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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 geographical diversity among the presenters.

Also coming from out of town is DonXML (Don Demsak) who lives in New Jersey.

They have humbled me since I’m only 4 hours away but will not be participating as it’s my birthday weekend and I thought I would spend some time with my hubby! (I will no longer be representing the number that is the answer to the universe…hopefully something even better this time. I cannot tell you how many people I know in our community that happen to be this age.) I also had to decline Cabana Night at Boston.NET since I will be just driving back from 2 user group nights in a row in Montreal — GUVSM presenting on WSE2 Security on Oct. 4th and GUMSNET on Oct 6th presenting on .NET 2.0 BCL for ASP.NET developers. Montreal is 2 hours north and Boston is 4 hours south. So it doesn’t work out too well.

By the way, check out who Boston.NET leader Chris Pels and Thom Robbins have lined up for Cabana Night:

Chris Bowen	www.monster.com
Carl Franklin	www.franklins.net
Robert Hurlbut	www.hurlbut-consulting.com
Patrick Hynds	www.criticalsites.com
Duane Laflotte	www.criticalsites.com
Jesse Liberty	www.libertyassociates.com
Chris Pels	www.idevtech.com
Richard Hale Shaw	www.richardhaleshawgroup.com
Don Sorcinelli	www.bostonpocketpc.com
Pat Tormey	www.4square.net

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 time presenting, but because he knew the topic so well,the presentation and demos and his ability to answer any question, was fantastic.

I think one of the most valuable parts of this presentation was that Ali explained some of the areas where you couldl really get yourself in trouble if you didn’t know what  you were doing and showed some demos of the funny effects that could be had by what seemed like reasonable coding.

We also learned a few cool tidbits. Ever notice that EVERY single class, method and function in the .NET Reference starts off with a sentence about thread safety? Ever pay any attention to that? If you are manually doing threading, you definitely should! We learned about background threading, safepoints and how the machine is involved with this whole process.

It was definitely fascinating – impressive to watch him do all the coding on the fly as well – and I was so impressed by the talk, that I have recommended that he do this at Code Camp II!

We will put his slides up on the user group website soon.  Go to the VTdotNET site’s Past Meetings page to get his powerpoint deck.

A couple of notable points about this meeting. Although it was on one of the very rare NICE nights we have had this summer, there were still 20 people there (I was surprised) and more impressively there were 5 totally new people that had never come to a VTdotNET meeting before!

Next month (Sept 20th) Michele Leroux Bustamante is coming as part of a northeast tour thanks to INETA. She will be talking about HTTP Handlers in ASP.NET. I saw part of this talk on a webcast she did during ASP.NET Week on the MSDN Webcasts, but had to cut out early. So that will be 2 plumbers in a row at Vermont.NET. Very nice.

(wierd format of this post is because I can’t left align images. When I do, they don’t appear.. so I used a table, but that’s all goofy too)

I’m not sure how long they’ve been there, but Brian Keller just posted that the streaming video from DevDays presentations is online. There is one each, looks like they taped them at the Redmond event which had the largest attendance. Boston was the 2nd largest. It was definitely the largest audience I have ever stood in front of. Hundreds!

Steve Smith’s a funny guy and points to just newly posted info on Beta 2 plans for ASP.NET 2.0.

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’s with a not-so-local plumber, Michele Leroux Bustamante who is coming to Vermont.NET thanks to INETA.

I have heard the prediction of the demise of VB from the mouths of some *very* believable sources (not at Microsoft).  These are people who are so immured in the internals of .NET that from their perspective it just may not make sense to have multiple languages. However from a practical perspective (i.e. the fact that there are just millions of developers using VB) it just makes no sense to *let* VB go away. There has been some loud vocalization of this in some recent Microsoft employee weblogs.

For example, here (Sean Gephardt) and here (Somasegar)  Somasegar is a Corporate VP of the developer division….I’ll believe him! And you gotta love this quote “When I’m with VB developers, I hear things like “all the samples are in C#”, and when I’m with C# developers, I hear “VB At the Movies, the VB Power Pack – what about us?” I guess we must be doing something right.”)

Over the winter, I had a great excuse to dive into the Whidbey BCL as I had a presentation to do for the Edge East Conference in Boston in February. I spent a huge amount of time going back and forth between the .NET 1.1 reference library comparing it to the reference library in the PDC bits. I did lots of experiments, watched Kit George’s PDC presentation so often that I’d no that voice *anywhere* :-). There was minimal information out there at the time. Practically the only thing anyone had written about was Generics (and those articles and book chapters were really helpful to me as well.)

I reworked the deck against the May bits of Whidbey for DevTeach in June – about a week before the Beta1 was released. I have uploaded that version of the deck. It is my attempt at a hit list of what’s new in the base classes. Many thanks to Kit George for clarifying things as well as making some great suggestions and feeding me some widely unknown tidbits every once in a while. Also thanks to Krzysztof Cwalina for some awesome posts on his weblog. Oh – and to Scott Cate and Scott Watermasysk for being my first guinea pigs on this talk over a live meeting in February.

Here it is…it’s 1.1 MB

As noted in a prior post, Ahmed AboutTaleb from the BCL Team just put up an official list of what’s new on the BCLTeam blog the other day.