She doesn’t know what it means yet, but it sounds really great and I can’t wait to find out what Elizabeth Grigg discovers that the definition of “becoming the loop” is.
“Anyway, instead of being out of the loop, I’m going to become the loop. Granted I don’t know what that means.”
I’ve been seeing on many blogs that there are beta versions of the upcoming Visual Studio.NET 1.0 and 1.1 Service Packs. I’m so filled up with betas that I think I will…well…maybe I can put it on my tablet that already has XP SP1 RC2 on it. Oh gawd – here we go again! My guess is that these are the service packs to make Visual Studio work with XP Service Pack 2 since it will be locking a lot of things down and create some possible breaking changes. That’s the thing we need to be focused on. You can read about what to expect and how to plan ahead for that here.
Just in case this is all confusing, these are not service packs for the whidbey beta, but beta service packs for the current version(s) of Visual Studio! 🙂
This is like a dream come true. You can be a programmer, do very cool work and live in one of the coolest towns in Vermont. I live on the other side of the mountain from Waitsfield and it was definitely one of our options for towns to live in. It is right by Mad River Glen (which you may have seen me write about just a few times in the past…) and also Sugarbush.
And the job description is awesome. Boy, if I were looking for work, I’d be on this job like glue. 20 minutes from my house. All of the type of things I love to do. Take the job. I’ll come have lunch with you once in a while!
The Company: Controlled Energy , Waitsfield, VT
The JOB: http://www.controlledenergy.com/html/info/waitsfield_job3.html
Lucky me, lucky Vermont .Netters!
Don Kiely is flying from Anchorage Fairbanks, Alaska on Friday to come for a visit. He’ll be here for about five days. The excuse for the trip is built around the fact that he is speaking at Vermont.NET on Monday night (July 12th) on Building Applications with Least Privilege. A topic I am psyched about and have a little experience in since I am now running as a non-admin on my computer!!
Don gets to go to a dog show while he’s here (he loves dogs so that will be fun) and I plan to take him kayaking in a few special places. Though he mostly white water kayaks, he will see no rapids here (it’s way past that season) but maybe we’ll get some of those great 3 foot waves out on the lake. We will definitely take him paddling out on the incredible Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain is 120 miles long and 10 miles wide with about 500+ miles of shore line – so it’s like a small ocean. The other is a very special place, now a state park, called Green River Reservoir. It is a place where no motored boats of any kind can be. So it is canoes, kayaks and some small campgrounds scattered around the shore that you can only get to by boat. It is also a wildlife retreat.
I was able to get meeting sponsorship (i.e. paying for pizza & soda) from Red-Gate who makes SQLTools and Ants for load testing and profiling. Since this will be a joint meeting with VTSQL, we’ll get a good demo from that user group leader (Ed Hall) who uses SQLTools a lot where he works (Vermont Dept. of Health).
We have so much swag for this meeting too, thanks in part to the INETA Spring Thaw and piles of ASPNetPro and CODE magazine as well! Hopefully we’ll get a great turnout, which is sometimes difficult in the summer months.
So mostly I’m looking forward to Don’s visit and an excuse to play hookey for a bit and go paddling! Then after he leaves I’m on my way to Redmond for about a week and bringing Rich with me, too, this time.
I was a little astonished by this article in the local paper, as I had heard nothing about this meeting. I love this quote: “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before“. 🙁 I have worked so hard to get the local media interested in Vermont.NET but they have never written anything about the user group. I have always thought it would be a great benefit to our members to be known by the local business community. So though the user group is known worldwide, and we have had up to 50 attendees at past meetings, the group and it’s notorious leader seem to be somewhat invisible at a certain level locally. Perhaps the problem is that the user group is not part of a local business association.
Nevertheless, I’m really happy that this is going to happen and I have gotten a nice introduction to the folks who are heading it up. Hopefully this will be a big help to me in promoting the user group and the resources provided by it’s members to the local (Vermont-wide) business community as well as helping to promote the fact that there is a lot of leading edge work being done in our area.
Burlington-area software companies decided they need to form an association
Local software developers gathered in Burlington on Wednesday to explore whether they share enough in common to create an association.
The 35 software developers attending a luncheon at the Wyndham Burlington were in agreement — an association would fill a void.
“I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before,” said Don Schramm, general manager of Data Systems Inc., who organized the meeting. “People are really feeling isolated out there and there seems to be a genuine need for some type of organi- zation.”
Many at the meeting were company owners. The largest company has 35 employees, but many were one-person operations, Schramm said.
Schramm was surprised by the diversity of the group. None of the companies at the meeting were direct competitors, he said. The group ranged from medical software developers to developers for non-profits, education and wholesalers, said Bruce Seifer, assistant director of Burlington’s Community and Economic Development Office.
CEDO sponsored the meeting, covering the $17-a-plate lunch and sending out invitations to 70 area companies. CEDO played a similar role in launching the South End Arts and Business Association years ago, Seifer said.
Attendees agreed that an association could serve as a catalyst for everything from networking to sharing office space to facilitating employee training.
The group said that the first order of business would be to create a database that informs them of who is out there in the local area, Seifer said.
Fewer than half the people at the luncheon knew each other, Seifer said. Networking could be useful for a variety of purposes, including teaming up for marketing studies and referring work to local companies, keeping jobs and income in the local economy.
“I see there’s an opportunity for people to work together,” Seifer said.
Eleven at the meeting signed up to form a steering committee to create an association.
I vented about my problems with the App Updater Compenent in this post last night. That’s not very constructive. In the effort of helping Erik Porter compile a more detailed how-to on using this component I am going to list some of the issues I was having.
1) I only want the app to check for an update when it gets started up. Not to constantly poll for an update. And the app needs to dynamically change the URL of the webserver. That is a key part of the app in finding it’s webservices and works just fine. But because of this, I have to change the url of the AutoUpdateComponent before it fires up. I set the AutoStart property for the poller to false and in my form load I change the UpdateURL property of the component, then test to see if there are changes (if CheckforUpdates=true) and if there are, call the DownLoadUpdate function. I went around in circles with this for a long time because something wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure out where.
2) I finally just bagged the dynamic url and the explicit download. I pointed to the ip of the internal webserver and let the component just do it’s auto thing itself. It failed becase when it was doing the deep file download (finding references out of the main exe to download) it kept looking for MyApp.resources.dll. There is no such thing. Since I do use a resource file in the app, I work with System.Resources. I can’t figre out why it didn’t know that this was in the system name space. I went through my code and explicitly typed in System.Resources.whatever anyplace I used those classes. This was the problem that finally made me give up.
3) I got bit by a wierd problem. I have WebDav on on my remote server. I edited the UpdateVersion.xml file over and over. I could open the file up and see the correct data. But it kept copying the default of that file to my local drive. finally I went over to the server and opened the file up and it was the default text in there! That wasted a few hours.
4) I have some dll’s that are dynamically loaded via reflection into the application. They are not referenced anywhere. So there is no part of the component that will discover and download them. I will have to write something manual to make them get pulled in because these are the things that are most likely to cause updates – as we will be adding more and more of those dll’s into the application.
I’m sure I could work all of this stuff out, but I really needed to move on with my work.
We could really benefit from this. We have many computers on the network use this app but will have more and more people out in the field using it as well. The app knows how to find the webserver on the internal network or to find it over the internet. So if the users of the offline mode could transparently receive updates to the application as well as the new modules at the same time that they are downloading or posting their data entry, it would be golden. And if I could remove those “Update App” scripts from the internal users desktops that would be nice as well.