreme.NET to give away at the meeting. Also, even though it's not exactly on topic, I can't help but raffle off copies of James Avery's new Visual Studio Hacks that arrived a few days back. Darn right I'm keeping a copy for myself. A quick look through left me really impressed. I will write about that later. We also have some swag from the last INETA mailing - Dundas Gauge for .NET.

So this will be a great meeting, very informative and excellent resources and tools to share. Thanks to O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, INETA, Dundas and Robert!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

stay tuned for details but mark your calendars.

Time: 6:30
Place: NECI Commons, 25 Church St. Burlington

Note that if there are too many of us to get a table quickly, we will just go elsewhere on Church Street or environs. So try not to be late!!

Richard Hale Shaw will be in town so we thought it would be fun to do a geek dinner on Thursday night.

I'll think up a place (probably downtown or maybe So. Burlington) where we don't need reservations, can walk in with a group of undetermined size and has something on the menu besides pizza.

(Please leave a comment if you plan to attend, thanks)

http://www.AcehAid.org

SQL Server Reporting Services and Crystal Reports:
A Competitive Analysis

Thanks for pointing this out, Mike. I have still not touched Reporting Services and continue my "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" relationship with Crystal, so I definitely need to read it.. It is written by Brian Bischof who has a self-published book on Crystal Reports.NET that I have talked about before.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I hate seeing this happen! [With her permission,] I am copying and pasting Heather's post here because she might remove this explanation as well. She already chose to remove the original post. I can understand, I had to do this once, too, although I didn't get hate mail, just a lot of people who wanted me to debate when I just didn't feel like it.

04 Apr 05 - 11:51

i've gotten so much hate mail from writing about a certain film with an assisted suicide, a crappy script and poor props management that i simply took it down.

never again will i express opinions that have even the remotest possibility of offending anyone with a taste for bad films. it's simply not worth it!

i tried writing back directly to those who've left comments but they didn't have the decency to spew their venom from real email addys.

this post will only remain up temporarily, just so you can get this message- in particular the very most recent and evil one which threatened me with God, etc in it. who's site is this anyway?

http://www.AcehAid.org

So I can never figure this one out.

You overpay your state taxes.

They send you a refund.

The next year, you pay taxes to the Federal Government on that refund.

eh?

http://www.AcehAid.org

Holy Canoli. I type really fast - or so I thought. So if I type fast and this is my score on the TypeQuick typing test, I cannot being to imagine how freaking fast Sahil types!!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I noticed a bunch of test posts coming through my aggregator from MS bloggers. Then I went over to weblogs.asp.net and saw they were gone, although they still exist at blogs.msdn.com. I also remember noticing blogs.technet.com earlier this week. So Josh Ledgard and Robert Scoble explain the changes. Basically they have moved to Ccommunity Server and finally disconnected from the big community blog, creating a dev blog and a tech blog. Lastly there's a portal page where you can search those blogs rather than googling to find a blog when you can't remember someone's blog name. I'd like to see an alphabetical list (actually two, one by last name, one by first name) of all of the MS blogger there. All in all - good move!

http://www.AcehAid.org

People always ask me how I find the time to learn about Whidbey and also get my work done. I wonder how people manage to deal with Avalon, Indigo, Longhorn etc. So I thought it would be a really interesting topic for a BOF. HEre's the BOF proposal that I just submitted. It has to be approved before you can vote.

Whidbey, Yukon, Indigo, Avalon, Longhorn, EEEK! How the heck do we learn all this stuff when we can't even keep on top of all of the current technology? Come to this BOF and we can talk about how we decide how far ahead we should be looking, how we pick and choose what we want to learn and how we find the time and energy to do it.

You, too, can submit a BOF!!

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

I know that every time we have done these we get a new group of women who have not had the opportunity to sit in a room with a bunch of women programmers and talk. Although there will be a Women in IT luncheon again this year (these are awesome). So I have submitted this BOF. Not sure how long it takes for them to go live. Here is the description.

