I almost missed a great sight the other night as I had my nose glued to the computer! But Rich mentioned it and I turned my head to the left to see

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D.K. Smith Forum presents:

“Outsourcing:  Opportunity or Threat?”

Wednesday, May 3, 2006, 4:30-6:00 P.M.

216 McCardell Bicentennial Hall, Middlebury College

A reception will follow in the Tormondsen Great Hall

Moderator

Pieter J. Schiller ’60, Partner(retired), Advanced Technology Ventures, Waltham, MA

Panelists

Nick Laird ’88, Chief Executive Officer, Global Realty Outsourcing.  GRO is one of the leading providers of business process outsourcing solutions to the real estate and financial services industries.
Michael E. Zeliger, Partner, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, Nicholson, Graham, LLP.
  Mr. Zeliger focuses his practice on complex civil litigation, with particular emphasis on patent and other intellectual property litigation.
Scott Hardy, Founder and President, NEOS Overshoes.  New England Overshoes is a Vermont firm designing and selling “performance overshoes” for personal, recreational and professional use.

In The World is Flat, Tom Friedman contends that software, the global fiber-optic network and ubiquitous Internet access is fundamentally altering virtually every aspect of our lives. For one, it is empowering individuals, groups and countries to collaborate and compete globally:

   We are all becoming neighbors.

   People can now go global seamlessly.

   Outsourcing is a direct consequence of a flat world, and is here to stay.

   Distance no longer insulates us from competition or impedes seizing global opportunities.

   We can now run global businesses, collaborate with (outsource to) partners and feel competition from around the globe without ever leaving home.

   Globalization is fundamentally altering how:

        People

            Are educated and prepare themselves for careers;

            Communicate and establish, build and maintain relationships;

            Work and play; and

        Companies

            Conceive, launch and grow entrepreneurial enterprises;

            Develop and secure intellectual property;

            Operate within increasingly transparent, global supply chains; and

            Compete and collaborate for markets and customers.

Questions and Issues

Does outsourcing jobs really mean we are outsourcing America? Or does outsourcing create more jobs than it moves offshore?

Does outsourcing mean that America will not be able to compete in anything, and that eventually there will be no jobs here?

If so, how do we explain the fact that, because outsourcing is making it so much more efficient and competitive, U.S. manufacturing is increasingly healthy, growing, and vibrant?

What are the implications of a “flat world” for intellectual property?

   Can companies secure world-wide protection? What are the critical factors and costs?

   What are the distinctions between “hard” products like shoes and machinery, and “soft” products like business processes, software and services?

   How do we deal with the reality that some countries do not recognize IP?

   How are courts looking at IP in this new environment?

A special thanks to the late Edward Schaefer ’56, Laura Schaefer Buckley ’79 and Edward Schaefer III ’84 for their generosity in establishing the Professor David K. Smith Visiting Economic Lecture Series in honor of David K. Smith’s work as a teacher and mentor at Middlebury College.

This event is free and open to the public.

Questions?

E-mail mosborne@middlebury.edu

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Everything I thought I knew about how to interop messages between WCF and WSE3.0 went down the toilet with the newest bits of WCF.

Thanks to some serious counseling from William Tay this morning (who has been diving deep with WCF for a long time and has also kept up with the changes that affect all forms of interop, even WSE3.0) and then lots of hours of just trying, failing, thinking, adjusting (rinse and repeat) I finally got a WCF client app to talk to a WSE3.0 secured web service using a UsernameforCertificate binding/policy.

And yes, it's all secured on the wire. I had every problem. Wrong X509 certificates installed, wrong encryption algorithms, hitting a few WCF bugs and more. Luckily, all of the work I have done with WSE3.0 has helped me prepare for troubleshooting this stuff. To me, that is one of the most important lessons!

Here are a few of the things I can share.

I was doing what Willie tells me is the hardest thing with interop - UsernameOverCertificate. But being bullheaded I had to go forward with it.

