That seems to be the thinking over here. Go see what the other half (well, I suppose Smalltalk doesn’t really make up 1/2 of developers – but you know what I mean) has to say about web services.
(edited title based on comment from James)
Monthly Archives: August 2004
Important News – Chocolate’s GOOD for you
Sorry, but if you are a chocolaholic, it’s always fun to read news like this. Yeah, yeah… so the problems from eating TOO much chocolate outweigh the benefit.
Quickbooks rant
I have used quickbooks since it’s 1.0 DOS version. I have also used Quicken for eons. Each has a method to import records from online resources. I use that in Quicken to import my personal American Express acount and in QuickBooks to import my corporat Amex account. The similarites end there. Quicken puts everything right into the register. Then you just need to go through and add categories, change some memos etc. QuickBooks on the other hand, is a huge pain in the butt. It puts everything into a “holding place” and then you have to go through an extreeeeeeemely tedious process for each and every entry to get it into the register. I dread having to do this and put it off month after month. Then I have to spend hours doing it. Even if I did one month at a time, it takes a good 45 minutes. I upgraded recently to the latest version of Quickbooks and they STILL haven’t done anything about this. Ugggh.
Blog entries as tech support knowledgebase
I have two posts that make me very happy. One is a post on a Crystal Reports problem that I had a hard time figuring out and did not find help online for. I frequently see referrers coming in to that post where people are googling the same error message that I had received. Hopefully my post has answered their problem.
Another one was a debugging problem that made me nuts until I found a nugget in one of John Robbins books. I have gotten two comments on that post from people saying “THANK YOU!” as they were going through the same horrible pain.
This makes it all worth while!
aha!Why you are forced to install J# with Visual Studio .NET
by way of Don Kiely, an explanation from Aaron Stebner who was on the VS Setup team at the time the decision was made – if you are curious. I definitely was. I like Aaron’s comment on being asked this question so frequently:
of course, in the mails from internal devs I have to remove the expletives from the question also…..
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman and Kay, too!
These are the guys who came up with asymmetric encryption, aka RSA encryption — (I’m learning a lot about this topic at the moment). In 2002 they won the Turing award, which is the like the nobel prize of i.t.. I would be neglect not to point out that this award was given to Alan Kay in 2003. Kay is the creator of Smalltalk 🙂 as well as a pioneer in object oriented programming.
In Newfoundland, Canada early September?
Even in a place far far away and probably more beautiful than you could imagine you can attend a .NET user group meeting. Not only that but Microsoft’s Atlantic Canada User Group Tour is making a pitstop there – in St. John’s, Newfoundland at WeDevelop.Net, the user group run by blogger, .Net programmer and XBox babe, Amanda Murphy.
There is a special place in my heart for Newfoundland since I have had many Newfoundland dogs and my parents breed them. I hope someday to go there and maybe I’ll even get to speak at Amanda’s group!
MSBuild Mailing List on ASPAdvice
Steve Smith has started a listserv for people wanting to talk about MSBuild.
Code Camp II in Waltham (Boston area) – Drawing speakers from far away and Cabana Night at Boston.NET
I’m impressed to see that Kent Tegels is coming all the way from Omaha, Nebraska to speak at Code Camp II in Microsoft’s Waltham, MA (Boston area) office. Now he says something in his blog about this being another stop on his tour. So I don’t know what that’s about but it’s great that there will be some geographical diversity among the presenters.
Also coming from out of town is DonXML (Don Demsak) who lives in New Jersey.
They have humbled me since I’m only 4 hours away but will not be participating as it’s my birthday weekend and I thought I would spend some time with my hubby! (I will no longer be representing the number that is the answer to the universe…hopefully something even better this time. I cannot tell you how many people I know in our community that happen to be this age.) I also had to decline Cabana Night at Boston.NET since I will be just driving back from 2 user group nights in a row in Montreal — GUVSM presenting on WSE2 Security on Oct. 4th and GUMSNET on Oct 6th presenting on .NET 2.0 BCL for ASP.NET developers. Montreal is 2 hours north and Boston is 4 hours south. So it doesn’t work out too well.
By the way, check out who Boston.NET leader Chris Pels and Thom Robbins have lined up for Cabana Night:
| Chris Bowen | www.monster.com |
| Carl Franklin | www.franklins.net |
| Robert Hurlbut | www.hurlbut-consulting.com |
| Patrick Hynds | www.criticalsites.com |
| Duane Laflotte | www.criticalsites.com |
| Jesse Liberty | www.libertyassociates.com |
| Chris Pels | www.idevtech.com |
| Richard Hale Shaw | www.richardhaleshawgroup.com |
| Don Sorcinelli | www.bostonpocketpc.com |
| Pat Tormey | www.4square.net |
VTdotNET August Meeting Recap – Ali Aghareza on Threading
 | Vermont.Net’s August meeting featured a fantastic presentation on Multi-Threaded Applications in .NET by local .Net plumber, Ali Aghareza. Ali has a weblog, by the way where he posts some awesome tidbits. Although threading is a very complex topic, Ali knows it inside and out. This was his very first time presenting, but because he knew the topic so well,the presentation and demos and his ability to answer any question, was fantastic. |
I think one of the most valuable parts of this presentation was that Ali explained some of the areas where you couldl really get yourself in trouble if you didn’t know what you were doing and showed some demos of the funny effects that could be had by what seemed like reasonable coding.
We also learned a few cool tidbits. Ever notice that EVERY single class, method and function in the .NET Reference starts off with a sentence about thread safety? Ever pay any attention to that? If you are manually doing threading, you definitely should! We learned about background threading, safepoints and how the machine is involved with this whole process.
It was definitely fascinating – impressive to watch him do all the coding on the fly as well – and I was so impressed by the talk, that I have recommended that he do this at Code Camp II!
We will put his slides up on the user group website soon. Go to the VTdotNET site’s Past Meetings page to get his powerpoint deck.
A couple of notable points about this meeting. Although it was on one of the very rare NICE nights we have had this summer, there were still 20 people there (I was surprised) and more impressively there were 5 totally new people that had never come to a VTdotNET meeting before!
Next month (Sept 20th) Michele Leroux Bustamante is coming as part of a northeast tour thanks to INETA. She will be talking about HTTP Handlers in ASP.NET. I saw part of this talk on a webcast she did during ASP.NET Week on the MSDN Webcasts, but had to cut out early. So that will be 2 plumbers in a row at Vermont.NET. Very nice.
(wierd format of this post is because I can’t left align images. When I do, they don’t appear.. so I used a table, but that’s all goofy too)