Lots of news in the last few days! Here's a list of all that has rtm'd and what is finally very imminent: read more...

[A DevLife post]

Who else but the energetic Stephen Forte! HEre's his account of running yesterday's marathon. Now he's on his way to TechEd Barcelona. I'm on my way to speak at DevConnections in Las Vegas. But my marathon was a marathon weekend of sitting in front of my computer.

Getting SqlDependency to work takes an enormous amount of orchestration up front - especially with regards to SQL Server permissions. Steve ran into a problem which made SqlDependecy work only intermittently. He finally got to the bottom of it (was related to the dbo owner) and has blogged about it here.

Something to write home about! 

(It's my mom)

Torn between wanting to just get 'er done and wanting to have a complete comprehension of everything that is going on under the covers? That's the line I have to constantly wrangle with when giving conference presentations and it's truly hard to please everyone, though I do know who I'm aiming for. Read more...

[A DevLife post]

DevConnections is this coming up this week! Here are some last minute things to know about.

The registration is unbelievable this year. There are nearly 5000 people registered for the combined shows. More stats: 190 speakers and held in a convention center that is literally one million square feet!

1. If it's not too late, don't forget to vote before you leave! Check with your town clerk ASAP.
2. There's a Women in I.T. Lunch on Thursday for attendees and speakers. Space is limited, so sign up for it when you register.
3. Bring your suit! You may find some time to enjoy the beach and big pools at the Mandalay before, between or after sessions. The weather is looking great - low 80's and sunny during the days.
4. Bring comfortable shoes since you'll be doing a lot of walking. Not that I've ever seen a programmer in high heels.
5. Evening activities
   1. Monday Keynotes 6:30 - 8:30pm
   2. Tuesday 5-7pm reception in Expo Hall
   3. Tuesday 7:15 - 9:15 Microsoft Unplugged for attendees of ASP.NET/SQL/Mobile Connections (w/pizza & beer)
6. If you've never been to Las Vegas, get a pass for the local 2 decker bus that drives all the way up the strip and back. The strip itself is 4 miles and ends at the Stratosphere, but the bus goes past that and through the old downtown, too.  It's $5 for a whole day (just pay for the pass as you get on the bus) and seeing the strip at night is a must. I only did this for the first time last year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Strip
7. I've never done it but have constantly heard that the last minute tickets to the Vegas shows are the way to go as they are heavily discounted. I think the deal is just walk up to the ticket window shortly before the show. Something to consider. 

We have gone to see the Telluride Mountain Film Festival for hte past few years because it comes to us. It will be in four locations in Vermont this year - Burlington, Waitsfield, South Royalton and Middlebury - during the month of November. Luckily I'll be back from DevConnections in time to see it in Waitsfield, which is near where I live. Here's the schedule.

One of my clients rolled out the Beta version of their big project this week - a public website with brilliant plumbing that allows end users to build their own interactive floorplans and maps. Drop your map or plan onto the site, upload pictures that represent views of different locations on the map/plan (a bedroom, a vista on a trail map), link them up, type in some descriptions and voila - you have a beautiful end product that any user can easily navigate. There are no refreshes to bring the various pictures up and I'm not talking AJAX style partial post backs. The photos just transparently change on the page.

It was a major undertaking and is all done in asp.net 2.0. I did not do the site, but mentored them through a good chunk of the process. It was wonderful to work with folks who were not only software smart, but their level of attention to the user experience was hugely impressive to me.

It's called MapsAlive.

Go check it out and it's a beta - so feedback is appreciated!

Here's a screenshot of the home page.

I was on a flight yesterday that required a re-boot of the plane's computer system. Huh? [Read more ... ]

[A DevLive post]

Rich and I went to a halloween costume party this past weekend. I did something I've always wanted to do - put wire in my braids to make them stick out so I can be Pippi Longstocking. My hair is a little long for doing this which made it hard to get through doorways and a little dangerous to walk around the party. Rich was a villanous Vampire.

The U.S. elections are Nov 7th. There are two big conferences next week in our community: TechEd Europe in Barcelona, Spain and DevConnections in Las Vegas, Nevada.

If you are leaving home for these events, don't forget to vote before you go!

In Vermont, absentee voting is allowed for 30 days prior to the elections. I'm not sure how this differs in other states. Here, you can get an absentee ballot in the mail from your town clerk (which needs to be back to the town clerk by Nov 6th, or to the polling place by 7pm on Nov 7th) or just go there and vote. I went to the town office and just sat down and voted there.

It didn't occur to me to do this until about a week ago even though I've known for a long time that I'd be gone. I just hadn't put two & two together!

In "blogtime" this is old news, but I just caught that John Lam is joining Microsoft to work on the CLR team, "to help bring the love of dynamic languages out to the statically typed heathens ". Great news!