I tried writing my own, but didn't understand well enough (though now I think I could tackle that) and instead used WSEHttpBinding that is a custom binding in one of the WCF samples.

That binding uses the Aes128 algorithm for it's default security binding and secure conversation. I kept getting a message that the algorithm was insufficient to encrypt and key wrap. Changing them both to Aes256 fixed that. It took me a while to realize there were two spots to change, but I had the right idea! Uggh.

At one point, I was still getting an error, but looking at the web service's trace, I could see that everything on that end had finally happened correctly. Therefore the problem was on the client side. Google gave me ONE response, and naturally it was from a blog post of Willie's! He had seen a similar problem in the Sept. CTP, but it was enough to fix my problem (Feb CTP).

Since this stuff is still in flux, I think I will wait for WCF beta2 to be released before I attempt to update my article on preparing WSE3 web services for WCF. Truly the hard part (until the new bits are all sorted out) is writing the WCF client. I didn't have to do anything to my web service to get this to work.

Willie's got a pair of great articles on WCF on The Server Side (first, second) and I hear there's a WSE3/WCF interop article coming soon from him as well. Lucky or the rest of us!

I will never have the deep knowledge of this stuff hat Willie and his compadres (Michele Butamante, Christian Weyer, Juval Lowy, etc.) have, but as long as I am willing to battle this stuff out so that I can share it with other programmers who are floating on the surface, I'll keep at it.

I'll be looking at more of this stuff in my WSE3 for WCF session at DevConnections next week. My focus is on making sure the WSE3 services are written correctly so that you can talk to them in the future from WCF. I won't be teaching WCF. You can go across the hall to see Michele for that.

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The next Vermont.NET meeting is Monday April 10th.

I will be presenting a session called "5 Supposedly Scary Things in.NET". It will be a high level introduction to

1. Declarative programming with attributes
2. Reflection
3. Delegates
4. Threading
5. Code Access Security

I have a full license to VS2005 Professional and SQL Server 2005 Standard to license off.

Pizza & Soda will be sponsored by DottNetJobs.com, a job portal for .NET jobs as well as SQL Server and ASP jobs.

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Vermont is in the midst of "sugarin'" season when the sap is flowing and sugarmakers everywhere are boiling one of Vermont's trademark products. The local paper, Burlington Free Press has some stories, a video and a slide show of sugarin' and boilin' on their site today.

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DonXML took the plunge and went back to being on someone's payroll. This has been on my mind a lot since I read his post. [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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Hopefully a word of warning to future crown-toothed friends.

I suffered through a 2 hour dentist appointment yesterday. It was #2 of what was supposed to be three appointments for getting crown. #1 was to build the tooth back up. #2 (yesterday) was to prep the tooth, take molds for the crown and get a temporary. #3 is going to be applying the crown.

However,this morning, when I was brushing my teeth, the temporary popped off and though I tried to spit it into my hand, was nowhere to be found. Obviously down the drain. I was a little tired to actually think to close the drain first. Duh.

So tomorrow morning, it's back to the dentist (for which I have no insurance) for another temporary crown. Oy vey!

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I just happened to be looking at the INETA "Upcoming Speaking Engagements" page and was struck by the fact that there are SIX events tonight!

Bill Evjen	San Diego .NET User Group	3/28/2006
Bill Vaughn	KC .NET User Group	3/28/2006
Chris Menegay	Aggieland (Texas A&M Univeristy) .NET Developers	3/28/2006
Jeff Prosise	East TN .NET User group	3/28/2006
Kathleen Dollard	Lower Alabama .NET User Group	3/28/2006
Mike Amundsen	Cincinnati .NET User Group	3/28/2006

It's also amazing to see events scheduled all the way through to the end of 2006. It's definitely hard to plan that far ahead, though I do have some INETA talks already scheduled in September!

