I was flipping through the latets Forbes Small Business (May 2006) this morning and nearly fell out of my chair when I read the last sentence of this letter to the editor. It was in reference to a recent issue filled with a number of articles on women-owned businesses. I can't believe the guy actually signed his name and business name, too!

As a senior man in the small-business world (I'm 64), I read with great interest your articles about the growth of woman-owned businesses. You discount why men succeed at a greater rate than women - which I think is because men are more realistic. From the time they are little girls, most women are taught that looks, rather than learning to be smart, matter in business. Women cake on a fake face every day to alter their looks, yet expect everyone, especially men, to comply with feminine prerogatives. That has a chilling effect on business negotiations. Incessant narcisism is rampant in the feminine mind, and it can and does cloud business judgement.

Richard Royce
President
VenturEXPO Group
Pasadena, Calif.

I wonder if he knows that the Narcissism began with a man named Narcissus.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Alentus has always been one of the ASP.NET hosts out in the front of the pack. It is where my own website and also the Vermont.NET site is hosted for nearly 4 years.

I just happened to cruise to their home page and saw that it has been totally spiffed up! That struck me because I have watched their "visual branding" evolve over the years. They really now finally have a good solid look that evokes the professionals that they are.

I also see they're now hosting WordPress and DotNetNuke.

They now have a basic $8.95 ASP.NET 2.0 hosting plan. I tend to stay the heck away from hosting that is that low-priced because it is usually cheap for a reason. But this is no "budget" host. They are very technical and knowledgable about ASP.NET.

Though they offered to let me have some space on a test ASP.NET server before RTM, I have been too busy to update any of my sites. But a new VTdotNET site is in the works and it is time! Yay.

Kudos guys.

Last week I had to send in all of my paperwork for my business quarterly taxes. There's the 941 to the Feds,  a tax & withholding to the State of Vermont Dept ofo Taxes and one other to the Vermont Dept of Employment and Training.

I inadvertantently switched the checks for the two Vermont agencies, sending the E&T check to the tax people and their check to E&T. I am a sole proprietor ... these are not big checks.

I actually got a phone call from someone this morning telling me that she had the right form, but the wrong check and she was going to "pink it over" (office internal mail) to the tax department. A phone call! Can you imagine? So I called the other department which is more automated and won't be able to get their hands on the check I sent them - it will just get processed, but they will send me a refund. So I called the first woman back who was so nice and told her I would just send her a new check. No forms, no notes no explanation. She said just put my employer i.d. on the check and she'll know what to do with it.

I know people with larger companies have issues with doing business in this tiny state, but it suits me just fine!

I just took a look to see how the schedule is filling out for Code Camp 5 in Waltham, MA next weekend and was really impressed!

The stats

• 47 sessions
• 5 tracks
• 19 speakers
• 3 out of towners (I think that's right)
• 1 speaker who seems to be planning to do 6 sessions - maybe Thom is just supposed to select from them...

This is definitely something that's on my mind a lot. I'm not marketing person and it's not something I've been tasked with by a marketing person or the TabletPC team. It's just something that keeps popping up and is very interesting to me.

This weekend while visiting friends outside of Madison, WI after Deeper in .NET, I learned that my friend's partner, a painting contractor who is extremely non-technical, has a TabletPC. [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Some pics of my fun trip to Deeper in .NET in Wisconsin and a look around WI afterwards!

Flying out of Burlington VT, I finally got a decent picture of Lake Champlain. Of course this is nothing compared to what I was looking at.

Flying into Chicago here is the torquoise Lake Michigan.

Avonelle and Val	Bill Hatfied and Korby Parnell	Dinner at a local brew pub
The wings of the Milwaukee Art Museum. This building is amazing. Look for pics on the MAM site.	Local legend Dale Chihuly at MAM	My dear friend Martha Downs and Korby at MAM.
What? Skiing in Wisconsin!	The Tyrol Basin Golf Course, err, Ski and Snowboard Area.

a VERY impressive woodpile!

A reader of my recent Ink on the Web article in CoDe Magazine (samples available here) emailed me with an odd problem that I had to see in action before I realized what was going on.

