These jobs are for Competitive Computing (aka "C2"). They are a Gold Partner and have some big name clients.

C# is a must for both jobs

Senior Software Engineer/Technical Architect

We are seeking a senior level software engineer/technical architect to lead design, architecture and development of custom application development solutions for large client projects. The successful candidate will have previous experience with ASP.NET (C#) development, with a strong background in web based development, object oriented concepts, relational database design and SQL Server development.  Strong hands on application architecture and designs skills are required for the position, with excellent written and verbal communications. Previous experience on large client projects and technical presentation skills are a plus. Bachelor's degree preferred, associate's degree considered, along with 5-7 years experience in an application development environment.

This is a unique opportunity to work in a highly collaborative team environment, on large challenging client projects, and offers significant growth potential for the successful candidate.

This has been on my mind for a while.... read more

[A New DevLife Post]

Tomorrow I am flying to Seattle then speaking tomorrow night at the Bellingham.NET User Group (which is even closer to the Canadian border than where I live) and then Thursday night at South Sound.NET in Olympia.

Thanks to my pal Camey Combs for suggesting the trip and to INETA and user group leaders Paul Mehner and Andy Robinson for making it all happen. Apparently, Camey and Paul have been promoting the heck out of this.

At Bellingham, I'll be presenting on LINQ to SQL and all the fun ASP.NET databinding you can do with it. In Olympia I'll be doing a 6 hour overview of ADO.NET Orcas. Just kidding. I wish I had all that time to talk about ADO.NET! Alright, so I will try to keep it under 4 hours. No? Nobody wants to stay at a user group until 10pm. How about 2 hours? Heck, I've done it in 75 minutes and 90 minutes in the past (and 2 hours and 15 minutes also). We'll see how it goes... [evil laugh].

LOCK THE DOORS!

Yay yay yay. I am not sure when this happened, but I just discovered that Pablo Castro will be doing the keynote at DevTeach (Montreal, May 14-18) and not surprisingly, he'll be talking about the Entity Framework. More here.

We have had some gorgeous snow reappear in the past week. Friday was an historic powder day at Mad River. I went on Friday and skiid like sh*t. I was so disheartened. Rich went yesterday and came home to say it was the best skiing of the year. Since it snowed more last night and today; and since Mad River was allowing weekday pass holders to ski for free this weekend,  Rich and I went again today.

On our first run, Rich took me into the woods. I'm a bit of a scaredy cat in the woods but, while I didn't swoosh straight down through the trees, I didn't have to pause and get my courage up between every turn like I usually do. It was actually fun. And nice powder!

Then when we hit the trails, something amazing happened. I started skiing the way I know I can ski, but rarely  seem to pull off except on the groomers. I ski on telemark skis - freeheel. I switched over from being a very experienced and confident alpine skiier of 30+ (on and off) years to tele about 5 years ago but never really regained my confidence.

But today my ski legs returned and I was just bopping down the hill doing what felt right. When I looked at (and blogged about) this great video of some tele guys at Mad River from Friday earlier today, it nearly made me cry to see these guys skiing the way I know I should be skiing. Perhaps it was watching that video and keeping that in my head, rather than the image of me really sucking! Who knows. But that's how I finally got to ski today and it just feels so good!

If only I had been skiing more frequently this year and this had happened earlier, because sadly, today was the last day of the season for Mad River.

So next winter, I have to start all over again. Oh well. At least I can end this season with a big smile!

I finally noticed that Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 corrected two of the problems that I've mentioned in previous articles and blog posts about ClickOnce. read more...

[A new DevLife post]

I was there in the incredible (not very eastern-skiing-like) powder on Friday, but didn't stay long and had to come back home for a conference call. This is how I dream of skiing, but I don't come close.

As someone who flies quite a lot, I am always interested in stories and news about airline flights. Today's CNN story about a Northwest flight out of Las Vegas being cancelled because the pilot (I can't believe this, yes the pilot!) was causing a disturbance (swearing up a storm and even at the passengers) that resulted in the police being called. Definitely something not right there and obviously, not at all normal. Talk about killing your career.

The fact that the flight was cancelled and the 180 passengers are now stuck in Las Vegas as a result of this definitely sucks.

They probably wouldn't be in the mood to watch this hilarious t.v. ad for the psycho stewardess who is trying to quit smoking. I wonder if that is what was wrong with the pilot?

I have definitely not had either of these experiences when flying.

There are a lot of us who have been looking forward to this show being posted: Daniel Simmons on ADO.NET Entity Framework. Now I have to find some time this weekend to listen to it. Roger Jennings has a fantastic analysis of the show here. While at DevConnections, Richard and Carl were talking about how much fun this show was to do. They didn't know anything about Entity Framerwork when they started and were definitely fascinated with it. I'm glad that more people are going to get exposed to EF!

Here is a link to Danny's blog.