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There was an article in the local paper about Computer Camps offered by the South Burlington School District this summer.

Maybe it's because I don't have kids, but I was definitely a surprise to see a robotics class for 6 year olds!

Here's the whole list which sounds like a blast! (No pun intended wrt the rocket tech class )

Robotics: Beginning robotics for grades one-three; mastering mazes for grades four-seven.

Rocket Tech: Grades three-six; learn how to build, test and launch solid propellant rockets.

Programming a Computer Game with HyperStudio: Grades four-eight.

3D Computer Animation: Grades six-12; introduction, advanced modeling, advanced animation and advanced team project.

Animating Your Web Site with Flash: Grades seven to adult.

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If you've ever wondered how Rick manages to churn out so much, the secret is out....

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Not only can you write web services today that can be consumed by WCF (Indigo) apps in the future, but working with WSE 3.0 today to secure your web services will also help you get a handle on many of the concepts of WCF. I have written an article for DevSource called "Using WSE 3.0 Today to Secure Web Services Tomorrow" based on current guidance (based on WSE 3.0 and WCF Beta 1) on just such a topic.

I will also be doing a talk on this topic next week at DevConnections.

Thanks to Mark Fussell for his insights on this topic.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

With most conferences,speakers need to submit their powerpoints way in advace of the conferences. Attendees are provided with books filled with the printouts of the decks so that they can take notes during the conference. It is not uncommon with a new talk to fine tune it between that early preparation and the actual time you your presentation.

Though this has only happened once, it struck me (and stuck in my brain) when an attendee wrote on an eval that it was a pain that the slides in my talk were different than the book.

So this time around,rather than hoping that I'm going to remember in the middle of a talk and say "oh, I changed this slide a little (for your benefit)" I am just putting tiny little notes on the bottom of modified slides: "This slide is slightly modified from the original printed version".

Hopefully that will mean one less negative comment this time around!

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I now have built three VPCs to be used as bases for various testing. I can make a copy of a VPC and then use that copy to install "dangerous" bits - eg betas, ctps etc.

My first VPC is a clean Windows XP SP2 system with all of the current updates.

My second VPC is that plus .NET 2.0,  VS2005 RTM and SQL Server Express RTM. I can the throw things like Atlas or WinFX on top of them. It took quite a long time to install this. So I won't have to do that again.

My third VPC is #2 PLUS the WinFX February CTP Components , SDK and VS2005 Extensions for WinFX. I plan to experiment with WCF (and need a very clean copy of this for a DevConnections session) with and without Atlas installed on top of it (ergo I want two) and also WPF.

I spent about two days creating them and then tucked them away onto my 200GB drive. Then I can make a copy on my external hard drive and go to town.

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My quiet (snowless boo hoo hoo) winter at home is winding down. Soon I will have to start tugging at the roots that have been deeply embedding me into my beautiful little place in the world and flit about the country ...err continent, that is.

It all begins again in about a week.

April 3 - 6: DevConnections in Orlando (I have 1 talk at ASPConnections and 2 at VSConnections)

April 10: Not a trip, but I'll be presenting at Vermont.NET!

April 11-13 - Maybe attend  Devscovery in NYC.

April 22: Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee.This will be new for me - a big one day user group event with myself and 4 other speakers that I am honored to be included with (Michele on Indigo, Scott Hanselman on ASP.NET seen through dasBlog, UI guru Jason Beres and ASP.NET book author Bill Hatfield)! I also get to spend a few days visiting a good friend.

May 2: Huntsville, AL to speak at the HUNTUG User Group run by Lori McKinney (an INETA event). I am looking forward to this as well, though I won't be doing the usual INETA speaker visit to the nearby Space Museum. nor two attractions that are more up my alley: Cathedral Caverns State Park and Burritt Museum.

