Thom Robbins is planning his what may be his last New England Hurrah before he heads off to Redmond for his new job! It's the 6th New England Code Camp! Oct 21-22! Mark your calendars and start your engines!

This little guy was curled up in a bed of ferns about 3.5 ft off the ground. I saw him while I was picking berries and no girly shrieks this time. He was sitting quite still and didn't surprise me at all. It was just funny that I noticed a shape that didn't fit in and took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. Much much smaller than his great grand-daddy that startled me in the compost bin recently. I do need to learn how to use my camera better though. I couldn't get a good closeup and the zoom was too fuzzy. His head is at the top left. He was watching me carefully!

...prepare an old computer for recycling? This should not have taken me the hours that I spent on this task tonight! [ read more...]

[A DevLife post]

• Support Analyst
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It took me hours and hours to notice and odd setting on my VPC that was creating a terribe visual effect that I couldn't live with. [Read more...]

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Interesting that CNN's headline refers to Essex as a "rural" Vermont town. It's actually very suburban and one of the most densely populated communities in Vermont -just outside of Burlington. This is where IBM's Vermont chip mfg plat is. Rich was at our dentist in Essex Jct when this was beginning to unfold about a mile away. Nobody ever expects things like to happen in their back yard. But they happen everywhere.

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

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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

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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...]

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