Local developer, Rick Martin from PAR Springer-Miller Systems in Stowe, is going to do a presentation on LINQ tonight at Vermont.NET. LINQ is one of those technologies that is pretty simple to get hooked on once you start using it and it is incredibly powerful for queering in-memory objects or data....

This Saturday marks the 11th New England Code Camp at Microsoft's Waltham Office. There's a great line up of speakers & topics which I am copying here from Chris Bowen's blog. There are over 350 registered attendees with 43 sessions by 31 speakers! The array of topics is astounding. It's also a great...

The Burlington .NET developers had a great treat this week. On Monday night we had Chris Bowen , Bob Familiar and Jim O'Neil , our Dev Evangelists from the Microsoft Waltham office leading a Q&A at the Vermont.NET User Group. We talked about everything from running .NET on Linux or even Unix, to...

Because the MSDN Northeast Roadshow's Burlington, VT stop coincided with the VTdotNET meeting, Chris Bowen , Bob Familiar and Jim O'Neil will be features at our VTdotNET meeting tonight. This is an "ask anything" session, and I already know that one of the user group members is interested in getting...

I'll be doing a presentation on EF tonight at my very own user group. :-) I've decided to begin with a quick EF overview (all slides, no code) before I dig into the real presentation where I will show a slew of tips & tricks for EF. I always look forward to talking about Entity Framework. Plus I...

It's hard to believe that the Vermont.NET User Group has been going for 7 years. But it's true. Our February meeting marks our 7th Anniversary. And since it will also be around the release date of my book , I scheduled myself to do a presentation which will be "You can do *that* with Entity Framework...

Last Monday, nearly 40 people showed up for Mario Cardinal's presentation, Best Practices to Design a Modular Architecture , at Vermont.NET. This is an unusually large crowd for our group, so I was pretty impressed - but not surprised. Developers don't get enough time to think about architecture. Mario...

I'm really looking forward to this Monday's VTdotNET meeting featuring a talk by Mario Cardinal titled " Best Practices to Design a Modular Architecture ". Apparently, so are many other VTdotNETters. I am predicting a larger than usual attendance at our meeting! Thanks to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters...

Are you familiar with Community Megaphone? I ignored it when I was first told about it (sorry about that, Rachel!) because I thought "Uggh, yet another place I have to re-enter my user group meeting info." Boy, was that a short-sighted response. I'm now a fan. Read more... [A New DevLife post]...

.NET devs in Vermont have a LOT going on this week (if I can call the next 9 days "this week" that is). Monday : Tonight is our monthly meeting of VTdotNet with Mark Merchant from Microsoft's Virtual Earth Business Unit presenting on leveraging Virtual Earth's APIs and web services in your web apps and...

If you are thinking about going to DevTeach in Montreal (Dec 1-5), tomorrow is the last day to get the CN$300 early bird discount for the conference. In addition to some EF talks during the conference, I'll be teaching a full day post con workshop on Dec 5th. I'll be raffling off a full-blown MSDN Universal...

Next Monday (Sept 15th at 6pm to be exact), VTdotNet is lucky to have Mark Merchant of Microsoft's Virtual Earth Business Unit (who just so happens to reside in Vermont) do a presentation on programming with the Virtual Earth API, services and controls. It was a good opportunity to test out the new ASP...

Last night's VTdotNET meeting with Nick Petterssen of Electric Rain talking about the product design and development around StandOut which is written with WPF was really fun. It was very inspiring to see what can be accomplished with WPF in a full product, not just bits and pieces of code samples. There...

Electric Rain is one of the darlings of the MIX conferences thanks to their early adoption of WPF in creating the very cool StandOut application. Although the company is based on Colorado, Product Design Manager, Nick Petterssen lives nearby, just outside of Montpelier, VT. Nick is presenting at tonight...

VS2008 SP1 RTM is now on MSDN Subscriber downloads. It's an 830MB download, unlike the gigs and gigs of the actual product. But of course, it's still pokey because there's quite a bit of competition on the wire! Two worthy additions: 1) Don't forget that the Silverlight .NET 2.0 Beta Tools for VS will...

If you live in northern Vermont and you have any interest in SQL Server, you'll want to attend tonight's VTSQL meeting. It's their official SQL Server 2008 Launch event, with gobs of swag provided by Microsoft and pizza sponsored by MyWebGrocer.com . Laura Blood and Roman Rehak " will be giving an overview...

Last night was one of the smallest meetings that we have had for VTdotNET in a long time - could it have been the 90 degree temps? The fact that schools out around the area and folks are on vacation? Well, they missed out because we had a blast. Carl Lorentson from Renaissance Info Systems , shared a...

Michale de la Maza follows up his popular C# day events with a VB.NET day at the Microsoft office on Tuesday May 27th. Join us for a relaxed, no cost introduction to VB.NET programming. By engaging in participatory activities, you will learn some of the most common and powerful features of the VB.NET...

The online registration system for Microsoft events is currently broken (or just acting really flakey). If you are trying to register for Thursday’s free, full-day, Bob & Chris & Jim Roadshow , try the online registration first here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID...

Colorado man, author and MS Regional Directory, David Yack , is in Vermont to present at the VTdotNET meeting tonight, thanks to INETA . He'll be speaking on a topic we have NEVER had in our 6 years at the user group: VSTO. THen off to NJ tomorrow to talk about Silverlight 2.0. But if that's not diverse...

Don't pencil it in; ink it in! May 22nd at Vermont Technical College in Williston from 9am to 4pm. You may notice that May 22nd is on a THursday. I will put money on the fact that Chris scheduled this so that he can go to Bove's . THe last few times he hit town at the beginning of the week, but Bove...

Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and founder of the GNU Project ( http://www.gnu.org/ ), will be speaking in the Burlington area on April 17 and 18. o Thursday, April 17, 4:30 p.m., St. Michael's College ; "Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks" o...

Code Camp 9 has a beautiful new logo created by Bryan Philips. Chris Bowen reports that the session for the April 5-6 Code Camp are filling up and the registrations are as well. At last count there are 40 sessions submitted. Deadline for abstract submission is March 24th. There is an introductory track...

Last fall, I presented a 3 hour workshop at DevConnections , comparing and contrasting ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework's LINQ to Entities, Object Services and EntityClient as well as comparing LINQ to Entities to Entity SQL, then providing recommendations for when one makes sense over the others...

Last night was Vermont.NET's 6th Anniversary. Our first meeting was Feb 2002 with Russ Fustino starting us off to an unknown future. So now it's been 6 years and we have had a meeting almost every single month in those 6 years. More importantly, we have built a great community of developers who have...

Now that the Team System's Unit Testing tools are built in to VS2008 Pro, many of us will finally get a chance to take a look at it. Luckily I know some VSTS experts who aren't too far away and we have Sarah Cameron coming down from Montreal to teach us all about how to use the built-in Unit Testing...

Burlington geeks from the itty bitty little market that can get 120 peope to who up at an MSDN event :-), will have to plan a road trip if they want to attend an official Launch event for VS2008, SQL SErver 2008 and Windows 2008 Server . There will be one in Boston on March 18 and one in Albany on May...

This weeks Seven Days features Vermont's Tech businesses and the Vermont 3.0 Tech/Creative Career Jam that is happening on Saturday (Jan 26) in Burlington. There are 50 companies that are registered as exhibitors for the career portion of this - most of them are looking for some type of technical workers...

