Daily Archives: August 21, 2006

Sasha Krsmanovic finally loses the darned V and “takes the red pill”!

Community Cheerleading

This is another thing I’ve been meaning to get up on a rooftop and shout for joy about! Sasha Krsmanovic, who for years has been a star in the MSDN Canada office as the MSDN Project Manager, was not a Microsoft employee but what we call a “v-dash” (vendor with a very close relationship).

Recently, Sasha became a full-fledged Microsoft employee as he stepped into the role of MVP Lead for Canada which is an awesome position for him, and continued great fortune for developers (and now other geeks) in Canada.

We finally prodded him to blog about it so that there was something to link to!

Thom Robbins moving up and over

Community Cheerleading

I’m still in denial but can’t put off blogging about this any longer. The  .NET developers and user group leaders in New England have long known that we have been extraodinarily fortunate to have a true mover and shaker as our Microsoft Developer Evangelist. Thom Robbins has constantly pushed the envelope with respect to Microsoft providing amazing resources to the developer community. He has also made himself very available to developers. Personally, Thom has pushed and encouraged me relentlessly over the years and there is only one time I dared say “no” to him! 🙂

We knew the day would come when Redmond could no longer put off bringing him closer into the fold.

He is off to Redmond to continue to spread the word about .NET, but in a much bigger way, as the Director of .NET Platform Marketing.

It’s going to be pretty tough to fill his shoes in Waltham, and prospects be warned, I have told Thom that whoever it is will have to get my stamp of approval before they can be hired. Heh heh.

I am not going to say that I’ll miss Thom, because I expect to continue to work with him regardless of east coast or west coast living. The only difference is that I probably won’t be able to ask him to cruise up to Vermont to present at Vermont.NET or VTSDA again. He amazed me with his willingness to drive the 3+ hours each way in one day – something I have not been willing to do as he well knows now: I hate road trips.. Of course, what takes me 3 1/2 hours might only be 2 for him!

Slides and Samples from my NYCdotnetDEV talk on Query Notifications – Samples have been modified!

Presentations

I had a blast presenting in NYC Thursday night on ADO.NET 2.0 Query Notifications. It was also a great whirlwind trip to my old stomping grounds where I lived for my first eight years out of college. I did a little of everything…subway, taxis, Museum of Modern Art, falafels in Union Square, the farmer’s market in Union Square, walking through the “new & improved” Times Square, an incredible meal at a French restaurant in Chelsea, Penn Station, NYC bagels…. Stephen Forte and Andrew Brust were great hosts!

It was my first visit to the microsoft offices up on 6th Ave. Last time I was there they were on 50th and 8th, in the same building where I happened to work at N.W. Ayer in the late 80’s. Thanks to the receptionist there for allowing me a little reprieve and internet access (and a cookie or two) prior to the user group meeting.

I have updated my Query Notification samples where I was [accidentally] overdoing it with the unecessary VB Static to cache my datatable rather than the simpler VB Shared. Although my samples worked perfectly well, they were not as efficient as they could have been. Thanks again to Andrew for pointing this out when hundreds of developers before him have either not noticed or just not bothered to mention it. (Read more about that as well as my recent (somewhat aggravating) education on VB Static over here.)

The deck and samples are on my TALKS page of my website. Scroll down to “Leveraging Query Notifications ….“