One of my favorite journalists (and bloggers) in Vermont is Seven Days writer, Cathy Resmer.Cathy is just cool and I love her take on the world. I meant to write about this a few weeks ago when she did a story on a hidden treasure on the Vermont/NY border that is drawn down the middle of Lake Champlain. A sculpture by Rodin! And not only is it by Rodin, but it is of Camille Claudel, one of France's other best sculptors. I remember seeing a wonderful film about her back in my NYC days.

Recently, Cathy and her partner had a baby - her partner was the "bio-mom". This may have created a conundrum at Mother's day with two moms now on hand for Graham, but Cathy doesn't see herself as a mom and they had it all worked out before Graham was born. She has a wonderful essay about this in last week's issue with the highlight for me being when she felt "out-maternalized" by a new father. A great read, whatever your kid calls you.

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Somehow, almost everytime I schedule an INETA speaking event, I end up getting asked to speak at another nearby group as long as I'm there. Why not? I say. It's fun, and I control my schedule. Luckily, the user group leaders have been flexible enough so that I can do the talks on consecutive nights.

I have 3, not 4 such trips coming up.

The first is a twist on the concept: my "Atlantic Provinces Tour". I am speaking at 3 groups in Canada's Atlantic Provinces over the course of 10 days. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is my summer vacation and my husband is joining me.

June 19th: New Brunswick.NET in Moncton, New Brunswick.
June 20th: .NET Nova Scotia in Halifax, Nova Scotia
June 26th: We Develop.NET in St. John's Newfoundland

Trip 2 is a Western Pennsylvania tour. Coincidentally (yeah, right), the last meeting is about a hour drive from my parents house. So I will spend a few days visiting them before I head back to Vermont.

July 18th: Central Penn in Harrisburg, PA (right near Hershey, PA... yummmm)
July 19th: Leihigh Valley.NET in Bethlehem, PA
July 20th: Dot Net Valley in Scranton PA

Trip 3 is an Ohio tour which started with the idea of paying a visit to Lake Quincy (Steve and Michelle Smith's home) near Cleveland. Then I added on two other meetings.

Sept 12: Cleveland .NET SIG
Sept 13: Findlay Ohio .NET User Group
Sept 14: Dayton .NET Developers Group

In between are scattered events: NYC in mid-August, 2 Massachussetts groups in early August and Syracuse in September.

(rather than sit here and do all the links, I will point you to my talks page where you can click to these groups' websites)

Reminds me of an old song from the musical Oklahoma!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have installed the latest CTP build of Vista on my Toshiba M4. Here is what I noticed right away. [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

www.MyWebGrocer.com is seeking bright, motivated, energetic and inquisitive software developers. Projects vary from E-Commerce and Handheld PDA applications to Interactive Web Solutions.

We are a dedicated team that is looking for additional developers who share our enthusiasm and focus in developing market leading solutions.

The successful applicant will have experience with ASP.NET, C#, SQL, CSS, JavaScript and Visual Studio.NET. Exposure to Web Services, SQL DTS and C++ a plus.

Salary commensurate with experience.

Contact:
Jeff Downs
802-764-1841
jdowns@mywebgrocer.com

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I only just became 100% sure that I was going to TechEd. Hooray.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Scott Guthrie's blog has turned into one of the best resources on future ASP.NET related bits. Each of his posts lately, is a complete article on how to get started with a particular technology that ties into ASP.NET, complete with screenshots and code.

The latest is Using LINQ with ASP.NET (part 1).

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www.vtsda.org

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Speaker - Thom Robbins, Microsoft New England
Topic - Trends in Software Development

Software development is changing at light speed. Gone are the days of single person development. Team based development with faster cycle times and quality code are becoming a driving force in the industry. Of course that doesn’t negate the need for security and standards. Well it may look murky but there are several trends that every software developer should keep an eye on as they build their careers. Join us to see what the future may hold.

Speaker Bio: Thom Robbins is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft in New England, and part of the MSDN Developer Program. He is a frequent speaker at events, including VS Live. Thom is also a regular contributor to various magazines including Visual Studio.Net, .NET Magazine and XML Web Services. He spends his time working with developers in New England. When not writing code he spends his time with wife Denise at their home in New Hampshire.