The problem was this. She had a web form with an ink-enabled winforms control on it that worked fine. But when she added an asp:dropdownlist, the page crashed. She said she got no error message.

I tried the same thing and received a big fat error saying "Control 'dropdownlist1' of type 'dropdownlist' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server".

Aha! In order to do most of the tricks I am performing with moving the ink control's data from the client side to the server side require the form to not be a server-side form. Therefore "runat=server" does not exist in the form tag.

The solution is to have separate forms on the page for the ink control and the server side controls.

Kirk Allen Evans reminds us that only one server side form can be visible at a time, so you have to design your page around these limitations unfortunately. You don't be able to have server controls in a form, then below that an ink control in another form and then below that more server controls in a third form.

The general html of the page would look like this:

MicroStrain, Inc., a leading microminiature sensor developer, is seeking a Visual C++ developer responsible for creating and maintaining their flagship, wireless sensor network application, Agile-Link. Qualified candidates will be required to write documentation for Agile-Link’s development, code design, and testing. In addition, candidates must have strong teamwork skills to interact with various engineers, sales, and support staff in the development of custom applications and software development kits. 

Applicants must have 3+ years of software design and development experience on the Microsoft Windows platform, including an understanding of software life cycle design. Proven, advanced knowledge of C/C++, object oriented design, hardware/software interaction, and the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) are required. Candidates must demonstrate a strong debugging foundation, and a clear, critical writing and verbal skill set to describe any such discovered issues.

A strong working knowledge of Visual Basic, the Microsoft .NET framework, and open source operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD are a plus. A Bachelors of Science Degree in Computer Science or better is preferred.

http://www.microstrain.com/employment.aspx Our employment page

Please send electronic resume to: humanres@microstrain.com and mention that you came thru vtdotnet.

Here's one way to ensure I'll be hovering around your boot at TechEd! [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Milwaukee was great at Deeper in .NET. I wrote a little about that this morning over here and posted some pics here.

Next week I go to Huntsville, Alabama as an INETA speaker to talk about Advanced Data Access Techniques with ADO.NET 2.0. Then the next week is DevTeach in Montreal. Hopefully it will be springier there than it is here!

I was nicely surprised to see Korby Parnell in Milwaukee at Deeper in .NET.  Luckily for me, the one session I had to miss, Scott Hanselman's (I was in my room doing one last run through of my talk), Korby has laid out in detail. But not so much technically as about what an unbelievabley phenomenal presenter Scott is. I laughed when I read that Scott makes fun of VB programmers who comment using this

'//this is my comment

which I do in the demo code for presentions because it's so much more obvious than a little apostrophe.

Scott hadn't seen my demo so it was a funny coincidence.

If you want more tips about what makes a speaker a great speaker, check out Korby's homage to Scott.

I'm in Milwaukee for the Deeper in .NET event that is happening today. Five speakers back to back all day starting with Michele Leroux Bustamante doing a talk on WCF, then Scott Hanselman, my (data access talk), Bill Hatfield and Jason Beres. I hear there are nearly 500 people registered. Wow!

Yesterday I had a great look at and taste of some of the specialties of the area.

My first surprise was the Bloody Mary that had something a little different in it

Yes, in between the celery and the lemon is a sausage. It's just the way they serve them here! This drink was ordered (and consumed) by Chris Barwick who I didn't think I knew until he told me he was OptionsScalper. Oh! I sure know him by that alias! Chris picked me up at the airport and I was amazed to learn all of the brainy things (like F# research at Microsoft's Cambridge UK research facility) that he's involved in.

There was a dinner last night for the speakers and some other locals and out of towners which was "taste of Wisconsin" - all of the Wisconsin treats. The bratwurst was awesome and they also had, get this, Beer Cheese soup. Had to try that and it was tasty.

It was a blast to get to meet Avonelle Lovhaug in person finally and Val the C# Gal too! Casey Chesnut is here and I divulged to him the secret of how I got ink on Virtual Earth. It's a big deal for me that I actually figured out something that Casey the mad genius got stumped on. Probably the only time *that* will ever happen.

Oddly there is a small FoxPro conference here too so it was a great surprise to bump into my dear friend Ceil Silver and some of the ol' FoxPro gang.

