I haven't revamped the code from the Virtual Earth site that I built using the first version of Virtual Earth and it seems to be quite broken now. I noticed the other day looking at someone else's V.E. site that the entire middle section of tiles was missing. The problem happens on my site as well. But worse, the functionality that I spent a LOT of hours to get working is also broken. This is the part that brings the tiles over to an inkable surface. Eventually, I'll have to retool and move it up to Windows Live Local speed. In my "free time".

Too bad I am going to be totally out of the office tomorrow. I guess I might need to attend the Virtual Earth Madness webcast!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here's a quick way to limit the number of items that you expose through the new RSSToolKit's RSSDataSource [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My 15 year old niece is visiting this week and her mission is to get me away from the computer. She's doing a great job. Yesterday we went (this is not something I'm very good at) shopping in downtown Burlington. It's really fun going to Victoria's Secret with a teenage girl. Hee hee. Today we are going to snowshoe up to a lean-to on the Bean Trail near my house. The Bean Trail is a side trail that leads up to the Long Trail. It's about 15 degrees out, so hiking uphill will keep us nice and toasty. Snowshoing? Yes. The snow has finally arrived....well a little bit at least. We have about 8 -10 inches of nice new snow but of course it's basically on top of grass and rocks since we lost all of our base. At least it looks pretty, though.

My mission while she is here is to expose her to different foods. Yesterday we went to a health food store so she could see that there are in fact more vegetables than broccoli and carrots. She has now had (and liked!!!) kale and red cabbage for the first time. We'll do veggie sushi. But she has definitely declined on the seaweed - something to do with seeing it on the beach too often. We'll see how far I get in a week. Heh. Tomorrow I think we will go to Montreal, though we'll have to pass on the city's famous smoked meat since she doesn't eat red meat.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

After a day of fiddling with the new Vista build on my tablet pc, here are a few rambling thoughts... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This is for EWA in Montpelier. They write software for the Department of Defense. I wish it weren't necessary, but it is ... and we might as well have the best and brightest on the job!!

Qualifications

The successful applicant will have a minimum of Bachelor of Science degree in Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Network Engineering, Management Information Systems, or Electrical Engineering with 7+ years experience in software specification, software design, programming (C, C++, .net), testing, and formal documentation. Excellent writing and verbal communication skills are a must. Network system administration experience and/or working knowledge of DoD software development practices are desired.

Applicants selected will be subject to a government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information.

Description of Work

EWA Government Systems Inc. (EWA), Montpelier, Vermont, has multiple, immediate openings for experienced software engineers in a variety of projects with long term growth involving multi-level security network development, Windows-based application development, and systems integration. Typical duties may include software design, computer programming, software integration, reverse engineering, configuration management, database development, network administration, and custom applications development in UNIX, Linux, and Windows-based environments. Projects will involve structured software design, development, testing, and documentation. Duties may involve hands-on work with specialized servers, gateways, VPNs, concentrators, firewalls, and encryption devices.

Contact

Click here to apply online.  Please use reference number GSI-220 when applying.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

William Tay (aka Softwaremaker), a WCF wizard, has an article on TheServerSide.Net which is a great intro to programming with WCF.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

For those of you who are all rss all the time, you may not have noticed the beautiful new Community Server site that dotnet.org.za has switched to. Now I see on Thea's blog that it was Armand who did the job

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Sahil's teaser video for his ado.net 2.0 video training course is great. Clearly a guy who loves data access and has an enormous reverence for data. But watch the video all the way through as you will surely get a great laugh at the end!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm only part way through watching this but you GOTTA see it. Naturally, they brought in Duane LaFlotte as a hacker - I have said before - he's the guy  you want on YOUR side!!

Check it out.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

We'll see. My ISP has really upped the DSL download speeds so I was finally looking forward to faster download times on these DVD sized files. But alas, the connect server is very pokey and I'm looking at a reported 19 or so hour download. I'm happy that the computer can still chug away while I'm sleeping!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Thea Burger went to a Women in IT networking event. She met a woman who made a startling comment when Thea introduced herself as a devloper. There is now a funny ongoing thread of comments about this on her post...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I think this post is just for my friend Dave who works at home and has more than his fair share of blog posts about donuts.

Rich bought a box of little chocolate covered donuts last night. I begged and pleaded with him to let me have some. He's a good husband though and tries to help me when it comes to succumbing to my dreadful addiction to chocolate. Especially as he's the one who has to hear me whine about the way my jeans fit (or don't, as the case may be).

