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 different times.

Rocky Lhotka presented to a packed house of 40 (that’s a LOT in our small city) enchanted developers at Vermont.NET last night. We even had some non-locals with one person travelling down from Montreal and another coming from Norwalk, CT (which I believe is 300 miles away)!  Rocky came to VTdotNET as an INETA speaker so we are very grateful to have had this opportunity.

Rocky explained the good and bad and the history of distributed computing with a focus on data-centric programming vs. object oriented programming. Many people think they are doing OOP but in reality are still doing Data-Centric. Big clue here – are you passing datasets and datatables around?

We also got a lot of insight into some of the bigger picture ideas and where distributed architecture is going with Indigo (and where remoting fits in and some issues with messages coming out of microsoft). He mentioned Rich Turner and I just kept hearing “no, nein, niente, shake head vigoursly“ rapping through my head.

We got a look at the basic concept of Rocky’s CSLA architecture and I have already been getting emails this morning from people saying “wow – it makes so much sense – I just ordered his book” We did raffle off a few copies at the meeting last night as well.

In the Q&A afterward I suppose it couldn’t be helped that Rocky got steered into a VB/C# discussion, but finally someone pulled us back to distributed programming.

Outside of the meeting, I should mention the wonderful leaf peeping tour we took. I picked Rocky up at the airport at noon and took him to an icon of Burlington – Al’s French Fries and then we hit the road. We took a 4 hour drive heading south from Burlington going over both the Middlebury Gap and Appalachian gaps. It made me sad to realize taht I had done this on my bike the year before I moved to Vermont and right now that is just not even physically possible. Anyway – though it was an overcast day – the leaves were just glowing and glorious on this entire drive. Rocky hit the absolute peak for this area of Vermont. After the meeting, a bunch of us headed to the Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop in downtown Burlington (see we do have a different type of user group!) Thanks also to Gardener’s Supply for not only hosting our meeting, but providing a gift certificate for us to present to Rocky in thanks.

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 all ASP.NET applications on a Web server against canonicalization problems that are currently known to Microsoft as of the publication date. We will continue to update this page as additional guidance and resources become available.

http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/aspnet.mspx

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. During each session block, you will have 4-6 talks to choose from. Amazing!!! Sign up here

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 Hollis will be at the SQL Server group in Montreal.

Rocky is going to talk to us Vermont geeks about a topic near and dear to his heart, “Creation of Distributed Object Oriented Applications in .NET”. We are also getting a bunch of his books from APress to give away at the meeting.

Rocky will arrive in Burlington a little before noon which will give us time for a nice drive around Vermont to do some leaf peeping. Apparently yesterday was official “Peak Day” but since the leaves change at different times depending on where you are in the state, it will certainly still be easy to find some glorious color on Monday. (and maybe even some maple syrup 🙂 ).

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’s really in Burlington but says Montpelier. Our DCC has tried to get this fixed and it hasn’t been. I am spending WAY too much time trying to help many confused people. Please can somebody fix this?

By the way, the new site design is VERY nice.

Yours truly,

Frustrated in Vermont

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 as new information becomes available.  You can also get in depth information on how to help protect your ASP.NET site by taking advantage of some simple code to programatically check for canonicalization issues at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=887459

There is also a discussion thread that I started on www.asp.net forums that you can find at http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=711220 — you can ask questions directly there.

Brian Johnson also makes a great point about getting free support (in North America) on security/virus related issues by calling (866) PCSAFETY (I think this is pretty cool, never realized it before to be honest — now I know where to send my friends and family when they have problems though 🙂 .

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. There were companies who do consulting and companies who have software products. There were companies who consult for any type of business and companies who have expertise in particular markets – very strongly represented in Vermont is Health Care software but there was also representation of folks who have expertise in software for accounting, manufacturing, insurance and other industries.

It was really exciting since nothing like this has happened in Vermont before, while there are many state or regional software business associations around the country.

I’m equally thrilled to be able to accomplish something I have been trying to find a way to do for a long time – which is to share my now extensive resources with my local community beyond just learning about .NET programming.We have formed a temporary board to replace the steering committee which I was on and I will be on this board as we really bring this organization into being a legal entity and after that, we will vote for a real board of directors.

If you are in Vermont and are in the business of software, definitely check out the website www.vtsda.org where there is already some info, a place to list your information and take a survey so we can continue to understand what types of needs we all have as a group!

(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 for a fun weekend visit. It was originally scheduled in June, when the lupine were in full bloom and “livin’ is easy”, but unfortunately, in late May, Michele had some unexpected travel coming up so we rescheduled for September as she was already planning to go to Jim Murphy’s group, NHDNUG in New Hampshire.

Although the weekend thing didn’t work out wtih everyone’s crazy schedules, Michele and I did get to spend a really fun day hanging out and hiking in the Appalachian Gap on the Long Trail. Luckily for her, the leaves have started turning early, so it is really beautiful here right now. She really had an insane trip, flying into Boston from San Diego on Sunday, driving the 4 hours to my house that night and then had to drive back to Boston on Monday night after the user group meeting. So I really wanted to be sure it was worth the effort she had put in to come all the way here.

Reading this post-meeting entry on her weblog, I think we did okay!

After a fun day on Monday we drove into Burlington for the meeting which was at a new location- the revamped offices of Gardener’s Supply which is in a very special place called the Intervale in north Burlington.

Although I had told everyone the meeting would end at 8 so that Michele could get on the road (she had an 8am talk in Boston at SD East the next morning), she ended up giving us the equivalent of two incredible presentations and talked until 9!

I have never seen Michele present before and I was really bowled over by not only her knowledge (which I am *well* aware of 🙂 ) but her really professional presentation style. Although quite focused on her content, I did keep thinking about my presentation style (which is pretty nascent right now) and wondered if time and experience would help me come near her confidence (which I’m sure she will say is just percieved) and ability to communicate deeply technical information.

I have to say that the women at the meeting were pretty thrilled to witness Michele. The only other woman that has ever presented at our group is me and I really have paled in comparison to most of the other pros that have presented there. So it was everyone’s first real experience of having a serious female presenter. So for the women, I think a lot of them were just really psyched because they suddenly didn’t feel as out of place as usual as the group is naturally dominated by guys. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes these things really do matter even if you don’t want them to.

All in all, I think Dave Burke’s post sums up the general feeling of the whole group about Michele’s presentation. It was basically….awesome.

And to top it off, she was wearing a pretty cool shirt from Newtelligence!