There is an Israeli contingent of speakers at DevTeach this year, bringing Udi Dahan, Oren Eini and Roy Osherove.  I was especially happy to meet Roy because after so many years of blogging, he is someone I feel like I've known for a long time! Here's proof that we were not only on the same continent, but in the same room!

I guess we can't call it ADO.NET Orcas any more.... I guess the right name will just be ADO.NET 3.5.

The DevTeach pre-con workshops are today. I am heading up tonight as the main conference is Tuesday through Thursday. Montreal in the spring - aaaah!

There's so much going on at DevTeach.

Tomorrow morning, Pablo Castro will be doing his keynote, which I'm looking forward to. He will follow up wiht a focus group on Entity Framework in the afternoon.

There is going to be a lively panel on OpenSource on Wednesday night as well as two Birds of a Feather sessions.. one on pair programming with Oksana Udovitsdka and Wendy Friedlander of Oxygen Media in NYC. I'm looking forward to meeting these two hip young women programmers even though I know I will stand next to them feeling like a frumpy old middle aged lady programmer.

I'll be doing three talks. One is on Hacking Click Once, based on my experiences I wrote about in this CoDe Magazine article. It's been hell getting this to gel with IIS7. I will also be doing a presentation on using the asynchronous features of ASP.NET 2.0 and then I will be talking about Entity Framework on Thursday afternoon.

I'm also looking forward to seeing Kate Gregory, who I haven't seen in way too long. Kate and I first met at the first DevTeach. We had each been told "you should meet..." and without having seen pictures of each other, we recognized each other immediately when we passed in a hallway. In fact there are many people that I met at DevTeach who have since become friends. It is a conference I truly look forward to every year.

In my short span betwee MIX and DevTeach (leaving tonight), I've been heads down playing with Silverlight's Inking capabilities and preparing for my DevTeach sessions and avoiding dealing with the delay of EF.

In the meantime, Roger Jennings continues to organize all of the info about ADO.NET Entity Framework into comprehensive posts such as this one.

Mike Taulty's library of LINQ to SQL videos has grown by orders of magnitude. Now he's posting LINQ to XML. When I see how many 15-20 minute videos it is taking Mike to demo and explain LINQ to SQL in a way that is satisfactory, it keeps making me laugh at the absurdity of covering whatever I can manage to squeeze into conference sessions that range from 60 - 90 minutes. Mike definitely has the right way to acheive this!!

An amazing panel of local experts will congregate  at Wednesday's Vermont Software Developer Alliance meeting.

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

12pm - 2pm, Courtyard Marriott Williston, Vermont

A discussion on climate change and what software companies can do to help slow it

This month's meeting brings together a panel of speakers who are experts in helping businesses to:

• Reduce energy consumption
• Recycle computers
• Properly dispose of electronic waste
• Leverage greener transportation options
• Buying greener products
• and more

More info at www.vtsda.org

Tonight we have two presentations at Vermont.NET.

Laura Blood from Blue Note Computing will present on Windows Services.

Mike Soulia, a guy of many hats: Vermont Tech teacher, owner of two great stores in Burlington (Apple Mountain and Kiss the Cook) and a consultant, will dig further into WPF and Expression.

Free pizza and soda sponsored by MyWebGrocer (who is actively looking for .NET developers).

It should be a fun meeting.

It will be the first meeting ever (5+ years) that I will miss since I am driving up to Montreal for DevTeach.

I've spent the good part of this lovely spring Sunday trying going around in circles with this problem. At least I have a workable solution for now.

[A new DevLife post]

We are a small design & development studio in Burlington, Vermont seeking a part time contract .NET mobile application developer (~20 hours/month on average). You would be responsible for helping to develop and maintain a mobile application using the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. Specific skill we are looking for include:

• C#
• .NET Compact Framework 2.0
• Mobile Client Software Factory
• Object-oriented analysis and design (OAD)
• Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• SQL Server 2005 Mobile
• Subversion/Trac

If you are a .NET developer interested in learning mobile application development, we may be willing to spend time training you on the specific skills above. Please email your resume and hourly contract rate to jobs@foundline.com.

MyWebGrocer seeks bright, motivated, energetic and inquisitive software developers. Projects vary from E-Commerce and Social Networks to Website development. We are a small dedicated team that is looking for both entry level and experienced developers which share our enthusiasm and dedication to developing market leading solutions. Areas in which we work involve ASP.NET, C#, SQL and scripting. Exposure to Web Services, SQL DTS, Flash and/or C++ considered a plus. Salary commensurate with experience.
 