May 9-11: Montreal for DevTeach! Yay yay! One of my favorite conferences. It's less than 3 hours from my house. Many of my friends are there as speaker and attendees and Montreal is beautiful in the spring! Then after that Alan Griver and Beth Massi are coming home with me for visit and Alan will be speaking at VTdotNET. Yay.

June - A whirlwind. I'm hoping to announce soon a Vermont Code Camp in early June. Then there's TechEd and then I'm off on a 10 day trip that is a combined vacation and INETA tour (with my hubby) to the Atlantic Provinces in Canada. I have always wanted to go to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and have been eyeing the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick for years, as well. I will be visiting New Brunswick.NET, the .NET Nova Scotia and finally We Develop.NET in St. John's Newfoundland.

The list goes on. I have a whole bunch of INETA gigs scheduled through September already and am talking with Thom Robbins about a possible mini-code camp, too.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

DevConnections is coming in a little over a week. Hooray! At Tuesday's lunch, there will be a bunch of tables reserved for women so that we can all get together and meet - attendees and the women speakers. That will be fun.

I remember when I first started going to conferences, I was so excited to see other women programmers that I just wanted to meet every chick that I saw in the hallways. This will be much more subtle and less embarrassing way to achieve that!

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One of my clients just had their ISA 2000 Server upgraded to ISA 2004 and were having some weird problems and finally got to the bottom of it - HTTP Request Filtering.

Symptoms

1) There was one ASP.NET 1.1 app that was having problems with buttons on new records that did a server.transfer. But on pre-existing records, the server.transfer worked.

2) In one of the ASP classic apps, we saw a pattern (pointed out by a non-programmer who asked "what about that ampersand?"!) where hyperlink requests with multiple query parameters failed but single query parameters succeeded.

The Pattern

Thanks to the eagle eyes of that user, I went back and looked more carefully at the asp.net app. Though the server.transfer involved only one query parameter, it was the page it was coming from that was the issue since the url doesn't change with a server.transfer. And indeed, the new records had multiple parameters but the pre-existing ones did not. (I wrote this app over 3 years ago, so I definitely wasn't too fresh on it!)

The Solution

So we went back to the i.t. guy and asked him to check the HTTP Filtering in ISA for either URL length or the ampersand and wouldn't you know it - the ampersand had come over from ISA 2000 (where it was ignored) and fallen into the list of forbidden URL characters!

Ha!!

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Brad Abrams has a long list of credits for the folks who helped him create demos for this MIX session. When I was at TechEd last June, I saw a totally awesome demo in a WCF Reliablility session that also had some top talent at Microsoft involved in building the demo. The Microsoft demos for the Indigo overview talk that has been done a lot by Ari Bixhorn takes a truckload of equipment and even a mini support team to run (whereas I had some ho-hum console apps when I did that at TechEd South Africa). I spend a ridiculous amount of time on my demos  but will never have anything like the ones these guys get to pull off for their nice shiny sessions. Sheesh.

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There's a guy who didn't waste any time!

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Drag, drop and type. Ooh let's do that again. Drag, drop and type. What the heck could this be about? [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

 

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Resolution Inc.  in Burlington

Reporting Analyst
  As Reporting Analyst, this position will be responsible for the design, programming, and analysis of reports / applications to support Resolution’s external and internal customers. Relational database experience and data analysis skills are required, as is a great team attitude. At least 3 years professional experience required. Experience with IBM AS400, Oracle, SQL, and MS Access preferred. Relational database experience and data analysis skills are required, as is a great team attitude. At least 3 years professional experience required. Experience with IBM AS400, Oracle, SQL, and MS Access preferred.

Internet Systems Architect
Resolution, Inc. is seeking an experienced, high-concept, solutions sales person to expand its considerable presence in the broadcast, publishing, educational and association markets.

