I had a great time speaking at the Western Mass .NET group last night (thanks INETA!)

THe group meets sometimes in Northampton and sometimes in Easthampton, Mass. Northampton is a very hip small city replete with coffee houses where the groovy people hang out and vehicles roaming the streets with kayaks on them (sounds like where I live!) I was lucky to stay in a beautiful historic hotel ,Hotel Northampton, in downtown northampton (ask for the corporate rate to get an affordable way to stay there).

Last night’s meeting was at the Atalasoft offices. Atalasoft makes imaging software and .NET components (eg the DotImage toolkit). Imaging is pretty complex, especially over the web, (they have windows and web components) and they have some insanely bright people working there. The office is in a huge old mill building called Eastworks in Easthampton. Part of the building’s past was as home of Stanley products (you know, door locks etc). Now it is home to lots of art studios, cool shops and office space. It’s very Tribeca (NYC) and I think it’s brilliant for communities to leverage these old buildings rather than knocking them down and spending gazillions to build new ones. Outside of Burlington, in Winooski, there are a lot of historic old mill buildings along the Winooski River. Some of the history is not great as it involved child labor etc in the turn of the century. But the buildings are really gorgeous and now house all types of creative companies.

I presented on many of the new asynchronous features in ASP.NET 2.0. I couldn’t do this without showoing client side callbacks, which, prior to Ajax/Atlas were a huge improvement over trying to do xmlhttp yourself. But now, with the 8 steps I laid out to set it up, seems a little embarrassing to show (since there are now easier and more sophisticated alternatives). Still, it’s there, and it was interesting learning how to use it and since there were plenty of peole there who hadn’t used any of these types of features (ajax, etc), it was a great eye opener.

The beauty of all of these tools though is that they enable a lot more people to leverage asynchronous processing without having to become gurus with threading and delegates. There were people there who are very comfortable and knowledgable with threading and delegates, which led to some questions and discussion that I was able to learn from. (I love that!) Additionally, thanks to some of the folks who have been doing a lot with AJAX already, we were able to take the discussion of the client side callbacks a little deeper. (I am now getting SO ready to make the leap!)

Robert Hurlbut (Mr. Enterprise) happens to be working with a client in the area, so it was great fun to have him come to the meeting as well as very handy to have him there when some of the threading discussion got a little deep. 😉

Now I have to head about 90 miles east to Waltham, Mass (to the Microsoft office) for the New England VB Pro user group, where I will be giving this talk again (another INETA talk) tonight.

I’ll be presenting at two user groups in Massachussets next week. I will be giving the same presentation at both groups: “Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET Developers”.

Description: Asynchronous programming makes so much sense for web applications but is often tough to achieve. With .NET 2.0, there are a number of new methods to simplify asynchronous development. These can be found in web pages, in ADO.NET, in Web Services and other ASP.NET 2.0 functionality. This session will examine these various ways to leverage asynchronous programming in your web development and make suggestions for which methods are appropriate for particular scenarios.

The talk will be straight ASP.NET 2.0 features, so it will not be abou AJAX or ATLAS, though I will include their baby cousin, ClientSideCallBacks.

Tuesday Aug 1: Western Mass .NET User Group in Easthampton, MA

Wedneday Aug 2: New England VB Pro User Group at the Micrsoft Offices in Waltham, MA

Thanks to INETA, once again!

I’m finally recovering from my whirlwind trip of three .NET User Groups in Pennsylvania last week. Thanks to INETA fr enabling me to go an to the u.g. leaders for inviting me.

Here are links to the powerpoints and demos on my website. I have also given your u.g. leaders permission to put them on your u.g. websites as well, so you may find them there too.

Tuesday July 18th: Central Penn .NET: Introduction to Tablet PC Web Development. This was an interesting talk to do. We went from 0 to 60, which is people who have never used a tablet pc and never used the Tablet PC APIs flying through intros to both so that we could get to the fun stuff – ink-enabling web applications. One attendee observed that my solutions all seemed kind of like a big hack -and he was absolutely right. There is no built in way to do this stuff, so I just figured out the best ways that I could to make it happen.
Downloads: The more generic powerpoint is on my website TALKS page. Scroll down to “Developing Ink-Aware Web Applications with the Tablet PC SDK”. You will see the Powerpoint and the zip file for the demos. Since I modified this talk specifically for your group, I have sent the exact powerpoint that you saw on Tuesday to Judy.

Wednesday July 19th: Lehigh Valley .NET: Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005. I had a lot of fun doing this talk and wrote all about it on my DevLife blog here. Thanks for all the great questions and the excellent New York style pizza. I spent some time in downtown Bethlehem on Wednesday, including a great lunch at the Apollo with two of the people from the u.g. and then walked around to see the incredible 18th century buildings. Bethlehem is steeped in history. I was really happy to get a chance to go there.
Downloads: I have sent the ppt and zip file to Chris, but you can get them on my site TALKS page. Scroll down to “Customized Debugging in Visual Studio 2005” and you will find a link for the powerpoint and for the zip.

Thursday: July 20th: DotNetValley: Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That shouldn’t have to be). I’m sure you guys can tell I love to do this talk. These are all topics that I was afraid to approach myself at one point. I am still not a guru in them, but I am certainly past “know enough to be dangerous” at this point. I think that my non-guru-ness makes it a lot easier to explain it because nothing is so obvious to me that I would assume it is obvious to you. Thanks for having me again and for some of the nice emails you sent after the presentation.
Downloads: You can get these from the TALKS page on my website. Scroll down to Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That don’t really have to be). The powerpoint on the site is from a different event, but it is the same as what you saw on Thursday night.