I was flipping through the latets Forbes Small Business (May 2006) this morning and nearly fell out of my chair when I read the last sentence of this letter to the editor. It was in reference to a recent issue filled with a number of articles on women-owned businesses. I can't believe the guy actually signed his name and business name, too!

As a senior man in the small-business world (I'm 64), I read with great interest your articles about the growth of woman-owned businesses. You discount why men succeed at a greater rate than women - which I think is because men are more realistic. From the time they are little girls, most women are taught that looks, rather than learning to be smart, matter in business. Women cake on a fake face every day to alter their looks, yet expect everyone, especially men, to comply with feminine prerogatives. That has a chilling effect on business negotiations. Incessant narcisism is rampant in the feminine mind, and it can and does cloud business judgement.

Richard Royce
President
VenturEXPO Group
Pasadena, Calif.

I wonder if he knows that the Narcissism began with a man named Narcissus.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Alentus has always been one of the ASP.NET hosts out in the front of the pack. It is where my own website and also the Vermont.NET site is hosted for nearly 4 years.

I just happened to cruise to their home page and saw that it has been totally spiffed up! That struck me because I have watched their "visual branding" evolve over the years. They really now finally have a good solid look that evokes the professionals that they are.

I also see they're now hosting WordPress and DotNetNuke.

They now have a basic $8.95 ASP.NET 2.0 hosting plan. I tend to stay the heck away from hosting that is that low-priced because it is usually cheap for a reason. But this is no "budget" host. They are very technical and knowledgable about ASP.NET.

Though they offered to let me have some space on a test ASP.NET server before RTM, I have been too busy to update any of my sites. But a new VTdotNET site is in the works and it is time! Yay.

Kudos guys.

Last week I had to send in all of my paperwork for my business quarterly taxes. There's the 941 to the Feds,  a tax & withholding to the State of Vermont Dept ofo Taxes and one other to the Vermont Dept of Employment and Training.

I inadvertantently switched the checks for the two Vermont agencies, sending the E&T check to the tax people and their check to E&T. I am a sole proprietor ... these are not big checks.

I actually got a phone call from someone this morning telling me that she had the right form, but the wrong check and she was going to "pink it over" (office internal mail) to the tax department. A phone call! Can you imagine? So I called the other department which is more automated and won't be able to get their hands on the check I sent them - it will just get processed, but they will send me a refund. So I called the first woman back who was so nice and told her I would just send her a new check. No forms, no notes no explanation. She said just put my employer i.d. on the check and she'll know what to do with it.

I know people with larger companies have issues with doing business in this tiny state, but it suits me just fine!

I just took a look to see how the schedule is filling out for Code Camp 5 in Waltham, MA next weekend and was really impressed!

The stats

• 47 sessions
• 5 tracks
• 19 speakers
• 3 out of towners (I think that's right)
• 1 speaker who seems to be planning to do 6 sessions - maybe Thom is just supposed to select from them...

This is definitely something that's on my mind a lot. I'm not marketing person and it's not something I've been tasked with by a marketing person or the TabletPC team. It's just something that keeps popping up and is very interesting to me.

This weekend while visiting friends outside of Madison, WI after Deeper in .NET, I learned that my friend's partner, a painting contractor who is extremely non-technical, has a TabletPC. [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Some pics of my fun trip to Deeper in .NET in Wisconsin and a look around WI afterwards!

Flying out of Burlington VT, I finally got a decent picture of Lake Champlain. Of course this is nothing compared to what I was looking at.

Flying into Chicago here is the torquoise Lake Michigan.

Avonelle and Val	Bill Hatfied and Korby Parnell	Dinner at a local brew pub
The wings of the Milwaukee Art Museum. This building is amazing. Look for pics on the MAM site.	Local legend Dale Chihuly at MAM	My dear friend Martha Downs and Korby at MAM.
What? Skiing in Wisconsin!	The Tyrol Basin Golf Course, err, Ski and Snowboard Area.

a VERY impressive woodpile!

A reader of my recent Ink on the Web article in CoDe Magazine (samples available here) emailed me with an odd problem that I had to see in action before I realized what was going on.

The problem was this. She had a web form with an ink-enabled winforms control on it that worked fine. But when she added an asp:dropdownlist, the page crashed. She said she got no error message.