 Necessary Skills: -Strong HTML & CSS skills -Strong Javascript skills including AJAX and JSON experience -Ruby programming ideally including Ruby On Rails -Experience implementing redundant file, database and application services -General web tools and languages (Python, PHP, Perl, etc.) -Experience directing a small team in a fast paced environment -Database administration (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle) -Unix / Linux system setup and administration skills -Experience with system monitoring and management tools (Nagios, BigSister, etc.) -Systems and procedure documentation (samples required).

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The January CTP install notes recommend installing the WinFX components before VS2005, but according to Michele Leroux Bustamante, who has done a LOT of work with WCF, if you are working with the newer (non go-live) February CTP  release, it's okay to install all of theWinFX ontop of VS2005. This is great to know because I can store a copy of a VPC with WinXp and VS2005 already installed, then use it when testing new WinFX bits as they are released.

See Michele's blog post for links and installation order.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My husband read the CNN article this morning about the Windows Vista delay. Reading "Unlike the current Windows XP, there will be no versions designed specifically for advanced 64-bit computing, multimedia computers or Tablet PCs" he interpreted that as no TabletPC capability for Vista, which is not true at all. In fact, he knows that I am using Vista on a tablet, but thought that it was going to be removed.

TabletPC functionality is built into Vista and will not be separate. That's all this means.

I wonder how many others will misinterpret that sentence?

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

It seems like just yesterday that I was asking around about how Atlas interacts with WS-Security and other WS* compliant web services created using tools like WSE or WCF. And woudntchaknowit! The Atlas version that was released just yesterday has WCF extensions built right in for seamless communication with WCF.

Oddly, I came across the link on the Atlas site today not knowing that it wasa brand spanking new page, and therefore was feeling  a bit embarrassed that I had completely missed this before!

It wasn' until I saw Steve Maine's post that I realized it hadn't been up there for long!

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My sister called today as they were driving through the Mojave Desert on their way to San Diego. She told me that she saw a sign at a gas station that said "Last chance to pee." Seriously.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Watching the Tim O'Reilly/Bill Gates conversation on the Virtual MIX website, I was struck by Gates encapsulating the direction of software as "the internet as an operating system". [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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I was just on the MSDN Speakers page to grab a pic of Burlington based Susan Wisowaty who is one of the MSDN DCC's and noticed something really fun that they have done to the site.

All of the DCCs have straight photos - serious and wearing their Microsoft shirts. But when you hover the mouse over the pictures, you see a real picture of that person. Bernard Wong competing with the sun in an ultra-bright t-shirt (you can always pick him out in a crowd!) ; Susan in her moto-cross gear , Russ Fustino in his tool-man garb, Rory Blyth being, well, Rory; and more. It's really fun since I know a bunch of these folks. Go check it out!

Susan will be presenting on Avalon (WPF) at our July 17th Vermont.NET meeting. Before she worked for Microsoft, she showed up at meetings in her leathers more than once!

Between the weblogs.asp.net feed and a variety of other individual feeds that I am subscribed to, I'm getting lots of good info streaming in from Mix.

My favorite comment so far was by Andrew Stopford who noted that everyone's reading name badges as they pass each other ("do I know him?" "do I know her?" "should I?") but that Tim O'Reilly read his badge but kept walking. Heck, I would have expected the same. Though the day Bill Gates stops on the stairway to say "Hey, Julie! I've been hoping to meet you someday!" is the day that I can say "my work here's been done" and go back to being a potter and pursue my other life dream at the same time.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

In addition to sharing all of the great computer and programming knowledge that breeds in his amazing brain, Scott Hanselman has always been very "out" about his diabetes in an effort to share his lessons, spread what knowedge he can and aid in pushing the envelope with respect to the technology that exists for those with diabetes.

Now Scott, his wife and Team Hanselman are walking in a fundraiser for the American Diabetes Association. There are a lot of reasons to support him in this, whether it's in thanks for all that he has done for your own personal programming skills, his contributons to the .NET community, because Scott's just a great guy or even just to support a really good cause.