(links later)

Milwaukee is a city filled with beautiful old buildings (it was the 2nd biggest inland port city after Chicago in the 1800's. I'm looking forward to strolling around tomorrow to see more.

Scott Isaacs and co. have done an amazing job and I'm really looking forward to the day.

From Chris Sells' blog:

Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn't change the meaning of anything.

With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice.

Egad!

I have a feeling that Charles Petzold is doing the same about now, since on 4/5 he said he had one more month before his 1000 page WPF book is due.

Code Camp 5 is only in a few more weeks. The abstract list is looking a little light (although Thom could be just having a hard time deciding from to many?) But it's not too late to submit your talks and certainly not too late to register.

Here are the details.

I'm still on the fence since I have to drive to Montreal on Monday for DevTeach where I give one talk a day for three days. Waltham is about 4 hours southeast of where I live and Montreal is about 3 hours north. So you can imagine my dilemma.

And before any of that, I am on my way to Milwaukee tomorrow for Deeper in .NET (speakin on ADO.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Integration) then home for a few days and then off again to speak in at HUNTUG (speaking on Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0) as an INETA speaker. Hopefully it will rain a few times while I'm gone on the peas and lettuce seeds in my garden.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Joel Spolsky's May 2000 article on the Chicken and the Egg Problem seems like a good place to look for solving the adoption problems of the Tablet PC (remember "Mobile PC" now) which is discussed endessly by Tablet PC developer ("make tablets easier to buy so people will buy our software!") and the manufacturers ("make more software so people will want to buy our tablets!"). [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Now that all three of my DevConnections powerpoint decks and demos are online, I just wanted to have one post for linking to them all.

If you were an attendee of ASPConnections or Visual Studio Connections, you should have password access to this stuff on the DevConnections site.

Otherwise, they are on the presentations page of my pwn website.

On that page, the talk are listed alphabetically. Look for:

1. Advanced Data Access Patterns with ADO.NET 2.0
2. Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That don't really have to be)
3. Using WSE 3.0 Today to Prepare for WCF Tomorrow

On that last one, note that I have also recorded the demos associated with that talk. Check this post for links to those videos.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some very knowledgable people are debating WSDL first. I think reading these types of threads where you get not only people's opinions of pros and cons, but the why's start getting answered too.

It starts with Craig Andera's post about protecting himself (and the world) from poorly written WSDLs by implementing iXMLSerializable.

This post woke Tim Ewald out of his blog slumber who, as a big contract first proponent,thinks that Craig's proposal is overkill.

Craig responded.

Aaron Skonnard got in on the conversation.

Christian Weyer did too (in Craig's comments) since he's got THE tool for doing contract first web services.

All in all, very educational thread, whichever side of the fence  you are on. Me ... I'm just, as always, on the fence.

It's too pretty out so I had to run outside and take these:

As I get ready to head to Wisconsin for Deeper in .NET, I see that Vermont's Cabot Cheese has once again won a bunch of gold medals at the "olympics of the cheesemaking industry", the 2006 World Championship Cheese contest. And just to be clear, it was the Wisonsinites who run this contest so thanks Wisconsin!

26th Biennial World Championship Cheese Contest  Selected Results
March 21-23, 2006 in Madison, Wisconsin

Results for Cabot Creamery Cooperative

Product Entry	Place	Score	Product Class
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (3 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (39 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (60 days old) Cabot Horseradish Cheddar Cabot Salted Butter Cabot Unsalted Butter	1st 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 4th 2nd 4th	99.20 98.70 98.20 98.85 99.25 98.35 99.20 98.65	Sharp Cheddar Medium Cheddar Medium Cheddar Extra Sharp Cheddar Mild Cheddar Flavored Past. Proc. Cheese Salted Butter Unsalted Butter

Product Entry	Place	Score	Product Class
Hahn's Blueberry Dream Spread Vermont Butter & Cheese Goats Milk Feta	2nd 3rd	99.60 99.45	Reduced Fat Cheeses Semi-Soft Goat's Milk Cheeses

For additional results and information about the World Championship Cheese Contest, visit:
www.wischeesemakersassn.org

I took this pic of one of the red maples on our property yesterday morning. Kinda gray but the buds are pretty. the picture wasn't impressive in a small format, but it looks so nice big that I have it for my screen background now. Spring is coming. Yay!