I've been helping a client deal with a website that we think was designed by DOS programmers. [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Noah Coad was a  student ambassador and an MVP when I first met him a few years ago. You could easily describe him as a young, eager, bright and clean-cut kid.

So was Ian Ceicys!

I see both of them occasionally at Microsoft events such as the MVP Summit or TechEds, 

Both of these young men got sucked up by Microsoft when they graduated from college.

(I am feeling older with every sentence - egad!)

I don't think I have ever seen them together which is the likely reason that somehow they had blended into the same person in my mind.

When I saw Ian at the New England Code Camp last weekend and asked him why he was in Boston and how his Microsoft job was going, he gave all the right responses - it could have just as easily been Noah - which is the mistake I made. I even blogged about it. Oops.

So here I am putting their pics side by side and now the difference is a little more obvious! Sorry guys!

Now that the "Click to Active and Use this Control" is a fixed part of IE7, web developers have to pay more attention to the problem. I got bit by it because I'm embedding winform controls into web pages to do Ink on the Web. Here are some pointers to what we can do to not share this grief with people visiting our websites.  [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

This was one of the early highlights of our trip to Bulgaria. Chalga-Man!

Click on the image to see and hear Chalga-Man in action!

Though we selfishly were sad to see Thom Robbins leave the D.E. position for New England, the local community was thrilled to see him move to an awesome new job at Microsoft. But the big question was who on earth could fill his shoes?

Happily, Thom has made a wonderful choice in a successor. Chris Bowen, a local developer who has been very involved in the community and someone for whom I have always had a ton of respect, will be our new D.E.

Thanks Thom! Thanks Chris!

Code Camp 6 was this past Saturday. It started out with a somewhat nervewracking 200 mile drive to Waltham due to torrential rainstorms and high winds. But I had a fun companion in the car who kept me well entertained throughout - Dave Burke, who was ridiculously kind when I was adamant that we needed to go south on Route 91 (totally wrong) and let me get away with it for 10 miles before I let him convince me to turn around. I suppose it's one thing to deal with female logic when it's your wife, but a totally different conundrum when it's another chick.

When we arrived at the event on Saturday morning, I learned some wonderful news. Athough we are all sad to see Thom Robbins go (and thrilled at his new job at Microsoft) he made a fantastic choice for our new Developer Evangelist in Chris Bowen. Chris is a local guy who has been involved with the .NET community in Boston for a long time and is someone I have a huge amount of respect for. So I was very happy to hear this great news.

Since people quickly disappear into the conference rooms, it's always hard to tell how many are really there, but at lunch time, it certainly seemed like major swarms of people heading for the pizza. I did only two of my three talks. As I expected, the Persisting Ink on the Web talk, which I was hoping to practice prior to Mobile Connections in a few weeks was waaaaaay to narrow so nobody showed up. But the Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Websites and Moving Big Data with ADO.NET 2.0 talks were both well attended.

I spent most of my free time futzing with the impact of the "click here to activate and use this control" issue that is now a permanent part of IE7 and has a big impact on the embedded winforms controls that I use to do ink on the web, rather than sitting in on other talks, so I missed out on Richard Hale Shaw's C# talks where I'm sure he couldn't resist a dig or two against VB .

There were a bunch of VTdotNETters there which is always great to see.

The other very nice surprise was seeing Noah Coad who I have known for a number of years, originally through the MVP academic community. He has been at Microsoft for a while now (they scooped him up the day he graduated from college), but I didn't realize he had recently moved to the east coast. So I'm sure we'll be seeing more of him.

When all was said and done, Dave and I hopped in the car for the drive back to Vermont in what was thankfully great weather on a beautiful fall night.

DevConnections (combination of 6 conferences: ASP, Visual Studio, Mobile, Sharepoint, SQL Server and Office) is only a few weeks away. I'm going out to present 2 sessions for ASP Connections (Managing & Deploying ASP.NET 2 Sites and Asynchronous ASP.NET), one for Mobile Connections (an advanced Ink on the Web talk) and a 1/2 day post-conference workshop on Advanced ADO.NET 2.0.

I'm sorely disappointed that my flight schedule is having me miss the Monday night keynotes, especially this one that Scott Guthrie and Brian Goldfarb are giving: Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and ASP.NET AJAX.

There is going to be so much going on at DevConnections, including some Microsoft "hear it for the first time in the U.S.") announcements from Microsoft. I hope I don't end up holing myself up in my room trying to perfect my talks again (so that means they need to be perfect before I go to the airport! ). Of course, there's always the lure of the gambling tables and the girlie shows (just kidding - not really interested in either), but still Vegas is certainly a fun place to be when you do want to take a little break from the geek fest!