This will be the 3rd Women who Code BOF. It is not a bitch & stitch session, but just an opportunity to gather with some women that you have a lot in common with and talk about some of the things that make being in a mostly male industry work for us. Maybe you find it a challenge. Perhaps you thrive on being special. You may even not think that it's an issue. Either way, it would be interesting to hear your perspective!

If you would like to see this session happen, go vote!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I'm sick of those referral spams so they are going directly to be "permantely deleted" by outlook. So if you want to get an email to me, don't put that word in the subject.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I think it's time for me to start focusing on concepts like Contract First and tools like ThinkTecture's WSCF as well as Kirk Allen Evan's new WSE2 templates. Web Methods mask messaging from us and using them in VS.NET makes me think I am working with objects. I think I have done more than enough with Web Services to finally get rid of the training wheels and prepare my head for Indigo. And definitely check out John Bristowe's and Benjamin Mitchell's thoughts on this.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I guess they got a little tiresome only because there were so many but it was fun how many people put together some really creative April Fool's jokes. Also it made it hard to post anything that was serious because who would believe it?

The best was Matt Hawley who has been blogging about his move to go work for Microsoft over the past few weeks. Yesterday he blogged - haha that was all an April Fool's joke, which kind of made any one reading those posts scratch their heads, wondering - what the heck is funny about that? It turned outo that the joke WAS on us, because he really is going to Microsoft. Good one, Matt.

My posting about the VB keywords The and A, was actually a group effort by a bunch of VB people: myself, Kathleen Dollard, Rocky Lhotka, Jackie Goldstein and Billy Hollis. Obviously a spoof. But I thought everyone's contributions were pretty clever and funny. Hardly anyone memed it though, oh well.

The funny thing about that post was that it was so obviously a joke, however my own comments made people think that I didn't get it was a joke! As if I found the press release somewhere else and was upset about it. Ha ha. So I did get you! Nah nah nah. And the other funny thing that happened, was that Kathleen and I (who love each other, really, we do!) had a little unplanned cat fight on our blogs. So in case that worried anyone, no need - we were giggling about it. She's not off her rocker. But she did get some good digs in on me, didn't she. Hmmmmmm....

Anyway, it was fun to do. I have been planning that since the MVP summit last  year.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have posted my powerpoint and demos from my ADO.NET 2.0 session. I loved doing this session. I even got to do it twice. I had lots of rave reviews from attendees. A big win-win. I am hopefully going to do it again at the Mid Atlantic Code Camp when I go to D.C. in May and again at my user group. It is a great session. I hope I find more venues to do it at!

You will find the powerpoints and demos on this page under "What's New in ADO.NET 2.0". The slant of the talk was to ASP.NET developers, but it's all back end goo, so it's for everyone. As Alex Homer points out, yes, I have working SQL Query Notification demos in here!!

This is the same talk I did at Code Camp III in Waltham on March 12th. Thanks to all of those attendees for being my guinea pigs. I was able to improve the talk a lot thanks to your feedback!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I see a bunch, but am especially happy for Sahil Malik, that are brand new. Also, Bill Vaughn did of course, retain his MVP status. I was in that speaker lounge where he wrote about how much grief he got from some Microsoft people (though I thought it evolved into much more light hearted ribbing over the next few days) and his response was basically that it had the intended effect. It brought a big time awareness to the fact that there are a lot of people and businesses who are not ready for VB6 to be retired.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Hmm - looks like they've reached an impass on the name for an umbrella website where all of the code camps can get listed and linked from, as well as other info relating to code camps, the wiki, etc.

Is it

CodeCamps.com

or

CodeCampHQ.com

go vote here! (that's Thom Robbin's website)

You can only vote once. (and no this is not an april fool's joke)

http://www.AcehAid.org

This is my bookmark to an article I really want to read, but I want to do it away from email, i.m. and the phone. It is a topic that I get stuck on because I basically understand it, but not enough to deal with more detailed questions..

Routing Secured SOAP Messages Through Multiple SOAP Intermediaries Using WSE 2.0

It's written by William Tay, who is one of my WSE2 pals - though I think I ask him many  more questions on i.m. about WSE2 than he asks me! Hmmm, I wonder why? (Because he understands this stuff at a much deeper level than me, that's why!!)

http://www.AcehAid.org