Even in a place far far away and probably more beautiful than you could imagine you can attend a .NET user group meeting. Not only that but Microsoft’s Atlantic Canada User Group Tour is making a pitstop there – in St. John’s, Newfoundland at WeDevelop.Net, the user group run by blogger, .Net programmer and XBox babe, Amanda Murphy.

There is a special place in my heart for Newfoundland since I have had many Newfoundland dogs and my parents breed them. I hope someday to go there and maybe I’ll even get to speak at Amanda’s group!

Aaron Skonnard is the author of the the great WSE2 Hands On Lab that I have been working with in my WSE education. (find it on this page) I just needed to thank him.

While I sit on my butt doing .NET, Andrew Knight, who is also a local web programmer, a VTdotNET member and used to host our user group meetings when he worked at Burton Snowboards, uses his spare time for much better use. I am always so thrilled to read about his accomplishments. This past weekend, he placed 3rd in the Mt. Washington road race. (photo) I believe he was 4th last year.  I hope that he’s sporting a red polka dot shirt this week!

From the FAQ page on the race site:

The Mount Washington Hill Climb is quickly becoming known as the toughest hill climb in the world and as Dick Devellian, past Race Director, says “This is the World Championship of hill climbing. If someone wants to say they are the best climber in the world then they need to prove it here on Mount Washington.”

The Mt Washington Auto Road is 7.6 miles in length, has an average grade of 12% with extended sections of 18% and the last 50 yards is an amazing 22%!

Well unfortunately, it took a little disaster for Thom to finally move is blog from radio userland over to blogs.msdn.com, but I’m happy he did. Thom is the Microsoft Developer Evengelist here in the Northeast and we think he’s the best one in the world (apologies to all of the other D.E.s who are also wonderful). Thom has been putting together a lot of community events mostly at the Waltham (Boston area) office. He just did  Mobility Day and upcoming are the 2nd Code Camp and a cabana event. Unfortunately it’s about 4 hours away so I don’t generally attend these things personally but I seem to always regret that when the post-event blogs start popping up. Thom has also been incredibly supportive of the efforts of us user group leaders as well as twisting my arm encouraging me and others to do more public speaking.

Here’s the direct link to his new blog blogs.msdn.com/trobbins.

Charles is somewhat of a legend in Windows programming, but my perspective on him is that besides being incredibly smart, he’s a really nice and fascinating guy . He knows a lot of things about the history of computing and loves to pepper his programming books with wonderful anecdotes.

Here’s a great example from Programming in the Key of C#. Charles is explaining Booleans.

When you use Boolean expressions, it helps to know a couple of shortcuts, and in particular, De Morgan’s Theorem, which is named after British mathematician Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) who, among other achievements, was math tutor to Augusta Ada, Countes of Leveleace, nee Byron (1815-1852). In 1843, Ada tranlated into English an Italian article about teh Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage(1792-1871) and also added some notes to the tranlation, including what is credited with being the first computer program (albeit for a macine that was never built). See how everything fits together? (p.153)

I would definitely recommend taking advantage of an opportunity to hear him interviewed on DotNetRocks. Carl and Charles and I had dinner together along with Dr. Neil and my husband, Rich, when we were in Redmond last month. So I have already had a taste of how fun and interesting this conversation is going to be.

Shelly Powers noticed that there were no women speaking at the XML DevCon. Dare Obasanjo, who is a master of finding any post with “xml” in it, listed some of the women he’d love to see presenting on XML.

I’d also like to mention Angela Mills who is the Group Program Manager on the Indigo Team. Angela was part of the Women in I.T. panel at TechEd 2004. I had never come across Angela before and was quite astonished by her. She is eloquent and inspiring – not to mention her beautiful Scottish accent. That whole panel discussion was phenomenal.

Of course, add the words “web services” to that and I can’t help but think of Michele Leroux Bustamante , Rebecca Dias and Jeannine Hall Gailey.

I was at a small party tonight (dinner cruise on Lake Champlain on one of the few nice nights all summer) and met a woman who, upon hearing I  was a programmer, told me that her friends son just started working at Microsoft. Just yesterday! And he’s working on the “next version of Windows”. I think she was surprised to see how impressed I was – “Wow! He’s on the Longhorn team!” Very cool.

So all you Longhorn folks, go seek out Eric Zamore from South Hero, Vermont and tell him hello!

oh – wrong speech – the user group he started, BeanTown.NET just became the latest INETA member – #580. Great job, Sam. Starting and running a user group is a lot of fun but a lot of work. There is actually a video on the ineta website that MSDN did about INETA, user groups and their relationship with Microsoft. although the video was produced to engage Microsoft folks some more – get them excited about user groups – I think it does a lot to express what it’s like to run one. VTdotNET was included in the video as well. it’s on the ineta home page.

I’ll leave all the “wow, awesome content” comments to the others, because what else would we expect from Sam but great content, anyway? Suffice it to say, he has been busy and this looks to be a great centralized resource. However, I would like to add that Sam Gentile’s new portal (DotNetNuke based) is also really pretty. It’s not often that a geek’s own website is well as pleasant to the eye as it is enticing to the brain!

I’m also happy to see that Sam (as well as some other Boston folks, such as Chris Pels and Robert Hurlbut) is speaking at Code Camp II. I’ve been flaky about committing (sorry Thom) because I have a bit of a conflict with that weekend.

looks like some super fun ahead for Eric Gunnerson! Seems he wants to write with C#, not just write it….