His first response was "donuts are for people who go to work". That did not go over well since I happen to work about 12 or more hours a day. So then he tried "donuts are for people who leave the house to go to work." Boo hiss.

After he "left the house to go to work" this morning I came downstairs knowing that surely, because he loves me so very very much, he had left me a few of these little tasty treats. But they were nowhere to be found. He told me later that he had departed with the fully sealed box of donuts this morning. I had to make due with oatmeal, since the closest possible source is a 25 minute round trip drive. So here it is, nearly lunchtime, and I'm still thinking about those damned donuts!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Scott Guthrie blogs about the RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 created by Dmitry Robsman on the ASP.NET team. The toolkit exposes an RSSDataSource which you can use with any of the databinding controls in ASP.NET 2.0. Check out Scott's post for all the details and how to's.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Seems pretty inane, but this is the kind of stuff one has to worry about when writing articles. Although sometimes I can leave that to the great tech editors I get to work with like Melanie Spiller. I have gotten very good at properly casing things like SqlNotification and DataSet. But [web services] was always an issue for me. So today I went onto the W3C site and found the following on this page:

"The World Wide Web is more and more used for application to application communication. The programmatic interfaces made available are referred to as Web services."

Okay, so I'm sticking with capital W and all lower case for the rest.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

"Error Creating Window Handle" is not a .NET error, but is coming from Win32, which, in itself, is a big clue when trying to solve this problem, which I had to do today. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Microsoft's Upcoming Vista to Support Legacy VB6 Apps

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I can barely contain my excitement over this article, "Practical Tips for Boosting the Performance of Windows Forms Apps" by Milena Salman in MSDN Mag (March 06). I read most of it this morning over breakfast and came down to my office with the sole intent of opening up the windows forms app I am getting ready to re-deploy in it's shiny new .NET 2.0 makeover and finding any place that I can apply all of the awesome advice Milena dishes out in this article.

Of course, now it's 2:00 and if I can just turn off Outlook, I.M. and the phone, I might actually get started on this.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have mentioned my use of the XCeed streaming compression for returning data from web services a number of times in this blog. Here is a post when I first discovered that it reduced a 2.9 minute download of  4 MB to 12 seconds! I have since mentioned it a few times but never showed exactly how it is coded. Last night Rod Paddock pinged me to find out if I thought that component would work for him and it turned out he had the exact same scenario as I have been using it for. Therefore I showed him my code and thought I would put it here as well.

The key to all of this is that the component compresses bytes, so whatever you are returning, you want to convert it to bytes first. I'm sure this may make some web service purists cringe, but is it any different than returning a binary attachment with MTOM - which is a W3C standard? (I'm open to further education on this, my purist friends!)

Anyway, back to stream compression.

Let's say you have a .NET client to .NET service scenario and are writing both ends. (That is a setup to avoid any rotten tomatoes for using a dataset in this example ).

On the web service end, I have a method that accepts the dataset, converts it to a byte array, compresses that into another byte array using XCeed QuickCompression class and then returns this compressed byte array.

Using ms As New System.IO.MemoryStream
 ds.WriteXml(ms)
 Dim bytearray(ms.Length) As Byte
 bytearray = ms.GetBuffer
 Dim CompressedBytes() As Byte
 CompressedBytes = QuickCompression.Compress(bytearray, CompressionMethod.Deflated, CompressionLevel.Normal)
 Return CompressedBytes
End Using 

On the client end, having called this web service operation, I decompress the received bytes into a new byte array, then read that byte array into a new DataSet. Et Voila!

Dim ds As New DataSet
Dim compressedBytes() As Byte = WSProxy.GetDataSetasCompressedBytes
Dim byteArray() As Byte = QuickCompression.Decompress(compressedBytes)
Using ms As New MemoryStream
  ms.Write(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length)
  ms.Position = 0
  ds.ReadXml(ms)
End Using

I remember when I was first looking for a means of doing this and reading about this component, it wasn't obvious how to do this in a web service, so I had a pointer from someone in tech support as to how to accomplish this.