Date:    May 17th, 2006
Time:    12:00 - 2:00 pm
Place:    Courtyard by Marriott
            175 Hurricane Lane
            Williston, VT

Plenty of free parking
Map & directions

Agenda:
12:00 - 1:00      Lunch and Informal Networking
1:00 - 2:00        Presentation & Discussion

Lunch will be provided free of charge to members who RSVP at least 24 hours prior to the event. Non-members who RSVP at least 24 hours prior to the event can pay $10 which will cover the meeting cost and lunch cost.  To RSVP, please email meetings@vtsda.org. Alternatively, feel free to bring your own lunch.

Three copies of Eric Sink's "The Business of Software" will be given away to lucky attendees.  Thanks to A Press for donating these books. 

Last week I downloaded version 5365 of Vista. Today I finally had some time and went to burn the image onto a DVD to install onto my laptop, only to discover that 5381 was now available. I have mid-speed DSL so these suckers take a good 12 hours to download! But it didn't make sense not to get the latest, so I'm now closing in on hour ten and hopefully will get a peek at the latest sometime tonight. Much of this is thanks to Kate Gregory's blog post about how much she is enjoying build 5365.

I did install Office 12 VS2005 on one of these builds, but it takes so long to do that I don't want to do it again until I'm willing to upgrade Vista not reformat and install anew.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I was fortunate enough to see Alan Griver's LiNQ presentation twice in one week. It has my mind spinning. Here is some of what I saw. [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some big brains duke it out over objects vs databases at the DevTeach panel. Read more...

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

What fun to be here at DevTeach! The day started out with being woken up by the slamming of the door of a nearby hotel room - a good thing in my case since it was 7:45 and Alan Griver's LiNQ keynote was at 8am - and NOT to be missed! I took a lot of notes during his talk and I'm even more excited about LiNQ now. I'll write more about that in another post.

There is a fantastic collection of speakers here - many of whom I've become friends with over the years coming to DevTeach (and from whom I learn a lot).  Also the .NET community in Montreal is wonderful. Since I live nearby , I get to come up occasionally and am always treated to a great time by this incredibly friendly bunch!

A special thanks to Etienne Tremblay who showed me how to get my VPC talking to my laptop through a loopback adapter! Etienne was even doing a talk on virtualization today, but it was in the French track.

The weather is great. The Marriott where the conference is is a really nice hotel to be in. There are about 300 attendees this year and lots of people from across Canada.

I did a talk on writing web services today to be able to be used by wcf tomorrow to the usual small crowd of web service developers. Even though there aren't a lot of people doing WSE, they still want and need help getting it working and just because WCF is coming, people still want and need to secure their web services today. I almost missed dinner because I was so enjoying answering questions after my session of a developer who has to port his vs2003/wse2 apps to vs2005/wse3. I have been there and done that and just wanted to give him a brain dump.

Unfortunately, I have a whole bunch of work to do for some clients remotely from here, so I better get on it before I fall asleep!

Posted from BLInk!

WCF is so hip, even water is getting in on the act!

(sorry, just couldn't resist )

Posted from BLInk!

Though I sadly had to miss this weekends Code Camp 5: Code Frenzy in Waltham (stay tuned here for a report from Dave), I will get 3 days of communing with geeks up in Montreal at DevTeach. This is DevTeach's fourth year. It is a fun smallish (200-300?) conference in a beautiful city with a host of top-notch speakers. I am proud to be countedin the ranks of this great group of presenters.

The pre-con is today, the post-con on Friday, with the main conference running from Tuesday through Thursday.

Rich & I picked Alan Griver (who after successfully overseeing the phenomenal implementation of data tools into Visual Studio, has now moved on to his second love, working with he developer community)and the brilliant and [oh my god] energetic Beth Massi up at the Burlington airport last night and after a stroll on the Burlington waterfront, took them to Burlington's phenomenal traditional Chinese restaurant, A Single Pebble.

We will drive up to Montreal this afternoon and Alan is doing the keynote tomorrow morning. Beth and I have three talks each over the next three days. Thursday afternoon we head back to Burlington for the VTdotNET meeting.

It's a beautiful time of year to go to Montreal and I'm really looking forward to seeing so many people - speakers and attendees - (note to self - stop at Lake Champlain Chocolates on the way up to get some truffles for Kate) as well as attending sessions myself.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Now that I finally have some time to write a new version of the VTdotNET site, I wanted to try to get my hands on as many of the new key ASP.NET 2.0 toys as I can. [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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This little guy was wobbling through my front yard a short while ago.