Please send your resume and salary requirement to careers@mywebgrocer.com
 
MyWebGrocer, a privately held LLC, is the leading independent E-Commerce service provider to the American Grocery marketplace serving hundreds of retailers nationwide.

I've been heads down since MIX07 playing with the new ink object in silverlight. I have posted a sample with my tests and some of the code. Read more here.

[A New DevLife Post]

Inntopia is the leading provider of central reservation software solutions for the mountain travel market. Our rapidly growing client list includes the leading central reservation services in Telluride, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Winter Park, Crested Butte, Stowe, Lake Tahoe and many more.

Inntopia team members share a passion for their work, a love of outdoor adventures and a sense of humor.   We are experiencing explosive growth, and are looking to grow the team.

Inntopia offers a great benefits package, flex-time scheduling and highly competitive wages in our Stowe, Vermont office.

If you enjoy a fast-paced, fun work environment and think you are a good fit for our team, email a cover letter and resume to lisa@inntopia.com.

APPLICATION DEVELOPERS

REQUIRED TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE

4+ years experience in a majority of the following technologies:

• ASP.NET/C#
• SQL/T-SQL
• XML
• XSL/XPath
• AJAX / JavaScript
• XHTML/DHTML
• COM/DCOM
• SOAP/Web Services

SOFTWARE TOOLS

Familiarity with the at least 2 of the following development applications:

• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/2005
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005
• XMLSpy
• Visio

REQUIRED SKILLS

• Ability to design, develop and maintain software on Microsoft .NET platform.
• Ability to design and develop software in a group or independently.
• Comfort with direct communication with all levels of technical and business resources.
• Self-managing, self-motivated learner with good written and oral communication skills.

ADDITIONAL BENEFICIAL SKILLS

• Travel/hospitality industry experience

• Experience with high-volume transactional accounting systems (accounts receivable and accounts payable)
• Experience with complex pricing and commission structures
• Experience with security protocols (i.e. PCI Compliance and data encryption standards)
• Experience with software development process management.
• Experience developing multi-lingual web applications.

SENIOR SYSTEMS AND NETWORK ENGINEER

Inntopia is taking its infrastructure to the next level by implementing clustering technologies and moving to a multi-homed environment.  We are seeking an individual to help us design, implement and support this new infrastructure. 

REQUIRED TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE

4+ years experience in most of the following technologies:

·         Microsoft server operating systems and application servers (Windows 2003 Server, IIS 6.0, SQL Server 2000/2005, Exchange 2003)

·         Microsoft infrastructure support applications such as ADS, DNS, FRS

·         Microsoft clustering technologies

·         Microsoft .NET web application configuration and deployment

·         Layer-3 switched networking technologies and other related technologies (VLAN, HSRP, spanning tree, etc)

·         Firewall and other network security technologies

·         Routing technologies including WAN Routing Protocols such as BGP, OSPF and EIGRP

·         Hardware and software load balancing

·         Common network-based services such as LDAP, DNS, SNMP, SMTP, etc.

·         Linux operating system

·         Storage Area Networking (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS)

·         Application and SLA monitoring and reporting

·         SourceSafe

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

·         Serve as the lead technical role in the design, implementation, and maintenance of network hardware and related software and services

·         Participate in a team responsible for the design, implementation, and maintenance of network hardware and related software and services

·         Act as a subject matter expert on all networking-related technologies used in the Inntopia systems infrastructure, as well as a broad knowledge of applications and server-related technologies in place.

·         Contribute to the infrastructure design and planning process by delivering technical requirements and capacity analysis.

·         Coordinate with Software Development, Release Management teams and others to draft & approve detailed work plans and deployment schedules.

·         Work with vendors to help Inntopia.com maintain supported configurations for key platforms.

·         Provide technical advice and support for integrated third-party services such as credit card and payment processing and business partner data exchange.

·         Serve a significant hands-on role in implementation and ongoing support activities, including highly technical problem solving and/or performing technical direction for work done by Inntopia.com staff and vendors.

REQUIRED SKILLS

• Ability to negotiate with customers and business partners
• Ability to perform a combination of lead and supporting technical roles in multiple simultaneous projects
• Microsoft certifications (MCSE, etc) and Cisco certifications (CCNA, CCNP, etc) preferred

USER SUPPORT SPECIALIST

User Support Specialists are available to provide phone and email support to Lodging Companies, Activity Providers and Central Reservation Agents.