I tried the same thing and received a big fat error saying "Control 'dropdownlist1' of type 'dropdownlist' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server".

Aha! In order to do most of the tricks I am performing with moving the ink control's data from the client side to the server side require the form to not be a server-side form. Therefore "runat=server" does not exist in the form tag.

The solution is to have separate forms on the page for the ink control and the server side controls.

Kirk Allen Evans reminds us that only one server side form can be visible at a time, so you have to design your page around these limitations unfortunately. You don't be able to have server controls in a form, then below that an ink control in another form and then below that more server controls in a third form.

The general html of the page would look like this:

MicroStrain, Inc., a leading microminiature sensor developer, is seeking a Visual C++ developer responsible for creating and maintaining their flagship, wireless sensor network application, Agile-Link. Qualified candidates will be required to write documentation for Agile-Link’s development, code design, and testing. In addition, candidates must have strong teamwork skills to interact with various engineers, sales, and support staff in the development of custom applications and software development kits. 

Applicants must have 3+ years of software design and development experience on the Microsoft Windows platform, including an understanding of software life cycle design. Proven, advanced knowledge of C/C++, object oriented design, hardware/software interaction, and the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) are required. Candidates must demonstrate a strong debugging foundation, and a clear, critical writing and verbal skill set to describe any such discovered issues.

A strong working knowledge of Visual Basic, the Microsoft .NET framework, and open source operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD are a plus. A Bachelors of Science Degree in Computer Science or better is preferred.

http://www.microstrain.com/employment.aspx Our employment page

Please send electronic resume to: humanres@microstrain.com and mention that you came thru vtdotnet.

Here's one way to ensure I'll be hovering around your boot at TechEd! [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Milwaukee was great at Deeper in .NET. I wrote a little about that this morning over here and posted some pics here.

Next week I go to Huntsville, Alabama as an INETA speaker to talk about Advanced Data Access Techniques with ADO.NET 2.0. Then the next week is DevTeach in Montreal. Hopefully it will be springier there than it is here!

I was nicely surprised to see Korby Parnell in Milwaukee at Deeper in .NET.  Luckily for me, the one session I had to miss, Scott Hanselman's (I was in my room doing one last run through of my talk), Korby has laid out in detail. But not so much technically as about what an unbelievabley phenomenal presenter Scott is. I laughed when I read that Scott makes fun of VB programmers who comment using this

'//this is my comment

which I do in the demo code for presentions because it's so much more obvious than a little apostrophe.

Scott hadn't seen my demo so it was a funny coincidence.

If you want more tips about what makes a speaker a great speaker, check out Korby's homage to Scott.

I'm in Milwaukee for the Deeper in .NET event that is happening today. Five speakers back to back all day starting with Michele Leroux Bustamante doing a talk on WCF, then Scott Hanselman, my (data access talk), Bill Hatfield and Jason Beres. I hear there are nearly 500 people registered. Wow!

Yesterday I had a great look at and taste of some of the specialties of the area.

My first surprise was the Bloody Mary that had something a little different in it

Yes, in between the celery and the lemon is a sausage. It's just the way they serve them here! This drink was ordered (and consumed) by Chris Barwick who I didn't think I knew until he told me he was OptionsScalper. Oh! I sure know him by that alias! Chris picked me up at the airport and I was amazed to learn all of the brainy things (like F# research at Microsoft's Cambridge UK research facility) that he's involved in.

There was a dinner last night for the speakers and some other locals and out of towners which was "taste of Wisconsin" - all of the Wisconsin treats. The bratwurst was awesome and they also had, get this, Beer Cheese soup. Had to try that and it was tasty.

It was a blast to get to meet Avonelle Lovhaug in person finally and Val the C# Gal too! Casey Chesnut is here and I divulged to him the secret of how I got ink on Virtual Earth. It's a big deal for me that I actually figured out something that Casey the mad genius got stumped on. Probably the only time *that* will ever happen.

Oddly there is a small FoxPro conference here too so it was a great surprise to bump into my dear friend Ceil Silver and some of the ol' FoxPro gang.

(links later)

Milwaukee is a city filled with beautiful old buildings (it was the 2nd biggest inland port city after Chicago in the 1800's. I'm looking forward to strolling around tomorrow to see more.

