Monthly Archives: May 2007

May Desktop Calendar for Green Mt. Club is up

Vermont

Yet another beatiful vermont photo for my desktop. This is Mt. Mansfield. The profile of Mt. Mansfield is a person’s face. You can get the properly sized desktop here at Green Mountain Club. The photos are from local professional photographer, Paul Hansen, of Ecopixel. He prepares them each month with the calendar image.

When I lived North of Burlington, Mt. Mansfield was nearby for loads of hiking and back country skiing. There are so many trails.

Towards the left is the chin. In about the middle of the photo is the nose and then the right part of the mountain is the forehead. The chin is the highest point in Vermont. Next highest after that is Camel’s Hump which is now our nearby mountain. We can see the peak of Camel’s Hump from our house, but only under very specific circumstances. “Mountain views!”

Bob & Chris MSDN Roadshow in Burlington Tuesday May 8th

VTdotNetFeed

It must have been the Bove’s Pasta Sauce that keeps them coming back. Microsoft New England’s Bob Familiar and Chris Bowen are back this week for another full day of fabulous and FREE .NET training.

REGISTER HERE!

Sheraton: 8:30am to 4:30 pm

AGENDA: AJAX, Extensible Scrubbing Bubbles and that Cross Browser Cleansing Motion
8:30amArrive, check in, grab a nosh and a seat
9:00 – 10:15XML and the Database
SQL Server 2005 offers architects and developers a slew of great features for creating data driven solutions. For this session we will focus on the XML features including XML Indexes, XQuery, the XML Datatype, the FOR XML clause and validating XML within the database using XSD. The use cases for these XML capabilities will also be discussed.  
10:15 – 10:30<Break />
10:30 – 12:00What’s New From The Patterns & Practices Group?
Like doing things the hard way?  Well, unfortunately for you this session is all about making your life as a developer or architect easier.  The Patterns & Practices group keeps churning out great tools, reference code, and guidance to show you Microsoft’s recommendations for designing, developing and deploying great applications.  We’ll cover Enterprise Library 3.0, various Software Factories, the Guidance Automation Toolkit and more, explaining how they could fit in with your development efforts.  If you suddenly find the hard way less thrilling, don’t say we didn’t warn you!
12:00-1:00Grab a lunch and search for patterns in the carpet
1:00 – 2:15Microsoft Silverlight (aka Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere)
At our last meeting, we dug into the Windows Presentation Foundation, a .Net Framework development library that sits overtop of DirectX allowing one to create the next generation of Windows user interfaces using advanced graphics, animation, rich documents and multimedia along with traditional UI controls. Windows Silverlight is a subset of the capabilities of WPF that can be used within browser based applications on the PC and the Mac. This session will discuss the architecture of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrate how integrate XAML into your browser-based applications.
2:15-2:30Take a break and animate
2:30 – 3:45ASP.NET AJAX – Going Deeper
If you’re developing applications for the web, you’ve likely heard about AJAX and how it can improve the usability and functionality of your site.  In this session, we’ll quickly introduce the main concepts of ASP.NET AJAX and then we’ll roll up our sleeves for other details that will help you when you’re in the trenches with AJAX.  We’ll talk about the client side library, Silverlight (formerly codenamed WPF/E) integration, enabling and invoking server methods and web services, debugging, best practices and more.    
3:45 – 4:00Zune Giveaway
  

 

Vermont IT Jobs: .NET Web Developer in Montpelier

Jobs

[originally posted March 16th. Reposted May 4th]

www.kdpyield.com

Web Developer – Montpelier, VT

Seeking an experienced Web developer. Most be proactive and detail-oriented, with strong QA and troubleshooting skills.

This is a full-time, permanent, on-site position, to be filled ASAP. Only serious candidates should apply. No contractors or recruiters, please.

Primarily responsibilities include:

– Coding new features for existing Web sites

– Troubleshooting existing Web sites for data and functionality issues

– Contributing to in-house tech support efforts

– Helping devise new technological strategies to improve company operations

Employer is a dynamic, medium-sized company with opportunities for learning and advancement. Position requires flexibility, a friendly attitude, and a willingness to contribute ideas. This is an environment where you can get substantive work done and be appreciated for it. New requirements and priorities come in all the time, so you should be able to shift gears as needed.

Necessary skills:

– Substantial experience in development of server-side Web applications

– HTML

– SQL (any flavor, e.g., MySQL, SQL Server/ISQL, Jet SQL, PL/SQL)

– Ability to work constructively as part of a team on multiple projects at once

– Good communication skills

Desirable skills (not strictly required):

– ColdFusion

– JavaScript

– .NET

– SQL Server development

– Visual SourceSafe

Experience in quality assurance, systems administration, or technical support is helpful.

Salary dependent on experience. Full benefits. Pleasant location in central Vermont, near State House.

