Monthly Archives: May 2006

Vermont Software Developer Alliance May Meeting with Thom Robbins from Microsoft!

dotNET

www.vtsda.org

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Speaker – Thom Robbins, Microsoft New England
Topic – Trends in Software Development

Software development is changing at light speed. Gone are the days of single person development. Team based development with faster cycle times and quality code are becoming a driving force in the industry. Of course that doesn’t negate the need for security and standards. Well it may look murky but there are several trends that every software developer should keep an eye on as they build their careers. Join us to see what the future may hold.

Thom RobbinsSpeaker Bio: Thom Robbins is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft in New England, and part of the MSDN Developer Program. He is a frequent speaker at events, including VS Live. Thom is also a regular contributor to various magazines including Visual Studio.Net, .NET Magazine and XML Web Services. He spends his time working with developers in New England. When not writing code he spends his time with wife Denise at their home in New Hampshire.

Date:    May 17th, 2006
Time:    12:00 – 2:00 pm
Place:    Courtyard by Marriott
            175 Hurricane Lane
            Williston, VT

Plenty of free parking
Map & directions

Agenda:
12:00 – 1:00      Lunch and Informal Networking
1:00 – 2:00        Presentation & Discussion

Lunch will be provided free of charge to members who RSVP at least 24 hours prior to the event. Non-members who RSVP at least 24 hours prior to the event can pay $10 which will cover the meeting cost and lunch cost.  To RSVP, please email meetings@vtsda.org. Alternatively, feel free to bring your own lunch.

Three copies of Eric Sink’s “The Business of Software” will be given away to lucky attendees.  Thanks to A Press for donating these books. 
The Business of Software

Vista versions keep on rolling

Just Rambling

Last week I downloaded version 5365 of Vista. Today I finally had some time and went to burn the image onto a DVD to install onto my laptop, only to discover that 5381 was now available. I have mid-speed DSL so these suckers take a good 12 hours to download! But it didn’t make sense not to get the latest, so I’m now closing in on hour ten and hopefully will get a peek at the latest sometime tonight. Much of this is thanks to Kate Gregory’s blog post about how much she is enjoying build 5365.

I did install Office 12 VS2005 on one of these builds, but it takes so long to do that I don’t want to do it again until I’m willing to upgrade Vista not reformat and install anew.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

DevTeach Day 1

Community Cheerleading

What fun to be here at DevTeach! The day started out with being woken up by the slamming of the door of a nearby hotel room – a good thing in my case since it was 7:45 and Alan Griver’s LiNQ keynote was at 8am – and NOT to be missed! I took a lot of notes during his talk and I’m even more excited about LiNQ now. I’ll write more about that in another post.

There is a fantastic collection of speakers here – many of whom I’ve become friends with over the years coming to DevTeach (and from whom I learn a lot).  Also the .NET community in Montreal is wonderful. Since I live nearby , I get to come up occasionally and am always treated to a great time by this incredibly friendly bunch!

A special thanks to Etienne Tremblay who showed me how to get my VPC talking to my laptop through a loopback adapter! Etienne was even doing a talk on virtualization today, but it was in the French track.

The weather is great. The Marriott where the conference is is a really nice hotel to be in. There are about 300 attendees this year and lots of people from across Canada.

I did a talk on writing web services today to be able to be used by wcf tomorrow to the usual small crowd of web service developers. Even though there aren’t a lot of people doing WSE, they still want and need help getting it working and just because WCF is coming, people still want and need to secure their web services today. I almost missed dinner because I was so enjoying answering questions after my session of a developer who has to port his vs2003/wse2 apps to vs2005/wse3. I have been there and done that and just wanted to give him a brain dump.

Unfortunately, I have a whole bunch of work to do for some clients remotely from here, so I better get on it before I fall asleep!

Posted from BLInk!

DevTeach bound! Yay!

Just Rambling

Though I sadly had to miss this weekends Code Camp 5: Code Frenzy in Waltham (stay tuned here for a report from Dave), I will get 3 days of communing with geeks up in Montreal at DevTeach. This is DevTeach’s fourth year. It is a fun smallish (200-300?) conference in a beautiful city with a host of top-notch speakers. I am proud to be countedin the ranks of this great group of presenters.

The pre-con is today, the post-con on Friday, with the main conference running from Tuesday through Thursday.

Rich & I picked Alan Griver (who after successfully overseeing the phenomenal implementation of data tools into Visual Studio, has now moved on to his second love, working with he developer community)and the brilliant and [oh my god] energetic Beth Massi up at the Burlington airport last night and after a stroll on the Burlington waterfront, took them to Burlington’s phenomenal traditional Chinese restaurant, A Single Pebble.

We will drive up to Montreal this afternoon and Alan is doing the keynote tomorrow morning. Beth and I have three talks each over the next three days. Thursday afternoon we head back to Burlington for the VTdotNET meeting.

It’s a beautiful time of year to go to Montreal and I’m really looking forward to seeing so many people – speakers and attendees – (note to self – stop at Lake Champlain Chocolates on the way up to get some truffles for Kate) as well as attending sessions myself.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org