I have used this combined with WSE 2.0 and now with WSE 3.0 to protect this data in addition to compressing it. If you have really humongous files, you can combine compression with MTOM in WSE 3.0 as well. I'll have to check this out with WCF at some point.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm looking at Rod Paddock's editorial in the current CoDe Mag issue. This is the future tehcnologies issue wiht articles on WPF, LinQ and Ajax. In the editorial he says that there is going to be a 6 article series on WCF starting with the next issue. I'm really looking forward to this. Especially considering who is going to be writing some of these: Michele Leroux Bustamante, Juval Lowy, Christian Weyer.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Ex-Microsoftie Alec Saunders' teenage boys believe they have found a really good use for a piece of carpentry (as opposed to computer) hardware. I'm married to a carpenter who is in many ways like a teenage boy. But I don't think he'll be trying out this technique in the kitchen any time soon.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here's what one software giant, Peter Norton, did with his millions ... [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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note - this is very clearly categorized under Purely Personal - so don't give me any grief

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/20/port.security/index.html

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Did you hear that the ADO.NET 2.0 indexing engine screams? But not in the way I was expecting! [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Sorry, couldn't help it but I can't think of Rich without thinkng of the phrase "No! Nope! Niet! Non! Negative! Nuh-huh! [shake head vigorously]!!!" in response to the question "is .net remoting dead?"

He's off to be p.m. for InfoCards, whic makes perfect sense. I think outside of Microsoft, Michele is the one person who knows anything about InfoCards so far - but that too, is a natural given her work in interop.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Wow, what a surprise but such a great one. INETA just added 5 new speakers

Scott Cate
Richard Hundhausen
Wally McClure
Sahil Malik
Robert Green (hey Robert, where's your blog?)

Although out of this bunch I have only ever personally attended sessions by Richard, the other 4 guys are not only some of the top experts in their fields, have done a ton of presenting and written a host of books, but every one of them (including Richard) are really nice guys and will be awesome to have at your user groups.

Congrats guys.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 4:45 PM
Subject: why do you auto highlight your pages? (via Julia Lerman Blog)

---

It took my like 300,000K of my memory, 50% of my CPU and 10 minutes to load one of your pages.

Why do you torture your visitors by doing highlighting at all, and even worse, by doing it on their side?

I didn't even read the content because I was so bothered by the fact that it was trying to highlight everything, including the letter 'i' whereever it occured.

 

****************************************************

 

Dear Chris,

 

Is this for real or does everyone with a dasblog get this email?

 

The only way you would possibly get this behavior is if you did a search (using the search tool built into dasblog) on the letter "i".

 

Here is the url when you use that search tool to search for "julie" in my blog:

 

http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/SearchView.aspx?q=julie

 

So clicking that link you will first get a definite lag time while everyone of my posts is searhced for the word "julie" and then when it renders (with EVERY post on my entire weblog that has this word in it), it will highlight in yellow the word "julie" on the resulting page.

 

So imagine doing the search in the letter "i". It will take quite some time to search through all of my posts and then return hundreds and hundreds of posts which will take a long time to render and THEN it will go through that entire rendered page and highlight the "i" s. And if that took ONLY 10 minutes, you must have one fast machine!

 

On the other hand, if you are searching for every time I used the letter "i" in a post over the last 2+ years, you have much bigger things to worry about.

 

Julie

For anyone who hasn't noticed, Infragistics and Telligent are both hiring. Telligent's growth never ceases to astound me! Both are great places to work where your .NET skills and your brains will be used, challenged and heightened.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Jean-Rene sent out a great email about DevTeach today. Here are some key elements from it:

Save 200$ by taking advantage of DevTeach early bird.
This year, we are offering an early bird of 200$ CAN for attendees that are registering before February 28th, 2006. Registered attendees have accessed to the DevTeach 2005 Archive sessions material for download.

User group members rebate at DevTeach 2006
The User Groups Rebate program is back in 2006. We are offering 50.00$ off the registration cost to all members of user groups registered with INETA, Pass, Culminis or the Universal Thread User Group Meeting Tracker. To benefit of this rebate, members need to enter a rebate code when processing their registration. This rebate can be combined with the early bird discount which gives a 200.00$ rebate until Fabruary 28th. User group leaders can request this rebate code good for 50$ off the registration by sending an email to jrroy@DevTeach.com.