Please send resume, cover letter, and (if available) links to sites on which you have worked to kdpjobs@kdpyield.com

In the hallways at MIX

Just Rambling

I was happy today to bump into a few people I haven’t seen in a while. Don Box is at MIX to give a talk tomorrow with Steve Maine on “Navigating the Programmable Web” .

RSS. ATOM. JSON. POX. REST. WS-*. What are all these terms, and how do they impact the daily life of a developer trying to navigate today’s programmable Web? Join us as we explore how to consume and create Web services using a variety of different formats and protocols. Using popular services (Flickr, GData, and Amazon S3) as case studies, we look at what it takes to program against these services using the Microsoft platform today and how that will change in the future.
 
It was fun catching up with Don for a few minutes. It sounds like he continues to perform his wizardry at Microsoft, dreaming up new approaches and concepts for software development.
 
I also was very happy to see Susan Warren who I haven’t seen since PDC05 where she showed me her latest project, Digital Locker, which has since become a big success. Susan has been working at Vertigo Software with Scott Stanfield for about 4 years now and clearly loves it. She even brought her twin sister, Anne, in to work for the company. I guess that makes Scott twice as lucky.
 
The Vertigo team was here in full force to show off their latest big project, Family Show.
 
A little later I bumped into Jim Bonnie, a guy from the New England .NEt community that I know through the Code Camps. Jim is a contractor  who has been doing some crazy data acrobatics for a project for Verizon. I’m sure he’ll leave MIX exploding with new ideas!
 
I heard rumors of Rory Blyth being around. That’s another face I haven’t seen in ages!

The Super Secret Session at MIX

Just Rambling

Danny Thorpe blogs about a MIX session about a windows Live technology that is SO secret that the sesison title and abstract are not in the MIX session list.

the buzz is building about the “secret session” that isn’t listed on any of the printed schedules, nor on the billboard at the room entrance.  We unequivocally cannot confirm or deny that it may or may not be scheduled at 11:45 in room Lando 4204, entitled “Windows Live Data services” and presented by the devlive team’s king of privacy paranoia, Yaron Goland.  We deny any involvement in annotating the room signage with a sharpie of unknown origin. 

The session is real, but it was withheld from the printed matter to avoid showing our hand too early.  It is actually listed in the online schedule.  I can’t tell you about it (yet), but it should be a knockout session.  Maybe not quite as sexy as spinning video cube Silverlight eye candy, but I’m sure it’ll get a rise out of the true data diehards who manage to actually find this session.

his post is also a fun read on hanging out in the speaker lounge with Anders Hejlsberg, and chatting with folks like John Lam and Miguel de Icaza. He refers to them as power hitters. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that he’s considered one of them! 😉

Ink Support in Silverlight

Tablet

Silverlight does INK! Yay. I’ve been asking about it for a while thinking it was the next natural step. I actually have played with it a bit and have a little app that I wrote that I need to deploy with the GoLive license. This is with the 1.0 version of Silverlight so it is all javascript against the InkPresenter XAML object. This also means that it is very different than coding against the Tablet PC API. However with the .NET runtime support for Silverlight that will change.

The InkPresenter has a StrokeCollection, just like we are familiar with in the Ink API. And then you drill into each individual stroke and even stylus points. With the stylus point data not only can you redisplay the ink in XAML, but you can redraw it and you can do so in real time (eg at the same speed that it was originally drawn in.

The way you interact with the user drawing ink via the javascript is by responding to mousedown, mousemove and mouseup events. Billy Hollis recognized this as how he worked with ink before we had the Ink APIs. It’s a little frustrating to have to work at this low level but it’s very interesting and i have a lot of flexibility. However, I do look forward to the .NET runtime implementation!

As always, my key interest is in persisting the ink. This can be done in XAML (you have to iterate through the ink structure and create the XAML, a function which can be encapsulated of course) and the CreateFromXAML javascript function will deserialize the XAML back into the inkdata that can be fed into the InkPresenter.

This is a pretty high level description and I’ll explain more of the guts of what I have done in a later post as well as have a screencast available while I deal with getting the golive version on the web.

In the meantime, check out Gavin Gear’s blog – he is a Program Manager on the tablet team and has done some amazing work with ink in Silverlight. Along with Sam George, he gets to show off a very cool demo tomorrow that they wrote. There are some live examples in the Silverlight gallery as well.

From Gavin’s blog

Want to check out a Silverlight Ink sample? Check out “Ink Tattoo Studio” and “Page Turn” here:
http://silverlight.net/community/communitygallery.aspx

Also, I know that Loren Heiny , who has always been a great innovator with tablet pc development, is playing with this stuff too. So keep an eye on his blog as well.

Pablo’s got a brand new blog

Data Access

In Pablo Castro’s session today, I noticed a link on the resource page to his own blog. I have never known that Pablo (tech lead on the ADO.NET team) had a blog and couldn’t believe that I could have missed such a thing. Luckily there is wireless available at the conference so I immediately browsed to the blog and lo and behold, he had made his first post just today! It is on the Astoria Web Data Services.

http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/