I recently attended a meeting in Burlington aimed at small businesses to give them some ideas about what they can be leveraging on the web.... [read more]

[A DevLife post]

I just accidentally wrote a line of code that looked like this:

private boolean MyMethod(byval x as someobject)

Yes I was going for VB, but I've been doing a bunch of C# coding lately. At least I didn't hit the semi colon, too!

The funny part is I although C# doesn't come very naturally to me, there are definitely some syntax things I love. Though I still have a really hard time getting my brain to grok code like Kate writes (though that's pure C++...)

It was announced a few days ago that Bulgaria and Romania will become part of the European Union on Jan 1

So I'm sure there will be a big excitement when we arrive in Bulgaria next weekend.

Martin (who lives in Sofia) has links to more details.

By attending DevReach in Sofia Bulgaria Oct 9-10, you will be entered in the drawing.

Pretty amazing!

Google Toolbar has a new feature called notifications.

It took me a while this morning to realize that this was the service that was preventing me from starting up a 16-bit application (FoxPro 2.6).

I had turned off all types of stuff, but when I killed the process for the GoogleNotifications in my task manager, voila, the program opened up.

Just a word to the wise....

I wasn't there to witness it but I have heard from DCC Susan Wisowaty that there were 110 people at the MSDN event in Burlington yesterday. Another attendee told me she had heard it was 117. This is pretty phenomenal for a city that got axed from the schedule due to poor attendance. This is pretty phenomenal for city with a population of 50,000. This would be a good number for an event in NYC or Boston!

So, for anyone who thinks that Vermont has nothing but farmers, hippies and ski bums as it's population, think again!

 Vermont SQL Server User Group

Thanks to hard work by Chris Pels and his posse, you can now register for Code Camp 6 (as attendees and to submit sessions as a speaker).

www.thedevcommunity.org

It's Saturday & Sunday, Oct 21 - Oct 22

In the past month, I have made a number of short trips that allowed me to get away with a small carry-on bag. My big problem was that I couldn't bring toothpaste with me. I hated the idea of buying toothpaste at my destination, using a touch of it and then throwing it away. I even felt guilty doing the same with teh travel-sized toothpaste that the hotels gave me. Use a small amount and then it gets thrown away. The packaging is my real issue - I am always at odds with the convenience of our disposable habits.

On the other hand, the hassle of checking my bags just so I could have toothpaste.

My deodorant is a solid, my face soap is a bar, hotels have shampoo and I don't wear make-up. So it was really just the toothpaste that was making me dizzy.

So I was happy to see this today even though my next three trips are long ones that I will be checking my bag for anyway.

I was flipping through a magazine and getting lots of great programming advice from the article highlights. Then I realized I wasn't even looking at a coding magazine! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Sometimes I feel like I learn .NET one little method at a time. Today I had to do something I'd never done before and the solution was not obvious at first. [Read more ....]

[A DevLife post]

The leaves are wierd this year, so if you plan to come to Vermont to see them, definitely check out the official website to get you in the right place at the right time.

http://www.vermontvacation.com/seasons/fall.asp?bfp090601

I was looking on the United Airlines website at the prices of possibly flying to Seattle in December and had to laugh when this option popped up in the list.

For those of you who are comma challenged, this translates to 14,763,950 dollars. Oh, and this is in Economy. I wonder what the Business Class version of this flight costs?

PKC Corporation (which is a very cool company with a product developed by a man who is constantly rumored to be a Nobel prize-winner, which would be deserved, but he's not really) in Burlington is looking for a Sr. Web Developer, a Sr. Software Developer and a Technical Writer. They are a .NET shop and have been so for many years.

Find the details here (note the aspx extension on the page ).

Company
Founded in 1998, Sageworks, Inc., a Research Triangle Park-based firm, is one of the fastest-growing software and information companies in the United States. The firm has many Fortune 500 clients as well as over 4,000 accounting and financial institution customers. The company's recently patented artificial intelligence technology is the first in the World to convert financial data/numbers into concise, plain-language evaluations of business performance. To learn more, visit our corporate website at www.sageworksinc.com.

Environment
Sageworks is comprised of focused and results-oriented people who get things done. The people at Sageworks are very friendly and down-to-earth, but we are also committed to achieving our long-term objective - which is to fundamentally change the way people and companies gather and use financial data. As such, we work hard but we operate in a flat organizational structure where people are given great latitude and responsibility.