Jeff McWherter and his very cool wife (what a lucky geek he is!) have come from Lansing, Michigan to Vermont with hopes of ice climbing and so that Jeff can speak at the VTdotNET group. Unfortunately we lost all of our snow in the last week (though it's finally snowing again) and the good ice for climbing...

According to Chris Bowen's blog , there will be a TechNet and MSDN event in Burlington on February 26th. The afternoon MSDN event will be two sessions covering: MSDN: " Explore IIS7, ASP.NET and Tackle Web Security " Check out the latest coding solutions with like-minded developers at MSDN Events. Witness...

Although I wasn't able to be in Vermont on Thursday for the Bob & Chris Roadshow or the VS2008 Installfest, I have gotten emails from Chris Bowen and others letting me know that it was a great success. Over 40 people showed up for the installfest, and I learned from Dave Burke's blog that they also...

Thanks (humongous thanks) to Chris Bowen for pulling off getting Vermont on the list for the installfest. It will be an "add-on" to the Roadshow day. From his blog: (read the details carefully.. priority goes to registered attendees of the roadshow...) Burlington (Williston), VT December 6th, 4:15 to...

Camey blogs that they are having a VS2008 install fest (with VS2008 being supplied by Microsoft) at the South Sound .NET User Group in December. I immediately emailed our D.E. asking if we can do that at VTdotNET, but unfortunately, he doesn't have enough licenses to go around (not his fault) so that...

I'm hopping in the car to drive the 4 hours to Boston forthe sold-out REMIX which started this morning. I'll be there all day tomorrow and will be giving a talk on Astoria tomorrow afternoon. For you locals, the Vermont.NET user group is having a special type of meeting tonight - a PubClub! We'll (without...

On January 26, 2008 , the VT Software Developers Alliance , CEDO , Champlain College , Seven Days , VSAC , the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce and GBIC , along with many other partners is hosting an all day "Creative/Technology Career Jam" at the Lake & College Building on the Waterfront...

Russ Fustino used to be our little secret when he worked out of the Microsoft New England office. He was well loved by Burlington, VT developers who looked forward to his Russ' Toolshed events. A full day of free training that was before MSDN events existed! But there's more to Russ' legacy. It was Russ...

Are you sitting? Buckled in? Yes it's true. It was just announced. Microsoft is releasing source for .NET binaries and letting us debug into it as well! Read more here! [A New DevLife post]...

By way of the Burlington Free Press James Martin, who Computerworld Magazine once ranked as the fourth most influential individual in the world of computer science, will talk tonight at Green Mountain College. More info here: http://www.greenmtn.edu/gmcjournal/index.asp...

Boy am I excited about this. Timothy Ng is on the VB team and wrote the recent MSDN Magazine article on Lambda Expressions for VB developers . I understood lambdas better than ever after reading the article ... finally something from the VB perspective. His two talks are: LINQ-ing your data In this session...

When Vermont.NET does not have a sponsor to cover the cost of pizza & soda, the attendees pay for their own - $5 each. This was the case at Monday's meeting. Additionally, we were doing a fundrasing raffle for the first time ever, using a license to Infragistics NetAdvantage that was donated by Infragistics...

The Burlington stop of the Bob & Chris Roadhow is this coming Monday, sept 10th . In addition to a day of great (and free) training on Dynamic Languages Silverlight Developer Productivity Tips & Tricks for VS2005 & VS2008 Understanding Service Oriented software (and a free lunch :-)) Bob...

Another one of the "satellite" MIX07 events will take place in Boston in early October - REMIX07 Boston . Brad Abrams will be doing the keynotes. I see Rocky Lhotka and Jeff Prosise doing talks too. The Eastern Region D.E.s who have organized this have also brought in some "local talent". Luckily people...

Just for fun, Vermont.NET will have our October 8th meeting at RiRa's in downtown Burlington. No powerpoints, no projector, no screen. Bring your laptop. We'll come up with a topic for discussion in advance....

Chris Bowen has posted the agenda for the full day of free training aka "Bob & Chris' MSDN Roadshow" that will make Burlington it's first whistlestop on Sept 10th. The day's topics are: Coding in a Dynamic World Practical Silverlight Developer Productivity Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio 2005 and...

“A Technical Community – How Do We Get There From Here?” Dean Kamen Tuesday, September 18, 2007 5:00 – 6:20 p.m. Davis Auditorium Medical Education Building on the University of Vermont Campus Dean Kamen, an inventor and entrepreneur and an inspiring speaker, will address a serious issue facing society...

New England Code Camp 8 Rise of the Silverlight Surfer Saturday & Sunday, Sept 29-30 in Waltham, MA It's free, it's fun and it is filled with great information! If you have a story to tell, come tell it! You can do a regular presentation or a lead a chalk talk discussion. Prior experience not required...

Thanks again to Richard Hale Shaw for driving up to Burlington on Monday (even a flat tire didn't stop him) to give VTdotNETters a very in-depth perspective on LINQ. Rather than just open up VS2008 and start pounding out LINQ queries, Richard spent most of the time building up our understanding of the...

Unfortunately, we'll have to reschedule Rob Daigneau's Aug. 13th presentation on WCF. We're both bummed, but we'll get him back in the fall, for sure! However, we lucked out because we were able to get Richard Hale Shaw to "fill in". Richard is one of the top instructors in the country and lives in Boston...

Finally, I get to share Entity Framework with my own user group (in Burlington, VT)! Yay. When: Monday, July 9th, 6-8:30pm Where: Champlain College, Hauke Building Room 005 (375 Maple Street, Burlington, VT) More info at www.vtdotnet.org Of course, I'm spending all of my time futzing with the new bits...

VTSQL is having their June meeting tomorrow, June 20th. Our pal, Jean-Rene Roy is coming down from Montreal to do a presentation on SQL Server Service Broker. This is one of those topics I found myself having to learn so that I could understand how Query Notification works in ADO.NET 2.0. But there's...

INETA sent Keith Pleas to speak to the grateful Vermont.NET User Group last night. Keith presented the Designing for Operations project that PAG is working on. It was eye opening to many of us who have not spent a lot of time thinking about having our applications provide useful information to those...

An amazing panel of local experts will congregate at Wednesday's Vermont Software Developer Alliance meeting. Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 12pm - 2pm, Courtyard Marriott Williston, Vermont A discussion on climate change and what software companies can do to help slow it This month's meeting brings together...

Tonight we have two presentations at Vermont.NET. Laura Blood from Blue Note Computing will present on Windows Services. Mike Soulia, a guy of many hats: Vermont Tech teacher, owner of two great stores in Burlington (Apple Mountain and Kiss the Cook) and a consultant, will dig further into WPF and Expression...

It must have been the Bove's Pasta Sauce that keeps them coming back. Microsoft New England's Bob Familiar and Chris Bowen are back this week for another full day of fabulous and FREE .NET training. REGISTER HERE! Sheraton: 8:30am to 4:30 pm AGENDA: AJAX, Extensible Scrubbing Bubbles and that Cross Browser...

Tonight's VTdotNET meeting is a little different for us "must focus on business apps" VTdotNETters. Griff Townsend is coming up from Albany where he has done two XNA sessions (2-D and then 3-D) at the user group there. I think it will be a lot of fun to open up our eyes to new ways (reasons for) programming...

