It must have been the Bove’s Pasta Sauce that keeps them coming back. Microsoft New England’s Bob Familiar and Chris Bowen are back this week for another full day of fabulous and FREE .NET training.

REGISTER HERE!

Sheraton: 8:30am to 4:30 pm

Tonight’s VTdotNET meeting is a little different for us “must focus on business apps” VTdotNETters. Griff Townsend is coming up from Albany where he has done two XNA sessions (2-D and then 3-D) at the user group there.

I think it will be a lot of fun to open up our eyes to new ways (reasons for) programming. I am hoping that we’ll be able to draw some of the students from Champlain College’s Game Development degree program.

www.vtdotnet.org for more info….

There are about 350 people already registered for Code Camp in Waltham, MA Mar 31-Apr 1st. There is also room for more sessions! I just added a chalk talk because I thought it would be fun to open up the Entity Data Model schemas and explain what the heck is going on there.

You do not have to have a completely prepared powerpoint presentation to do a chalk talk. Just an idea, a computer and some working knowledge of the topic and then just go with the flow, which is driven by everyone in the room.

CODE CAMP 7 – more info here

We’re really looking forward to this. Gov Douglas will be featured at the next VTSDA Meeting: A Discussion on the Vermont Software Sector and its role in Vermont’s Economy.

More info at http://www.vtsda.org/meetings/

VTdotNET had our Vista launch event at last night’s meeting and we had a blast. There were about 35 people there (which is a crowd for us!). TEKSystems brought us piles and piles of fabulous pizza and two VTdotNET members, Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr gave great presentation.

Mike, who owns two of our favorite local stores in Burlington (Kiss the Cook and Apple Mountain where he has built their POS system) covered WorkFlow, WCF and WPF. Mike teaches software classes at Vermont Tech as well. WF is a hard thing for many developers to grasp at first, especially when it isn’t solving a big problem that they have been struggling with. There are many who see it and say “oh, what I’ve always needed!” and others who just don’t get it. I was in the latter camp at first and could tell there were plenty feeling that way last night. One thing I like to share with folks like me is that the fact that people who I have a lot of respect for, such as Kathleen Dollard, are VERY VERY excited about WF. She is doing a full day session on it at DevConnections. I figure if Kathleen things it’s huge, then it’s huge and that I need to pay attention to it.

Mike built a basic hello world server and a client  to call it with WCF so people could just see the working parts, get the most basic concepts and see that it works. After this he demo’s Expression Web and showed an awesome iPod-like interface that when he hovered the mouse over the center circle (moving it around the circle), the volume went up and down, just like on an iPod. Very cool stuff.

Next up was Rob, who makes the University of Vermont School of Business Administration tick. Before he got started, I made him show Flip3D on his computer. There are plenty that hadn’t seen it yet, so there was a fun reaction! Rob covered Vista security and then gave us a great presentation on CardSpaces, which I think nobody in the group has seen before. There’s an article on CardSpaces in MSDN Magazine this month (April and it’s not online yet, but I have it in my hands!) by Michele Leroux Bustamante.

After the meeting, we raffled off the swag that Microsoft sent as part of this launch event. The highlight was five Vista Business licenses,then there were things like pens, zipper pulls and mouse pads – silly stuff. I was really pleased that a woman who lives in Souther Vermont (over 2 1/2 hours away) and has never been to a meeting before was one of the Vista winners.

Thanks to Mike and Rob for all of the work they did preparing these sessions. And thanks to Elizabeth Rudolph at TEKSystems for not only sponsoring the pizza & soda, but picking it up, bringing it to the meeting and setting it all up.

The first three days of the week are busy ones!

On Monday, Vermont.NET is having it’s Vista/.NET 3.0 Launch meeting. Local brainiacs Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr will be presenting (after months of working with the Vista Launch team as part of the big user group roll out) and we’ll have 5 Windows Vista licenses to give away (plus free pizza & soda thanks to TEKSystems, who recently opened up an office in Burlington).

Tuesday is the TEchNet/MSDN Event in Burlington. It’s a day of training on Vista and Office 2007 products, with the morning focused on IT Pros and the afternoon for developers. Susan emailed me yesterday to say that they will be giving away Office 2007 licenses at the MSDN event!!!

I’ll be missing that though because I’ll be driving down to Albany to give a presentation to the Tech Valley .NET User Group about ADO.NET Orcas. Thanks to INETA for sponsoring this trip.

Then I drive back on Wednesday do to a GeekSpeak show with Susan Wisowaty (who is doing the MSDN event on Tuesday) and Glen Gordon. They were kind enough to move the time to later in the afternoon so that I’d be back from Albany on time and ready for action.

Press Release

March 7th, 2007

Vermont Software Developers’ Alliance

http://www.vtsda.org

*** Governor James Douglas will be making a presentation at a Vermont Software Developers’ Alliance event on March 21. ***

Governor James Douglas will be making remarks about the Vermont Software Development sector and its role in Vermont’s economic future.  We’ve also been informed that he has plans to make a very special announcement regarding the vtSDA.

This event will be held on Wednesday, March 21st 2007 from 11:30am to 1:30pm at the Sheraton Burlington Hotel and Conference Center.  The governor is scheduled to speak at 12:00pm sharp, for about 20 minutes. 

Mike Quinn, Commissioner of Economic Development and Pat Moulton, Commissioner of Labor, will follow the Governor’s remarks with a presentation and Q&A period about the Vermont business environment, specifically relating to the software industry.

Please, accept our invitation to attend this very exciting event for the vtSDA and the future of software development in the state of Vermont. We anticipate having 30-40 owners and executives of local software development firms in attendance, as well as a number of government and media representatives.

The details of the event are still being finalized. Once we have gathered all the appropriate information we will issue a follow-up announcement.

Questions? Please email us at [email protected]

Did I really forget to blog this? I know I have sent out emails to VTdotNET members, but we now have TWO MSDN events in March right here in Burlington.

In addition to the “classic” MSDN event on March 13th (Vista/.NET 3.0/Office 2007 Development) [register here: http://www.msdnevents.com/march/]

…

there is the Chris & Bob Road Show.

Chris Bowen (our new D.E.) and Bob Familiar, also fo Microsoft New England, will be presenting a full day of .NET 3.0 development. It’s free. it’s at the sheraton. It’s March 1st. Here are details and registration info.

You can thank Bove’s Restaurant for this being on our schedule. Chris is an addict!

The Waltham Westin is our favorite place to stay when we go to Code Camp in Waltham, MA. The next one, Code Camp 7: Deer in the Headlights! is coming Mar 31 – Apr 1.

The Westin has  a great bar/lounge area so it’s a nice place to hang out with all the CC geeks! Breakfast is pretty expensive, but there’s always Dunkin Donuts!

The only problem is that it’s a pricey hotel, but if you keep your eyes open, they will occasionally have specials. Last night, I happened to check (even though I already had a reserveration elsewhere) and the [online non-refundable] room rate for that weekend is now $92 before taxes.

So I’ve cancelled the other, and booked at the Westin along with my roomie, Laura Blood.

I didn’t realize that the VTSQL meeting originally scheduled for tonight has been re-scheduled for Wednesday night. More info at www.vtsql.org.