Monthly Archives: May 2006

Mega User Group Meeting at TechEd!! Monday night June 12th.

Vermont

New England Mega User Group Meeting
Developing with .NET in 2006 — What’s Hot and What’s Not

Register Now!

Monday, June 12, 2006

Boston Convention Center/TechEd 2006, Boston, MA
6:30-9:30 p.m.
Room information will be posted here before the event

Panel and Mini-Cabana Discussions

Do you develop in the world of Microsoft .NET?
Would you like to know more about .NET technologies?

If you answered yes to either question, don’t miss this event. Join us for a free and wide-ranging discussion with a panel of nationally-recognized experts on Microsoft development technologies. Architects and developers from the Boston area and around the world will be in attendance at this Boston Mega User Group Meeting held in conjunction with TechEd Boston 2006.

Panel Discussion

.NET is Microsoft’s strategic software platform for building systems that connect information, people, systems, and devices. Each of the panelists will share their philosophy and favorite (or not-so-favorite) tools, tips and techniques for .NET success. The topic areas include:

  • Visual Studio 2005
  • Web Services
  • ASP.NET
  • WinForms
  • SQL 2005
  • C# and VB
  • .NET Framework
  • MSIL
  • XML

    Panelists

    Bob Beauchemin
    Bob is a database-centric application practitioner and architect, instructor, course author, writer, and Director of Developer Skills for SQLskills. Over the past two years he’s been teaching his SQL Server 2005 course to 500 students worldwide through the Ascend program. He is lead author of the books “A First Look at SQL Server 2005 For Developers” and “SQL Server 2005 Developer’s Guide”, author of “Essential ADO.NET” and has written articles on SQL Server and other databases, database security, ADO.NET, and OLE DB for MSDN, SQL Server Magazine, and others.
    Sam Guckenheimer of Microsoft
    Sam, author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, has 25 years experience as architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager and general manager in the software industry in the US and Europe.  In his current capacity as Group Product Planner for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, he acts as chief customer advocate, responsible for the end-to-end external design of the next releases of these products.
    Fritz Onion of PluralSight
    Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book Essential ASP.NET (Addison Wesley), and the upcoming Essential ASP.NET 2.0. He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine and a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, VSLive!, and TechEd. You can read Fritz’s blog.
    Jeff Prosise of Wintellect
    Jeff is cofounder of Wintellect, a developer consulting and education firm that provides services to companies all over the world. His most recent book, Programming Microsoft .NET, was published by Microsoft Press in 2002, and his writings appear regularly in MSDN Magazine and other developer magazines. A reformed engineer who discovered after college that there’s more to life than computing loads on mounting brackets, Jeff is known to go out of his way to get wet in some of the world’s best dive spots and to spend way too much time building and flying R/C aircraft.
    Jay Roxe of Microsoft
    Jay Roxe is the Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft. In this role, Jay is responsible for product planning, technical evangelism, and external communication. Prior to this role, Jay was a developer and development lead on the .NET Framework where he had responsibility for the Base Class Libraries.

    Mini-Cabana

    Immediately following the panel discussion, we’ll break out into informal Mini-Cabana discussion sessions where attendees can ask the panelists and other nationally known experts questions.

    Experts Attending

    The final list of authors and experts will be determined between now and TechEd. We’ve got a great pool of talent to draw upon, so you can be sure the Mini-Cabana sessions will be an interesting, lively and informative discussion!

    Don’t miss this chance to meet some of the foremost experts in the field of Microsoft development technologies.  Register Now! for this valuable no-cost event.

    Volunteers

    Moderator and Event Coordinator: Bob Goodearl of RGood Software
    Bob is an independent consultant with more than 28 years of experience in the industry as software architect, designer, and developer. He is also a contributor to BostonDotNet and a member of the board of ICCA-Boston.
    Event Director: Chris Pels of iDevTech
    Chris is President of INETA North America and the Boston .NET User Group as well as running his consulting firm iDevTech since 1986 which specializes in system and database architecture.

    IT Jobs: Microsoft TechExo inWaltham MA, May 25th

    Jobs

    From Joe Stagner’s blog:

    There is a Micosoft Career Connections Event in the Waltham MA district office on Thursday May, 25.

    Here is the info from the TechExpo Website.

