I was looking at Vista side bar gadgets on live.com and noticed gadgets for 2008 presidential hopefuls. While Hillary and Obama's are for your myspace or live blogs where others may be somehow inspired by your early choice in candidates, the mcCain one is a sidebar gadget. So if I were a McCain supporter, i could share that fact with my dogs, cat and husband who are the only ones that might be in my office.

There are about 350 people already registered for Code Camp in Waltham, MA Mar 31-Apr 1st. There is also room for more sessions! I just added a chalk talk because I thought it would be fun to open up the Entity Data Model schemas and explain what the heck is going on there.

You do not have to have a completely prepared powerpoint presentation to do a chalk talk. Just an idea, a computer and some working knowledge of the topic and then just go with the flow, which is driven by everyone in the room.

CODE CAMP 7 - more info here

There are some great questions bubbling up in the forums. THe ADO.NET team is busy in these discussions as well as writing some good blog posts on Entity Framework. Here's the current run down...

[A DevLife post]

Kate Gregory pointed to a blog post by Microsoftie, Darren Strange, who just plain old had a bad day. An experienced presenter, he was well aware that he was in a downward spiral, but just couldn't seem to do anything about it. (Probably not as bad as what he describes.) The hardest part about when talks go south is picking up your ego and moving ahead.

I had a horrible conference experience (that I considered confessing to, but decided to keep a little bit of my pride in tact) and not only had to face myself (and my scores, and the people who had so kindly brought me to speak at the conference) but I had to present a week later at another conference, a sizable one, at that. Believe me, I did not want to. Not at all. But of course, I had a commitment to fulfill and I had to work hard to find the courage to go forward with it.

This was really really hard to do. It made me question if I should even be presenting. (Okay, I question that prior to every speaking commitment I have ever made (and after reading one negative eval, even if it's surrounded by many positive ones).)

My choices were to just go totally dark or turn my bad bad experience into a series of lessons. I thought long and hard about everything that did not go well, the reason for each of these problems and what I was going to do from then on to avoid each and every one of them.

I was also fortunate to have the ears (and the shoulders) of other folks who do a lot of presenting (such as Kate) to pat my poor ego a little and remind me why I present in the first place - because I really love sharing what I have learned.

I stress out prior to every opportunity I have to humiliate myself publically. Wouldn't you?  

Susan Wisowaty and Glen Gordon were angels earlier this week when the normally routine (2 minute) installation of Live Meeting that I had inevitably put off (this wasn't my plan, of course) to only 1/2 hour prior to the GeekSpeak webcast just would not work. Finally I turned off UAC, rebooted my computer, ran the install yet again and was finally ready about 30 seconds before we went live. Those two, who are serious pros, were cool as cucumbers, professing basically that it was "all good" and even if I just talked about ADO.NET without showing any code (and believe me, I could do that for  hours and hours) it would still be fun. Of course, in the end, the event flew by and it was a blast and hopefully it was beneficial for listeners.

We're really looking forward to this. Gov Douglas will be featured at the next VTSDA Meeting: A Discussion on the Vermont Software Sector and its role in Vermont's Economy.

More info at http://www.vtsda.org/meetings/

I remember trudging through piles of snow when I was little, knocking on my neighbor's doors taking (and then delivering) cookie orders.

Now if I want cookies, I have to go track them down. I just discovered that there's a list of where I can buy them all over vermont this week. (I just happened to think of it and it just happened to be this week!)

VTdotNET had our Vista launch event at last night's meeting and we had a blast. There were about 35 people there (which is a crowd for us!). TEKSystems brought us piles and piles of fabulous pizza and two VTdotNET members, Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr gave great presentation.

Mike, who owns two of our favorite local stores in Burlington (Kiss the Cook and Apple Mountain where he has built their POS system) covered WorkFlow, WCF and WPF. Mike teaches software classes at Vermont Tech as well. WF is a hard thing for many developers to grasp at first, especially when it isn't solving a big problem that they have been struggling with. There are many who see it and say "oh, what I've always needed!" and others who just don't get it. I was in the latter camp at first and could tell there were plenty feeling that way last night. One thing I like to share with folks like me is that the fact that people who I have a lot of respect for, such as Kathleen Dollard, are VERY VERY excited about WF. She is doing a full day session on it at DevConnections. I figure if Kathleen things it's huge, then it's huge and that I need to pay attention to it.

Mike built a basic hello world server and a client  to call it with WCF so people could just see the working parts, get the most basic concepts and see that it works. After this he demo's Expression Web and showed an awesome iPod-like interface that when he hovered the mouse over the center circle (moving it around the circle), the volume went up and down, just like on an iPod. Very cool stuff.

Next up was Rob, who makes the University of Vermont School of Business Administration tick. Before he got started, I made him show Flip3D on his computer. There are plenty that hadn't seen it yet, so there was a fun reaction! Rob covered Vista security and then gave us a great presentation on CardSpaces, which I think nobody in the group has seen before. There's an article on CardSpaces in MSDN Magazine this month (April and it's not online yet, but I have it in my hands!) by Michele Leroux Bustamante.

