Daily Archives: January 9, 2004

An updated logo

Blogging

My pal Chris McCracken was fiddling around to get fix up of the non-rasterized (is that the right term) totally unprofessional little logo that I invented for The Data Farm when I overhauled my site last year.

Here is the old

       and the new 

I changed everything over but am thinking, even with its deficiencies, I kind of like the old one just cause it’s brighter etc. Opinions?

Chris works for one of my clients. He is a bright young guy (even though he does use a Mac) who has taken to webdesign and even picked up some asp to add to his bag of javascript tricks and put together some nice stuff. What’s been also interesting is because he is very interested in computers and programming, he has become a great point person at my client’s site for handling user issues, training people, adjusting their i.e. proxy settings, etc because he picks up on this stuff pretty quickly. We have had fun working on a bunch of projects together over the past year.

Paul Stubbs- MS Visual Studio.NET Office Tools Program Manager blogging

dotNET

Every so often, Microsoft raids the coffers of INETA. Or so we like to think, when they hire user group leaders, INETA speakers, etc.

Paul Stubbs is one of those that Microsoft recently sucked up. Paul was the leader of MaineBytes for a very long time. So you know, New ENgland, Vermont, Maine. He’s like a local guy in my mind. But now he lives all the way on the other side of the world in Seattle.

Hey Paul (wave wave) How’s it goin’ out there? It was 15 below this morning when I walked the dog! Do they know how to make chowdah out there? If your homesick you can just check out a Sunny Day video (he’s a Mainer you see) on www.franklins.net!

On the new DebuggerDisplay(Name) attributes in Whidbey

dotNET

One of the many cool things that Kit George demo’d at PDC in his What’s new in the Whidbey BCL demo was a deeper control over the debug process. With the DebuggerDisplay attributes, it is possible to control how information is displayed about your objects in the debugger. Apparently they wrote this stuff in order to better control how hash table info was displayed in the debugger and then decided to let us developers leverage the attributes as well. In the bits he used he had [DebuggerDisplay] with params of name and value. I wanted to check out how to use this, but in our bits (PDC) and in any documentation (Longhorn SDK online or Whidbey) what I find is DebuggerNameDisplay, DebuggerValueDisplay and DebuggerTypeDisplay. I can handle this difference no problem except I couldn’t for the life of me get my version of the code to run (C# or VB). I put a question about this in the newsgroups a month ago (microsoft.private.whidbey.clr) and still there has been no response. There are 2 posts in that newsgroup. I asked a few people at MS and was told probably I should skip it for now. I wonder if anyone in the world has used these attributes and knows how they work in Whidbey? I really am curious about them. I don’t think they are going away even if they do change drastically.

I ask because I wanted to talk about them in my talk at EdgeEast. I think I will talk about them, but just not demo using them. Instead I will demo the how they have been used internally and maybe compare a .net 1.1 hashtable in debug vs. a Whidbey hashtable in debug. Or maybe an object that a VB developer would be more familiar with that is leveraging this. :-).

The MVP Leads

Community Cheerleading

I just got an email from my MVP Lead, Rafael Munoz, who has been on leave for 6 weeks to get to know his new baby. Now that I have met Rafael and a number of the leads, it makes me smile to get his emails. These folks are MVP leads for a reason. They are really just the nicest people and they love what they are doing. I know that this sounds really gooey – but I swear it’s true. Being an MVP lead used to be a “side” task to a Microsoft employees regular job. But the program has been modified a great deal and now it is a full time dedicated position.

Go to DevDays 2004 and go home with Whidbey!

dotNET

http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/devdays2004/default.mspx

It will be in 32 cities during the month of March.

Not only do you get a full day of awesome training. Not only is it cheap ($75 before Feb 10th, $99 after). But you will walk away with the “technology preview“ of Whidbey. Ummm- I think that translates as the Alpha Bits.

How cool.

So when you see this little description on the website:

In either track, you’ll see a local expert build a real-world best-practice application, see the application in action, and leave with the code at the end of the day.

you can think of me, because in Boston, MA and Hartford, CT, I’ll be that “local expert”, building the secure ASP.NET app.

SAMS/QUE, DevDays, TechEd and my friend Amy

Just Rambling

Amy Sorokas has been somewhat of a muse for me.

When I started Vermont.NET two years ago, I emailed SAMS to see if I could get some books for the user group. I got an email back from Amy Sorokas saying – “hey, have you heard of INETA?”. I hadn’t. (If you know me, you know that I am extremely involved with INETA to this day.)

When I started learning a thing or two about .NET I sent a few ideas to DotNetJunkies. There was Amy Sorokas again, helping out with the articles and authors who were writing for the site. It took me a while to figure out where I knew the name from and one day I wrote to her and said “Oh, I know – you’re from SAMS!”

I finally met Amy in the flesh this past summer at TechEd in Dallas. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected a cute, hip young woman to have been the same person who had been my muse.

Amy has a weblog now on GeekswithBlogs, even though I dare say, she’s not really very geeky.

Amy does write about what she is doing at SAMS. Over these past two years, I have gotten the impression that this is way more than “just a job” to her. She really loves what she does, she is very proud of her company and even more proud to be involved in a process which enables so many bright folks to publish many of the books that we depend on to learn the tools of our trade. And when SAMS was moving offices this summer, I kept getting these big boxes full of books (and some pens and cups). She was cleaning out her office and VTdotNET was the beneficiary!

Amy just wrote that not only will SAMS be supporting DevDays 2004 , but they will be a Bronze Sponsor of TechEd. This is a big deal for a relatively small company. I think it’s great. Yeah Amy!

That’s my story about Amy Sorokas.