Job Qualifications
We are hiring talented software engineers to help us develop new products in the financial and banking markets. We are seeking highly motivated and intelligent software developers to help us leverage and build upon our core expert system. Experience in Microsoft technologies is required, .NET experience is a must. We seek developers who "code to live and live to code"; they must be passionate about software development. Finance and accounting experience is a plus.

Job Description
The position will require software development work:

1. The individual may perform testing/QA work initially as part of their job training.
2. The individual will perform the mundane (fix bugs) as well as the exceptional (build World Class applications).  

Technical Qualifications

.Net Framework, 1.0 & 2.0, OO methodology

C#, ASPX, JavaScript, XSLT, SQL Server 2005

The positions are located in Burlington, VT. Some travel to Raleigh, NC will be required.

Contact: Tim.Keogh@ProfitCents.com

The Vermont Software Developer Alliance had a fantastic meeting yesterday with 3 bank presidents and a partner from a Venture Capital fund as panelists in a discussion of "Positioning your company to get financing and capital investment". The room was packed with software business owners. While it was still somewhat fresh, I wrote down some of what I learned over here....

[A DevLife post]

VPN is affected by the worm protection setting of NAV 2006. There is no obvious way to allow VPN unless you can figure out what app drives it. I googled and read other forum posts for quite some time tonight - most of them complaining, no real solutions.

So turning off the worm protection in NAV is the only way I have been able to be able to continue using VPN since I updated NAV.

As it took a while to find any other info about this, I thought I would blog it to save someone else some time.

When I first moved to Vermont in Sept 1999, there were 3 or 4 highway moose accidents reported within a few weeks. I have fretted about them ever since when I am driving at night. I don't recall any bad accidents locally until seeing a news report today in the local paper. Some poor man was killed in a car accident on the highway near midnight last night.

My friends at Global Garage Sale outside of Burlington had an exciting day earlier this week when they sailed over the milestone of having sold over $1 million worth of other people's stuff on eBay. They are one of the hottest drop-off stores in the country and are getting ready to start franchising because they have a business model that is not only successful, but very socially responsible as well and that is a great combination. The local news station did a big item on them. I was proud like I was their momma!

I was driving home earlier this week on Route 17, facing the green mountains in the late afternoon. There is a section of the road where you see a sweeping view of the mountains that is like a big bowl. In the afternoon, the sun is hitting this wall of mountains. The afternoon glow combined with the colors of the changing leaves made the range radiate from foot to peak, north to south - completely red.

I pulled into the parking lot of a gas station to take a picture although a good chunk of the view is chopped off from that vantage point. So imagine seeing about the same as this mirrored on the left. Additionally, by the time I stepped out of my car and turned my camera on, the cloud cover had impacted the astonishing effect I had been looking at as I drove up the road. Still, this is pretty, even if it doesn't begin to capture what I was hoping to share. Most of this is Mount Abe, where we have gone hiking a few times recently.

On Thursday evening I gave a talk on WS Security Fundamentals in Dayton Ohio. One of the resources I point to is the PAG Guide on Securing Web Services. On the way home the next day, while sitting on the runway in PHL for 2 hours before taking off (uggh), I was reading the latest ASPNET Pro and Michele Leroux Bustamante's Under the Hood column was all about X509 cert management. It's great advice and I highly recommend it. It's the October 2006 issue which does not have all of its articles online.

Many developers who are starting up with programming message level security (eg with WSE or WCF) definitely have a learning curve when it comes to having to grok all of these bits and pieces of security tools that we have to work with - encryption, hashing, signing, certificates. I don't know how many times I have seen the question "where do I get a certificate" in the wse newsgroups. Heck, I had the same question myself once. And it was a lot of work to wrap my head around all of this crypto stuff.

So.... if you get ASPNET Pro or you can grab a copy at your local user group, check it out.

I'm going to send this to the sysadmin that works with one of my clients. I spent three months trying to explain to him why I needed a server certificate that was not going to be used for SSL. Aargh. Message level security seems to be a bit of an oxymoron to IT Pros.

(from their press release)

DevReach 2006 debuts in Bulgaria

The conference is the first of its kind to be held on the Balkans, focused on the latest trends in building software applications with Microsoft development tools.

SOFIA, Bulgaria – September 04, 2006 – National Academy for Software Development - a private education center, specializing in professional training of software engineers, and Telerik Corporation - a leading vendor of UI and data components for ASP.NET, announced today the DevReach conference to be hosted in Bulgaria with the sponsorship of Microsoft Corporation.

