Paul Litwin, an INETA speaker, came all the way from Seattle to Vermont to speak at Vermont.NET. Rather than fly in the day of the meeting and out the next morning, Paul arrived on Saturday night in order to enjoy being in Vermont for a few days. Unfortunately, shortly before his trip he agreed to do a project that kept him in front of the computer a good part of the time, but we still managed to get him out to a walk around our neighbor’s mountain farm, visit our favorite swimming pond, meet his first brushhog and even go Chanterelle picking (I don’t mind divulging my secret Chanterelle spots to someone who lives 3000 miles away) and visit a local sugarhouse (Purinton’s) to buy some maple syrup.

Last night was our user group meeting and after local developer, Rob Hale (from G.E.Health Care), did a short talk on the Strategy Pattern, Paul shared with us some of the many tricks he had to figure out for his own work when using the ASP.NET 2.0 data controls. I find that the things I struggle with make good fodder for presentations, so I love this kind of talk. Rather than just diving into the tricks with an assumption that everyone was familiar with the ins and outs  of the new controls, he went through them first. I have not played iwth them a lot so even in the beginner part of the sessio, I learned plenty. The tips & tricks will definitely come in handy and I’m glad that someone else has already done the heavy lifting for me on this stuff! Paul will be doing this talk at ASP.NET Connections in the fall, although without the benefit of the extra time we get when presenting at a user group.

After the meeting, we brought Paul to downtown Burlington to sample some more of the local beer (we had already had dinner at brew pubs on Saturday and Sunday night) and then somehow finished up the night at Ben & Jerry’s. The amusing part of this was that the other woman who came along, web developer Gail Guy (who was also the lucky winner of the FarPoint Spread for Web license we raffled off…the Genom-E Express license went to Roger Gillim from the Vermont Dept. of Health) and I started talking about programming and the guys all rolled their eyes and moved to the other end of the table.

Paul found the secret to being the perfect guest at our house – being kind and loving to our old Newfoundland dogs, Tasha & Daisy. Thanks Paul!

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