Yo yo yo! Chickity check it out. www.devreach.com and I'll be there! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Talented? Want to work with other talented people? Pragmatic Technologies, Inc. is in search of individuals that want to join our team. If you are inspired by technology and delivering results then we want to meet you.

We offer a competitive results based salary, benefits, and individual growth in a great working environment at our office on the waterfront in Burlington, Vermont.

Send cover letter and resume to talentscout@be-pragmatic.com

Pragmatic Technologies, Inc. is a growing company specializing in the development of custom information systems.

We primarily work with the .NET and Java platforms

http://www.sra.com/career/

Before flying to NYC last week, I tried to find some information on what I could expect at the airports regarding the impact of the new security. Since I couldn't find anything, I thought I would post these two airports.

Burlington (Thursday Aug 17th, late morning: 5 minutes)

The two ends of BTV are treated like separate terminals and each has their own security checkin. I went through the downstairs one which is for Jet Blue and some of the others, but I can't remember which ones. My flight was at 11:30 am. I arrived at 9:45 am. I got through security in under 5 minutes.

JFK Jet Blue Terminal 6 (Friday Aug 18th, late night: 5 minutes)

This shocked me. I arrived at about 8:30 and again was through security in 5 minutes. They had 4 lines open and there just weren't very many people.

Liquids in Carryons - oops

Both times, I inadvertantly had some liquid when going through security. The first was a small bottle of hand lotion in an outside pocket of my back pack. I had emptied out the backpack and repacked it, but had missed this. On the way home, I had totally forgotten about the small, nearly emtpy now, bottle of water I had been carrying around Manhattan on that hot August day with me. Both of these were extracted by the security workers.

I talked with someone who was travelling out west with a friend earlier that week. They had met up with her somewhere in the midwest. She too had a bottle of water. Security stopped her and found and tossed the water. The friend is from Texas and normally carries a Texas sized version of a pocket knife (a hunting knife!). When they arrived at their destination, she realized that her knife was still in her bag. She had forgotten to take it out before going to the airport and didn't even know it was in there. The security folks were so hell-bent on liquids that they hadn't found it.

This is another thing I've been meaning to get up on a rooftop and shout for joy about! Sasha Krsmanovic, who for years has been a star in the MSDN Canada office as the MSDN Project Manager, was not a Microsoft employee but what we call a "v-dash" (vendor with a very close relationship).

Recently, Sasha became a full-fledged Microsoft employee as he stepped into the role of MVP Lead for Canada which is an awesome position for him, and continued great fortune for developers (and now other geeks) in Canada.

We finally prodded him to blog about it so that there was something to link to!

Read all about it here...

[A DevLife post]

I'm still in denial but can't put off blogging about this any longer. The  .NET developers and user group leaders in New England have long known that we have been extraodinarily fortunate to have a true mover and shaker as our Microsoft Developer Evangelist. Thom Robbins has constantly pushed the envelope with respect to Microsoft providing amazing resources to the developer community. He has also made himself very available to developers. Personally, Thom has pushed and encouraged me relentlessly over the years and there is only one time I dared say "no" to him!

We knew the day would come when Redmond could no longer put off bringing him closer into the fold.

He is off to Redmond to continue to spread the word about .NET, but in a much bigger way, as the Director of .NET Platform Marketing.

It's going to be pretty tough to fill his shoes in Waltham, and prospects be warned, I have told Thom that whoever it is will have to get my stamp of approval before they can be hired. Heh heh.

I am not going to say that I'll miss Thom, because I expect to continue to work with him regardless of east coast or west coast living. The only difference is that I probably won't be able to ask him to cruise up to Vermont to present at Vermont.NET or VTSDA again. He amazed me with his willingness to drive the 3+ hours each way in one day - something I have not been willing to do as he well knows now: I hate road trips.. Of course, what takes me 3 1/2 hours might only be 2 for him!

I had a blast presenting in NYC Thursday night on ADO.NET 2.0 Query Notifications. It was also a great whirlwind trip to my old stomping grounds where I lived for my first eight years out of college. I did a little of everything...subway, taxis, Museum of Modern Art, falafels in Union Square, the farmer's market in Union Square, walking through the "new & improved" Times Square, an incredible meal at a French restaurant in Chelsea, Penn Station, NYC bagels.... Stephen Forte and Andrew Brust were great hosts!

It was my first visit to the microsoft offices up on 6th Ave. Last time I was there they were on 50th and 8th, in the same building where I happened to work at N.W. Ayer in the late 80's. Thanks to the receptionist there for allowing me a little reprieve and internet access (and a cookie or two) prior to the user group meeting.