Get to know our speakers by reading their blog and listening to their talk show interviews.
Most of our speakers write regularly in their blog and have been interviewed by the Dot Net Rock Talk Show or the Visual Studio Show. Get to know our speakers by reading their blog and listening to their latest interview on talk shows. The DevTeach conference include a top selection of speakers having a strong experience in various areas. Most of these speakers are presenting at major conferences around the world on a regular base and in other areas as well such as user groups, corporate training and class training.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Hip hip hooray. Blue House Group in Richmond, VT has created a beautiful and informative website for VTSDA. There is still some tweaking to do, but the new site is now live. www.vtsda.org.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Greg was my A#1 contact for all things INETA down under, so I was happy to see this announcement on Frank Arrigo's blog this morning.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm not sure if I should cry in relief or frustration. I just spent hours and hours trying to get at the cause of a NullReferenceException being thrown by my application. I could not trap it, inspect it or even get rid of it by grabbing a straws. I finally got rid of it, but only by a stroke of luck. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Our NetFlix facility is 100 miles away in White River Junction Vermont. It takes one day for mail to get there. We can't figure out why the website says that movies are "received" by them 6 days - 4 business days - after we mailed them back.

I don't think we are uber-renters, destined for the list that we've been reading about lately. But it's pretty annoying and of course not very easy to complain to anyone. The only types of problems they seem to let you report are if you are missing a sleeve or scratched DVD. Otherwise you get in a hopeless loop searching for a way to contact them.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here is a project that I am now publishing through clickonce.

I just opened the project up in VS2005 and saw all of these warnings. Sheesh, here we go again...

(Note: I got an email from Patrick Darragh who is a Program Manager on the VB Team and has a lot to do with ClickOnce. Patrick tells me that "those warnings are controlled by the ‘Verify files uploaded to the server’ property on the Publish Options dialog off the Publish tab.  If you uncheck this property, the warning should go away.")

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I couldn't resist buying my honey a big ol' bag of M&Ms for Valentines Day because I knew I had M&M wrapping paper at home. Heh heh.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Would you like to work out of a newly renovated office with awesome views, great
co-workers and the best coffee machine in Burlington, VT? Do you have solid web
development chops, good customer service and interpersonal skills, the ability to
work under deadlines, and a good sense of humor? This job may be for you…

Union Street Media, a leading Vermont web design and development company, is seeking to add
a new Web Developer to our team. Since 1999, we have developed database-driven web sites
focusing on visual appeal, usability, and search engine prominence. The company serves over
250 clients in three primary business areas: real estate, e-commerce, and content-driven sites.
USM is a young, aggressive company requiring its employees to wear many hats. As a member
of our development staff, the person who fills this role will be responsible for helping in the
development and support of our clients’ web sites. The role requires timeliness in project
delivery, attention to detail, and a high degree of professionalism. We’re looking for a
hard working team player who enjoys working on the web. Those who don’t play well
with others need not apply.

Previous experience at a web development or marketing firm is preferred, but not required.

The position comes with a host of benefits including health insurance contribution, a gym
membership, dog-friendly atmosphere, and access to our stash of ski vouchers.

Functions/Responsibilities:
• Strong people skills and team mentality
• Work with all members of the USM team to develop web sites for clients
• Build sites using USM's CMS; design custom templates for various modules.
• Thorough understanding of HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Web Standards, usability
• Working knowledge of PHP, MySQL
• Keeping skill set up to date with current design and technologies
• Help with support tickets, spam filtering, DNS changes, setting up FTP and email accounts

Compensation:
Commensurate with experience

Schedule:
This full-time position in our Burlington, Vermont office is open immediately.

To Apply:
Email resumé, cover letter, and three references to jobs@unionstreetmedia.com .
No phone calls please.
Union Street Media is an equal opportunity employer.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm looking at a VS2005 ad in CoDe Magazine - part of the "spot the difference" campaign. The before picture has people meeting around a table with an obvious work load ahead. The after picture shows them after they have launched their product. But there is something bugging me about the after picture. The gold master framed dvd on the wall is dated October 7, 2005. So they shipped their product based on VS2005 Beta 2? Eek!

okay back to work...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have really been trying to force ClickOnce to let me publish ONLY the changed files, but according to this forum post by David Guyer, I should probably just give up.

Here are my issues.

1) Moving the new deployment folder and manifest to the production server takes way too long.
  1a) part of the reason for this is that I have 3rd party dlls that I have as INCLUDED rather than Pre-Requisites. Even with all of my security, I'm a little nervous about controlling the deployment of 3rd party licensed tools and this feels safer. So with some Infragistics, Janus and XCeed components, this adds 4.5 MB to my deployment files. This is one place I will have to focus on paring it down. However, with the rate at which infragistics updates its components, this provides another excuse for leaving it in the Includes.