There are about 350 people already registered for Code Camp in Waltham, MA Mar 31-Apr 1st. There is also room for more sessions! I just added a chalk talk because I thought it would be fun to open up the Entity Data Model schemas and explain what the heck is going on there. You do not have to have a...

VTdotNET had our Vista launch event at last night's meeting and we had a blast. There were about 35 people there (which is a crowd for us!). TEKSystems brought us piles and piles of fabulous pizza and two VTdotNET members, Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr gave great presentation. Mike, who owns two of our favorite...

The first three days of the week are busy ones! On Monday , Vermont.NET is having it's Vista/.NET 3.0 Launch meeting. Local brainiacs Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr will be presenting (after months of working with the Vista Launch team as part of the big user group roll out) and we'll have 5 Windows Vista...

Press Release March 7th, 2007 Vermont Software Developers' Alliance http://www.vtsda.org *** Governor James Douglas will be making a presentation at a Vermont Software Developers' Alliance event on March 21. *** Governor James Douglas will be making remarks about the Vermont Software Development sector...

Did I really forget to blog this? I know I have sent out emails to VTdotNET members, but we now have TWO MSDN events in March right here in Burlington. In addition to the "classic" MSDN event on March 13th (Vista/.NET 3.0/Office 2007 Development) [register here: http://www.msdnevents.com/march/ ] .....

The Waltham Westin is our favorite place to stay when we go to Code Camp in Waltham, MA. The next one, Code Camp 7: Deer in the Headlights! is coming Mar 31 - Apr 1. The Westin has a great bar/lounge area so it's a nice place to hang out with all the CC geeks! Breakfast is pretty expensive, but there...

You can now submit talks for the 7th New England Code Camp : "Deer in the headlights". If this were in Vermont, it might be called "Moose's knees in the headlights". Read more at Chris Bowen's blog....

The resumes that these two men sent me to place onto the VTSDA website were astounding. Unfortunately, I had to use only a segment of each, as they were so long. They have each served on the boards of many of Vermont's biggest charitable organizations. They have both started hugely successful I.T. companies...

Ladies n Gents, start your engines! http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2007/01/17/save-the-dates-code-camp-7-deer-in-headlights.aspx...

Note: the offer has been extended to Feb 1st Sure wish I had known about this when we had our meeting last night! ReSharper personal license fior Individual Developers is $99 through Jan 11th . Thanks Laura and Dave ....

Wednesday's Vermont Software Developer Alliance meeting features a panel discussion with representatives of Vermont colleges and universities. Learn what they're doing to prepare students for software related jobs, and what they're doing now to help employers connect with young talent. Wednesday Jan...

The "Ready for a new day" Launch 2007 Event for Vista, Office 2007 & Exchange 2007 is starting this month. I'm sure many people will be interested in the fact that attendees will receive free copies of Office Pro 2007 and Groove 2007. Events "near" Vermont are Albany Feb 15th Nashua Feb 15th Boston...

Last night's VTdotNET meeting was a blast. We did something that we have never done before. Rather than have one person do a session on a .NET topic, 6 members from the user group demo'd tools that they love to use when they are programming. Some were Visual Studio Add-Ins, such as ReSharper . Others...

Altova is sponsoring tonight's VTdotNET meeting in a big way. They are paying for the pizza and soda, plus they sent a big box o'swag. Check this out. The bags are for the winners of the 5 DiffDog licenses. They ahve in them a hat and a 128 MB thumbdrive with all of the Altova evals on them. In addition...

We have a fun session coming up on Monday. Six VTdotNET members will show off some of their favorite productivity tools. Some of these tools are free, some are shareware and some are commercial. The demos will be fast and furious. Here’s the skinny: · Mike Soulia: XMLSpy (xpath features) · Chris DeGuise...

The January 8th VTdotNET meeting is shaping up with a LOT of people demoing their favorite tools. Here's the roster so far: VTdotNet'ers show off Developer Tools We Love Chris DeGuise: ReSharper (20) Dave Burke: CodeSmith (20) Rob Hale: Beyond Compare (10) Bret Griswold: Code Charge Studio (10) Julie...

The VTdotNET Holiday potluck party was at my house in the boonies last night. Someday I will learn how to use my camera but flash photos never come out right. Nevertheless, here are a few. Note the [not yet decorated] tree with all of the GEEKY gifts underneath. We got a pile of books from WROX and I...

Though we selfishly were sad to see Thom Robbins leave the D.E. position for New England, the local community was thrilled to see him move to an awesome new job at Microsoft. But the big question was who on earth could fill his shoes? Happily, Thom has made a wonderful choice in a successor. Chris Bowen...

The schedule for this weekend's Code Camp in Waltham, Mass is live . This Code Camp will be packing all of the sessions into one day - Saturday, rather than spread out over two. If you haven't registered to attend yet, you can register here . I'll be doing three talks throughout the day: 9am: Managing...

Next Meeting — Wednesday, October 18, 2006 Tom Evslin Software developer, entrepreneur, author Tom Evslin's remarkable career has taken him from nerd to CEO to novelist and consultant with a brief stop as Transportation Secretary for the State of Vermont. He founded and ran a successful Vermont software...

Code Camp 6 is Oct 21-22 in Waltham. You can register now. You can also submit abstracts . Code Camp is a great place to show off anything from stuff you've figured out that you want to share or technologies that fascinate you that you were looking for an excuse to dig into. Session range from low-key...

We Vermonters and flatlanders who live in Vermont are a bunch of tightwads when it comes to spending our hard earned money, so paying $200 for one night in Waltham for code camp was more than we could bare. I finally gave in and booked ar oom at the Homestead Suites . What the heck. It's clean it's new...

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...

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...

www.msdnevents.com We've been off the tour for a while. If you live in the area, be sure to attend this! Remember that if the attendance is poor, these will go away again. Tuesday Sept 26th 1pm - 5pm Wyndham Hotel, Downtown Burlington Featuring our own MSDN DCC: Susan Wisowaty ! REGISTER Get Connected...

The Community Economic & Development Office of Burlington (CED0) will be putting on a workshop to prepare local businesses for Web 2.0 The goal is for the Business Technical Assistance Providers to learn more about the current trends using Web 2.0 technologies. In turn they can better assist current...

You can find the slides and demos from Paul's session on ASP.NET 2.0 Data Controls Tips & Tricks on his website at www.deeptraining.com/litwin . Paul blogged about the meeting here ....

Rather than our regular monthly business meeting, Vermont Software Developer Alliance ( VTSDA ) is going to enjoy one of he very special things in Vermont tonight. We will board the Spirit of the Ethan Allen for an evening cocktail and networking cruise on Lake Champlain. For those of you unfamiliar...

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...

We are lucky to have INETA Speaker Paul Litwin coming from Seattle to present on the ASP.NET 2.0 Data Controls (Tips & Tricks) on Monday night! In addition to INETA flying Paul here, they pay for the pizza & soda at the meeting, which is always appreciated! AND, that's not all folks! :-) INETA...

MSDN DCC, Susan Wisowaty (who just so happens to live in Burlington - yeah, that's right, we had her FIRST! :-)) will be presenting an Overview of Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Avalon) this coming Monday (July 17th) at the Vermont.NET User Group. Given the great response to last month's .NET Newbie...