At what point in a project do you start wanting to grab the remote and start flipping the channels? Camey Combs talks about losing that loving feeling on a recent project which, until then, had been filled with intriguing challenges. read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

Mad River Glen (which is open today since we had a big dump of snow and it's beautiful out and I'm tortured because I need to work... uggh) is going to begin a major restoration of it's historic and world famous Single Chair lift next week. To raise funds, they have been auctioning off the old chairs. The VERY LAST chair is now being auctioned off on eBay.

It's not often that one sees their name right next to Anders' (especially considering that I'm a VB programmer ), but check out this LINQ article in the  current issue of Redmond Developer News. While the focus is Anders and this great technology he and others (and always with a nod to Alan Griver) are bringing to Visual Studio .NET, I was asked to give some developer perspective.

I'd also like to say that I wasn't literally jumping up and down at PDC.

I know that I have had the same reaction when watching Scott Guthrie present on LINQ to SQL. I think I'm jumping up and down with joy, but truly my butt remained glued to the chair.

It was fun talking to Michael Schwarz about this, but I think I may have overwhelmed him with my geek technical perspective of LINQ from which he was trying to extract key points for dev managers. He seems to have done a great job.

Michael talked to another developer, VB guru Bill McCarthy who gave him a great analogy quoted at the end of the article.

A recent LINQ forum question asked about the differences between Linq to SQL and the Entity Framework.

This is the response that I wrote and thought I would surface it in my blog:

 Besides that Linq to SQL is only for SQL () one of the big differences is that the EDM is more flexible and more loosely coupled because of the 3-tiered model (conceptual layer, source schema and the mapping layer in between).  For example, you could have one conceptual layer and then multiple mapping layers that point to mulitple databases. In LINQ to SQL, your dbml properties are tightly bound directly to one particular field in a table.

While these are not in the March 2007 CTP, EDM is getting the ability to build views of the conceptual layer as well as to write stored procedures in the mapping layer. These are really cool features. I don't believe you can do this with Linq to SQL, but a) I could be mistaken and b) that may be something that is forthcoming.

In addition to Linq to Entities, Entity SQL can be used to query entities. This can be either through the object services API or the Entity CLient (the one which gives you connections/commands and results in a dbDataReader). Entity SQL, while not as elegant as using the strongly typed LINQ, has the advantage of enabling dynamic queries, since you use a string to build a query, much like TSQL.

Both Linq to SQL and EDM allow inheritance and extending the code generated class with addtional partial classes. EF allows many to many relationships. I believe that LINQ to SQL will NOT be getting this by RTM.

These are just a few points and hardly exhaustive. But to me they are the low hanging fruit.

My latest asp.netPRO article is about ink-enabling web sites and is aimed at web developers who are new to the ink APIs for TabletPC development.

I LOVE the cover they did for this issue. Coooooool, huh?

Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati has a book on LINQ that he wrote against very early bits. When the March 2007 CTP came out, he blogged a list of things that he discovered had changed in LINQ syntax that required updates to his book. The list is handy if you have code even from the January CTP.

I used to hate flying. It still terrifies me to tempt gravity and nature so. But I have to fly a lot since I go to conferences and user groups all over the place. One of my tricks is that I love to get a window seat and look out at the amazing view.

Today I flew back from Orlando where I had just been at DevConnections (which I wrote about here). I flew from Orlando to Washington Dulles, then from there a short 1 hour flight home to Burlington, Vermont. Because it was a short flight, we were in a small plane and flying low. It was a fabulously goregous sunny day. I slept for the first bit of it but then woke up whe the pilot said "if you look to your right, you'll see a great view of NYC". I was on the left so I was looking at Newark. However as we got a little further north, it got better and better.

I lived in the Hudson Valley for 8 years prior to moving to Vermont. I was also quite in love with the Hudson River. My favorite bike rides were ones where I rode my bike across some of the many bridges that span the Hudson. Eventually, we were following the Hudson as we headed north and it was right out my window. By the time we got over Poughkeepsie, I was able to identify so much of what I was seeing because they were places I have spent a lot of time. I was able to see New Paltz and the Shawagunks. Then Rhinebeck which led to something that made my heart jump. I quickly followed the road out of Rhinebeck with my eyes and made my way to the house that I lived in for a very wonderful 6 years of my life (okay, that's discounting an icchy boyfriend that lived there with me for a short while (but hindsight's 20-20, right?). I couldn't really see the house, but I saw what was my pond when I lived there and filled in the rest of the view from memory.

I kept my eyes peeled to the landscape all the way to Burlington. Up the Taconic and Hudson river, the Hudson bridge and the town of Hudson. The Castskills (where I have spent a lot of time not only hiking and winter climbing, but bicycling through as well in my "former life") then Albany , the Adirondacks, Lake George and finally Lake Champlain. Even flying over Vermont, it was easy to pick out the place we put in to paddle Dead Creek, the Addison County Fairgrounds, Snake Mountain, Vergennes, Shelburne Bay and Shelburne Farms. Then finally Burlington. It was a pretty boundy landing due to some strong winds, but we did it safely and I got to drive home on some of the same roads that I had been watching from my birds' eye view.