(Here's a short video I also took with my camera in case you've never seen one before - 25 seconds about 1MB.)

There's a part of me (and most people who live around here) that has very evil thoughts when we see these little buggers, because we know the pain they can inflict on our curious pets and children. Apparently the most efficient means of doing this involves something like a baseball bat. Horrors! I could never.

 

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I know that hungarian notaton is supposed to be totally uncool now, but I am just not giving up using it on controls so I can easily tell the difference between buttons, textboxes etc when I'm reading my code (or coding my code).

From hereonin (is that one, two or three words?), this blog post from Charles Petzold is what I will point to anytime somebody gives me sh*t for continuing to do this.

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We got a call from our neighbor telling us there was a moose heading up the road. So we ran out and there it was just at the corner of our property. I ran back to get my camera while Rich and our neighbor Tom watched him (I think it was a male). It was bent down on it's front knees eating grass.

Though it wasn't quite dusk, I couldn't get a good picture. The flash, I now realize, was focusing on the white street sign and everything else was dark. Without the flash it was blurry. So I tried a movie. The light was perfectly fine for that somehow, but my shaky hand and the fact that my best attempt to walk towards the moose steadily was unsuccessful, rendered that pretty shaky. You can see if you want, though. It's more like your typical loch ness monster video. I sure wish Shelley had been here! (Of course I think that every time I want to take a picture of something special to share.)

It was a young moose - probably a yearling and not afraid of much - typical for moose. There are enough moose around that there is now a moose crossing sign down on the main road about 1 mile from our house.

After it wandered off into the woods, Tom and Joe (another neighbor who had come down the road to see) were excited because they could hear a woodcock in the woods. I couldn't recognize it's call among the peepers. Eventually it came out of the woods, circled around above us and then landed in our front yard and continued it's mating call (umm - no that's not why Tom and Joe were excited). Now I could easily hear it's crazy call. There is a good recording of the sound on this page from the SUNY Stony Brook website. It's the 3rd from the bottom.

The woodcock has a crazy mating ritual which includes a lot of big spirals in the sky. We'll be watching out for him in the next few weeks. Him and the darned porcupine that was also wobbling up the road during all of this. That is something we can do without.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm waiting for Dave to post this great news before I can blog about it. Seems only fair

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Sitting in front of a computer all day and all night has it's downsides, not just on your social life, but after years and years and years, it can (along with age, of course) wreak havoc on your vision. I've always had 20/20 and not needed glasses. I finally got some glasses for the computer a few years ago and haven't used them a lot because they give me headaches after a full day. But now I suddenly can't even read road signs any more until I'm about 5 feet away. Afte months of complaining about this latest threshold and thinking minor adjustments to my environment will correct the effects of strain on my eyes (with my husband laughing at my denial as I near the age of 45 (6 more months - eeek!) I finally went back to the opthamologist today.

And the results are that my vision is still 20-20. So why can't I read any more? Why is the world a blur? Apparently, the optical profession is discovering that this meaurement and stigmatism are NOT the only two factors that effect our eyesight. And although I have no stigmatism and my eyesight is 20-20, I can still be having bad problems with my eyes. There are depth perception issues and even some double vision. So we'll try a few new prescriptions (yes I am talking BIFOCALS - well, transitional lenses)and I have to be more consistent in using them and I get to also have a pair plain old reading glasses at my bedside for reading at night. In that case, the magnification is really the only help I'll need.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

The May 2006 INETA NORAM Newsletter is out and there is a wonderful article in there by INETA Speaker Kathleen Dollard on a recent 3-user group tour to the Gulf Coast region. Kathleen also donated all of her honorariums for the user group events to local organizations and makes some suggestions how we can continue to help this still devasted area.

Also in the newsletter is information about the success of Deeper in .NET which was a full day event put on by the Wiscosin .NET user group. Scott Isaacs is eager to share with other user group leaders his secret to success!

The 2nd Alabama Code Camp was held recently also and there is an article written by Huntsvillian (had to becareful ont to type Huntsvillain) Dan Wygant about that event as well. The article is accidentally anonymous. I'll update this post when I get the name of the person who wrote it. Maybe we can get the online editionof the newsletter updated, too.

If you are not on the list  to receive the newsletter you can read it here.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org