So I'm flipping through the local weekly, Seven Days, and I did a double take when I thought I saw Bruce Schneier's name in big letters at the top of the page. Here's the article. Yep it's him and yep he's coming to Vermont. There's an ACLU meeting on Tuesday and he's speaking at it. When? You ask? On...

I finally put the new ASP.NET 2.0 version of the Vermont.NET website up. I have been using it as a playground to finally fiddle with the new UI stuff as well as recently released projects. I have not moved all of the content over from the original site. It doesn't have any Atlas on it yet, but give me...

The June meeting of Vermont.NET will be "portal night". We have Dave Burke of telligent doing a talk on Community Server. Paul Swider, from Burlington based OnClickSolutions will do a talk on Sharepoint. Jon Limmer of Green Mountain Beverage, a company whos main website is based on DotNetNuke, will demo...

The Vermont Software Developer Alliance will have a booth (in a primo area, too!) at next week's Vermont Business Expo . As a board member of VTSDA, I'll be manning the booth from 10am to after lunch time on Wednesday. I'm going to find out if it's allowed (legal, NDA's, etc.) to bring my laptop with...

One of the Vermont.NET members, Sergei Serdyuk, has started a new user group for Ruby on Rails in Burlington. The site is www.vtrails.org and the first meeting is June 6th. See the site for more information! There are now 5 technology user groups (that I am aware of) in Burlington. Vermont.NET Our little...

www.vtsda.org Wednesday, May 17, 2006 Speaker - Thom Robbins, Microsoft New England Topic - Trends in Software Development Software development is changing at light speed. Gone are the days of single person development. Team based development with faster cycle times and quality code are becoming a driving...

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...

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...

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. Don't Forget: www.acehaid...

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...

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 Declarative Attributes Reflection Delegate Threading Code Access Security I'll be raffling off the last of the launch copies of Visual Studio...

Don't miss out on this opportunity to reserve a guest room for only $109. Valid for weekend stays between April 13th- June 9th Sink into The Westin Heavenly Bed(R) Relax in our heated indoor swimming pool or oversized whirlpool Must book by Friday, April 14th Limited rooms available Here's the link Don...

Rich Tarrant started a little software company in the late 70's and recently sold it to GE for $1.2 billion. He will be speaking to the Vermont Software Developer Alliance at our monthy meeting on Wednesday April 19th. More information at www.vtsda.org . Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

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...

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 Declarative programming with attributes Reflection Delegates Threading Code Access Security I have a full license to VS2005 Professional...

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...

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...

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...

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...

There is a new "ASP.NET How Do I?" video series on MSDN and also a great series aimed at beginners but with lessons for not-so-beginners is available. [ Read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

Jean-Rene sent out a great email about DevTeach today. Here are some key elements from it: Save 200$ by taking advantage of DevTeach early bird. This year, we are offering an early bird of 200$ CAN for attendees that are registering before February 28th, 2006. Registered attendees have accessed to the...

Hip hip hooray. Blue House Group in Richmond, VT has created a beautiful and informative website for VTSDA. There is still some tweaking to do, but the new site is now live. www.vtsda.org . Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

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

Next Mondays VTdotNET meeting marks our 4th anniversary. I think after 4 years, I'm allowed to say that I'm very proud of this! VTdotNEt has created a real community out of the many .NET developers in Northwest Vermont. That was my ultimate goal. We also have a bevy of highly skilled .NET developers...

These guys are NOT to be missed if you are able to get to Waltham, MA on March 25th. It's a "mini-code camp." A one day one track event . Patrick Hynds and Duane LaFlotte are two guys you want on YOUR side when it comes to hacking. Had Duane found a different mentor in his youth, he'd be the guy downloading...

Well, it seems really official now. GE purchased Burlington based IDX in 2005 for $1.2 billion. Today I got an email from someone at IDX asking me to update his email address from @idx.com to @ge.com! That's going to take some getting used to. Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

The sessions for DevTeach have been announced and the early bird discount of $300 is only good for a few more days. So if you are hoping to go to beautiful Montreal in early May, register sooner than later for savings. I'll be doing 3 sessions at DevTeach. I love presenting at this conference and it...

Open Membership Discussion How can VTSDA Move Forward and Benefit the Membership? VTSDA has been around since late 2004. Since this time we have had many monthly meetings, but what else has VTSDA accomplished? What do we currently have in the works? What else should we be thinking about? Who would like...

At the Vermont.NET meeting (our Visual Studio Community Launch) Laura covered some of the most interesting of the UI basics that are new in ASP.NET 2.0. There were a lot of attendees to this meeting that are brand new to ASP.NET 2.0 and want to learn more. A really good starting point is the www.asp...

Wow! We had 41 people at our meeting last night. That's a lot for our small group. As Dave reports , the room was jam packed. Laura did a great job with the presentation on ASP.NET 2.0. Boy, it was some styling powerpoint Microsoft gave the community launch team to use!! What was great about her talk...

I'm off to Burlington for the January VTdotNET meeting where we are having our INETA Community Launch event. Laura Blood has been working hard on her ASP.NET 2.0 session. I have bags and bags of books and swag and of course we are raffling off 5 licenses to VS2005 Pro/SQL Server 2005 Standard/BizTalk...

From Brad McCabe's blog Free VB 2005 and ASP.NET Training With the holiday’s coming lots of people have some extra time on their hands, with this in mind MSDN and Microsoft Learning got to together to give you something to do, free training! We were trying to figure out what course to give away and decided...

i got this message from a friend at CEDO and thought I would share: There is an addtional 1,200 parking spots downtown for the holidays during nights and weekends. If you want a map of the other 14 parking lots and garages and a list of the 300+ retailers downtown go to our web site www.cedoburlington...

In the past, the December "meeting" for Vermont.NET has been a pot-luck gathering at either someone's office or house. This year, with other (less stingy? ;-)) folks than myself in charge, we are having a real party! It's going to be at Parima Thai in Burlington which has a really cool private party...

Over the past nearly 4 years of Vermont.NET, I have given away hundreds of books donated by publishers. Early on, I enabled the VTdotNET website so that the recipients of those books could post reviews of them. Here is our book review page and our software review page. It's the least we can do in return...

Yeah - so I printed the eval forms just before I left my house and left them sitting in the printer! Attendees of last night's meeting can get the form from the Vermont.NET home page (top of page). Please email them back to me after you fill them out. Filling out the forms is what assures that I get...

In February ('05) we had Rob Howard scheduled to speak at VTdotNET as an INETA speaker, and we were very excited. Even with a snowstorm, there were a lot of people planning to come. Unfortunately, the snowstorm prevented Rob from getting to Vermont .... he got stuck in Chicago at the airport waiting...

Rob Howard has come to Vermont on a cold, gray, cloudy, blustery day. Maybe we can make it up to him with a great pancake breakfast! Rob is presenting at Vermont.NET tonight (thank you INETA!!) and will be giving a talk on ASP.NET 2.0 tips & tricks. We are very excited to have him here! Addison-Wesley...

VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 are live and on MSDN Online now . Good luck trying to get them though! The servers are getting quite the workout. Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

All I can say is "lucky us"!! Tim is driving up (or is that over) from New Hampshire to give a fantastic talk I saw/heard him do at TechEd to the Vermont.NET user group tonight. We are also lucky to have a new convenient venue for our meetings at Vermont Technical College and a sponsor for pizza &...