DevReach conference is the first of its kind to be held on the Balkans, focused on the latest trends in building software applications with Microsoft development tools.

Over two days, more than 500 attendees will meet 12 world famous lecturers, engaged all year round in such events as TechEd, VSLive!, Microsoft DevDays showcasing their latest knowledge in creating more reliable, scalable and secure solutions using Microsoft technologies in more than 20 technical sessions.

DevReach will be held at the International Exhibition Center on October 9-10 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference is hosted by National Academy for Software Development and sponsored by Telerik Corporation and Microsoft Corporation.

DevReach is the premier development event on the Balkans, featuring in-depth exposure to the latest Microsoft development technologies and a chance to interact with other members of the developer community.

Teodor Milev, managing director of Microsoft Bulgaria is scheduled to deliver a keynote presentation unveiling the latest Microsoft platform innovations for developers.

Keynote highlights also some industry-recognized innovators, including Plamen Vatchkov, chairman of the State Agency of Information Technologies and Communications, Nikolay Vassilev, minister of Public Administration and Administrative Reform, and others.

Developers at DevReach can benefit from sessions arranged in 3 parallel tracks that present vital information on important topics such as best techniques for accessing data with SQL Server and ADO.NET, writing high performance and extensible ASP.NET sites, writing secure and efficient .NET applications in integration with 2007 Office System and SharePoint.

As a part of the event attendees have the unique chance to participate in technology “Question & Answer” forums and network with more than 10 world known gurus in software development with Microsoft tools.

The target of the event is to become a place for passionate Microsoft developers from Eastern Europe to get in touch with the latest trends and to become a significant part of the global community.

We don't have to worry about stuff like that around here because we shop at our nearby farmstands.

Many benefits of course, but the one that is highlighted this week is knowing where your food comes from.

Though we did not do the localvore challenge (here's an example of one), I know it was inspiration to many!

I was happy to find this very current slide denoting the status of the various WS-* specs. I got to use it in a WS-Security fundamentals talk that I did in Dayton Ohio last night.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jevdemon/archive/2006/08/02/686515.aspx

After I warm up by speaking at my local user group tonight (Vermont.NET) about Asynchronous ASP.NET 2.0, I am taking the proverbial show on the road and will be presenting this same session in Cleveland tomorrow night (9/12), then my session called “5 Supposedly Scary things about .NET” in Findlay on Wednesday (9/13) and I wrap up in Dayton on Thursday night (9/14) doing a talk that explains some of the security fundamentals that anyone getting ready to do any flavor of Web Services Security (WSE, WCF (aka Indigo), or even non-Microsoft platforms) should have under their belt. The last talk is all concept (eg: what the heck is a digital certificate, what is encryption, what is signing) and no code, but pretty powerful, especially for people who don't know a lot about security and are daunted by all of these mysterious crypto tools.

I don't think I have ever been to Ohio - except for driving through it on a road trip to Colorado nearly 10 years ago.

You can see my full schedule here.

You can see the schedule of all INETA sponsored events here.

I'll be doing a talk on ASP.NET 2.0's Asynchronous features (async pages, async tasks and more) tonight at my home town user group (VTdotNET).

Huge thanks to SyncFusion for sponsoring this entire meeting. Not only are they covering the pizza & soda, but they have given us a license to Essential Studio to raffle off. It's a $1300 product (okay, that's the retail price). And there will be even another raffle for an individual license of any one of their components.

SoundToys in Burlington, VT is llooking for a C/C++ programmer.

You can read more about the job in their Seven Days classified ad here

Two companies are looking for SEO experts:

Dealer.com (they also have a bunch of other developer jobs that I posted last week)

and

Vermont Teddy Bear

No direct link so here's how I found these:

Go to the State's public recruitment site: http://erecruit.per.state.vt.us/index.html

Select View Job Postings/Apply for  a Job

Search with the cateogyr "Info Technology & Statistics" selected.

There are over 20 job listings here such as Systems Developer, Network Admin, DBA.

There are a few Data Analyst jobs in there as well.

Slow PDF printing? I had two suggestions - Print to Image and PostScript driver. For some reason, I settled with the first and never tried the latter until this morning. What a dope! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Daybreak ICS, in Williston VT, is looking for software developers (1099s) for short-medium term projects over the next 6 months starting in September 2006, with potential for ongoing work.