So, there was much ado about somethng when Gretchen announced she was leaving Microsoft. I love that Korby referred to her as a Microsoft Legend and almost wrote a blog post about that. She is something of a folk legend (I don't mean that as in "imaginary" though) for what happened when she and Zoe started the JobsBlog as opposed to, say the MSDN "Microsoft Legend" program which highlights some of the best selling authors in our industry.

Michael Kaplan pointed to where Gretchen landed and it's really great. She and Zoe have come back together to create a business which leverages their extreme experience as recruiters to offer assistant to technology job seekers and technology job seekees. JobSyntax. Excellent! Go girls!

Giant breed dogs don't have a long lifespan but my dogs Tasha (12) and Daisy (11) are not only very old for Newfoundlands but unbelievably healthy at their unusual age. Here's a little 8 second movie (only 364KB) of them on a walk last week. Daisy is on the leash and Tasha is in front. People who own Newfies cannot believe these dogs.

Tasha came to me as a rescue at 2 1/2 yr old with bad knees. She had 3 operations on her 2 back knees when she was about 3 or 4 years old. She has been on Cosequin for many years but we switched to something called Cetyl-M a few years ago. Tasha was always athletic. Tasha definitely has problems with those back legs now. If she is on the tile floor, it is really hard for her to get up (slippery) and she is pretty pokey going up and down stairs. But she is eager (and able) to go for long walks and still even runs a little. She's not a powerful dog anymore, but she still amazes us.

Daisy who is a year younger is one of my parent's dogs (they are breeders). All the other dogs at my parents knew that it was pointless to chase stick or a ball if Daisy was around because she aways got there first. Daisy still runs and jumps and chases - very very strong and powerful still. She has not been on anything until about 6 months ago we put her on Cetyl-M too. The vet says she's like a 5 year old Newf. Even her coat is still dark and rich.

It's everywhere it's everywhere! And now it's even on MSDN, too! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I recorded my basic "Securing a web service with WSE 3" demo using Camtasia. There are two versions of this.

1. In the 30 minute version (25MB), I spend a lot of time looking at config and policy files as well as tracing and debugging while implementing the security.
2. The shorter 15 minute version (12MB) does not take any stops along the way although we do inspect the trace file at the very end  just to prove that the message was secured.
3. WCF Client to WSE3 Service Demo (20MB, 20 minutes) see notes below

I don't get to take this much time to explain things during a conference, so I'm happy to be able to do the demo in my own time frame. I think I will do this for some of my other favorite presentations.

It's different to do a presentation with no audience, in the quiet of my office. I did have to edit out the barking dog at one point. It's not nearly as fun and I can tell that I sound very different than when presenting to a room full of developers. Maybe I should drink a few cups of coffee next time I record demos. Also, without the conference clock ticking away, I am not racing through the demo which is a nice change. Calm cool and collected.

Next I will record the demo of my WCF client calling into a plain ASMX web service built in .NET 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 and then calling into a web service that has been secured with WSE 3.0. When that is online, I come back to this post and link to that as well.

Update 4/18: The WCF demo is online. It is 20 minutes long and about 20 MB. There are two important things to know about this demo. 1) It is part of a bigger presentation about writing web services today that can communicate with WCF tomorrow, but the demo doesn't go over those rules. You can see basic guidance in this article that I wrote, but becuae the guidance was in flux when I published the article, please do keep an ey on he MSDN WSE Dev Center for an upcoming article by William Tay and PAG guidance. 2) This is not focused on how to write the WCF client. Although I show a little about how I did it, the point of the demo is just to prove that it works. Again, watch for William Tay's article!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have Urchin on my website for site analysis but never think to look at the stats. It is an amazing reporting tool with the amount of detail and analysis it does. My site is hosted on Alentus and this is one of the tools they offer.

I was surprised to see that blog folder alone is getting about 400,000 page views a month. I know from my referrals that an enormous amount of that is coming from Google.

Another stat I noticed that surprised me was that in the past month, there have been over 2,000 downloads of powerpoints and zip files(containing my demos) from my presentations page. I sure hope people are finding them useful!