I suppose it's great news for Richard Tarrant, who founded this company in Vermont in 1969, as he is making a bid for Senate (though he will likely be running against the ever-popular Bernie Sanders), but the news is causing major worry for many here. IDX employs 800 people in their Burlington headquarters...

VBSR SOLO Circle is a group of independent business people from a wide variety of industries who get together monthly to discuss things that are specific to working SOLO. Come one, come all, and gather to discuss the really knotty thorny subjects that arise when Solos have to confront tough ethical issues...

October 17th Tim will be doing a fantastic talk that I saw him do at TechEd 2005: Top Ten Hands-On Tips and Tricks for Implementing ASP.NET Web Services more info at www.vtdotnet.org Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

Don't forget the VTSDA meeting today. It's a lunch time meeting from 12-2pm at the Ethan Allen Club in downtown Burlington. Today's speaker is Jeffrey McMahan, a laywer from Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew, P.C. , speaking on Preparing to Grow or Sell: How to Prepare for Investors or Acquirers . This meeting...

ThinkVermont.com is the website of the Vermont Department of Economic Development. They always have a calendar of interesting events (lectures, workshops, etc) in the area. Here are a few upcoming ones I wanted to point out September 29 5 Big Questions about the Future Details: This Aiken Lecture features...

(update: added Expression graphics stuff down below) Links that I referred to last night in my "what I saw at PDC" VTdotNET presentation first - Code Camp 4 "Almost Agenda" VISTA Tablet PC on Vista Tablet PC on WPF (Avalon) Atlas Website with Hands on Labs and Forums LINQ Site C# 3.0 VB9 Office 12 Channel...

Vermont SQL Server Special Interest Group Next Meeting When: 6-8pm, Tuesday, September 13th. ** Different date than usual! Where: Competitive Computing, Inc. Colchester, VT. Speaker: Rushabh Mehta Rushabh is a business intelligence consultant for Solid Quality Learning and the principal ETL architect...

I don't have a Costco membership, but I just called and got permission to come shopping there for the Vermont National Guard trucks going down to the Gulf Coast that are collecting today and today only. ( More info on that here if you are from Vermont .) If you are someone that I know and you would like...

A few days ago, I blogged that the local chapter of the American Red Cross was headed south. I had seen it on the television news. Those volunteers are blogging their experience here http://nvtredcross.blogspot.com/ www.acehaid.org...

A message from the Northern Vermont Chapter of the American Red Cross "A hurricane of this magnitude is a true act of nature, something totally beyond our control. We can make a difference, though, by responding to those who so desperately need our help now," said Rob Levine, Executive Director of the...

Hooray, I have been looking for this all day. I was even starting to fantasize about hiring a trucker and making this happen, but I'm thrilled that the state of Vermont is doing this. I have lots of clothes already piled up and am going on a shopping spree tomorrow. From the VPR.NET website Vermont offers...

from Thom Robbins' blog We are pleased to announce Weekly Fast Tips a new subscription service to help you use the Visual Studio Team System 2005 more fully for Microsoft East Region developers , the Weekly Fast Tip . Upon subscribing you will receive in email (upon subscribing ) each week a short (5...

One of the many topics I cover in my ADO.NET 2.0 talk is about the ability to modify the rowstate of unchanged rows with SetAdded or SetModified. If you have never been in a position where you wished like crazy that you could change the row state, or if you don't understand the semantics of DataRowState...

I did one of my favorite talks (What's new in ADO.NET 2.0) for my favorite user group (VTdotNET) last night. This is the 5th time I have done this talk since March and these guys and gals asked me questions that nobody had asked before (and I didn't always have the answer) as well as made a lot of interesting...

Methods and Masters: The VB Upgrade Tour Are you still using VB 6? If you are then this is something that you will want to attend. Visual Basic 6.0 developers have had a great tool – but it’s time to learn how to use those Visual Basic skills with the next generation of products. Visual Basic .NET/2005...

I received a box filled with books from Addison-Wesley today. The next meeting of Vermont.NET will be an ADO.NET blowout with Mike Soulia from Kiss the Cook & Apple Mountain doing the .NET Newbie session on ADO.NET and then I will be doing one of my favorite new talks: What's new in ADO.NET 2.0....

Announcing - Code Camp 4: Developers Gone Wild September 24/25, 2005 Register Today September 24 – 8:30 AM – 9PM September 25 – 8:30 AM – 4PM Microsoft Waltham 201 Jones Rd. Waltham , Ma. Call for Speakers www.acehaid.org...

GUVSM, one of the .NET User Groups in Montreal, is hosting a full day workshop on Test Driven Development on Tueday August 16th. The workshop will be taught be Scott Bellware , from Austin Texas, who has been doing TDD training for a while and is a passionate advocate of TDD. There will also be one section...

To appease the masses (okay it was just Dave Burke's loud whining ), Kathleen will talk a bit about Code Gen at our VTdotNET meeting on Monday night. Her regularly schedule presentation, Tracing in VS2003 and VS2005 is a 90 minute talk. So we will take a break after that talk (app. 8:15 for the break...

Free OnLine ASP.NET Training Are you looking to learn to create ASP.NET Web applications with Visual Studio.NET? If so now is your chance to get 17 hours of hands-on ASP.NET training for free from Microsoft Learning. For a limited time only, Microsoft Learning is offering Developing Microsoft ASP.NET...

Many moons ago, when I made the transition from FoxPro to Visual Basic, my first resource I hit up was the newsgroups. There was Kathleen Dollard not only present but answering questions and she was the only woman's name I saw anywhere in those groups. She was very nice and answered some of my really...

Now is the time to hit up the keeper of the training budget. http://weblogs.asp.net/CFranklin/archive/2005/06/16/413377.aspx TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881...

Here is the abstract for the talk Sam is doing tomorrow night at VTdotNET as our first INETA event of 2005. There have been a lot of arguments in Blogs and elsewhere lately about SOA and two themes seem to emerge from some: SOA is bogus because there is a lot of hype around it and SOA is bogus because...

Although I have had conversations in the past with Tim, Dr. Neil and Rob about speaking at VTdotNet this year, I have managed to (nearly) lock them in while at TechEd. Yahoo! Now I have the rest of the year covered (with December being our christmas party). I realize that I have got all of our INETA...

surely this is everywhere on the blogosphere, but I want to be sure to push it to the VTdoNET site! Paul Flessner announced the official release date for VS 2005 - Nov 7th. According to Mark Fussell, the program manager for WSE, WSE3.0 will be out somewhere in the 4-5 timeframe after VS2005e is released...

This month, VTdotNET is starting something new: .NET Newbie sessions. It is in response to my ponderings about how to deal with the widening knowledge gap in the user group . So I am really excited that this is starting. The first session is this month at our June 13th meeting. Laura Blood, from Blue...

Microsoft Tech·Ed 2005 is sold out but you can still explore Microsoft technologies and solutions in this series of webcasts. Join us through the end of May for pre-Tech·Ed webcasts, then tune in for a special week of webcasts June 5-10, 2005, as we simulcast 12 sessions live from Orlando, Florida. Also...

