People always ask me what we do up here in Vermont. Well, here are FOUR jobs related to .NET so we aren't just boiling syrup and milking the cows all day, y'know! I noticed these local IT jobs in 7Days this week. One is a .NET Developer job that I have posted before. Here's a link right to 7Days classifieds for IT jobs.

1) I see my favorite local software company, Synergy is hiring again. I worked there when they were just porting to VB6 and frustrated because .NET was released while they were in the middle of it. But now they are looking for .NET developers. Yay!

2) Blue House Group - a local consulting company that does great work and is in hip little Richmond, VT (12 miles from Burlington) has a web designer positions (as well as a few other jobs). They are also knee deep in .NET at Blue House along with the other technologies they use.

3) HazMed has a .NET Developer (C#) postion that is in 7Days but not on their website. They do have a SysAdmin job on their website.

4) ASP Developer wanted (.NET skills a plus) at CPA Site Solutions.

 

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TFS was released today for those that have been waiting. I know someone in my user group was asking about this recently. More from Soma.

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Is winter back? Well, it's pretty but I can't go out and ski in the woods even though we got lots of fluffy snow overnight and this morning. My skis would just go right down to the rocks and grass. Oh well. Bad for the maple syrup makers right now but its still early. They require cold nights and warm days for the sap to flow (up to the top when it warms up, down to the roots when it cools down.... each pass is a chance for the sap to flow out of the taps). But we had days and days of warm days and warm nights and now cold nights and cold days. Neither is the right combination! I did see the thick plumes of smoke coming out of a sugarhouse on monday. I wanted o stop and roll down my window so I could smell the sweet sugary smoke, but it wasn't an option at the time. Did you know that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup?

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Someone asked me about ADO.NET indexing which encouraged me to write about some of the amazing results of some performance tests I have done comparing VS2003 and VS2005's DataTable indexing. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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I am astonished that INETA has had to go so far as to have a prize drawing to encourage user group leaders to report on the health of .NET user groups (thereby also helping INETA to show it's sponsors what type of reach they are getting which is a VERY reasonable thing for a sponsor to ask).

Once a month, it is a tiny itty bitty task. All they ask is that you identify yourself, your user group, the date of your meeting and the # of attendees. Additionally, they ask what your current membership count is and if you are so inclined, you can even leave comments.

One minute? Two?

So why is it hard to get u.g. leaders to do this? Do you find it invasive? That's the only thing I can come up with because certainly it's not much of an imposition. Even if INETA did nothing more than provde the speaker bureau - that's huge. And this is just about the only thing they ask in return other than eval forms when they send a speaker (and pizza) to your group three times a year. So what if they ask every month - not just months that you have INETA speakers. And even with that, you cannot imagine the time and energy that the INETA volunteers put in to running this organization. And for what? For you - for your user groups. So a little survey each month is not much to ask as far as I'm concerned. I'm very happy to share that info with them.

Really, I am very curious why bribery is necessary? Not that I would turn down a $100 gift card for my user group (though I wish I could use it at the local pizza joint)!

Feel free to leave comments or link back to this post if you want to blog a reply.

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I took Tasha and Daisy to the vet today. They are both newfoundlands. Tasha turned 12 in December and Daisy turned 11. Tasha was a "rescue" who I adopted when she was 2 1/2 yrs old. She had come from a home where she literally had lived in the back yard her whole life. She was kind of naughty when she first came to live with me having never had any freedom - so she ran away a lot. But I knew that if I couldn't get through to her, nobody would have enough love and patience to do it. So I took her to dog training and let her sleep on my bed. Soon she loved me so much she just wanted to be good and grew up to be a quintissential newfie - the gentle giant. Now Tasha is 12 years old, which is very unusual for a newfie to live this long, and other than some "old age" stuff ... loss of muscle mass - most noticably on her head, a little swelling around the knees and having slown down a little -she is in really great shape. She's happy, healthy, still runs around and has a great appetite. Even her eyesite and hearing are still awesome. Today at the vet, after verifying all of this to be true, he also told me that her heart was perfect. PERFECT!