After the meeting, we raffled off the swag that Microsoft sent as part of this launch event. The highlight was five Vista Business licenses,then there were things like pens, zipper pulls and mouse pads - silly stuff. I was really pleased that a woman who lives in Souther Vermont (over 2 1/2 hours away) and has never been to a meeting before was one of the Vista winners.

Thanks to Mike and Rob for all of the work they did preparing these sessions. And thanks to Elizabeth Rudolph at TEKSystems for not only sponsoring the pizza & soda, but picking it up, bringing it to the meeting and setting it all up.

It wasn't obvious to me how to do this (hey, I've admitted worse embarrassments on this blog before...) so here's the scoop...

A DevLife post

My main machine has so many old apps on it that I don't want to install .net 3.0 there. Now that I have my other dev box set up on Vista, I can easily check out all of Charles Petzolds cool WPF demos that he posts on his blog! (Such as today's 3D shadow test.)

If you are not on the email list to receive the monthly newsletter for INETA NORAM  you can always find them at www.ineta.org/newsletters.

Scott Spradlin does a great job putting this together as editor. I do the speaker interviews each month, something I started when I was the editor. This month I got the dirt (that's dirt bike dirt) on Chris Kinsman. Check it out.

I know that this cartoon in the New Yorker this week sadly comes close to home to many people that I know.

Tomorrow night Patti Smith is being inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Rock on.

The first three days of the week are busy ones!

On Monday, Vermont.NET is having it's Vista/.NET 3.0 Launch meeting. Local brainiacs Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr will be presenting (after months of working with the Vista Launch team as part of the big user group roll out) and we'll have 5 Windows Vista licenses to give away (plus free pizza & soda thanks to TEKSystems, who recently opened up an office in Burlington).

Tuesday is the TEchNet/MSDN Event in Burlington. It's a day of training on Vista and Office 2007 products, with the morning focused on IT Pros and the afternoon for developers. Susan emailed me yesterday to say that they will be giving away Office 2007 licenses at the MSDN event!!!

I'll be missing that though because I'll be driving down to Albany to give a presentation to the Tech Valley .NET User Group about ADO.NET Orcas. Thanks to INETA for sponsoring this trip.

Then I drive back on Wednesday do to a GeekSpeak show with Susan Wisowaty (who is doing the MSDN event on Tuesday) and Glen Gordon. They were kind enough to move the time to later in the afternoon so that I'd be back from Albany on time and ready for action.

GeekSpeak is a lot more free-form than a typical webcast and I'm not sure what to expect. I'll have the new CTP of ORCAS open and I guess we'll poke around Entity Framework and the three LINQ to ADO.NET techs (LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities nad LINQ to DataSet). And the most fun part is that I'll be doing this with hosts Glen Gordon (who I did a webcast with on ADO.NET 2.0 topic a few years ago) and Susan Wisowaty (who lives right here in Burlington!), from the MSDN Events team.

More info and registration here

I'm building out two Vista boxes today. One is a new tablet and the other is my Dell XS280 with a brand new hard drive. Read more...

A DevLife post

Erick Thompson from Microsoft followed up on a thread about where ToDataTable went in the march CTP. http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1300671&SiteID=1

Police said witnesses reported seeing two males walking on **** at about noon. One of the men was carrying flat screen television; the other was carrying a large duffel bag.

Officers arrived within minutes and found the duffel bag and television behind another house on *****. They followed a set of tracks in the snow and within minutes, officers found *** and ***, who has been under the supervision of the state Department of Corrections.

Press Release

March 7th, 2007

Vermont Software Developers' Alliance

http://www.vtsda.org

*** Governor James Douglas will be making a presentation at a Vermont Software Developers' Alliance event on March 21. ***

Governor James Douglas will be making remarks about the Vermont Software Development sector and its role in Vermont's economic future.  We've also been informed that he has plans to make a very special announcement regarding the vtSDA.

This event will be held on Wednesday, March 21st 2007 from 11:30am to 1:30pm at the Sheraton Burlington Hotel and Conference Center.  The governor is scheduled to speak at 12:00pm sharp, for about 20 minutes. 

Mike Quinn, Commissioner of Economic Development and Pat Moulton, Commissioner of Labor, will follow the Governor's remarks with a presentation and Q&A period about the Vermont business environment, specifically relating to the software industry.

Please, accept our invitation to attend this very exciting event for the vtSDA and the future of software development in the state of Vermont. We anticipate having 30-40 owners and executives of local software development firms in attendance, as well as a number of government and media representatives.

The details of the event are still being finalized. Once we have gathered all the appropriate information we will issue a follow-up announcement.

Questions? Please email us at marketing@vtsda.org

It was -14.7 F at 7am this morning. It has warmed up to -7 right now (8:30am). The thermometer said it got as cold as -15.2 last night. BRRRRRRRRR.

I've noticed that the posts on the ADO.NET and LINQ forums for Orcas have completely subsided after a flurry over the weekend. I guess everyone had to get back to work!