I have updated my Query Notification samples where I was [accidentally] overdoing it with the unecessary VB Static to cache my datatable rather than the simpler VB Shared. Although my samples worked perfectly well, they were not as efficient as they could have been. Thanks again to Andrew for pointing this out when hundreds of developers before him have either not noticed or just not bothered to mention it. (Read more about that as well as my recent (somewhat aggravating) education on VB Static over here.)

The deck and samples are on my TALKS page of my website. Scroll down to "Leveraging Query Notifications ...."

You can find the slides and demos from Paul's session on ASP.NET 2.0 Data Controls Tips & Tricks on his website at www.deeptraining.com/litwin.

Paul blogged about the meeting here.

I've long been confused by the fact that static variables in VB are not the same as static variables in C#, but shared variables/methods/classes in VB *are* like static variables/methods/classes in C#. It made for some cumbersome VB code that didn't have to be. I think I finally got it cleared up and here is a blog post I wrote trying to explain it (to myself for future reference). [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Java Engineer Developer Lead

We plan to shake up the IT industry with a unique process management software application utilizing Web 2.0 technologies and the software-as-a-service model. Our target is the Global 2000 market. We are in the exciting start-up stage with beta test customers and will release our first version this fall.  The application is being built with Adobe Flex on the front end and Java on the back with open source technologies.  The founder has a proven track record with a past successful startup and is willing to provide a competitive salary with serious equity bonuses (stock awards, not stock options!).

We have huge plans and need a technical leader to build a smart technical team and to solve complex problems.  Please contact us if these points fit you:

Most Important

- You hate bad company politics

- You're smart, energetic, and you like people

- You're searching for something new and exciting to build (with passion!)

Technical Skills

- Strong experience building large complex web applications

- Expert with Java, XML, web services, databases, and open source solutions

- Can find solutions to everything else you don’t know

People & Project Skills

- Easily coach other smart and nice people

- Manage the entire development process and foster innovation

- Ensure efficiencies with standards and Agile development methods

Are you tired of smog, traffic jams, long commutes, mean people, and long travels to get out of town?

Our office is located in downtown Burlington, VT, a college town with lots of cafes, gourmet restaurants, fine arts, great skiing, sailing, hiking etc.  Live in the city and walk to work or settle in the country with very short commutes.

Oh yes, don't bother going to our website www.piematrix.com yet since what we are doing now is still a secret!

Please send your resume to paul.dandurand@piematrix.com

Rather than our regular monthly business meeting, Vermont Software Developer Alliance (VTSDA) is going to enjoy one of he very special things in Vermont tonight. We will board the Spirit of the Ethan Allen for an evening cocktail and networking cruise on Lake Champlain. For those of you unfamiliar with Vermont, Lake Champlain is huge - 120 miles long and 10 miles wide at Burlington. The weather forecast is perfect, so we have lucked out. (For those of you unfamiliar with Vermont, you just can never know what to expect with the weather!)

I'm psyched to be hopping down to NYC tomorrow do an INETA sponsored presentation at NYCdotNETDev. I lived in New York from 1983 to 1991 (as you can imagine, my impressionable 20's), so it's fun to go back once in a while. I plan to spend Friday at the MOMA and eating great food with friends before taking a late night flight back to Burlington. It's only a one hour flight, so it's a nice and easy trip.

I'll be presenting on Query Notifications, a topic near and dear to my heart. Most user groups find this a little narrow no matter how fascinating I find it! So I'm happy that these guys were interested in this talk.

More thoughts about where the line is between what we expect from our tools and when we are willing to roll up our sleeve and muck around in the APIs ourselves.... [read more here...]

[A DevLife post]

Congratulations to Jim Smith and EQ2 for their recent award of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner! EQ2 creates solutions for the health care field. Health care software is big business in Vermont. Thanks to IDX (now G.E. Healthcare), a lot of talented people have spun up related businesses here.

There are now five Gold Partners in our tiny little state Vermont.

1. EQ2
2. Competitive Computing
3. SynEcology
4. SymQuest
5. Network Perfomance

I was hoping to do an impressive per capita comparison, but after looking at Mass, Washington and New York, I think I better wait a few more years. But we are growing!

Rich and I went to this classic Vermont country summer fair last week. Below is a photo of the tractor pull. There were so many garden tractors lined up, this event went on for hours and hours and hours. One event that I wish I had known about (before it happened, rather than hearing about it after the fact!) was a hand-mowing competition (using scythes). I have an old scythe and use it ocassionaly (not for the lawn but for clearing tall weeds) and would have loved to see how it's really done.

While wandering through the booths, I came around a corner and saw a well-known Vermont actor/comedian/writer named Rusty Dewees. This is a guy you can't avoid if you live in Vermont. He's got a column in the local paper (which is very personal like a blog), does radio spots for lots of businesses, gets written about and highlighted on the news all of the time and does shows (which I have never attended) all over the state. Without thinking, I greeted him like an old friend, only to remember in the next moment that I didn't really know him, and of course, I was a complete stranger t him. Just another fan, I guess. I was pretty embarrassed (how unlike me!).

