Luke’s 35th was a few days ago. I thought it was high time I sent him a thanks for all of joy I get from sharpreader every day. So I found a special way…

DevDaysBloggers.com was for me the most helpful tool in preparing for my DevDays presentations and for continuing to share my session materials to attendees and everyone else.

Drew & Kevin – Thank you Very much!!!

I just read this on Amy Sorokas’ blog and will just copy & paste cause it’s so cool!!

Hooray. Congrats to Steve & Ruth. Ruth is Steve’s wife, has been my co-chair on the user group relations committee for INETA  for the past year and is also Steve’s business partner and enabler in so many ways.

Although Jason is an INETA speaker, he recently started working for Infragistics and it was Infragistics that sponsored him coming to speak to Vermont.NET monday.

Jason was such a hit with our user group (see this example on Dave Burke’s blog), I am still getting emails from attendees thanking me and Jason for this great meeting. Jason talked about the many interesting solutions he came up with when working on a multi-tier windows application. He didn’t even point out any of the infragistics controls he used. I was pretty impressed. I know that even if he had said “oh by the way… that’s an infra grid” or something like that , nobody would have run form the room screaming “eek marketing!”

Jason is a fun, nice nice guy and he has a ball presenting. Thanks so much to Infragistics for sending Jason, buying pizza for the night and for the two licenses to NetAdvantage that Jason raffled off at the end.

I have had the good fortune of meeting one of the two Dave Chappell’s, this one, at TechEd and again at PDC. Right now I am sitting with the “other” Dave Chappell. But now he is the other other Dave Chappell as he has recently [and quite proudly] lost 60 pounds.

The DevDays web track last session goes over Microsoft’s entry to eWeek’s 2002 OpenHack contest – now renamed and even updated. Though we are reminded that Microsoft’s application was not hacked once even after 80,000 attempts,  Oracle’s app did suffer a few hacks. Okay they were minor but… (here’s eWeek’s wrapup of that)

Kirk Allen Evans will be working for MS starting March 1st as a DE for the Telco industry. He gets to stay in Atlanta.

Kirk – better start practicing the monkeyboy dance!

Oh, and I was just asked to pass this message on to you:
Congratulations, Keith!
Yours, Jennifer
(hee hee – sorry folks, inside joke!)

Mike is also a great community champion! Here is an interview he did with Greg Robinson for ADT Magazine. Greg’s work was featured by Microsoft in a case study. Read all about Greg’s days as a COBOL programmer! 🙂

Speaking opps?? Ha! There is no such thing! *I* don’t even get to speak at my own user group any more. Being VERMONT, it is kind of a popular venue. By November of 2003, I had all but 4 months of 2004 booked.

If you don’t happen to wander over to that site

here is a line up (more details here)

(This is going to require a mass of links – too tired – maybe later – sorry!!)

Jan Pat Hynds (INETA speaker but came on his own and I still want to keep thanking him!)
Feb Steve Smith(ASPAlliance) Sponsored by the Julie & Rich B&B
Mar Jason Beres(INETA Speaker who is also a new Infragistics employee and Infra is sponsoring)
Apr Joe Stagner(MS)/Trace Galloway (Altova) – it’s an XML night
May Tim Huckaby (INETA sponsored)
June Michele Leroux Bustamente (INETA Sponsored)
July Don Kiely (frequent flyer miles and Julie & Rich B&B sponsored)
August – Ali Agheraza (local brainiac plumber)
Sept – (hey maybe a spot for me???)
October – Rocky Lhotka (INETA sponsored)

phew

Generally all of the out of town speakers stay at our house and try to get here for the prior weekend to enjoy Vermont. Pat was going to but unfortunately it became not possible at the last minute and he drove all the way here and back on the same afternoon/evening (boston to Burlington – 4 hrs each way). Thom Robbins from Microsoft Waltham has done that and so did Shawn Wildermuth back in June 2002.

Another fun thing is that I’ve managed to find local companies to donate speaker gifts – something special from Vermont (eg gift basket of Vermont food products cheese, coffee, chocolate, syrup etc.) We have some pretty well known companies in the area and many of them are represented in the group. Gardener’s Supply, Green Mountain Coffee, Lake Champlain Chocolates, Karhu, Burton (okay the Burton guy – who is also becoming a famous bike racer! – went over to Gardener’s Supply) so I do have a good  pot to draw from. Last year, one member donated ski tickets at (my favorite ski place – Mad River Glen) for Chris Kinsman when he came here in March.

Now you see why I don’t get to talk at my own user group. These people are spoiled rotten with primo speakers. Heh. And I’m kidding. They are not rotten. They are the BEST and deserve this. Really it’s been awesome. THere are a lot of people in the group that are really working full time in .NET now at a pretty high level.

We have one young guy in the group, Neil Wacek, who was working on the Mono documentation before the user group even started. So he knew a ton before all the rest of us even knew how to spell dotnet. Another person, Roman Rehak, publishes lots of articles in Visual Studio Magazine has  become a national speaker (well International if you count DevTeach in Montreal) and was track chair for the PASS conference this past year. I expect to start seeing Roman on the bill for future big conferences – he really is a phenomenal presenter and knows his stuff inside and out.

So those two, well, they probably figured all of this out without benefit of the group. But really people are learning and it’s wonderful to see the transition. Hell, I hadn’t even installed VS.NET until after our 2nd meeting!! (And I had a live, working asp.net app by the 3rd…)

So back to the amazing speaker roster — it has been like that for our whole two years (Feb was 2nd yr anniversary). Here’s a page (need to update recent talks) of almost all of our past meetings.

Not bad for a little ol’ Vermont User Group, eh?

Why am I writing about this? I was thinking how it kinda sucked that I didn’t get to practice my upcoming presentation by doing it for the user group first. 🙂 But that’s okay.

Well, that was a LOT more fun than practicing my talk or writing code and now I’m just gonna go to bed! HAHAHA! (yes, it’s ONLY 10pm!)

A few days ago, I posted a completely bullshit post  (with caveats) about working with Longhorn. The post was nothing more than a commentary. I sometimes wonder if some of the people who write broad statements about Longhorn have even touched it, and are merely writing something, anything, for appearances’ sake. I have not even installed Longhorn. I’ve seen pieces of it at PDC, read a bit about it, looked at the sample stuff people are developing (videos or screenshots). But I’m not doing anything bleeding edge there.

The one person who commented, who missed my (a bit too unobvious I realize) irony, was Jason Nadel, who I quite like, and truly *is* working with Longhorn. So I was tickled to see this post by Chris Sells, saying that it seems Jason has built the “first real custom app for Longhorn I’ve seen that doesn’t have to do with demonstrating or building for the platform”.

Go Jason!