You can now submit talks for the 7th New England Code Camp : “Deer in the headlights”. If this were in Vermont, it might be called “Moose’s knees in the headlights”.

Read more at Chris Bowen’s blog.

The resumes that these two men sent me to place onto the VTSDA website were astounding. Unfortunately, I had to use only a segment of each, as they were so long. They have each served on the boards of many of Vermont’s biggest charitable organizations. They have both started hugely successful I.T. companies in Vermont. They are both incredibly smart, well-versed in matters of politics, economics and busines and both equally generous. I’m very excited that we have them coming to speak at VTSDA!

Managing Your Business for Change and Then for Growth

Bill Schubart
CEO, Resolution, Inc.

Pat Robins
Co-Founder, SymQuest

Bill Schubart and Pat Robins are two of Vermont’s most prominent business leaders and are also high-tech pioneers in our state.

Bill and Pat will talk about:

• their vision of the potential of the Software Industry in Vermont
• their experiences growing their companies
• the state of economic development in Vermont and
• what businesses are (and can be) doing to help themselves.

The meeting is Wednesday, Feb 21st from noon-2pm at the Courtyard Marriott in Williston. More info, rsvp & direx here…

The next meeting of Vermont.NET, Feb 12th, will be our 5th Anniversary!

Ladies n Gents, start your engines!

http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2007/01/17/save-the-dates-code-camp-7-deer-in-headlights.aspx

Note: the offer has been extended to Feb 1st

Sure wish I had known about this when we had our meeting last night!

ReSharper personal license fior Individual Developers is $99 through Jan 11th.

Thanks Laura and Dave.

Wednesday’s Vermont Software Developer Alliance meeting features a panel discussion with representatives of Vermont colleges and universities.  Learn what they’re doing to prepare students for software related jobs, and what they’re doing now to help employers connect with young talent.

Wednesday Jan 17th

12pm – 2pm

Courtyard Marriott in Williston VT

www.vtsda.org for more info

The “Ready for a new day” Launch 2007 Event for Vista, Office 2007 & Exchange 2007 is starting this month.

I’m sure many people will be interested in the fact that attendees will receive free copies of Office Pro 2007 and  Groove 2007.

Events “near” Vermont are

• Albany Feb 15th
• Nashua  Feb 15th
• Boston Jan 24th

More info here: http://www.microsoft.com/business/uslaunchevent2007

Last night’s VTdotNET meeting was a blast. We did something that we have never done before. Rather than have one person do a session on a .NET topic, 6 members from the user group demo’d tools that they love to use when they are programming. Some were Visual Studio Add-Ins, such as ReSharper. Others were apps help create .NET code such as CodeSmith and Code Charge Studio. Other’s were tools that work hand in hand with Visual Studio, such as XMLSpy. And then there were a whole bunch that were not really related to coding: SnagIt, pureText, TimeSnapper, NotePad++, ExamDiff, Toad Free Modeller and a bunch of Windows XP PowerToys.

I have the links to all of the tools demo’d in a power point on the Past Meetings page under the Jan 8th meeting.

The tools also ranged from free to shareware to commercial.

We were happy to have licenses to ReSharper and Altova’s DiffDog to raffle off at the end of the meeting.

It was a lot of fun because so many of these tools were useful to everyone and many people had never seen most of them before. Amusing to me was how each person told me “oh, I won’t need all of the time allotted to me” and everyone of them got buzzed in the middle of a sentence and was shocked that they had already used up their allotted time. Dave Burke wrote about that on his blog. 🙂 I used a little shareware stopwatch program called XNote StopWatch to keep track of the time and tied an obnoxious wav file to the “time’s up” event. Then I was able to pay attention to the demos and not worry about the time. Nobody got the hook of course. This just helped us know when it was time to wrap up.

A huge thanks goes to Altova who sponsored the meeting in a big way with money for pizza & soda plus gobs of swag.

Altova is sponsoring tonight’s VTdotNET meeting in a big way.

They are paying for the pizza and soda, plus they sent a big box o’swag. Check this out. The bags are for the winners of the 5 DiffDog licenses. They ahve in them a hat and a 128 MB thumbdrive with all of the Altova evals on them.

In addition they sent piles of hats and t-shirts (really nice colors!) , pens and lit about their products. This was really generous of them and will make the meeting like Christmas all over again.

We have a fun session coming up on Monday.

Six VTdotNET members will show off some of their favorite productivity tools. Some of these tools are free, some are shareware and some are commercial. The demos will be fast and furious. Here’s the skinny:

·         Mike Soulia: XMLSpy (xpath features)   

·         Chris DeGuise: ReSharper

·         Dave Burke: CodeSmith  

·         Rob Hale: Beyond Compare

·         Bret Griswold: Code Charge Studio

·         Julie Lerman: SnagIt, PureText, TimeSnapper & 2 PowerToys 

·         Bob LoCicero: NotePad++, ExamDiff, SyncToy, XmlNotepad & Toad Free Modeller

PIZZA & SODA will be sponsored by ALTOVA, makers of XMLSpy.

Please rsvp for a pizza count! [email protected]

We got a big box of swag from Altova including:

Date: Monday, Jan 8th

Time: 6:00 – 8:30

Location: Vermont Tech, Williston Campus

More Info at www.vtdotnet.org