2) Even though all of the documentation promises that the client ONLY pulls down the new files from the server, the update dialog says that all 6MB are being downloaded and looking in the GAC I see all of the files in the latest folder, not just the new ones. This is acceptable wrt speed on the intranet, but what about our dialup users out there on the web. I'm not the only one who is questioning this.

UPDATE
I have been keeping at it and learned a little more about #2. Yes, I have to publish the entire app over again, but if I do it right, the files that are not new will not get downloaded. The way to acheive this is to make a copy of the previous deployment folder, which will mean all of the previous files will match up with the hash that the client machine has for them. Then use the MAGE tool to create the manifest. (See this msdn doc and look for the "next steps" section re: updating.) Then the client machine won't bother pulling those down again and instead, grab them from the last folder. Or something like that. Either way, the client will still say "downloading xxxMB" where xxx is the size of the complete app, but it is only downloading new stuff from the web server and kind of "cross-loading" so to speak from a sibling folder already on the client.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My mom is at Westminster this year again because Bumper was competing in this, the biggest dog show in the U.S. I think Bumper is the third one of my parent's dogs that has gone to Westminster. Oddly, the man judging the Newfoundlands picked one of his own dogs (a dog he had bred) as Best in Breed. It's astonishing that there isn't a rule about something like that, but boy are there a LOT of politics in the dog world.

In 1999, Annie (who is now 9 years old) won an Award of Merit at Westminster, which was a big big deal.

Here's a picture of Bumper and a link to the BlueHeavenNewfoundlands website.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont.NET turned FOUR at our meeting last night and we had a joint meeting with the Vermont SQL Group which is a spin off of VTdotNET. This was the 2nd of our two launch events (the first was related to INETA and the 2nd to PASS) so we had 5 more VS2005/SQL Server2005 licence packs to give away.

So, I counted 46 at the meeting. That is our 3rd largest meeting ever.

1) Ken Getz (INETA): 50
2) Keith Pleas/Thom Robbins/ INETA 100th Speaker event and MSDN film crew: 50
3) Laura Blood/Roman Rehak/SQL2005 Launch: 46
4) Rocky Lhotka (INETA): 40
5) Laura Blood/VS2005 Launch: 40

Laura and Roman did an awesome job. Laura presented the slides that MSDN created for these events. That was some chore because each slide was jam packed with information, so she pointed out highlights. Then Roman did the demos and he used a lot of his own (from his job as SQL Server guru extraordinaire) and also a few from some other sources that he acknowledged.

The most interesting thing to me was my new persective on Service Broker. I have only really looked at it from what it provides for Query Notification and didn't really "get" it's real purpose. Now I realize that the reason for this is because I am a) not a DBA with the problems that it solves and b) not doing big time enterprise work. I understood the queues and the services but was missing the big picture. But I finally got it and it's really easy -  by sending processing chores off to the service broker, you can distribute your processes (much more easily than the previously available methods). Some examples: Scenario A is where you send a process such as executing a particular query off (asynchronously) to a service broker on a different box. Scenario B is where you queue up requests to be processed over night. It was a real "AHA!" moment.

He also did a great xml data type demo where he showed the difference between finding a needle in a haystack of xml formatted data stored in a (???) varchar field and finding that same needled with the data stored in an xml data field. The xquery/xpath was much more efficient, cutting a 40 second search down to a few hundred millseconds. Then by applying some of the indexing you can do with the xml data type, it got down even more.

There were many other great demos - CLR in SQL Server, and a B.I. demo - something I have never looked at or considered before - from Integration Services. Very cool, very impressive.

Thanks to Laura and Roman for a great meeting.

A few other highlights: cake for our 4th anniversary and goodies from local MSDN DCC Susan Wisowaty. Susan lives in Burlington, but is the DCC for New York and New Jersey.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Pablo Cibraro (who should be an MVP) is, in my opinion, one of the most knowledgable WSE guys around. He is up there with Michele and Softwaremaker (who have both moved on to be WCF gurus, of course). But besides having a wealth of practical knowledge, he spends an inordinate amount of time sharing it in the WSE newsgroups, answering myriad questions and following up on many of them.

He has answered questions for me too.