Read more on Scott's blog and find out how to help Team Hanselman acheive their goal of raising $10,000.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

We all now google as in "go google it".

But I learned a new usage for google as a verb: "we've been googled" as in Google bought the company. No, not *my* company.

But here's a coupla happy guys from Boulder Colorado who's company, @Last, makers of SketchUp, got Googled thanks to an add-on for Google Earth!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Has this ever happened to you? An idea pops into your head and you open up your web browser to check it out. But because the home page of your web browser is pointed to a news website, the minute you see the home page filled with news (good and bad) you completely forgot what it was that you had meant to look up only one second ago.

This happens to me way too often.

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Two new contests were announced.

Made in Express  $10,000 for the most clever app written in VS2005 Express and/or SQL Server 2005 Express.

Mash it Up with Atlas Smartphones and XBOX 360's are the giveaways for getting up to your eyeballs with Atlas and doing something cool. The newest Atlas CTP was just released, too! more on atlas.asp.net.

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Michele Leroux Bustamante has posted code samples from her sessions at SD West. The posts keep coming and coming. I think she did something like 40 sessions! Not really, but it looks like she did 5 regular sessions and 2 half day sessions. I do not know how on earth she manages that. It must be an IDesign thing, since Michele and Brian Noyes and Juval Lowy also do a zillion talks each at DevConnections.

Speaking of DevConnections - it's only in 2 more weeks! April 2-5. I'll be doing three talks this time, Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0, Building WSE 3.0 Secured Web Services that can talk to WCF and Five Supposedly Scary things in .NET. I have taken liberties with the actual session titles, but that's the gist of it. There is going to be a lot of amazing content.

At the end of the month, Michele and I get together again, along with Jason Beres, Scott Hanselman and Bill Hatfield to present a full day of talks at Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee. This is a full day user group event put on by the WI.NET Users Group.

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From Larry O'Brien's blog:

SD Magazine: R.I.P.

Oh well. The writing had been on the wall, but today it's official: Software Development magazine, which I founded in 1992, has been absorbed by Dr. Dobb's Journal and will cease publication. Ironically, SD was born when Dr. Dobb's absorbed Computer Language after Miller Freeman (now CMP) bought DDJ. Between the two events, that means more than 150,000 subscribers who signed up for Computer Language or Software Development and winded up with DDJ. Just saying. Larry also has some follow up posts: The Imminent Death of Developer's Magazines Commenting on a blog post by Eric Sink Why DDJ Won't Change:Commenting on a blog post by Joel Spolsky

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DevSource has started  new video interview series called Great Minds in Development. This is not more podcasts featuring our friends in the .NET community chatting away, but interviews with some of the thought leaders in the development world. The first video is online... [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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My parents had to put down one of their dogs earlier this week. Beautiful Inka. Two days later, the owners of Alex, one of Inka's brothers, had to put him down, too. Inka and Alex were 10 1/2 which is pretty old for a newfie. They were from a litter of 13 that I will never forget -good ol' Pippa had all those puppies all at once.

We put a little rememberance of Inka and Alex on the home page of my parent's kennel website.My mom, dad and I had fun writing this and giggling about these beautiful dogs who have such big personalities. So much easier than bawling some more. www.blueheavennewfoundlands.com

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People always ask me what we do up here in Vermont. Well, here are FOUR jobs related to .NET so we aren't just boiling syrup and milking the cows all day, y'know! I noticed these local IT jobs in 7Days this week. One is a .NET Developer job that I have posted before. Here's a link right to 7Days classifieds for IT jobs.

1) I see my favorite local software company, Synergy is hiring again. I worked there when they were just porting to VB6 and frustrated because .NET was released while they were in the middle of it. But now they are looking for .NET developers. Yay!

2) Blue House Group - a local consulting company that does great work and is in hip little Richmond, VT (12 miles from Burlington) has a web designer positions (as well as a few other jobs). They are also knee deep in .NET at Blue House along with the other technologies they use.