    Microsoft Career Connections – New England- May 25, 2006

    Date & Time: Thursday, May 25, 2006 – 10am-4pm
    Location: Microsoft Offices – 201 Jones Rd. Waltham, MA 02451
    Phone: (781) 487-6600
    Directions: For travel directions,     click here.
    List of exhibitors: scroll down or click here
    Security clearance required ? -> No


  • 2 years professional TECHNOLOGY or TECH SALES experience Required
  • Bring many resumes
  • Tell your friends who are experienced professionals

    • You can [ CLICK HERE ] for the website.

    If you get a job at Microsoft and email Joe that you found out about the Career event on my blog – he’ll buy you dinner after your start date !

    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    ASP.NET 2.0? Don’t forget to check cross browser support!

    dotNET

    I did. For shame, eh?

    I have been playing with a new Vermont.NET user group website and using lots of new asp.net 2.0 UI features.

    I put it up and quickly got a reminder from ASPInsider, Aaron Seet, (who I’m grateful to for checking) that there were some messy areas when he opened it up in FireFox.

    I don’t, well didn’t, even have FireFox on my computer. So I downloaded it and saw the mess right away. I wasn’t sure how to fix it at first, but after looking at that page in the designer for a while, I finally saw the problem. I had DIV tags that had a default height in them. When the actual content made the div larger than that default height, I.E. made the adjustment. Firefox didn’t and the content hung over the bottom of the div into the element below it. I removed the height parameters and all was well.

    While I was at it, I checked the html for XHTML compliance. You can do this when in source view by changing the drop down from it’s default of Internet Explorer 6.0.

    I cleaned up my html with alt’s in my images and more. I had a few i.e. specific things that I left in  such as setting the non-xhtml img border parameter to “0” so that hyperlinked images don’t get a big ugly border around them.

    I’ve discovered a few other things I’m doing on the site that don’t work in FireFox. For example

    1. You can’t move ASP.NET 2.0 web parts around in FireFox. However, if you move them around in IE, the positions are stored to your user account and displayed properly in FireFox when you are logged in.
    2. I have some groovy little popup divs that are driven by html and javascript. If you go to the site in i.e. you can see these in action. There are little question marks on the page. Hover over them and you will get info on the ASP.NET 2.0 (or other interesting) tool that is used in that section of the page.
    3. I have a telerik r.a.d.panelbar on the book reviews page. That is awfully funky in FireFox. I’m sure I just have to change a few parameters and will deal with that after I get some client work done.

    Bottom line is don’t assume that even .NET developers are so Microsoft-centric that they wouldn’t dream of using a non-MS browser. 😉 And don’t be so darned lazy. Look where it got me! Spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon working on my user group’s website. Okay, I’m kidding about the nice weather.



    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    Office12 Video

    Tools

    Over  month ago, Markus Egger pointed out this video of Office12 features that is on the Microsoft Office site. I finally got a chance to take a look at it today and am now inspired to reinstall my beta copy on my mobile pc (translation: my tablet) and play with it more.

    One of the things I think is cool about Office 12’s  ribbon is that it is going to make using Office 12 really comfortable with a stylus. The tablet apps that I have written are light on drop down menus and heavy on single click functionality. That design came from dogfooding my own apps until they felt good to use with the stylus.



    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    www.vtdotnet.org v2.0

    dotNET

    I finally put the new ASP.NET 2.0 version of the Vermont.NET website up.

    I have been using it as a playground to finally fiddle with the new UI stuff as well as recently released projects.

    I have not moved all of the content over from the original site.

    It doesn’t have any Atlas on it yet, but give me time. 🙂

    There is a page called About this Site that highlights all of the features I experimented with for the site so far.



    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    Portal night at Vermont.NET – June meeting

    dotNET

    The June meeting of Vermont.NET will be “portal night”.

    We have Dave Burke of telligent doing a talk on Community Server.

    Paul Swider, from Burlington based OnClickSolutions will do a talk on Sharepoint.

    Jon Limmer of Green Mountain Beverage, a company whos main website is based on DotNetNuke, will demo DNN for us.

    This should be cool! Especially for Vermont geeks who aren’t going to TechEd. (I’m planning to drive down Tuesday morning.)

    The meeting will be Monday June 12th at 6pm at Champlain College. I will get the info onto our website shortly.

    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org