The INETA Spring Thaw mailing arrived today. In it, along with some great swag, was enough sets of VSTS 2005 Beta2 installs for me to distribute to most of my user group! I'm sure that some people have already downloaded from MSDN or ordered from the www.GetTheBetas.com website, but this will get everyone...

Speaking of Sam , he is coming to Vermont.NET on June 13th to talk to us about SOA and Indigo. This is an INETA event - so thanks once again to INETA. We are definitely looking forward to it. Maybe I'll have to wear my Indigo shirt (oh what a geeky girl I am...) http://www.AcehAid.org...

Very cool. Green Mountain Oracle Users Group . Lots of cross-pollination opportunities here with VTdotNET. Now we have a SQL group AND an Oracle group (as well as a Flash group) right in Burlington. Kewel... Their kickoff meeting will be June 22 at the Wyndham with Tom Kyte, VP Core Technologies of Oracle...

Well, wouldyalookatdat ?! MS is going to include 5 seats for Foundation Server with any of the team system skus. This will make lots of people happy. However I am scratching my head a little because, if I understand Thom's explanation correctly the other night at VTdotNET, Foundation Server is aimed...

There's a fairly new u.g. in town - it's the VTFUG . They meet monthly in Burlington and have been doing so since November 2004. It's nice to keep some friends with design skills around, y'know? They meet on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, which is one night after VTdotNET. There is another Flash/Macromedia...

Vermont SQL Server Special Interest Group Next Meeting The next meeting is still being scheduled... Check back with us! --> When: 6-8pm, Monday, May 16th. Where: Gardener's Supply , Intervale Road, Burlington VT --> Competitive Computing, Inc. Colchester, VT. Topic: SQL Server 2000 Security in a Web...

Our Microsoft D.E., Thom Robbins , drove up from NH yesterday to present at the VTdotNET user group. It's a longish drive, so happily it was a beautiful day and he had lots of geek toys to entertain him on the way up. Our pre-meeting preamble was a little longer than usual, because there is so much going...

We are very happy to have our very own D.E., Thom Robbins , coming all the way to Vermont tonight to present on what's new in VS2005 and also show a little of Team System to the Vermont.NET User Group. I also plan to talk more about our .NET Newbie Sessions (starting with our next month's meeting) and...

Beta2 is already available to non-MSDN Universal Subscribers. You can order a DVD from Microsoft by starting at the VS2005 home page . Also for a limited time, orders in US & Canada will get free shipping & handling on the discs. http://www.AcehAid.org...

I know our DCC fights for us, but it's tough not being a top tier market. I just checked the city list for the newest MSDN Events spring tour and Burlington is not there, again. At this point, outside of the VTdotNET user group events, Microsoft doesn't come to Vermont anymore. There is so much going...

Richard Hale Shaw is in town so we thought it would be fun to do a geek dinner. Date: Thursday April 8th Time: 6:30 pm Place: NECI Commons, 25 Church St. Burlington Note that if there are too many of us to get a table quickly, we will just go elsewhere on Church Street or environs. So try not to be late...

Hey Vermont.NETters.... Here is fellow user group member, Dave Burke, talking about our Monday speaker, Robert Hurlbut and pointing to his Dot Net Rocks show. Check it out! http://www.AcehAid.org...

VTdotNetters - Last call to register - Mini CodeCamp C# Special Edition with Richard Hale Shaw (@ Watham MA All day Saturday April 30th). Done in the CodeCamp tradition and will benefit VB/C++ developers who want to get into .NET or C# programmers looking for an all-day refresher course. (thanks SB for...

(yeah, I know it's been blogged by many people tonight - but this is awesome and I want to push it to my user group website!!) Microsoft has just launched the VBRun dev center for VB6 developers Here are the sections highlighted on the start page Greatest Hits - highlighting some of hte best "black-belt...

Microsoft has put SQL Server 2005 on their virtual labs site. YOu can actually go play with it without having to find an extra computer to install it on! http://msdn.demoservers.com/login.aspx?group=sql2005 http://www.AcehAid.org...

Our next Vermont.NET meeting is Monday, April 11th. Robert Hurlbut is driving up from New Hampshire to teach us about Test Driven Development, Unit Testing and NUnit. I am really looking forward to this. I also managed to get a few copies of Dr. Neil Roodyn's Extreme.NET to give away at the meeting....

stay tuned for details but mark your calendars. Time: 6:30 Place: NECI Commons, 25 Church St. Burlington Note that if there are too many of us to get a table quickly, we will just go elsewhere on Church Street or environs. So try not to be late!! Richard Hale Shaw will be in town so we thought it would...

What does it mean to Sponsor a Vermont.NET meeting? What you do: Pay for the pizza and soda What you get: Get your company logo on the homepage of our website ( www.vtdotnet.org ) during the time of promoting the meeting (and afterwards sometimes if I don't update for the next meeting right away) Get...

Reading Jerry Delany's post about attending the Atlanta.NET meeting and a comment he made at the end about attending the Atlanta C# meetings because they are more advanced made me think of a problem I have been pondering lately with my user group , Vermont.NET, that is not uncommon. We have been meeting...

Rod has his downloads from Code Camp on his website ( www.dashpoint.com ). The SQL Server 2005 DataTypes with VS2005 presentation he did at VTdotNET on Monday night are included in the MSDN Code Camp downloads . http://www.AcehAid.org...

Next week's luncheon meeting of the Vermont Software Developer Alliance features technology in the goverment sector expert, Amy Santanello of MetaGroup . See the VTSDA website for more info on on this meeting. IT's at noon in downtown Burlington. $8 for VTSDA members, $15 for non-members. Food is darned...

Jackie Goldstein points out this important reminder . What's changing: Extended Phase (through March 2008) [Still have] Standard support offerings include Premier Support, paid telephone and online incident support, and free online self-help tools. Critical Updates will be available for a fee . Free...

Well, it almost came to fisticuffs at the Web Services Edge conference when I asked Thom Robbins , who is the New England Developer Evengelist for Microsoft, if he could come to Vermont.NET and give us the wonderful Visual Studio 2005 overview presentation that I was watching Doug Turnure , the Atlanta...

If you have been following the saga of Rob Howard trying to get to Vermont for our 6pm meeting where he was our INETA speaker... Rob was stuck in Chicago waiting for a flight that kept being delayed and delayed. We finally decided he should turn around and go back to Dallas. I think we made the right...

Boo hoo Rob Howard's flight from Chicago was delayed again so as there was no point in him arriving very late and then flying out tomorrow morning, I sent him home to Texas and 85 degree weather. After a quick concensus of those who rsvp'd, many people said they weren't going to come now (no star, icchy...

Based on the current United schedule, we will start the meeting at 6pm and Rob should arrive at about 7pm with Roman Rehak. The first hour of the meeting will have the usual "what's going on" and then I will facilitate a free for all .NET Q&A until Rob arrives. http://www.AcehAid.org...

(responding to some emails and phone calls) really - here's why flight 7960 is en route. It left Burlington one hour late and will arrive in Chicago only 25 minutes late. It is the same plane, it arrives at gate E2 and Rob's flight departs from E2. I think they said 3:30 because they did not know when...

Watch here for updates on meeting status! I will feed them to the VTdotNET site as well. Rob Howard is scheduled to speak at Vermont.NET tonight. Everyone is very excited and I have a lot of RSVPs. But now we have a snowy blustery morning and a forecast for it to be like this all day. Rob's flight is...