Daisy is 11. We kind of stole Daisy from my parents two summers ago. She came for a visit and stayed. Daisy is astonishing in her own right. Except for grey eyelashes and a grey mustache, she looks and acts and moves like a five year old dog. When we go outside in the morning she jumps up and down until I throw her bumper for her which she races after and then prances around with when she gets it. Daisy floats up and down stairs - very different than Tasha who has to kind of bounce her back legs together to get up and down. She too is an amazing dog and this very experienced vet finds it hard to believe she is 11 years old.

I just needed to record that.

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Though the camera seems to be trained on the speaker and never the screen. I keep waiting to SEE what he's talking about. Maybe someone will notice and do something about it.

Maybe by the time Sahil Malik is on a little later, they'll have it fixed

http://www.ajax.sys-con.com/

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I was at a party last night and someone asked me “so, have you got an Origami yet? Heh heh.” [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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I have a client who is a programmer with a small company that is creating a really cool on-line product. And I mean kew-well!

His background is very strong in architecture and also he and his team have done a ton with WinForms but his ASP skills hark back to the pre.NET days. But he's doing the app in ASP.NET 2.0 and I am mentoring him with this and a variety of other related things.

Along the way, he was frustrated with some of the limitations of the built in ASP.NET 2.0 controls (a post for another day). Even though I have never used them, I knew that based on the particular tools he was seeking, I have heard such great things about telerik from people I trust, so I recommended that they be on the top of the list of 3rd party controls to check out. Needless to say, the report back from him is that he is now using 3 or 4 of those controls and is so happy that he's (no, not buying the company) but subscribing to their full package.

A few weeks later he was ready to start synching between his development sql server and he online sql server as he got deeper into his tests. Though I have only played with them a little, I am still quite familiar with Red-Gate's tools and also know so many people (that I trust) who think they are awesome. So once again, I gave him a strong recommendation to try them out. A few days later, I got another very happy email from him saying that the Red-Gate tools were fantastic and he is definitely sticking with them.

There's a lot to gain from just knowing what's out there and paying attention to what people say about them (and who it is that's saying them and what the context is) even if you don't have hands on experience with every tool out there.

So thanks Red-Gate. Thanks telerik. (And thanks ASPInsiders, too.)

p.s. no, this is NOT a sponsored post!

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I want to point the Vermont.NET members to Korby Parnell's blog post which highlights and even enhances an invitation to give feedback in a very explicit way to the usability team.

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I created a scratchpad today using Windows Live Local that has a view of my house (yes my HOUSE outin the boonis in the mountain. You can actually see where my house is (though the photo must be from shortly before it was actually built), the trails into the woods. Anyway, I selected eight points on it for my scratch pad with a title and notes for each one. Then I clicked on the email function and it created an email but the link. Yikes. Was it long and filled with gook. Lori McKinney from the Huntsville .NET User Group sent me a tiny url to get to a scratch pad she created for seeing where their meeting location was, the airport and a few surrounding hotels. That's the way to go. So hopefully down the road, this [very cool application which has come  long way since Virtual Earth's release this summer!!] will enable a cleaner way to share scratchpads without having to take care of that piece of the puzzle ourselves. I sent the link of the scratchpad I created to my husband he told me he deleted it because it was filled with gobbledygook. That is going to be the typical reponse of regular users.

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I was trying to be really skeptical but it didn't work. After poking around Windows Live for about 5 minutes this afternoon - I think it's pretty cool. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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It took embedding XML into SQLServer to get Stephen to go public on his love for it. Perhaps all of those digs at Clemens Vasters' choice to store dasBlog data in XML were just a ruse. But now Stephen is not only at one with XML, he is spreading the joy. (Hey maybe I should be a lobbyist, that's pretty good, huh?)

Stephen is coming to Vermont.NET on Monday night, all thanks to INETA to present on XML in VS2005 & SQL Server 2005.

