I’m hopping in the car to drive the 4 hours to Boston forthe sold-out REMIX which started this morning. I’ll be there all day tomorrow and will be giving a talk on Astoria tomorrow afternoon.

For you locals, the Vermont.NET user group is having a special type of meeting tonight  – a PubClub! We’ll (without me  – so You’ll) be meeting at RiRa’s in downtown Burlington. Check the website www.vtdotnet.org for details.

Thanks to Laura Blood, Tom Cooley and Rob Hale for coordinating and leading the three discussion topics.

On January 26, 2008, the VT Software Developers Alliance, CEDO, Champlain College, Seven Days, VSAC, the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce and GBIC, along with many other partners is hosting an all day “Creative/Technology Career Jam” at the Lake & College Building on the Waterfront. We are hoping to attract at least 30 employers to set up booths and meet with high school, college students and adults to discuss the growing need for qualified technical employees.

This event will include food, music, and keynote and educational seminars presented by respected technology professionals, well known in their fields. Booth spaces will be $150 for 20 or less employees and $350 for more than 20 employees with limited space available. There will also be sponsorship opportunities. The rate sheet is not yet available, but please contact Bruce Seifer of CEDO ([email protected]) or Patrick Martell with vtSDA ([email protected]) if you are interested.

Russ Fustino used to be our little secret when he worked out of the Microsoft New England office. He was well loved by Burlington, VT developers who looked forward to his Russ’ Toolshed events. A full day of free training that was before MSDN events existed!

But there’s more to Russ’ legacy. It was Russ who inspired us to start our user group, VTdotNEt, and it was Russ who pointed his finger at me when he looked around the room to see who might actually take on the challenge.

Then a dark day came and Russ moved to Florida. There was audible moaning and snivelling to be heard all over the Champlain Valley.

Happily, we have been very lucky over the years to have Joe Stagner, Thom Robbins, Susan Wisowaty, Chris Bowen and Bob Familiar come to town.

But next month Russ is coming back!

I wonder if anyone told him that Nectar’s has new owners? Well, let’s keep that part quiet because they still serve gravy fries and have local bands playing every night. Hasn’t changed that much.

On Nov 12th, Russ will be presenting at the VTdotNET User Group Meeting and on Nov 13th he will be doing a full day MSDN Event in Burlington.

You can find out more about the meeting at www.vtdotnet.org.

You can find out more about the MSDN event as well as register at www.msdnevents.com.

And one more thing, Nov 12th is Russ’ birthday. I vote for wrapping up the meeting as soon as we can and heading down to his favorite watering hole on the planet (that would be Nectar’s)  and try to see if we can convince him to return for good.

Are you sitting? Buckled in?

Yes it’s true. It was just announced. Microsoft is releasing source for .NET binaries and letting us debug into it as well!

Read more here!

[A New DevLife post]

By way of the Burlington Free Press

James Martin, who Computerworld Magazine once ranked as the fourth most influential individual in the world of computer science, will talk tonight at Green Mountain College.

More info here: http://www.greenmtn.edu/gmcjournal/index.asp

Boy am I excited about this.

Timothy Ng is on the VB team and wrote the recent MSDN Magazine article on Lambda Expressions for VB developers. I understood lambdas better than ever after reading the article … finally something from the VB perspective.

His two talks are:

LINQ-ing your data
In this session, I will explore how LINQ will change the way you think about data in your applications. In particular, I will explore how LINQ provides a higher abstraction for accessing your data, provides a common abstraction across data domains, and allows for simplified data transformations. I will focus on LINQ to XML as the transformation technology, and the various XML features that are available in VB.

LINQ from the Ground Up
In this session, I will explore the fundamentals of LINQ by examining how the various language features (such as extension methods, type inference, lambda expressions, and anonymous types) form the foundation for LINQ. I will share some of the experiences that the VB compiler team had while building LINQ, in hopes that it will help you build your applications on LINQ. Examples will be in VB, but this talk applies to C# folks who are interested in learning how the fundamentals work as well. All language concepts apply to both VB and C#.