Robert Hurlbut is going to come to Vermont.NET for our April 11th meeting and teach us about TDD, Unit Testing and using NUnit. Really I know we all just need to read Dr. Neil's Extreme .NET . But I like the idea of having someone explain it to me. :-) http://www.AcehAid.org...

The 2/16 meeting of VTSDA features a membership roundtable discussion on Business Development & Sales. This is a lunch time meeting at the Ethan Allen Club in downtown Burlington. Please see the website for details as well as how to rsvp (important to do so they can pre-order enough lunches). http...

The Vermont.NET January meeting's presentation by Mario Cardinal was about Enterprise Library. All of Mario's work was based on the specifications because the product had not yet been released. The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team has just announced that the Enterprise Library has indeed been released...

Thanks for the reminder Dave! Since I'm going to Code Camp (sure hope my sessions get selected), his post made me think to actually book my room. So I booked a room at the Waltham Westin. Funny, they have an internet discount of 15% but it is a non-refundable reservation. I could get a 21 day AAA discount...

Update: it was cancelled In case you were wondering about the status of the mini Code Camp this weekend, it is totally on, regardless of the forecast. Thom Robbins has said that if for some reason they do decide to cancel (sounds highly unlikely) he will post something over here on his weblog . http...

VTdotNET member Zachary Kent has set the date for the first Vermont Code Brew. It will be February 2nd from 6-8pm. Zach has created a Yahoo Group to help manage this. Group name: VTCodeBrew Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VTCodeBrew Group email address: VTCodeBrew@yahoogroups.com The first...

This is just a reminder Tomorrow's meeting of VTSDA will feature a panel of software business owners and marketing experts discussing effective marketing for our businesses. The meeting is from 11:45 - 2:00 at the Ethan Allen Club in downtown Burlington. See the VTSDA website for more details. http:...

Digital Bridges is a program at Middlebury College and they are putting on a full day workshop wtih professionals from many different businesses that either do business on the web or provide infrastructure. Sounds interesting. Here's more info on the event. http://www.AcehAid.org...

Strategies for Winning Government Contracts - Practical Tips and Hands on Help for Small Business Wed Jan 26 8:30 am to 4 pm Capitol Plaza Hotel, Montepelier, VT. More info brochure (hang it by the water cooler! :-) http://www.AcehAid.org...

lucky us!!! Rob Howard is coming to Vermont.NET on February 21st. We are getting a Black Belt ASP.NET Tips & Tricks talk. This is happening thanks to INETA as Rob is an INETA speaker. I had tricked Rob into coming here with the promise of some fun snowboarding at near by Sugarbush, but unfortunately...

Our next meeting (this monday, Jan 10th) of Vermont.NET features the ebulient and really dang smart, Mario Cardinal who is coming down from Montreal. Mario is going to teach us all about Microsoft's Application Blocks. Date: 01/10/05 Speaker: Mario Cardinal ( Mario Cardinal Inc. ) -- Location: Gardener...

This is local news - but for the curious, Champlain College is in downtown Burlington and is incredibly innovate, technical and leading edge. They have super facilities for technology and even a Masters program in IT . Here is a link to the press release on the new president . Posted from BLInk!...

As mentioned by Dave Burke , the local paper, Burlington Free Press has this story in their Business Monday section about Competitive Computing . This is where SQL guru Roman Rehak works. The Free Press does not persist its articles for over a week so I am copying and pasting it into my blog. All copyrights...

from Guy Barrette's blog (Guy is the user group leader of www.guvsm.net and also a Regional Director in Montreal) Montreal Visual Studio User Group next meeting More info about this talk at www.guvsm.net INETA Speaker: John Robbins Subject: .NET Performance Tips and Tricks. Date & Time: Tuesday,...

[More info at Vermont Software Developer Alliance website] Topic: How to make your licensing agreements work for you - and not against you Software licensing expert Peter Kunin of Downs Rachlin Martin PLCC joins us for our December meeting to share his insights on drafting agreements that give you the...

There is talk of forming something along the lines of the CodeBrew that Bill Evjen started in St Louis or maybe a PubClub which Stan Schultes and Russ Fustino are doing in Florida. Stay tuned. Posted from BLInk!...

Last minute reminder on my talk tonight at Vermont.NET Web Service Enhancements 2.0 was released in June. It can look very complicated but does not have to be!! Not only is WSE2.0 a valuable tool for securing web services *TODAY* (as well as implementing a number of the other Web Services specifications...

The next meeting (our first speaker event!) of VTSDA is Tuesday 10/26. We have as our speaker Stan Eames, President and CEO of Synergy Software . See details about the speaker and presentation on the VTSDA website. The meeting is from 11:45 - 2:00. Lunch will be catered and is looking very yummy. The...

For those of you who attended the MSDN Event yesterday in Burlington, VT, I just wanted to make sure you are aware of this change from the CURRENT beta of ASP.NET 2.0 to Beta 2: (this comes from the weblog of the Group Program Manager of ASP.NET ) Access Data Providers In Beta 1, ASP . NET application...

To anyone who has never attended a presentation by Rocky you may find that post title very strange. Everyone else is probably shaking their heads in agreement. It really felt like this. I could feel the vibe and that people were on the verge of jumping up and shouting out “hallelujah“ at...

Going to pick up Rocky Lhotka at the airport and take him on a drive through northwest vermont. I sure hope it's not as foggy as it is now because it the leaves are perfection right now. We have a lot of RSVP's for tonight's Vermont.NET meeting. It should be a blast....

This evening a download was added to the ASP.NET Security Vulnerability information page. It sounds like there is more to come but this is a start. Note This page was updated October 7, 2004, to include information about a newly released mitigation option, an HTTP module installer. This module protects...

Sam Gentile , who is one of the many awesome speakers that Thom Robbins has lined up to present at Code Camp (at the Waltham, Mass office outside of Boston) Oct. 15 & 16 points to the schedule now published. The event is free and is 2 days chock full of expert presenters teaching 53 different topics...

Boy it seems like Michele was just here! And now we have Rocky Lhotka coming to Vermont.NET in a few days (Monday 10/11 to be specific). Two INETA speakers in a row - lucky us. ANd many more all around us as well. Juval Lowy at Beantown .net, Jeff Prosise was just at Boston .NET. Later this month Billy...

Please please please can someone fix the drop down of event locations for the current cycle? It says MONTPELIER Vermont and the lcoation is Burlington and there has been a huge amount of confusion because it actually was originally scheduled for Montpelier (though the details said Burlington) . Now it...

From Microsoft's Brian Goldfarb : Tonight we posted a bunch of information about a reported ASP.NET security vulnerability. I urge you to take a look at the security incident page at: http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/aspnet.mspx That page has all the latest info and will continually be updated...

I will update the VTdotNET site and email everyone but for now this is the quickest I can do. Joe Stagner tells me that the powers that be have changed their minds about the location of the MSDN event and it will be IN BURLINGTON , not Montpelier. It's been a little confusing... ;-)...

Today we had the first meeting of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance . There were 40 people there and we had an amazing array of business types represented. Not only across technologies (where Microsoft had about a 60% share) but everything from contractors to businesses to upwards of 60 employees...

(forgive the crappy photo - it's really hard to take one good pic of speaker and audience in a dark room and darn, all the chicks were on the edges of the room - but there were a bunch!) Almost a year ago, Michele and I arranged through INETA for her to come to speak at Vermont.NET and of course come...