I wish I could have filmed the entire thing, but hopefully by blogging it, I'll be able to come back and enjoy the memory here.

I was heads down prepping for DevConnectiosn last week and missed this post from Beth Massi. This is fabulous news, not just for Beth but for anyone who is a fan of the VB Developer Center (and all the new fans that I'm sure she will attract). Beth is one of the most energetic people I know and she's scary smart, too!

Congrats Beth!!

Thursday, March 22, 2007 6:27 PM
Yes, I swallowed the red pill, drank the koolaid, been assimilated, whatever...
That's right folks, I joined Microsoft on Monday! (Right after the MVP summit, of course.) I'm very excited about my new position writing content for the Visual Basic Developer Center and promoting the Visual Basic language in the community. I'm still getting all set up over here but stay tuned!!!...

Here's her new blog: blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi

I am at DevConnections where I was VERY excited to see Brian Dawson (ADO.NET team) do not one but TWO Entity Framework talks on Monday.

Brian has a newer build than what we are working with in the March CTP and I saw some stuff that made me wanna whine "gimme gimme".

• SPAN - calling span on an entity sql query will force the ObjectContext to load up an object's entire hieriarchy without having to call Load after the fact to get related data. This seems to be available in Object Services but not through Linq to Entities. Hopefully an Extension Method will be created for Linq to Entities to give us access.
• The EDM Wizard will display Views and Stored Procedures when building an EDM from a database. Then these will be part of the schemas.
• Referential Contraints will work the way you would expect. For example if your db has a referential constraint to delete child records when a parent is deleted, EDM will pick those up. I don't know the details here but am assuming we will have some granular control over this.
• ToList may not be necessary in the future and serialization will be implicit.
• Beta 2 will have something (new to me) called IPOCO... Interface for Plain Old CLR Objects
• QueryViews - ooh baby ooh baby. Create your own views in the mapping layer.
• Associations between sub types.
• There will be a way to convert existing strongly typed datasets to entity schemas. Unfortunately either Erick (who I got this from) misunderstood the question or I misunderstood the question or I misunderstood the answer. Darn.

At the same time as DevConnections, VSLive was happening in San Francisco. (Quite unfortunate scheduling...) Britt Johnston did a keynote and showed [a video of] the latest prototype of the EDM Modeler and also let us know that it won't be ready for Orcas but they plan to release it shortly (?) (well the quote from the ADONET blog post is literally "sometime") after Orcas. This is really frustrating, but it is just the reality and as developers we know the difficulties of designing tools... so it is what it is and until we have it, I will learn a LOT with the XML and personally hold off on doing any seriously complex modeling.

See the ADONET Team blog and Data Blog for more on Britt's keynote and links to the screencast on where the modeler is at today.

I did my ADO.NET Orcas overview talk yesterday to a full room (not a huge room, but still all the seats were filled which was great given that Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell were doing a live DotNet Rocks show with Scott Guthrie at the same time!). I love talking about this stuff even if I never seem to have enough time for all the cool stuff I wish I could show.

If you forget to run particular apps (and I'm talking about key development tools) as an administrator,  you may find yourself, as I did, spending a lot of time trying to solve the wrong problem! Read more

[A New DevLife Post]

I want to preface this by saying that I worked at Synergy when I first moved to Vermont and think the world of this company!!

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Synergy Software Technologies Inc. is a dynamic, fun and exciting software company located just outside of Burlington, Vermont.   Synergy has been in business since 1992 and is a leader in software for human services organizations with over 5000 installations across the country.  We are rapidly expanding our product line and have an immediate opening for an experienced MS SQL Server DBA. 

This position requires a strong knowledge of MS SQL Database Administration on Windows 2003 platforms running in a clustered environment.  Responsibilities include optimization and performance tuning, monitoring and maintenance of customer databases, development of scripts, documentation and procedures for database administration within testing and production environments and working with our development and technical support departments on resolution of database-related issues.  The successful candidate must be a self-starter with the ability to establish priorities and work independently.  Crystal Reports experience a plus.

Synergy offers a relaxed, fun working environment, and an opportunity to be part of a team working with the latest technologies in a high-growth area.  We are leaders in the market segment that we serve, and expect continued rapid growth over the next several years.  This is an opportunity for a creative, aggressive DBA to have a significant impact on our business.  Come grow with us!

Interested candidates must submit a complete package, including cover letter, resume, and salary requirements to ddap@synergysw.com.  Incomplete packages will not be considered.  Please do not submit system generated resumes.  Due to the typical volume of applicants, we will only be in contact with those candidates that we wish to interview.

Synergy Software Technologies Inc is an Equal Opportunity employer.