Scott Isaacs and co. have done an amazing job and I'm really looking forward to the day.

From Chris Sells' blog:

Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn't change the meaning of anything.

With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice.

Egad!

I have a feeling that Charles Petzold is doing the same about now, since on 4/5 he said he had one more month before his 1000 page WPF book is due.

Code Camp 5 is only in a few more weeks. The abstract list is looking a little light (although Thom could be just having a hard time deciding from to many?) But it's not too late to submit your talks and certainly not too late to register.

Here are the details.

I'm still on the fence since I have to drive to Montreal on Monday for DevTeach where I give one talk a day for three days. Waltham is about 4 hours southeast of where I live and Montreal is about 3 hours north. So you can imagine my dilemma.

And before any of that, I am on my way to Milwaukee tomorrow for Deeper in .NET (speakin on ADO.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Integration) then home for a few days and then off again to speak in at HUNTUG (speaking on Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0) as an INETA speaker. Hopefully it will rain a few times while I'm gone on the peas and lettuce seeds in my garden.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Joel Spolsky's May 2000 article on the Chicken and the Egg Problem seems like a good place to look for solving the adoption problems of the Tablet PC (remember "Mobile PC" now) which is discussed endessly by Tablet PC developer ("make tablets easier to buy so people will buy our software!") and the manufacturers ("make more software so people will want to buy our tablets!"). [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Now that all three of my DevConnections powerpoint decks and demos are online, I just wanted to have one post for linking to them all.

If you were an attendee of ASPConnections or Visual Studio Connections, you should have password access to this stuff on the DevConnections site.

Otherwise, they are on the presentations page of my pwn website.

On that page, the talk are listed alphabetically. Look for:

1. Advanced Data Access Patterns with ADO.NET 2.0
2. Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That don't really have to be)
3. Using WSE 3.0 Today to Prepare for WCF Tomorrow

On that last one, note that I have also recorded the demos associated with that talk. Check this post for links to those videos.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some very knowledgable people are debating WSDL first. I think reading these types of threads where you get not only people's opinions of pros and cons, but the why's start getting answered too.

It starts with Craig Andera's post about protecting himself (and the world) from poorly written WSDLs by implementing iXMLSerializable.

This post woke Tim Ewald out of his blog slumber who, as a big contract first proponent,thinks that Craig's proposal is overkill.

Craig responded.

Aaron Skonnard got in on the conversation.

Christian Weyer did too (in Craig's comments) since he's got THE tool for doing contract first web services.

All in all, very educational thread, whichever side of the fence  you are on. Me ... I'm just, as always, on the fence.

It's too pretty out so I had to run outside and take these:

As I get ready to head to Wisconsin for Deeper in .NET, I see that Vermont's Cabot Cheese has once again won a bunch of gold medals at the "olympics of the cheesemaking industry", the 2006 World Championship Cheese contest. And just to be clear, it was the Wisonsinites who run this contest so thanks Wisconsin!

26th Biennial World Championship Cheese Contest  Selected Results
March 21-23, 2006 in Madison, Wisconsin

Results for Cabot Creamery Cooperative

Product Entry	Place	Score	Product Class
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (3 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (39 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (60 days old) Cabot Horseradish Cheddar Cabot Salted Butter Cabot Unsalted Butter	1st 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 4th 2nd 4th	99.20 98.70 98.20 98.85 99.25 98.35 99.20 98.65	Sharp Cheddar Medium Cheddar Medium Cheddar Extra Sharp Cheddar Mild Cheddar Flavored Past. Proc. Cheese Salted Butter Unsalted Butter

Product Entry	Place	Score	Product Class
Hahn's Blueberry Dream Spread Vermont Butter & Cheese Goats Milk Feta	2nd 3rd	99.60 99.45	Reduced Fat Cheeses Semi-Soft Goat's Milk Cheeses

For additional results and information about the World Championship Cheese Contest, visit:
www.wischeesemakersassn.org

I took this pic of one of the red maples on our property yesterday morning. Kinda gray but the buds are pretty. the picture wasn't impressive in a small format, but it looks so nice big that I have it for my screen background now. Spring is coming. Yay!