3) HazMed has a .NET Developer (C#) postion that is in 7Days but not on their website. They do have a SysAdmin job on their website.

4) ASP Developer wanted (.NET skills a plus) at CPA Site Solutions.

 

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TFS was released today for those that have been waiting. I know someone in my user group was asking about this recently. More from Soma.

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Is winter back? Well, it's pretty but I can't go out and ski in the woods even though we got lots of fluffy snow overnight and this morning. My skis would just go right down to the rocks and grass. Oh well. Bad for the maple syrup makers right now but its still early. They require cold nights and warm days for the sap to flow (up to the top when it warms up, down to the roots when it cools down.... each pass is a chance for the sap to flow out of the taps). But we had days and days of warm days and warm nights and now cold nights and cold days. Neither is the right combination! I did see the thick plumes of smoke coming out of a sugarhouse on monday. I wanted o stop and roll down my window so I could smell the sweet sugary smoke, but it wasn't an option at the time. Did you know that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup?

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Someone asked me about ADO.NET indexing which encouraged me to write about some of the amazing results of some performance tests I have done comparing VS2003 and VS2005's DataTable indexing. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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I am astonished that INETA has had to go so far as to have a prize drawing to encourage user group leaders to report on the health of .NET user groups (thereby also helping INETA to show it's sponsors what type of reach they are getting which is a VERY reasonable thing for a sponsor to ask).

Once a month, it is a tiny itty bitty task. All they ask is that you identify yourself, your user group, the date of your meeting and the # of attendees. Additionally, they ask what your current membership count is and if you are so inclined, you can even leave comments.

One minute? Two?

So why is it hard to get u.g. leaders to do this? Do you find it invasive? That's the only thing I can come up with because certainly it's not much of an imposition. Even if INETA did nothing more than provde the speaker bureau - that's huge. And this is just about the only thing they ask in return other than eval forms when they send a speaker (and pizza) to your group three times a year. So what if they ask every month - not just months that you have INETA speakers. And even with that, you cannot imagine the time and energy that the INETA volunteers put in to running this organization. And for what? For you - for your user groups. So a little survey each month is not much to ask as far as I'm concerned. I'm very happy to share that info with them.

Really, I am very curious why bribery is necessary? Not that I would turn down a $100 gift card for my user group (though I wish I could use it at the local pizza joint)!

Feel free to leave comments or link back to this post if you want to blog a reply.

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I took Tasha and Daisy to the vet today. They are both newfoundlands. Tasha turned 12 in December and Daisy turned 11. Tasha was a "rescue" who I adopted when she was 2 1/2 yrs old. She had come from a home where she literally had lived in the back yard her whole life. She was kind of naughty when she first came to live with me having never had any freedom - so she ran away a lot. But I knew that if I couldn't get through to her, nobody would have enough love and patience to do it. So I took her to dog training and let her sleep on my bed. Soon she loved me so much she just wanted to be good and grew up to be a quintissential newfie - the gentle giant. Now Tasha is 12 years old, which is very unusual for a newfie to live this long, and other than some "old age" stuff ... loss of muscle mass - most noticably on her head, a little swelling around the knees and having slown down a little -she is in really great shape. She's happy, healthy, still runs around and has a great appetite. Even her eyesite and hearing are still awesome. Today at the vet, after verifying all of this to be true, he also told me that her heart was perfect. PERFECT!

Daisy is 11. We kind of stole Daisy from my parents two summers ago. She came for a visit and stayed. Daisy is astonishing in her own right. Except for grey eyelashes and a grey mustache, she looks and acts and moves like a five year old dog. When we go outside in the morning she jumps up and down until I throw her bumper for her which she races after and then prances around with when she gets it. Daisy floats up and down stairs - very different than Tasha who has to kind of bounce her back legs together to get up and down. She too is an amazing dog and this very experienced vet finds it hard to believe she is 11 years old.

