VTFUG is celebrating it's 10th Anniversary! Congratulations Kurt.

Meeting info at www.vtfug.org

We are lucky to have INETA Speaker Paul Litwin coming from Seattle to present on the ASP.NET 2.0 Data Controls (Tips & Tricks) on Monday night!

In addition to INETA flying Paul here, they pay for the pizza & soda at the meeting, which is always appreciated!

AND, that's not all folks!   INETA sent out their SWAG mailing earlier ths summer and I'm still pulling treats out of it. This month I will be raffling off

• a license to FarPoint Spread for Web (ASP.NET Spreadsheet) val $899
• two licenses to Genome Express (Object Relational Mapping for .NET) val $399 each

If you plan on attending, go to the site and rsvp (this way we know how much pizza and soda to bring).

There are lots of new discounts on the member page of the website.

Meeting details and directions at www.vtdotnet.org.

If you are getting either of these errors when using the Publish Wizard for ClickOnce:

• Cannot publish because a project failed to build.
• SignTool reported an error 'XmlResolver can be set only by fully trusted code.'

I thought I would take a little break from the computer on this nice sunny day, so I did something that I've been giving lip service to for two years. I raked up a big pile of grass cuttings from the latest lawn mowing to put in the compost bin. We've been throwing food stuff in there for 3 years but never anything else. So it never "cooks" (breaks down and turns into black gold). I have never even stirred it up. The grass cuttings do add some needed ingredients to get the compost cooking.

Now I've always been careful when opening the lid of the bin because when we moved here, the *very* first time I went out there (hmmm, early August, come to think of it, just like today) there was a snake hangng out on top of all of the stuff (left by the former owners (not the snake, the stuff!)). I have added to it once or twice a week all year round for three years since then and have never seen another one. Today, rather than carefully sliiiiiiiiding the lid just a bit to expose enough space for me to put my little compostable cornstarch bag of kitchen compost in, I just flipped the lid off onto the ground and of course - SNAKE! Just a garden snake, but it was not one those little 1/4 inch diameter ones. It was more like 1  or 1 1/2 inches around.

Needless to say, after my girlie shriek and jumping back, I abandoned the lid, my bag of grass cuttings and my little pitchfork for when Rich gets home. In the meantime, I hope the poor snake recovers from the probable minor heart attack he had. There he was, resting in a nice dark place before all of this happened!

I'm not really afraid of snakes. In fact, a college friend had an Indian Python named Eve that I got friendly enough with to actually put around my shoulders a few times. It's just the *surprise* snakes.

shiver...

Frustrated with the experience of trying to explain the complicated ASP.NET 2.0 Client Side callbacks at user group sessions, I decided to see how this compared to using AJAX.NET and ATLAS. So I rewrote the demo with each of these tools. Here is what I found... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Bottom line: there are lots of software businesses in Vermont. They are all growing. Wanna move to Vermont? [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I had a great time speaking at the Western Mass .NET group last night (thanks INETA!)

THe group meets sometimes in Northampton and sometimes in Easthampton, Mass. Northampton is a very hip small city replete with coffee houses where the groovy people hang out and vehicles roaming the streets with kayaks on them (sounds like where I live!) I was lucky to stay in a beautiful historic hotel ,Hotel Northampton, in downtown northampton (ask for the corporate rate to get an affordable way to stay there).

Last night's meeting was at the Atalasoft offices. Atalasoft makes imaging software and .NET components (eg the DotImage toolkit). Imaging is pretty complex, especially over the web, (they have windows and web components) and they have some insanely bright people working there. The office is in a huge old mill building called Eastworks in Easthampton. Part of the building's past was as home of Stanley products (you know, door locks etc). Now it is home to lots of art studios, cool shops and office space. It's very Tribeca (NYC) and I think it's brilliant for communities to leverage these old buildings rather than knocking them down and spending gazillions to build new ones. Outside of Burlington, in Winooski, there are a lot of historic old mill buildings along the Winooski River. Some of the history is not great as it involved child labor etc in the turn of the century. But the buildings are really gorgeous and now house all types of creative companies.

I presented on many of the new asynchronous features in ASP.NET 2.0. I couldn't do this without showoing client side callbacks, which, prior to Ajax/Atlas were a huge improvement over trying to do xmlhttp yourself. But now, with the 8 steps I laid out to set it up, seems a little embarrassing to show (since there are now easier and more sophisticated alternatives). Still, it's there, and it was interesting learning how to use it and since there were plenty of peole there who hadn't used any of these types of features (ajax, etc), it was a great eye opener.

The beauty of all of these tools though is that they enable a lot more people to leverage asynchronous processing without having to become gurus with threading and delegates. There were people there who are very comfortable and knowledgable with threading and delegates, which led to some questions and discussion that I was able to learn from. (I love that!) Additionally, thanks to some of the folks who have been doing a lot with AJAX already, we were able to take the discussion of the client side callbacks a little deeper. (I am now getting SO ready to make the leap!)

Robert Hurlbut (Mr. Enterprise) happens to be working with a client in the area, so it was great fun to have him come to the meeting as well as very handy to have him there when some of the threading discussion got a little deep.

Now I have to head about 90 miles east to Waltham, Mass (to the Microsoft office) for the New England VB Pro user group, where I will be giving this talk again (another INETA talk) tonight.

I'll be presenting at two user groups in Massachussets next week. I will be giving the same presentation at both groups: "Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET Developers".

Description: Asynchronous programming makes so much sense for web applications but is often tough to achieve. With .NET 2.0, there are a number of new methods to simplify asynchronous development. These can be found in web pages, in ADO.NET, in Web Services and other ASP.NET 2.0 functionality. This session will examine these various ways to leverage asynchronous programming in your web development and make suggestions for which methods are appropriate for particular scenarios.