He was also planning to come up for another snowshoing hike (we did Mt. Mansfield last time he was here) but alas, we are expecting rain rain and more rain.

Meeting Date: Monday March 13th
Time: 6:00 - 8:30 pm
Location: Vermont Technical College, Williston Campus
More info and details and directions at www.vtdotnet.org

We also have some great raffles this month! We will be raffling off Sax's CommStudio and Atalasoft's DotImage.

This is a joint meeting with www.VTSQL.org.

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Some might say that Doug Reilly is making lemonade from lemons, though I think that his health situation is much more sour than a lemon and the work he is doing is much sweeter and more nutritious than lemonade.

Doug is a fellow developer, and ASPInsider and an author who has been battling a really tough illness for a long time. He has an article out about being responsible about dealing with your clients and your commitments when big things happen in your life. It is a valuable read for anyone in consulting.

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Who knows windows development better than Charles Petzold? And and he thinks Windows Forms are definitely going to be around for a long time - even if there are some big gaps in the WPF version.

Charles' post refers to Tim Sneath's excellent post on the same topic.

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Maybe just cause I'm a dope and reallllllly stubborn. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

 

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After the long awaited beauiful dump of snow this weekend and then enjoying the great skiing in the woods, it was time to get some use from our weekday season pass at Mad River Glen yesterday. Another glorious blue sky day.

Most of these are from the chair lift as I was too busy skiing to take pictures.

Rich and I went in the afternoon and headed right to the single which would take us up to the tippy top.

This might be the oldest running chairlift in the country. It was christened in 1949 and is a landmark and a treasure of Vermont ski history. It's the same chair I got stuck in for 2 1/2 hours a few winters ago, but they have done lots of great work on it since then.

We were excited to see some beautiful tracks in the snow below. Granted this photo is of a section of trail that was closed off so yes, it had some nice powder.

The higher you get the better the views are! You have to be willing to swivel around in that little chair though, to see them. First you start seeing awesome views of the Green Mountains behind you but then the White Mountains, further off in NH appear. The view is way better than this photo whenyou get to the top, but I had put my camera away by then.

I took this picture just for Chris Kinsman. The green blob is part of the chair. The rest is a big huge vertical rock with water ice on it. Notice all of the ski tracks going over it. This is why the slogan for Mad River is "ski it if you can".

This is typical too at Mad River. And don't think this is all powder. We were surprised to discover that all the new pow had been skiid off over the weekend and the whole place was just icey! We didn't mind though. We hoped it meant awesome ticket sales for Mad River. They needed it after this dreadful season.

At the very top of the single, a great reward on a clear day - a view of the Adirondacks to the west.

This is something I have always wanted to take a picture of. The top of the chairlift is a winter wonderland after it snows.

A few more. Rich loves skiing in the trees and on this day that's where all the snow was. I have had my magic moments of just going with the flow in the trees but mostly I just get too scared and just slide stop turn slide stop turn. Oh well. It' somethng I need to do many times during the ski season to get my confidence back. But this was the first time I had been in the trees in over a year.

Here's Rich taking off his boots before we headed home. The base lodge at Mad River is old-fashioned, very homey and loved by all.

When I download pictures from my digital camera they are huge. I have to open them up one at a time in PSP and shrink them. The other day, after years of doing this stupid method, Ihad a great idea. I emailed all of the pictures to myself. When outlook asks "do you want to mail them as their original size or shrink them", I choose the "shrink 'em" option. Then I have an email with all of the attachments of the new small sizes. I don't even have to mail them. I can just copy them from the attachment input box in the email and paste them into a folder on my computer. Sweet. Stupid to have to do it this way though. I will have to go look on my Vista box to see if there is a nice function already built in to do that.

Update:Etienne Tremblay reminded me of the Microsoft PowerToys page that has the perfect utility - ImageResizer. There are a ton of awesome powertoys.

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I have noticed when ordering on some sites that the drop down for the year of the expiration date for my credit card starts at 2002. That is just dumb.

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