This seems to be the general response I got from everyone at the meeting. I'll post on it myself soon. Michele is one of the best presenters I have seen. Combine that with her deep knowledge - and you have got an awesome presentation....

Very excited to have Michele coming to Vermont to speak to Vermont.NET on Monday. Luckily she comes in Sunday night, and the leaves are already turning, so I plan to show off a bit of our beautiful little state to her before she heads right back to Boston as she has an 8:30 am talk at SD East in Boston...

I didn't until today. http://www.vtsbdc.org/ “The SBDC mission is to strengthen existing business entities, and assist start-ups through high quality, no cost counseling, and high quality, affordable training programs” What an awesome resource. It's not uncommon for many of us developers...

I am on the steering committee for a new group being formed in Vermont, the Vermont Software Developers Association (working title maybe). The steering committee meetings are getting more frequent as we head to our goal of having our first official meeting at the end of September in downtown Burlington...

I'm impressed to see that Kent Tegels is coming all the way from Omaha, Nebraska to speak at Code Camp II in Microsoft's Waltham, MA (Boston area) office. Now he says something in his blog about this being another stop on his tour. So I don't know what that's about but it's great that there will be some...

Vermont.Net's August meeting featured a fantastic presentation on Multi-Threaded Applications in .NET by local .Net plumber, Ali Aghareza. Ali has a weblog , by the way where he posts some awesome tidbits. Although threading is a very complex topic, Ali knows it inside and out. This was his very first...

thanks Suresh for pointing this out... http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/xpsp2web.asp...

Vermont.NET's next meeting is on Threading in .NET. Ali Aghareza , our local .net internals guru and a blogger is speaking at our Monday Aug 9th meeting. Meeting details at www.vtdotnet.org . Ali is a Sr. Systems Programmer at Green Mountain Power . Then next month, we will be diving into HTTP Handler...

MSDN Events - Free Events for Developers To Register, click here or call 1.877.MSEVENT toll free August and September MSDN Events: .NET Development and ASP .NET Registration: 12:30 - 1:00 pm Event Time: 1:00-5:00 pm Join us for a demo-packed afternoon and gain valuable insight into .NET development....

Jon Box points out an important thing to be aware of with the upcoming XP service pack. He also points to some additional resources on the topic. And since I seem to do it in every single post where i mention Windows XP SP2, here is a link to what you need to know as a developer about this service pack...

With the constant barrage of 'treat every application like an enterprise app', it's so important to have reminders like this one that Alex Campbell presents . (although do note the comment left by m7) This is going onto my user group feed ! It goes into the same category as SecretGeeks' “ you are...

Lucky me, lucky Vermont .Netters! Don Kiely is flying from Anchorage Fairbanks, Alaska on Friday to come for a visit. He'll be here for about five days. The excuse for the trip is built around the fact that he is speaking at Vermont.NET on Monday night (July 12th) on Building Applications with Least...

Though the cat got out of the bag a little early, the betas just launched! And a beautiful new MSDN developer center to go with them. VS2005 Beta 1 (released June 29th) How to get it MSDN Subscribers will be the first to receive Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, which will be available for subscriber download...

From MSDN maven (ooh - that sounds old, but she's not!) Sara Williams , this new feature of MSDN just went live: At the MSDN Product Feedback Center , you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You...

Feed: Geekswithblogs.net Main Feed Title: New Presentation: Microsoft Services Oriented Architecture Source: XML Bill Evjen's Blog Author: Bill Evjen 0 Comments Another presentation for .NET User Groups to use from Microsoft has been made available from the INETA website! Microsoft is giving INETA user...

This is a half day free seminar from the Microsoft Tablet Team and the Leszynski Group that is targetted to developers. It hits Boston this Wednesday, June 9th. The sessions focus on core features of the Tablet SDK and will be code and API intensive. Date: Wednesday, June 9 2004, Start Time : 1:45 PM...

I read with great interest Paul Vick's post on “The truth about Nullable types in VB“ vs. C# as I am talking about nullable types in my revised Whidbey BCL talk that I am doing at VTdotNET in a week and then at DevTeach in a few weeks. I have played with nullable in the March preview bits...

June 8th, Capitol Plaza Montpelier, VT This event is hosted by the Vermont Information Technology Center and the Vermont Commission on Women. More info here I have been trying to get in touch with ANYONE from this conference about possibly participating as a panel speaker or something. If anyone has...

Just a reminder that, thanks to INETA, Tim Huckaby speaks at Vermont.NET tonight. We are gettingn a preview of his TechEd 2004 talk on Architecting and Building Smart Client Apps with .NET. Here are all of the details! www.vtdotnet.org Tim took great advantage of the trip east. He and his wife spent...

Roman Rehak will be presenting at the next two Vermont SQL SIG meetings. Note that the dates have changed from Monday to Tuesday When: 6-8pm, Tuesday, May 18th. Where: Vermont Department of Health in Burlington. SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services - An in-depth study Speaker: Roman Rehak Senior Developer...

New to blogging , but well-versed in programming!! Kathleen is a true VB and Code Generation expert, an MVP and you have likely seen her many many articles in Visual Studio Magazine. She's on dotNetRocks this Thursday night 10-12pm EST. from Carl's blog: Rory and I will be talking with Kathleen Dollard...

I just had my first call from a friend who got the Sasser Virus. The sad thing is that she works in a company where there are i.t. people responsible for ensuring that she is safe. An important thing to stress with clients/friends/my parents (aiming here at people who are not computer professionals)...

I am trying to aggregate the many discussions I have seen lately on women in i.t.. I think all opinions are important. Here is where there are. Marcie is going to help by posting stuff she sees too. Let me know if we miss something! Thanks to Bob Roudebush for the pretty .Text Skin....

It seems that a bunch of developers have finally cracked under the pressure of too much information on the future stuff and just not enough focus on the current technology that most developers are working in (referring to .NET 1.1, there). I definitely understand. Take a look at Greg Robinson 's post...

Late last year, I finally began tackling WSE and then followed that up with some (now postponed boo hoo) very excited digging into WSE2. During that time I had read a very useful article on WSE by Jeannine Hall Gailey and heard from her that she had a WSE2 book coming out . The insatiable programming...

Hannes Preishuber (who I met at the summit. Hi, Hannes!) learns something very scary about TSQL . Here are some great reasons to protect yourself from SQL Injection through things like validation (Hannes points out that a typical search for quotes won't help in this case), using stored procedures and...

As I'm contemplating Loren's post (just wrote about it in my previous post ) on using VS.NET on a tablet, I am thinking about screen real estate. I work with a 19” monitor set at 1024x768. I can't make the resolution any smaller, and a larger screen is really hard on my eyes - focusing back and...

Loren Heiny , who is a developer first and a tablet pc (MVP and) expert second (that ranking is my own personal opinion), (and even an author ) -- spent some time using his new Toshiba M200 as a development machine to answer the question many developers have asked - “but can I use a tablet as my...

Oh no! Someone “leaked” the decks from the MDC talks on developing applications for TabletPC with the TabletPCSDK. This is terrible. Now anyone will be able to write tabletpc applications! So please, don't show anyone these links ! Found by way of whatisnew.com and tabulapc , too. Naughty...