It made me think a lot about how much I expose my own life on my otherwise "technical" blog. When I meet developers at conferences around the country and the world, and they know personal things about me, it takes me a moment to realize it's because I write about it all the time. But I love this aspect of meeting people who don't feel like strangers for long. Somehow, I wasn't able to project that Dewees might feel the same way even though he was being perfectly nice. Additionally, it's only a more narrow community of programmers that know me, so I already have lot in common with these people, as opposed to anyone that might accost this poor guy. It would probably have been a little better if I had bought one of his dvds or calendars or something (the guy is pretty talented and also a marketing machine), but though I enjoy reading his column and have been impressed to watch what he has done with his career, I'm not sure if I really want a calendar of him on my wall (though he's awfully good looking! )

The tractor pull. Click on photo to see full size

Paul Litwin, an INETA speaker, came all the way from Seattle to Vermont to speak at Vermont.NET. Rather than fly in the day of the meeting and out the next morning, Paul arrived on Saturday night in order to enjoy being in Vermont for a few days. Unfortunately, shortly before his trip he agreed to do a project that kept him in front of the computer a good part of the time, but we still managed to get him out to a walk around our neighbor's mountain farm, visit our favorite swimming pond, meet his first brushhog and even go Chanterelle picking (I don't mind divulging my secret Chanterelle spots to someone who lives 3000 miles away) and visit a local sugarhouse (Purinton's) to buy some maple syrup.

Last night was our user group meeting and after local developer, Rob Hale (from G.E.Health Care), did a short talk on the Strategy Pattern, Paul shared with us some of the many tricks he had to figure out for his own work when using the ASP.NET 2.0 data controls. I find that the things I struggle with make good fodder for presentations, so I love this kind of talk. Rather than just diving into the tricks with an assumption that everyone was familiar with the ins and outs  of the new controls, he went through them first. I have not played iwth them a lot so even in the beginner part of the sessio, I learned plenty. The tips & tricks will definitely come in handy and I'm glad that someone else has already done the heavy lifting for me on this stuff! Paul will be doing this talk at ASP.NET Connections in the fall, although without the benefit of the extra time we get when presenting at a user group.

After the meeting, we brought Paul to downtown Burlington to sample some more of the local beer (we had already had dinner at brew pubs on Saturday and Sunday night) and then somehow finished up the night at Ben & Jerry's. The amusing part of this was that the other woman who came along, web developer Gail Guy (who was also the lucky winner of the FarPoint Spread for Web license we raffled off...the Genom-E Express license went to Roger Gillim from the Vermont Dept. of Health) and I started talking about programming and the guys all rolled their eyes and moved to the other end of the table.

Paul found the secret to being the perfect guest at our house - being kind and loving to our old Newfoundland dogs, Tasha & Daisy. Thanks Paul!

DasBlog is an open source project, so I need to be patient while waiting for a response to my query on the forums. In the meantime, perhaps someone else has experienced this and knows the cause and resolution.

Since Sunday, my blog has been throwing a wierd error that is causing the events log to bloat to 12 or more megs. My datafarm.com sites are in trouble. My webhost had to restart IIS on the web server.

Below is an example of the error. The errors cite different macros, but the rest is always the same. I have gone back to the default Blog Template, but the problem is still there. I recopied the DLL's, but the problem continues.

So, a plea for help if anyone out there has experienced this. It happened suddenly with no changes to the site. I've seen two other unanswered questions about this error in the dasblog forums.

Here is what the error looks like:

l2 time 2006-08-14T15:28:11 code 1 message <span>Error:<br/>Error executing macro: bodytext. Make sure it you're calling it in your BlogTemplate with paratheses like 'myMacro()'. Macros with parameter lists and overloads must be called in this way. Exception: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Threading.ThreadAbortException: Thread was being aborted.
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 118
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 61
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.SharedBasePage.ProcessDayTemplate(DateTime day, Control ContentPlaceHolder) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\SharedBasePage.cs:line 744
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.Macros.get_Bodytext() in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\Macros.cs:line 1233
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean isBinderDefault, Assembly caller, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
at System.Reflection.RuntimePropertyInfo.GetValue(Object obj, Object[] index)
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.InvokeMacro(Object obj, String expression) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 332
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 105<br/> while processing .</span>

I might be the only person onthe planet who didn't know you could use environment variables in Explorer to quickly get to key folders. Here's my public confession...

[A DevLife post]

My latest rant () is in the new issue of CoDe Magazine (Sept/Oct issue) where I bitch and moan about how hard it is to find someone to do user group talks on current technology. It's in print now, but not quite yet online, I think.

There are a bunch of great ASP.NET 2.0 articles in this issue in addition to the rest of the usual excellent content!