The Igloo Coder (aka Donald Belcham) who is the president of the Edmonton .NET User Group, has written a wonderful series of posts about his experiences and lessons of starting up that group along with a posse of others. I love that he talks about things like motivation in addition to more practical matters. Highly recommended reading.

Also, INETA has been doing a series of webcasts about starting and running a user group. Check them out at live.ineta.org.

Thanks to Leon Bambrick for making sure I didn’t miss the Igloo Coder series!

This was the fourth year of having this great event at TechEd. The format was slightly different. The speaker was great and lesson from a past event comes full circle for one attendee. [Read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Mary Jo Foley has an interview with Robert Scoble about his departure from Microsoft. She talks to Robert about how he thinks Microsoft will do with Web 2.0, who was the most interesting person he interviewed on Channel9, if (and how) Microsoft could have kept him in the fold and more.

Geeze -I had my aggregator filtered on TechEd so I could see what was going on and missed the stream of blog posts about Robert making a big move. It does not surprise me, considering all that he wrote surrounding his mother’s recent death wrt “not waiting for life to happen”. If you want the scoop, I recommend reading Robert’s perspective, not everyone else’s interpretations. I was hoping that they would be moving east so I could see Maryam more often. You know, like to Vermont! Now I don’t even get to see her on my next trip to Seattle. 🙁 

I am looking forward to being able to get my hands on the RTM version of the ASP.NET 2.0 book that Alex Homer & Dave Sussman have coming out TechEd. The previous versions (alpha and beta) were also co-authored by Rob Howard. I have great expectations for this final version, that is written against the final release of ASP.NET 2.0. Developers are fortunate to have so many great ASP.NET 2.0 books at our disposal.

update: here’s the inside scoop on the book from Dave who says it’s not just a polished up version of the beta book…

Michael Kaplan.

In my blog feed aggregator where I have MANY blogs feeding in, I can always identify posts Michael wrote by their very clever and witty titles.

Someone give that man a prize! (Sorry but I’m 3,000 miles away…)

It always makes me smile!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

MSDN has added another female Developer Community Champion to it’s ranks.

Meet  Lindsay Rutter:

Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Southern California, Virginia, West Virginia
http://blogs.msdn.com/lindsay

How many Microsoft presenters can claim they were “locked in” at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Mira Sorvino? Lindsay, for one. It’s a story you’ll have to get straight from the source. She has also produced content for a high traffic television network site and the internet division of one of America’s largest banks, where she helped to choose and implement a deployment tool for multiple data centers. Lindsay enjoys coding in C++, but admits that C# is quickly vying for her affections. She’s also proficient in Unix, Visual Studio 2005, OOD concepts, HTML/CSS, XML, Java, JavaScript, Perl, .NET, relational database concepts, and computer security and forensics tools including Autopsy and Encase 5.0. Lindsay graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, where she was part of a team that researched how to implement an Internet-capable computer lab in a school in N’Djili in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – an area that has no telephone services and receives electricity only three days per week. As a developer, Lindsay loves solving technical problems and formulating solutions that are precisely tailored to her clients’ needs.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

What fun to be here at DevTeach! The day started out with being woken up by the slamming of the door of a nearby hotel room – a good thing in my case since it was 7:45 and Alan Griver’s LiNQ keynote was at 8am – and NOT to be missed! I took a lot of notes during his talk and I’m even more excited about LiNQ now. I’ll write more about that in another post.

There is a fantastic collection of speakers here – many of whom I’ve become friends with over the years coming to DevTeach (and from whom I learn a lot).  Also the .NET community in Montreal is wonderful. Since I live nearby , I get to come up occasionally and am always treated to a great time by this incredibly friendly bunch!

A special thanks to Etienne Tremblay who showed me how to get my VPC talking to my laptop through a loopback adapter! Etienne was even doing a talk on virtualization today, but it was in the French track.

The weather is great. The Marriott where the conference is is a really nice hotel to be in. There are about 300 attendees this year and lots of people from across Canada.

I did a talk on writing web services today to be able to be used by wcf tomorrow to the usual small crowd of web service developers. Even though there aren’t a lot of people doing WSE, they still want and need help getting it working and just because WCF is coming, people still want and need to secure their web services today. I almost missed dinner because I was so enjoying answering questions after my session of a developer who has to port his vs2003/wse2 apps to vs2005/wse3. I have been there and done that and just wanted to give him a brain dump.

Unfortunately, I have a whole bunch of work to do for some clients remotely from here, so I better get on it before I fall asleep!

Posted from BLInk!

I’m waiting for Dave to post this great news before I can blog about it. Seems only fair 😉

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I’ve been reading Eric Sink’s collection of blog posts and articles (with additional commentary) in his recently published book “The Business of Software” (APress) and I’m very pleased that these have been published this way. Though I have seen many of these online, I don’t believe I have actually read too many of them all the way through. This is such a big problem with anything on-line because when you are online there is so much info coming at you and it’s too hard to stay focused. So if something isn’t a quick read, you think “okay, I’ll read it later” and later never happens. Then it get’s lost, buried in the past. [read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!