I sure wish I was seeing these before I do my LINQ talk in San Diego on Tuesday! 🙂

Richard Hale Shaw will be doing some pretty cool LINQ talks too which will be a C# focus.

Before I learned that Tim was coming, I was already excited about the Code Camp speaker roster. This will be the first time that Jesse Liberty and Fritz Onion (who are “local” in about the same way that I am local… well, I guess Fritz’s drive is even longer than mine). Jesse recently started working for Microsoft (see? I managed not to say “swallowed the red pill”!) and he is “da man” at Microsoft on Silverlight. Fritz is a true ASP.NET plumber who amazed us all with his book Essential ASP.NET in the .NET 1.0 days and again with the updated version for ASP.NET 2.0, because it explained HOW ASP.NET actually worked and he continues to spelunk on our behalves.

There are already almost 40 sessions listed with tons of amazing expertise on display.

I’ll be doing a talk on Astoria, a session on using Entity Framework in multi-tiered apps (and getting a little nervous that nobody seems to be doing an Intro to entity framework session) and a session on ASP.NET Databinding with LINQ.

When Vermont.NET does not have a sponsor to cover the cost of pizza & soda, the attendees pay for their own – $5 each. This was the case at Monday’s meeting. Additionally, we were doing a fundrasing raffle for the first time ever, using a license to Infragistics NetAdvantage that was donated by Infragistics. The raffle was $5. There were about 25 people at the meeting.

Usually, collecting the money is a subtle thing that happens in the background and I have not even had to do it in years as another user group member has been grabbing the cash on my behalf. But I was doing it on Monday and wouldn’t you know it, but everyone had 20’s. Nobody seemed to have change. In over 5 years and 70 meetings, this has never happened before. It took a good 15 minutes or more to get it all sorted out. While I’m laughing about it now, it was totally chatoic and embarrassing at the time. We had a bunch of new attendees and our speaker, Mark Mullin (who helped come up with change for a 20) from New Hampshire. I could only imagine what they were thinking!

So my lesson? I guess from now on, I’ll just have to add in “20’s not accepted”.

The Burlington stop of the Bob & Chris Roadhow is this coming Monday, sept 10th.

In addition to a day of great (and free) training on

• Dynamic Languages
• Silverlight
• Developer Productivity Tips & Tricks for VS2005 & VS2008
• Understanding Service Oriented software

(and a free lunch :-))

Bob & chris will have passes to attend REMIX Boston (Oct 8/9th) for free as well as a trunk full of the MS Press book “Introducing LINQ”.

More info and sign up for Monday’s event here.

And just a note, VTdotNET’s monthly meeting will be Sept 17th. See more details on www.vtdotnet.org.

Another one of the “satellite” MIX07 events will take place in Boston in early October – REMIX07 Boston.

Brad Abrams will be doing the keynotes. I see Rocky Lhotka and Jeff Prosise doing talks too. The Eastern Region D.E.s who have organized this have also brought in some “local talent”. Luckily people like Fritz Onion (Maine) and Richard Hale Shaw (Boston) are part of our local talent! Additionally, they have allowed me a session on Astoria and I see fellow use group leaders Bill Wolff, Andy Beaulieu doing talks on WPF and Silverlight, respectively.

This is a two day event with 7 session slots and each session has 5 talks to choose from. Not quite as stressful as the number of talks to select from at MIX07 in Las Vegas, but enough to make you have to think pretty hard!

It’s only $299 for a registration fee. And it is also pretty easy to figure out how to attend for a lot less (or even free).

read more on Chris Bowen’s blog

Just for fun, Vermont.NET will have our October 8th meeting at RiRa’s in downtown Burlington.

No powerpoints, no projector, no screen.

Bring your laptop. We’ll come up with a topic for discussion in advance.