The VTdotNET Holiday potluck party was at my house in the boonies last night. Someday I will learn how to use my camera but flash photos never come out right. Nevertheless, here are a few. Note the [not yet decorated] tree with all of the GEEKY gifts underneath. We got a pile of books from WROX and I also put lots of other books I’ve had around for a while and a pile of t-shirts. I noticed there was competition for two items under the tree. One was WROX’s gazillion page ASP.NET 2.0 Pro book and the other a particular hilarious but slightly naughty bright orange t-shirt from telerik.

Here’s Laura & Neal Blood of Blue Note Computing and Bob LoCicero of Inside Edge Software. In addition to attending almost every VTdotNET meeting since its inception, Laura co-runs the VTSQL user group along with Roman Rehak. Dave Burke brought his accordian and regaled us with the unique sounds of accordian style christmas songs. The bottom pic is Neal Blood again with Carl Lorentson of Rennaisance Info Systems (Carl also serves on the VTSDA board with me) and Rob Hale (well, his back) and Dave Friedman, both from GE Healthcare, talking with Chris DeGuise, co-founder of Pragmatic Technologies. Tasha and Daisy laid on the floor near the table and waited for any food that might get accidentally dropped on the floor. My smart doggies!

We got nearly 3 hours with Anders Hejlsberg at the ASPInsiders Summit last week. He went over language innovations in C#3 and how they feed into Linq. I can’t do a full brain dump in a single post, but here is some of what he talked about (with some added VB examples too for fairness, since the new goo in  C#3 and VB9 are usually discussed mutually exclusive of one another, though they do have a lot of innovations in common).

[A DevLife post]

I’m at Microsoft in Redmond for the ASPInsiders Summit, three days of training by various members of the ASP.NET Team as well as experts in other relavant fields. Most of what we’re looking at is what’s coming down the pipes in the near future and in the longer term. Yesterday was the first day and it was an amazing amount of content. I’ve written about some of the things I learned that I hadn’t known before over here….

Posted from BLInk!

I’m writing a WinForms app that is only for me to use, so I decided to see what it’s like to use the drag ‘n drop databinding wizards for the first time ever. Read more…

[A DevLife post]

Though we selfishly were sad to see Thom Robbins leave the D.E. position for New England, the local community was thrilled to see him move to an awesome new job at Microsoft. But the big question was who on earth could fill his shoes?

Happily, Thom has made a wonderful choice in a successor. Chris Bowen, a local developer who has been very involved in the community and someone for whom I have always had a ton of respect, will be our new D.E.

Thanks Thom! Thanks Chris!

I don’t pay much attention to Facebook (could it be that I’m about twice the age of the average user? ;-)), but thought it was intersesting that they expose web services for devs to tap into. Here’s an article on DevSource by Tim Stevens called Using the Facebook API: Social Networking in .NET
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The schedule for this weekend’s Code Camp in Waltham, Mass is live. This Code Camp will be packing all of the sessions into one day – Saturday, rather than spread out over two.

If you haven’t registered to attend yet, you can register here.

I’ll be doing three talks throughout the day:

9am: Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Website: This talk is aimed at sorting out all of the options for creating, compiling and deploying ASP.NET 2.0 websites along with tips for making the best choices.

1:15 pm: Persisting Ink on the Web. If you are interested in creating ASP.NET Web apps with ink capabilities for Tablet PC users, this session offers a slew of information about what to do with the ink once it’s collected. Handling ink in a website is very different than working with it in a windows application. This session will deal with things like how to deal with postbacks, sending the ink to another web page, storing ink into a database and retriving it and getting ink to and from web services and more.

4:45 pm: Handling Big Data in ADO.NET 2.0: Most demos and samples for ADO.NET deal with small amounts of data and simplistic functions. This session will take a look at how to design and code your data layer for dealing with real-world, high-end, data-intensive applications. We’ll look at some advanced patterns for handling more sophisticated scenarios such as updating huge amounts of data, leveraging middle-tier caching for heavy traffic Web sites, and an inmemory query processor that the ADO.NET team has built that we can use today. Much of what will be shown will leverage features of ADO.NET 2.0 as well as some of the performance improvements that have been made to the internals.

The new post cache subsititution functionality of ASP.NET 2.0 is one of the features of ASP.NET 2 that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but I am quite fond of it. So I wrote an article about it for DevSource and it is now online. You can read it here.

Code Camp 6 is Oct 21-22 in Waltham.

You can register now.

You can also submit abstracts. Code Camp is a great place to show off anything from stuff you’ve figured out that you want to share or technologies that fascinate you that you were looking for an excuse to dig into. Session range from low-key “chalk talks” in front of small groups, to presentations in one of the larger rooms.

There will be 7 tracks so almost anything goes.

So… even if you have never presented before, this is a great and low-stress venue to share what you’ve learned with other developers.