But today, he really impressed me even more. I was runing up against a problem that I could not figure out or find the answer to anywhere. In fact, I found two other questions on the web with the same problem but no answers.

The more I dug into the problem the more I learned and I finally was able to google the right keywords. And where did I find the solution to my problem? In Pablo's blog (see below). He does not post very often, but boy am I glad he wrote about this. I had even been fiddling in the right section of my web.config file, but just wasn't tweaking quite the correct thing.

So thanks Pablo!

And for google's sake, the problem was some encryption being done in a request for a securityContextToken in WSE3.0. On Windows 2000 machines, it was encrypting the requested key with RSA15, but WIndows XP clients were encrypting with OAEP and the win2003 server was expecting OAEP.

Windows 2000 does not have the ability to wrap with OAEP. So I had to force all clients to wrap security tokens with RSA15 (Win2000 will do it by default, but XP won't) and then force the server to use RSA15 also.

But I couldn't figure out how. Pablo's post on using the web.config in WSE 3.0 to override the default encryption led me to my solution. He also followed up with a reply in the newsgroup as I was typing this very post.

The error

An unsupported signature or encryption algorithm was used --->
System.Exception: WSE3002: The receiver is expecting the key wrapping algorithm to be http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-oaep-mgf1p, but the incoming message used http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-1_5. You can change the key wrapping algorithm through configuring security token manager.

The solution in both web.config of the service and app.config of the client (inside of the security tags of the microsoft.web.services3 tags):

<binarySecurityTokenManager>
    <add
valueType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3">
     <keyAlgorithm name="RSA15" />
    </add>
   </binarySecurityTokenManager>

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

How cool is this? Here is a college kid at Champlain College in Burlington who started an Ipod accessory company and is making it big! (And he's probably all of 19 years old, now.)

Mophie is a developer of innovative, value-added solutions for the digital lifestyle accessory market The Company was founded in March of 2005 by an 18 year-old optimist with a head full of ideas and a renegade marketing consultant with an arm full of tattoos. Our goal was to create a funky product development firm built around good people and great ideas.

The products start with a base case to put your ipod in and then is extended by a variety of forms that the base case fits into.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This spring I will be heading out to speak at the fourth Deeper in .NET event that is hosted by the Wisconsin.NET user group. This is Scott Isaac's first time coordinating it, as former group leader Brian Tinkler has gone to work for Microsoft.

This will be a one day event with 5 talks. Michele Leroux Bustamante will be (very appropriately) doing a session on WCF. Scott Hanselman, Rob Howard and Jason Beres (returning for his 4th year!) are also on the roster.

I'll be doing a talk on ADO.NET 2.0 integration with SQL Server 2005. I could easily spend at least 1/2 of the entire day talking about that, but I will limit myself to my 90 minute slot.

An added benefit of going to Wisconsin is that I am going to spend a few extra days there visiting with a friend who I haven't seen in too many years.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm sure all of the big cities in the Northeast that are getting seriously dumped on today would gladly send their snow here if they could. And we would be happy to have it. Once again, the big dump has missed us completely. Countless ski resorts will suffer greatly this season which will also have a big negative impact on Vermont's economy.

It's not even snowing here. And this picture from Charles' window in Manhattan just makes my wanna cry. It reminds me of a magical moonlit night out in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) after a huge snow storm nearly 15 years ago. I went out there with my dog and there were hundreds of people out there walking and even cross country skiing. Of course, normally, going to a NYC park at night is unheard of.

This is what many of us live for here in Vermont. But alas, there are only about 3 inches of snow in my front yard and no base underneath. It is so bad that we can't even use our "rock skis" in the woods. Just a pair of regular hiking boots will suffice.

Well, good day to continue getting through my myriad commitments that keep me in front of the computer.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here's a cool trick you can do using the new IE Developer Toolbar if you want to find out meta data about a Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local) map. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I replaced one of my 512MB modules with a 1GB module in October. Time to get the old one off my desk.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6848791085&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&rd=1

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Thom Robbins is presenting a 1/2 day seminar on Programming Virtual Earth on March 1st  in Boston and it will also be accessible over Live Meeting.

At the end of the session, Thom will announce how you can participate in the a Virtual Earth Mashup and even win an XBOX 360.

Thom will also have help from the ViaVirtualEarth's  Neil Roodyn and maybe even me.

For information on go to the registration page for the virtual event.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org