Ken Levy has written a wonderful historical post tying all of these things together. As I have blogged in the past, Ken was something of a Wunderkind in the FoxPro world back in the day. I had no idea how extensive and impressive the rest of his background was. The story he weaves in this post, becomes, in the end, a lovely welcome to Danny Thorpe (if you don't know who this is, it's another great excuse to read this blog post!) who has just joined the Windows Live team.

While I have merely enabled ink in my own controls on my own web pages , Loren Heiny is working n something really cool!! A way to place inkable edit controls over existing text boxes on web pages. For example, in his Camtasia video demonstrating his tests, he opens up Google and can write directly in he google text box, then it will get recognized and converted to text. This is instead of using the TIP.

This is big U.I. problem that many tablet pc developers struggle with. We like the idea of users opening up forms and writing directly in them and having that get recognized. What we lose, though is the editing flexibility of the tip. So the conundrum is how to get these two things to merge!

Loren is using some magic to get his inkable edit boxes placed over the fields, which means that this needs to be predefined somehow for each page. But that doesn't seem worriesome to me. It sounds like his tool might eventually enable anyone to create the definitions for any page and share them. Or the developers of those page could create the placement definitions for their own pages and let end users download them. Something like the how the context tagging works for tablet pcs. Or better yet, anyone could just hire Loren to create the mappings for their pages.

Anyway, check out Loren's post and accompanying video demonstration. Neat stuff!

Last week our neighbor's house was robbed in the middle of the day. I sent an email out to a list of about 30 local people to let them know and suddenly many of those people were reporting back about a number of other recent local robberies. Many of these had the same signature which was the door being kicked in. My carpenter husband had even repaired one of these doors.

A positive effect of this is that we are now planning to have a community meeting about setting up a neighborhood watch and hopefully having a state trooper come and advise us as well. I already feel like the Mrs. Kravitz of Moody Road since I can see who is driving up and down the road all day long while I'm at my computer. There are not very many houses on my road and it'sa dead end road, so an unfamiliar car definitely stands out!

Happily, it seems that the perps of some (maybe all??) of these robberies have been caught, according to this news report in the Burlington Free Press.

This has definitely had an effect on us and some of our habits in the past week. I prefer living in my little fantasy bubble where nothing bad can happen to us.

Green Mountain Power

IT Point Person

Do you have great programming and communication skills?

We’re looking for an energetic professional to join our programming team who has that rare mix of programming and people skills. If you like a fast paced user-driven environment working on a wide-variety of systems, we have a great job for you. You will be the point person for a high-powered software team responsible for triaging requests, writing specs, coding, and project work in order to satisfy a diverse group of users. This position has plenty of opportunities to grow.

The development environment focuses on Microsoft's tools and Oracle databases on Windows, Tru64 UNIX, and VMS systems. Fluency in a cross section of Visual Studio, Oracle, SQL, PL/SQL, C#, Microsoft .NET and Object Oriented programming techniques is highly desirable.

 Green Mountain Power offers a very competitive benefits package for our employees including medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your family, a pension program as well as a 401-k plan with a dollar for dollar match of your first 4 % contribution.
 
You can email a resume in Word doc form to brown_p@gmpvt.com and please cc aghareza@gmpvt.com indicating that you found this on the VTdotNET site or on my blog.

Green Mountain Power Corporation
Green Mountain Power, a Vermont company committed
to the development of its employees, to serving customers and to the
Vermont value of preserving the environment

                                                                          AA/EOE

The demos from my talk on Monday night at Vermont.NET are on the TALKS page of my website. They are listed alphabetically, so look under "F" for "Five..." The link to the PPT and ZIP files is below the session description.

I'll get them onto the Vermont.NET website shortly.

Code Samples from my two latest CoDe Magazine artcles:

• Ink on the Web
• SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications Tell .NET 2.0 Apps When Critical Data Changes 

 are on the "articles" page of my website.

I have been doing a bit of organizing and gotten the following two sessions from DevConnections on-line.

• Advanced Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0
• Five (Supposedly) Scary Things about .NET

These can be found on the "talks" page of my website.
The talks are listed alphabetically with links to the PPT and ZIP files just after the descriptions.