Projects will include design/build/test/implementation of applications for various aspects of Content Management. Anticipated skill sets include experience coding in Java, C#, ASP.net, VB, and Win GUI development. Project duration could be from a few weeks to a few months, and will include at least part of the time in our Williston, Vermont offices. There is a potential for limited national travel for a short-term project for requirements definition, but that should be minimal.

Any interested candidates should forward their resumes to Andy at alowe@daybreakICS.com.

I was recently involved in an ASPAdvice thread about close and dispose - an age old .NET debate. (Okay, the "age old" part is relative.)

As backup, I quoted the msdn documentation that says "close and dispose are functionally equivalent" and someone pointed out not to believe everything I read and that in .NET 1.1, it was known to be "broken".

With a hint from Angel Saenz-Badillos from the ADO.NET team, I opened up reflector to find proof that dispose will close as well . See the guts of dispose and close below.

I don't see anythingn wrong with still calling close *and* dispose, just to be completely explicit. I've seen people do it inside of using blocks with a connection, even though the end of the block will call SqlConnection.Dispose which in turn calls close. So it's redundant. And you would think that C# programmers would celebrate the use of less code.

Are there truly known cases where this fails?

This is SqlConnection's Dispose method:

protected override void Dispose(bool disposing)
{
      if (disposing)
      {
            this._userConnectionOptions = null;
            this._poolGroup = null;
            this.Close();
      }
      this.DisposeMe(disposing);
      base.Dispose(disposing);
}

And just for fun...SqlConnection's Close method. Don't get confused by that Dispose at the end.
That's for a different object, not the actual connection.
 
public override void Close()
{
      IntPtr ptr1;
      Bid.ScopeEnter(out ptr1, "<sc.SqlConnection.Close|API> %d#", this.ObjectID);
      try
      {
            SqlStatistics statistics1 = null;
            RuntimeHelpers.PrepareConstrainedRegions();
            try
            {
                  statistics1 = SqlStatistics.StartTimer(this.Statistics);
                  lock (this.InnerConnection)
                  {
                        this.InnerConnection.CloseConnection(this, this.ConnectionFactory);
                  }
                  if (this.Statistics != null)
                  {
                        ADP.TimerCurrent(out this._statistics._closeTimestamp);
                  }
            }
            catch (OutOfMemoryException exception3)
            {
                  this.Abort(exception3);
                  throw;
            }
            catch (StackOverflowException exception2)
            {
                  this.Abort(exception2);
                  throw;
            }
            catch (ThreadAbortException exception1)
            {
                  this.Abort(exception1);
                  throw;
            }
            finally
            {
                  SqlStatistics.StopTimer(statistics1);
            }
      }
      finally
      {
            SqlDebugContext context1 = this._sdc;
            this._sdc = null;
            Bid.ScopeLeave(ref ptr1);
            if (context1 != null)
            {
                  context1.Dispose();
            }
      }
}

I had to translate some VB code to C# and it took me a while to see the light! Here's the shortcut.

[A DevLife post]

I see that DevReach has two new sponsors, CoDe Magazine and MSDN Magazine. This is great news. And even greater, I have learned that Malek Kemmou, who I have not seen since he made the transition from Regional Director (which enabled him to travel to many conferences in the U.S.) to a Microsoft employee (Techology Architect in SOA and Business Process for Microsoft MEA), a job which does not allow us to see him over here any more. Boo hoo. So I'm very happy to hear he will be in Sofia as it has been tooooo long.

This is going to be a fantastic conference. I'm truly looking forward to it and then galavanting around Bulgaria with my friends in Tourista mode.

One of my prepration tools is here.

This is nothing new, but it was new to me and it was messing up my dynamically rendered ASP.NET pages. My lesson in VarybyCustom.

[A DevLife post]

Thom announced 10/21 & 10/22 as the dates for Code Camp 6!

I just tried to book a room at our favorite Code Camp hotel (Waltham Westin) for just Saturday night and there are no rooms for one night stand-ers.

You can book a room for the weekend for a pricey $318 if you go through their special fall 20% off package offer on the web.

What happened to the $119/night of earlier code camps? Baah!

Maybe it's time to find another hotel (with an adequate bar/lounge) for us all to camp out at!

Leave suggestions in the comments.

Hilton Garden Inn (newly renovated, has a lobby and restaurant) is $125/night.  Or $137/night for 2 beds and full breakfast for two. Total with tax is about $150 per night which is closing in on the Westin rate except for the breakfast.