REQUIRED TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE

General familiarity with Internet Applications (Explorer, Outlook, etc)

SOFTWARE TOOLS

• Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, etc)

REQUIRED GENERAL SKILLS

• Certain degree of technical savvy.
• Great interpersonal and communication skills.
• Attention to detail.

ADDITIONAL BENEFICIAL SKILLS

• Travel/hospitality industry experience.
• Experience as a user of the Inntopia system.
• HTML or graphic design skills.

Esther Schindler sent me this link since she saw it came from a library in a small town in Vermont.

I never even heard of this linux based o/s (only because I really don't pay much attention... there's already too much for me to learn.). But the video says it all. Happy happy librarian.

IronPython, IronRuby, VBx.. what? "I-can't-get-no-respect"-VB is one of the cool new languages? Read more

[A New DevLife Post]

The Silverlight Beta 1.0 (golive) has a problem wtih Firefox and apparently it's a FF bug that creates the problem. It completely prevents the embedded Silverlight app from being displayed on a web page.

Eric Sowell has a post explaining the problem and points to this MSDN forum thread which suggests a workaround which is a temporary hack.

Yet another beatiful vermont photo for my desktop. This is Mt. Mansfield. The profile of Mt. Mansfield is a person's face. You can get the properly sized desktop here at Green Mountain Club. The photos are from local professional photographer, Paul Hansen, of Ecopixel. He prepares them each month with the calendar image.

When I lived North of Burlington, Mt. Mansfield was nearby for loads of hiking and back country skiing. There are so many trails.

Towards the left is the chin. In about the middle of the photo is the nose and then the right part of the mountain is the forehead. The chin is the highest point in Vermont. Next highest after that is Camel's Hump which is now our nearby mountain. We can see the peak of Camel's Hump from our house, but only under very specific circumstances. "Mountain views!"

It must have been the Bove's Pasta Sauce that keeps them coming back. Microsoft New England's Bob Familiar and Chris Bowen are back this week for another full day of fabulous and FREE .NET training.

REGISTER HERE!

Sheraton: 8:30am to 4:30 pm

Bob Dylan is my hubbie's A#1 favorite musician so I was very happy to get tickets online just as they went on sale this morning for his July 1st concert at the Champlain Valley Expo (aka the fairgrounds) outside of Burlington Vermont.

I can't wait until Rich gets home so I can tell him my big surprise! (Since he doesn't read my blog, I know the surprise is safe here...)

[originally posted March 16th. Reposted May 4th]

www.kdpyield.com

Web Developer - Montpelier, VT

Seeking an experienced Web developer. Most be proactive and detail-oriented, with strong QA and troubleshooting skills.

This is a full-time, permanent, on-site position, to be filled ASAP. Only serious candidates should apply. No contractors or recruiters, please.

Primarily responsibilities include:

- Coding new features for existing Web sites

- Troubleshooting existing Web sites for data and functionality issues

- Contributing to in-house tech support efforts

- Helping devise new technological strategies to improve company operations

Employer is a dynamic, medium-sized company with opportunities for learning and advancement. Position requires flexibility, a friendly attitude, and a willingness to contribute ideas. This is an environment where you can get substantive work done and be appreciated for it. New requirements and priorities come in all the time, so you should be able to shift gears as needed.

Necessary skills:

- Substantial experience in development of server-side Web applications

- HTML

- SQL (any flavor, e.g., MySQL, SQL Server/ISQL, Jet SQL, PL/SQL)

- Ability to work constructively as part of a team on multiple projects at once

- Good communication skills

Desirable skills (not strictly required):

- ColdFusion

- JavaScript

- .NET

- SQL Server development

- Visual SourceSafe

Experience in quality assurance, systems administration, or technical support is helpful.

Salary dependent on experience. Full benefits. Pleasant location in central Vermont, near State House.

Please send resume, cover letter, and (if available) links to sites on which you have worked to kdpjobs@kdpyield.com

These two incubator projects build on top of the Entity Framework. It's a very early look at what the data access team is working on. READ MORE HERE

[A New DevLife Post]

At MIX, attendees received a copy of Expression Studio, but rather than in it's standard pacakaging show here:

we received a commemorative edition which is pretty cool...

Now the challenge is to figure out how to use it!