I still have to package up the code from the third talk: "Preparing WSE3 Web Services for WCF Clients".

The power went out for a short while today. Though I have no idea what stroke of luck caused this to happen on a 70 degree sunny day, I took great advantage of it and planted peas in the veggie garden bed. Most things can't be planted until after memorial day. But to sate my need to get gardening, I have seeds for a bunch of things that can get started early.

ok I retitled the post - didn't want to trick anyone into reading about my garden ....<g>

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Though I have the necessary permissions for using SqlDependency almost memorized (as well as documented in my presentations and my new CoDe Mag article on Query Notification), I tend to forget that when using the lower level SqlNotificationRequest, that you need permissions to send and receive on your custom services and queues.

Here's how to do that and here is the MSDN Documentation on the same.

In this example, the ASPNET account is the one for IIS5 that I have set up in my SQL Server. Use whichever account is going to be accessing the services and queues.

GRANT RECEIVE ON MyNotifQueue TO ASPNET

GRANT SEND ON SERVICE::[MyNotifService] TO [ASPNET]

Having spoken a few times over the years at the one of the Poughkeepsie NY ACM groups, I am on their mailing list. I got a good laugh from the recent mailing announcing a talk about Image Storage ex-IBM engineer (that describes most of the members of the chapter) who has an I.T. support business. In his business description, he says:

To keep from being swamped with more and more business, Jerry has adopted a new slogan:  Highest Priced Computer Service in Town.

The TabletPC Hands on Labs were very popular at DevConnections. I think I heard that over 600 people did the labs. Upon completion of the HOLs, the attendees were given a bright orange Mobile PC baseball cap. Throughout the conference, 3 attendees wearing those hats won a new Toshiba M400 Mobile PC (you know, a tablet). Lora Heiny has a lot of great pictures of the thrilled recipients here.

You can imagine that every time attendees were in one big room, for example at breakfast or lunch, it was a sea of orange, as they were all wearing the hats in hopes of winning the M400.

But even after all of the M400's had been given away, people were still wearing the hats. They were kind of cool. At the closing session, where perhaps 1,000 of the attendees were all seated, I took this short video to show the sea of orange hats.

It is only 12 seconds long. The AVI version from my camera is 25 MB and the choppier WMV file is only 2.9 megs.

As I was doing the last section of my "5 Supposedly Scary Things in .NET" talk last night at the Vermont.NET user group, I came to the slide with the Permission attributes examples to either Request, Demand or Assert permissions. I had decided to try to explain these (very high level) as they had always completely mystified me. Although I have given this talk before, I had a sudden epiphany for a new analogy for the demanding and asserting permissions - purchasing beer. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

I'll be doing a talk entitled "Five Supposedly Scary things about .NET" at Vermont.NET this evening.

The talk covers the following daunting topics on a high level

1. Declarative Attributes
2. Reflection
3. Delegate
4. Threading
5. Code Access Security

I'll be raffling off the last of the launch copies of Visual Studio 2005 PRO and SQL SErver 2005 Standard.

Free pizza courtesy of www.dottnetjobs.com.

After I did this talk at DevConnections last week, an attendee told me that he had been trying to solve some problems with an app and hadn't looked at any of these technologies becuase they seemed over his head. He was very excited because he realized that he could solve these problems using some of the stuff covered in the talk and was looking forward to learning more and leveraging them. That is exactly why I did the talk. I hope to inspire others as well.

My parents' dog Celeste just had her first litter. She had 10 gorgeous little things. Here are the first pictures: http://www.blueheavennewfoundlands.com/blueheavennewfoundlands/April2006LitterCeleste.htm

Celeste is Daisy's great grand-daughter, so these are Daisy's great great grand puppies.

CoDe Magazine sends a pile of issues for the VTdotNET user group every month. I got the box before I left for DevConnections and set it aside, only opening it this morning in prep for tonight's user group meeting. I didn't realize that the Query Notification article and the opinion piece I wrote for them had already been printed, but there they were. It's the May/June issue but is not online yet. In addition to my articles, there is the first of the WCF series articles in there (yay!!!) by Juval Lowy and one on Transactions in ADO.NET by Sahil Malik (yay!). And of course (as always) bunches of other great articles and columns.