I just needed to record that.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Though the camera seems to be trained on the speaker and never the screen. I keep waiting to SEE what he's talking about. Maybe someone will notice and do something about it.

Maybe by the time Sahil Malik is on a little later, they'll have it fixed

http://www.ajax.sys-con.com/

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I was at a party last night and someone asked me “so, have you got an Origami yet? Heh heh.” [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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I have a client who is a programmer with a small company that is creating a really cool on-line product. And I mean kew-well!

His background is very strong in architecture and also he and his team have done a ton with WinForms but his ASP skills hark back to the pre.NET days. But he's doing the app in ASP.NET 2.0 and I am mentoring him with this and a variety of other related things.

Along the way, he was frustrated with some of the limitations of the built in ASP.NET 2.0 controls (a post for another day). Even though I have never used them, I knew that based on the particular tools he was seeking, I have heard such great things about telerik from people I trust, so I recommended that they be on the top of the list of 3rd party controls to check out. Needless to say, the report back from him is that he is now using 3 or 4 of those controls and is so happy that he's (no, not buying the company) but subscribing to their full package.

A few weeks later he was ready to start synching between his development sql server and he online sql server as he got deeper into his tests. Though I have only played with them a little, I am still quite familiar with Red-Gate's tools and also know so many people (that I trust) who think they are awesome. So once again, I gave him a strong recommendation to try them out. A few days later, I got another very happy email from him saying that the Red-Gate tools were fantastic and he is definitely sticking with them.

There's a lot to gain from just knowing what's out there and paying attention to what people say about them (and who it is that's saying them and what the context is) even if you don't have hands on experience with every tool out there.

So thanks Red-Gate. Thanks telerik. (And thanks ASPInsiders, too.)

p.s. no, this is NOT a sponsored post!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I want to point the Vermont.NET members to Korby Parnell's blog post which highlights and even enhances an invitation to give feedback in a very explicit way to the usability team.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I created a scratchpad today using Windows Live Local that has a view of my house (yes my HOUSE outin the boonis in the mountain. You can actually see where my house is (though the photo must be from shortly before it was actually built), the trails into the woods. Anyway, I selected eight points on it for my scratch pad with a title and notes for each one. Then I clicked on the email function and it created an email but the link. Yikes. Was it long and filled with gook. Lori McKinney from the Huntsville .NET User Group sent me a tiny url to get to a scratch pad she created for seeing where their meeting location was, the airport and a few surrounding hotels. That's the way to go. So hopefully down the road, this [very cool application which has come  long way since Virtual Earth's release this summer!!] will enable a cleaner way to share scratchpads without having to take care of that piece of the puzzle ourselves. I sent the link of the scratchpad I created to my husband he told me he deleted it because it was filled with gobbledygook. That is going to be the typical reponse of regular users.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I was trying to be really skeptical but it didn't work. After poking around Windows Live for about 5 minutes this afternoon - I think it's pretty cool. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

It took embedding XML into SQLServer to get Stephen to go public on his love for it. Perhaps all of those digs at Clemens Vasters' choice to store dasBlog data in XML were just a ruse. But now Stephen is not only at one with XML, he is spreading the joy. (Hey maybe I should be a lobbyist, that's pretty good, huh?)

Stephen is coming to Vermont.NET on Monday night, all thanks to INETA to present on XML in VS2005 & SQL Server 2005.

He was also planning to come up for another snowshoing hike (we did Mt. Mansfield last time he was here) but alas, we are expecting rain rain and more rain.

Meeting Date: Monday March 13th
Time: 6:00 - 8:30 pm
Location: Vermont Technical College, Williston Campus
More info and details and directions at www.vtdotnet.org

We also have some great raffles this month! We will be raffling off Sax's CommStudio and Atalasoft's DotImage.

This is a joint meeting with www.VTSQL.org.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org