Some teens in Brattleboro (southern part of the state) have decided that 1970's style flashing wasn't quite rebellious enough. So they are just hanging around in the middle of town buck naked. Egad. It's a little ridiculous (easy to say now that I'm so far past those rebellious years) and to make it worse - CNN had it on the home page today.

The town is waiting for the weather to get cold enough for them to give up this particular form of expression of freedom. "As soon as winter comes, there won't be a story anymore".

It was an exciting week at Microsoft as they pushed out the RC1 versions of Vista and .NET 3.0! [read more....]

[A DevLife post]

One of the points of confusion I've seen wrt these new asp.net features is people trying to use them (and getting no farther than head banging) with random functions.

.NET 2.0 makes a lot of asynchronous stuff much easier with the Event Driven Asynchronous Pattern.

The BackgroundWorker sets up the entire package for  you and is a great solution for Windows Forms.

But with the ASP.NET 2.0 methods, you must call out to methods that already have BeginInvoke/EndInvoke and that return IAsyncResult. It's easy to do with classes that already do this - like the new SQLCommand Async functions (eg. BeginExecuteReader/EndExecuteReader) or calls using HTTPRequest to pull down data from another website (eg an RSS Feed). But what about doing long running processes that don't have .NET (or 3rd party) calls that implement the async pattern? What if you have a website that does the ever popular Fibonacci calculation? (Not really "ever-popular", though it is the common example of long running method used in MSDN docs ).

The grown-up way is to create a delegate for your synchronous method and then call BeginInvoke and EndInvoke. Here's some help with that.

An easy way that doesn't require mucking with delegates is to stuff the function into a web service then use the web services async functionality (which come for free when you build a web service proxy through Visual Studio). Prior to VS2005, we had only the Begin/End methods availalbe. VS2005 has those plus a new pair that ift into the Event Driven Async Pattern: myMethodAsync & myMethodCompleted. You can see both of these in the above link.

How about attempting to sort out and file away 8 months of bills, etc that have been piling up in my filing in-box?

It's hard to tell by the picture, but there is a LOT of paper in these piles. On CSI, of course, you'd be able to zoom in on this image ...

...and then "enhance" it, to make it perfectly legible and clear. Of course, you wouldn't think of that unless Horatio Caine was standing over your shoulder, looking in the other direction, saying, "hmmmmmmmmmm, what I want you to do.... what I want you to do, is zoom in on that picture. Yes. Now enhance it.". Then slide his head around to give you the snake eyed glare. God that makes us laugh... ever predictable.

If that total fantasy isn't the fantasy that I think it is, I guess I'm pretty much screwed.

Huge congrats to Charles on another important Windows programming classic-to-be: Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation

Karsten J (who knows WPF well enough to be a great judge of the book's worthiness) has high praise for the book: "The book is pedagogically brilliant".

I especially love that he says:  "It actually does read like a novel to me, with a narrative arch as it negotiates its methodical way through the WPF jungle of APIs." This is what makes Charles' books such awesome reading. He's very literate and a great story teller. So even when writing about technical stuff, it's so palatable. Who else would so naturally insert analogies to Greek mythology or the affairs of 18th century French courtisans into explanations of software development?

I am so currently mired in VS2005 stuff that my inability to dive into WPF, Vista, WCF, ADO.NET v.next, etc. is a constant challenge to my attempts to keeping some balance in  my life. Perhaps when I finish my current bedside reading, I'll just have to break my golden rule again, and stick this on the nightstand!

Okay all my Seattleite pals: Alison Bechdel, author of Dykes to Watch Out For, who has been rocketed to wider fame beyond her popular strip by her new book Fun Home, will be at Bumbershoot tomorrow night (Monday). She won't arrive in Seattle loaded down with maple syrup and Vermont Coffee Company coffee like I usually am when I come to Microsoft (she'll be happy if her necessary liquids arrive), she's slinging a lot more interesting stuff than code!

Monday, 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm @ Alki Room

Alison lives nearby, so I love watching what she's up to and making sure nobody's missing out on her! I know Fun Home has been making the rounds here in Huntington!

Even though I was climbing a rock today, for the most part I have been living under a rock. Luckily for me, Maryam is on the ball (though a bit under the weather) and made sure I didn't miss out on this insanity from Forbes Magazine.

A Save the Internet Rally took place in Montpelier yesterday and has the support of our Senator Jim Jeffords. Scroll down to Vermont’s Jeffords Gets Behind Net Freedom for a link to a YouTube video starring my pal, Joe Golden, of Green Mountain Linux.