It was announced a few days ago that Bulgaria and Romania will become part of the European Union on Jan 1

So I'm sure there will be a big excitement when we arrive in Bulgaria next weekend.

Martin (who lives in Sofia) has links to more details.

By attending DevReach in Sofia Bulgaria Oct 9-10, you will be entered in the drawing.

Pretty amazing!

Google Toolbar has a new feature called notifications.

It took me a while this morning to realize that this was the service that was preventing me from starting up a 16-bit application (FoxPro 2.6).

I had turned off all types of stuff, but when I killed the process for the GoogleNotifications in my task manager, voila, the program opened up.

Just a word to the wise....

I wasn't there to witness it but I have heard from DCC Susan Wisowaty that there were 110 people at the MSDN event in Burlington yesterday. Another attendee told me she had heard it was 117. This is pretty phenomenal for a city that got axed from the schedule due to poor attendance. This is pretty phenomenal for city with a population of 50,000. This would be a good number for an event in NYC or Boston!

So, for anyone who thinks that Vermont has nothing but farmers, hippies and ski bums as it's population, think again!

 Vermont SQL Server User Group

Thanks to hard work by Chris Pels and his posse, you can now register for Code Camp 6 (as attendees and to submit sessions as a speaker).

www.thedevcommunity.org

It's Saturday & Sunday, Oct 21 - Oct 22

In the past month, I have made a number of short trips that allowed me to get away with a small carry-on bag. My big problem was that I couldn't bring toothpaste with me. I hated the idea of buying toothpaste at my destination, using a touch of it and then throwing it away. I even felt guilty doing the same with teh travel-sized toothpaste that the hotels gave me. Use a small amount and then it gets thrown away. The packaging is my real issue - I am always at odds with the convenience of our disposable habits.

On the other hand, the hassle of checking my bags just so I could have toothpaste.

My deodorant is a solid, my face soap is a bar, hotels have shampoo and I don't wear make-up. So it was really just the toothpaste that was making me dizzy.

So I was happy to see this today even though my next three trips are long ones that I will be checking my bag for anyway.

I was flipping through a magazine and getting lots of great programming advice from the article highlights. Then I realized I wasn't even looking at a coding magazine! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Sometimes I feel like I learn .NET one little method at a time. Today I had to do something I'd never done before and the solution was not obvious at first. [Read more ....]

[A DevLife post]

The leaves are wierd this year, so if you plan to come to Vermont to see them, definitely check out the official website to get you in the right place at the right time.

http://www.vermontvacation.com/seasons/fall.asp?bfp090601

I was looking on the United Airlines website at the prices of possibly flying to Seattle in December and had to laugh when this option popped up in the list.

For those of you who are comma challenged, this translates to 14,763,950 dollars. Oh, and this is in Economy. I wonder what the Business Class version of this flight costs?

PKC Corporation (which is a very cool company with a product developed by a man who is constantly rumored to be a Nobel prize-winner, which would be deserved, but he's not really) in Burlington is looking for a Sr. Web Developer, a Sr. Software Developer and a Technical Writer. They are a .NET shop and have been so for many years.

Find the details here (note the aspx extension on the page ).

Company
Founded in 1998, Sageworks, Inc., a Research Triangle Park-based firm, is one of the fastest-growing software and information companies in the United States. The firm has many Fortune 500 clients as well as over 4,000 accounting and financial institution customers. The company's recently patented artificial intelligence technology is the first in the World to convert financial data/numbers into concise, plain-language evaluations of business performance. To learn more, visit our corporate website at www.sageworksinc.com.

Environment
Sageworks is comprised of focused and results-oriented people who get things done. The people at Sageworks are very friendly and down-to-earth, but we are also committed to achieving our long-term objective - which is to fundamentally change the way people and companies gather and use financial data. As such, we work hard but we operate in a flat organizational structure where people are given great latitude and responsibility.

Job Qualifications
We are hiring talented software engineers to help us develop new products in the financial and banking markets. We are seeking highly motivated and intelligent software developers to help us leverage and build upon our core expert system. Experience in Microsoft technologies is required, .NET experience is a must. We seek developers who "code to live and live to code"; they must be passionate about software development. Finance and accounting experience is a plus.

Job Description
The position will require software development work:

1. The individual may perform testing/QA work initially as part of their job training.
2. The individual will perform the mundane (fix bugs) as well as the exceptional (build World Class applications).  

Technical Qualifications

.Net Framework, 1.0 & 2.0, OO methodology

C#, ASPX, JavaScript, XSLT, SQL Server 2005

The positions are located in Burlington, VT. Some travel to Raleigh, NC will be required.

Contact: Tim.Keogh@ProfitCents.com

The Vermont Software Developer Alliance had a fantastic meeting yesterday with 3 bank presidents and a partner from a Venture Capital fund as panelists in a discussion of "Positioning your company to get financing and capital investment". The room was packed with software business owners. While it was still somewhat fresh, I wrote down some of what I learned over here....

