this guy is just scary smart! And Jason's latest Captcha attempt is still pretty darned impressive!

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Congrats to Scott Lock and his wife on the birth of their new boy, Christopher. July 15th.

Scott is the user group leader for Capital Area .NET User Group in the D.C. area (Vienna Virginia) and an INETA User Group liaison as well. Scott also has an interesting job working on the donation site for the American Red Cross. Here, you can test it out if you want!

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One of the most memorable things about this year's Women in I.T. luncheon at TechEd, was Scott Bellware, who attended, telling me afterward that he was surprised to learn how much women talk with each other about work life balance. He thinks that men of course think and worry about this all of the time, but it is not something men generally discuss among themselves. ("How 'bout those Mets, huh?")

So seeing this article "Eight Great Lessons from Working Dads" on MSN's CareerBuilder.com about men and work/life balance definitely caught my eye.

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If this was near me (NYC or Boston) I would definitely make the effort to attend the one day BlogHer Conference. Even though I am not very political, I am very interested in the voices of women in the blogging world - especially technical women. How we represent ourselves? Do we just be a techie or can we women techies? Do we blend in or show our ti**ies (tee hee). (shut up, Sahil - I'm just making a point). And how does what we do today affect young women coming into the world of tech (and blogging). But it's in California - all the way across the country. No can do. Bummer.

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I have started watching the taped WSE 3.0 SDR presentations. Here are some of my thoughts on what I am seeing and learning [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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This is cool news:

from Sam

from Paschal

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Sheesh - how did I miss that blog post?!

Hearty congrats, pal!

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"United States v. Microsoft (2001): Represented 18 states and the District of Columbia in the Microsoft antitrust case"

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Well, my summer hasn't really gone as planned (or should I say: fantasized) and I keep thinking maybe it's just not here yet- summer. A few things that remind me that it really is summer - fighting with the Japanese Beetles who are after my hollyhocks, roses and beans, watching the tiger lilies disappear (deer grazing) and yes I have been in my kayak some 4 times. What' been missing in its entirety and normally defines summer for me is cycling. But I don't want to talk about that - too disheartening. However last night I actually had a little summer fun - going to the Vermont Mozart Festival event at the famous and beautiful Round Church in Richmond (12 miles away).

And to continue my summer journey, I actually picked berries around my property this morning. Mmmmm. Now back to the grind...

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Holy blank Batman! I don't know when these went up but I just found them thanks to Carter Maslan (you know the guy who does all the cool Longhorn demos!!)

I think I'll just download them all in case they are there by mistake.

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Sarah Blow is trying to get a women geek dinner together in London.

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Here are a few things that keep biting me when I return to working on a web services app using wse3.0. I have blogged about some of these before, but need to keep them in the front of my mind!

1. ASP.NET Project NTLM Authentication: If NTLM Authentication is on and you are not set up to use it, you will get a 401 Unauthorized error ("The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.") when trying to start up a web page or access a web service.  This was a new project property setting as of Beta2.
2. Using File System and not IIS? Check your port #.  When trying to hit a web service and the port # of the Development Server has changed, you will get an error message saying "Stream was not writable". This happened to me when I moved a solution from one computer to another and I needed to change the port # in the web reference.  In an ASP.NET application you will get this message "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it" when your port # has changed.
3. Permissions to read certificates Depending on your environment, a particular windows account will need READ access to the web server certificate. Normally, it would be the ASP.NET account. I found that when developing with a non-admin account, I needed to give that non-admin account access to the certificate (in a development environment). If you have not set this up properly, you will see a message indicating "Bad Key" in the soap fault when looking at the trace info. This will come back in the TraceInput of the client application. The Security Hands on Lab for WSE3 (found on this page) has instructions for setting permissions on certificates.

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If you have seen Wally McClure's many posts on AJAX lately, then this great news will come as no surprise. Congrats!

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When INETA began, Christian Nagel was our man in Europe. When INETA was divided up into the five regions (North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East Africa and Europe) he took the lead of Europe. Now that region is very organized. Christian did a fantastic job and also brought a lot of great people on board to help him out all across Europe. As with the recent evolution with INETA NORAM, Christian decided it was time to let someone else step up to the plate and the obvious choice was Damir Tomicic who was already on the INETA Europe board. Damir lives in Bavaria where he runs a .net user group and is an MSDN Regional Director. He blogs at www.tomicic.de and you can read his bio here.

I know he's already doing a great job!

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If you have done any work with the TabletPC SDK, you are probably aware that there is a COM API and a managed API, but that the managed API is really just a wrapper to the COM API. You are also probably aware that the Tablet API is VERY tightly bound to the windows API. Everything that you do is through windows handles. If you have tried to add ink to your web pages, you probably learned this lesson well also.

Shawn van Ness was fortunate enough not only to have been born with a pretty good brain, but he was also lucky to be working at the Leszynski Group when they got very involved with doing TabletPC development hand in hand with Microsoft. Do you know that it was the Leszynski Group that wrote the super cool Physics Illustrator app? And that Shawn was one of the authors of that program? Shawn has also authored a great many Tablet PC development articles for MSDN Online.

So I was definitely not surprised to learn in February that he had finally gotten scooped up by Microsoft to ink-enable Avalon. And I was not surprised when his recent blog article came out talking about ink being baked directly into Avalon.

What is interesting is how differently it is all going to work. Because Avalon tosses our dependence on Windows handles, working with ink had to be rethought from the ground up. Shawn is a very good teacher and he offers a great explanation of how and why this will work and how it is compares to our current Tablet PC SDK development experience.

And no, I have NOT played with Avalon yet. Aaargh!

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One of the projects I have been involved with for the last year is the formation of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance. The Vermont Business Magazine just published a great article on the organization and I was very happy to see this paragraph.

Included in that number is a one-woman software consulting firm with an international reputation. Julia Lerman, who does some of her business via thedatafarm.com, works with Microsoft on software development projects while giving speeches around the country and serving as a mentor to young software companies. She moved to Huntington six years ago from the New York City area because of the state's skiing and riding opportunities. Lerman says she had wanted to relocate to Vermont sooner, but it took her a while to realize "how much tech is going on up here."

There are a lot of awesome companies (vertical, consulting, large and small) in our area. Not just the .NET folks that have made Vermont.NET such a success, but many technologies. We are darned lucky to have our cake (live in this beautiful place) and eat it too (do the work we love).

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Keeping up with the Joneses #2

Keeping up with the Joneses #2: AJAX, MSBUILD, IIS7 and Certifications [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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Doug Reilly interviews Shawn in his Database Geek series. Shawn lives in New Hampshire and we were very lucky to have him speak at one of the very early Vermont.NET meetings. This was before there was an INETA Speaker bureau even, which of course, Shawn is a now member of!

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Mike was on one of the trains, luckily, many cars away, that got bombed in London. Although he notes how fortunate he was not to get killed, he notes that many who left physically unscathed, will still suffer emotional scras for a long time. Here's his blog post. (by way of Szymon Kobalczyk).

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