The talk will be straight ASP.NET 2.0 features, so it will not be abou AJAX or ATLAS, though I will include their baby cousin, ClientSideCallBacks.

Tuesday Aug 1: Western Mass .NET User Group in Easthampton, MA

Wedneday Aug 2: New England VB Pro User Group at the Micrsoft Offices in Waltham, MA

Thanks to INETA, once again!

Jason Gaylord interviewed me last week for the ASPNetPodcast website after I spoke at the DotNetValley user group that he leads. I was impressed with the questions he asked me as it was clear he had done some research. But I think I still surprised him a little with a few of my answers!

Here's the list of recent shows. Mine is #59.

If it weren't for Neil Roodyn's ViaVirtualEarth site, anyone doing development against Virtual Earth would have been at a huge loss last summer. Eventually Microsoft started doing some webcasts, but still, there was a dearth of help out there directly from Microsoft. I just got a download notification from Microsoft and it points to the Virtual Earth SDK.

Personally, I have stopped fiddling with VE since the API was overhauled a while ago. I know I have a learning curve (and my Virtual Earth on Ink app... using the old API broke with the release of the new - uggh) but am busy with so many other things. One of the things I had done in my app was discover and reuse the tiles from whatever map was in current view. Apparently you are not allowed to do that now [no comment], though there are some interesting articles (1, 2) on ViaVirtualEarth about using the VE Tile Servers (with caveats about the future availability of the tile servers).

I would love to see the local.live.com use ink. However my app has been out there for over a year and I haven't heard a peep from Microsoft about it. Oh well, it was still a really fun challenge that Neil put in front of me.

In the meantime, Virtual Earth on local.live.com has become an amazing tool! I'm a big fan of it, but now define myself as end-user rather than as a developer of VE.

Here's the SDK.

Seriously.... 15! That's a lot of remembering for my poor brain. [Read more here...]

[A DevLife post]

EATING CROW! I wrote in May about getting a desktop shortcut with ClickOnce. I have finally discovered a big flaw (well, two actually) in that method. This post explains the flaw and offers up a much better solution! [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

wow!

The spammers are getting even more creative! [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I'm finally recovering from my whirlwind trip of three .NET User Groups in Pennsylvania last week. Thanks to INETA fr enabling me to go an to the u.g. leaders for inviting me.

Here are links to the powerpoints and demos on my website. I have also given your u.g. leaders permission to put them on your u.g. websites as well, so you may find them there too.

Tuesday July 18th: Central Penn .NET: Introduction to Tablet PC Web Development. This was an interesting talk to do. We went from 0 to 60, which is people who have never used a tablet pc and never used the Tablet PC APIs flying through intros to both so that we could get to the fun stuff - ink-enabling web applications. One attendee observed that my solutions all seemed kind of like a big hack -and he was absolutely right. There is no built in way to do this stuff, so I just figured out the best ways that I could to make it happen.
Downloads: The more generic powerpoint is on my website TALKS page. Scroll down to "Developing Ink-Aware Web Applications with the Tablet PC SDK". You will see the Powerpoint and the zip file for the demos. Since I modified this talk specifically for your group, I have sent the exact powerpoint that you saw on Tuesday to Judy.

Wednesday July 19th: Lehigh Valley .NET: Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005. I had a lot of fun doing this talk and wrote all about it on my DevLife blog here. Thanks for all the great questions and the excellent New York style pizza. I spent some time in downtown Bethlehem on Wednesday, including a great lunch at the Apollo with two of the people from the u.g. and then walked around to see the incredible 18th century buildings. Bethlehem is steeped in history. I was really happy to get a chance to go there.
Downloads: I have sent the ppt and zip file to Chris, but you can get them on my site TALKS page. Scroll down to "Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005" and you will find a link for the powerpoint and for the zip.

Thursday: July 20th: DotNetValley: Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That shouldn't have to be). I'm sure you guys can tell I love to do this talk. These are all topics that I was afraid to approach myself at one point. I am still not a guru in them, but I am certainly past "know enough to be dangerous" at this point. I think that my non-guru-ness makes it a lot easier to explain it because nothing is so obvious to me that I would assume it is obvious to you. Thanks for having me again and for some of the nice emails you sent after the presentation.
Downloads: You can get these from the TALKS page on my website. Scroll down to Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That don't really have to be). The powerpoint on the site is from a different event, but it is the same as what you saw on Thursday night.

I had a problem using a website today that was due to some logic on the part of the programmer. This gave me more pause to consider my own logical error in an app that I am currently working on, even though the code was just fine... [read more]

[A DevLife post]

I had to fly from Binghamton to Burlington yesterday. The flight was scheduled to leave Binghamton at 1:55 p, arrive in Philly at 2:30 and then another flight at 3:30 arriving in Burlington at 5:00pm. Philadelphia had more wicked storms yesterday which forced many airplanes to sit on the runway before allowing the passengers to depart. The reason was that they are not allowed to use the ramps when there is lightning (which is totally reasonable). Needless to say, the airport was a mess, many flights were delayed and people were even stranded. I did manage though to get home last night, arriving in Burlington at 11:30pm. The irony was that normally I drive, as it is only a 5.5 hour drive from Binghamton to my house. This trip ended up being over 12 hours door to door. 

I had forgotten how much fun it is to show off the new Debugger Display attributes in VS2005. A recent talk at an INETA user group in Pennsylvania got me thinking about them again... [read more]

[A DevLife post]

http://www.sadeveloper.net/The SA Developer Gauteng team (Gauteng is a province in South Africa that includes Johannesburg) all met in the Microsoft offices in Jo'burg to attend the most recent INETA Live Webcast. Andre Odendaal wrtes about doing this and how valuable he thinks these webcasts are to u.g. leaders.