[A DevLife post]

VPN is affected by the worm protection setting of NAV 2006. There is no obvious way to allow VPN unless you can figure out what app drives it. I googled and read other forum posts for quite some time tonight - most of them complaining, no real solutions.

So turning off the worm protection in NAV is the only way I have been able to be able to continue using VPN since I updated NAV.

As it took a while to find any other info about this, I thought I would blog it to save someone else some time.

When I first moved to Vermont in Sept 1999, there were 3 or 4 highway moose accidents reported within a few weeks. I have fretted about them ever since when I am driving at night. I don't recall any bad accidents locally until seeing a news report today in the local paper. Some poor man was killed in a car accident on the highway near midnight last night.

My friends at Global Garage Sale outside of Burlington had an exciting day earlier this week when they sailed over the milestone of having sold over $1 million worth of other people's stuff on eBay. They are one of the hottest drop-off stores in the country and are getting ready to start franchising because they have a business model that is not only successful, but very socially responsible as well and that is a great combination. The local news station did a big item on them. I was proud like I was their momma!

I was driving home earlier this week on Route 17, facing the green mountains in the late afternoon. There is a section of the road where you see a sweeping view of the mountains that is like a big bowl. In the afternoon, the sun is hitting this wall of mountains. The afternoon glow combined with the colors of the changing leaves made the range radiate from foot to peak, north to south - completely red.

I pulled into the parking lot of a gas station to take a picture although a good chunk of the view is chopped off from that vantage point. So imagine seeing about the same as this mirrored on the left. Additionally, by the time I stepped out of my car and turned my camera on, the cloud cover had impacted the astonishing effect I had been looking at as I drove up the road. Still, this is pretty, even if it doesn't begin to capture what I was hoping to share. Most of this is Mount Abe, where we have gone hiking a few times recently.

On Thursday evening I gave a talk on WS Security Fundamentals in Dayton Ohio. One of the resources I point to is the PAG Guide on Securing Web Services. On the way home the next day, while sitting on the runway in PHL for 2 hours before taking off (uggh), I was reading the latest ASPNET Pro and Michele Leroux Bustamante's Under the Hood column was all about X509 cert management. It's great advice and I highly recommend it. It's the October 2006 issue which does not have all of its articles online.

Many developers who are starting up with programming message level security (eg with WSE or WCF) definitely have a learning curve when it comes to having to grok all of these bits and pieces of security tools that we have to work with - encryption, hashing, signing, certificates. I don't know how many times I have seen the question "where do I get a certificate" in the wse newsgroups. Heck, I had the same question myself once. And it was a lot of work to wrap my head around all of this crypto stuff.

So.... if you get ASPNET Pro or you can grab a copy at your local user group, check it out.

I'm going to send this to the sysadmin that works with one of my clients. I spent three months trying to explain to him why I needed a server certificate that was not going to be used for SSL. Aargh. Message level security seems to be a bit of an oxymoron to IT Pros.

(from their press release)

DevReach 2006 debuts in Bulgaria

The conference is the first of its kind to be held on the Balkans, focused on the latest trends in building software applications with Microsoft development tools.

SOFIA, Bulgaria – September 04, 2006 – National Academy for Software Development - a private education center, specializing in professional training of software engineers, and Telerik Corporation - a leading vendor of UI and data components for ASP.NET, announced today the DevReach conference to be hosted in Bulgaria with the sponsorship of Microsoft Corporation.

DevReach conference is the first of its kind to be held on the Balkans, focused on the latest trends in building software applications with Microsoft development tools.

Over two days, more than 500 attendees will meet 12 world famous lecturers, engaged all year round in such events as TechEd, VSLive!, Microsoft DevDays showcasing their latest knowledge in creating more reliable, scalable and secure solutions using Microsoft technologies in more than 20 technical sessions.

DevReach will be held at the International Exhibition Center on October 9-10 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference is hosted by National Academy for Software Development and sponsored by Telerik Corporation and Microsoft Corporation.

DevReach is the premier development event on the Balkans, featuring in-depth exposure to the latest Microsoft development technologies and a chance to interact with other members of the developer community.

Teodor Milev, managing director of Microsoft Bulgaria is scheduled to deliver a keynote presentation unveiling the latest Microsoft platform innovations for developers.

Keynote highlights also some industry-recognized innovators, including Plamen Vatchkov, chairman of the State Agency of Information Technologies and Communications, Nikolay Vassilev, minister of Public Administration and Administrative Reform, and others.

Developers at DevReach can benefit from sessions arranged in 3 parallel tracks that present vital information on important topics such as best techniques for accessing data with SQL Server and ADO.NET, writing high performance and extensible ASP.NET sites, writing secure and efficient .NET applications in integration with 2007 Office System and SharePoint.

As a part of the event attendees have the unique chance to participate in technology “Question & Answer” forums and network with more than 10 world known gurus in software development with Microsoft tools.

The target of the event is to become a place for passionate Microsoft developers from Eastern Europe to get in touch with the latest trends and to become a significant part of the global community.