All posts by Julie

ranting about a book

Just Rambling

Alex P doesn’t like this book. He is absolutely entitled to his opinion. What I don’t understand is his position that Francesco Balena has no credibility and that his position as an RD is of little value. Balena is a well known and respected author in the .NET world as well as pre-.NET Visual Basic. And RD’s aren’t selected based only on their good looks. 😉 Many of them also happen to be some of the top in their field technically, which is why Microsoft allows them to represent MS as such. I see nothing wrong with expressing one’s opinion, but I think the [unjustified and unqualified] personal attack is pretty crappy.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Obsolete [Beta] APIs in .NET 2.0

dotNET

If you have been and continue to be using pre-release versions of .NET 2.0, Kit George has pointed to this download which will list the APIs that are in existing bits that will not make it to the final RTM version. Definitely pay attention to this!

Clarification for those who may need it: These are NOT v1.x APIs, but APIs that are new to .NET 2.0 that have been in the current beta and other pre-release bits and will probably be in the Beta 2.0 as well. But they won’t make it to the final release.

http://www.AcehAid.org

BCL Blog Day: Twenty Two posts from the BCL Team today, march 15th

dotNET

This is impressive! I need to dig through them to see if there is anything to update for my BCL Talk at DevConnections next week.
 
[note: they kept going the next day with another 13 or so posts! See Kit’s complete summary here…]
 
Take note of Kit’s post on the .NET Vision and the Best Features post.


http://www.AcehAid.org

Tablet PC Development Webcast on Friday!

Tablet

Friday, March 18th at 10 AM PST

This session focuses on the InfiNotes Note Taking Framework built by Agilix Labs Inc. as an extension to the Tablet PC SDK and Visual Studio .Net Development environment. Agilix InfiNotes is a collection of .NET controls that add rich ink note-taking functionality to new and existing applications. Simply drag the control from the toolbox and begin adding digital ink to your application immediately! You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can develop ink note-taking features in your .NET application. InfiNotes Standard Edition is available free from http://www.infinotes.com and should be installed on your development environment along with the Tablet PC SDK, available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc. (You do not need a Tablet PC to develop Tablet apps, this can be done right from your existing Windows development environment).

http://www.AcehAid.org

Rod Paddock in Vermont and beyond

Community Cheerleading

Boy did we have a blast! Rod  Paddock flew into Boston for Code Camp III where he did 3 back to back sessions on Sunday. He drove back to Vermont with Laura Blood and I. We forgot to pause in NH so he could “touch down” and claim he has been to NH, now. We met up for dinner at my favorite Montepelier restaurant, Sarducci’s, with Mario Cardinal and Eric Cote, our GUVSM.NET buddies who were also at Code camp and on their way back to Montreal.

Yesterday Rod treated me to my first Best Buy experience. I have never been there before! Then I toured him around Burlington a bit and off we went to the meeting.

Rod did a talk on creating custom data types for SQL Server 2005 using VS 2005. He is a fantastic presenter.. I could tell that the VTdotNET members were  very interested and engaged because of the many questions. Jean Rene Roy came down from Montreal to pick up Rod since he was heading there next on his world tour. After the meeting Rod, Jean-Rene and Marc Heinzer who is doing awesome work at Gardener’s Supply (the largest mail order and online ordering gardening supply company in the country), had a little more geeking out at The Daily Planet and off they went to Montreal.

Rod is speaking tonight at Montreal’s Foxpro User Group and then tomorrow night in Toronto at the Toronto VB User Group. He started at home in seattle so he will have a lot of miles under his belt at the end of his mini-world tour.

http://www.AcehAid.org

IT Jobs: Two Database Consultant jobs in Maine

Jobs

Database Production Support Consultant (1 year)

  • At least 4-5 years combined using both MSSQL and Oracle RDBMS
  • Experience with performance tuning and integrity via indexing, normalization/de-normalization, constraints, triggers, etc.
  • Understanding of database security and implementation using views, column level permissioning, and roles.
  • Experience with DTS, creation/maintenance of SQL jobs, and security from server to database (including use of NT Authentication as well as standard SQL login/password security)
  • Excellent debugging and communication (both written and verbal) skills required
  • Excellent organizational skills
  • Windows command line scripting and UNIX shell scripting including Awk
  • Ability to communicate technical issues in an understandable way to non-technical end users, and keep management informed of the status of issues.
  • Database maintenance including backup and recovery, space management, and consistency checks
  • Responsibilities to include monitoring existing production processes, identification of performance improvement opportunities in existing processes, completion of audits (daily through monthly), creation/maintenance of desktop procedures/instruction manuals for existing processes, assisting during testing of new processes, and maintenance of data dictionaries

 

Database Consultant (1 year)

  • At least 4-5 years combined using both MSSQL and Oracle RDBMS
  • Creation and maintenance of large data warehouse databases (up to 1TB)
  • Extensive development of stored procedures (containing complex business logic) and views
  • Experience with performance tuning and integrity via indexing, normalization/de-normalization, constraints, triggers, etc.
  • Understanding of database security and implementation using views, column level permissioning, and roles.
  • Excellent debugging and communication (both written and verbal) skills required
  • Excellent project management and organizational skills
  • Experience creating and updating technical documentation and following development methodology
  • Windows command line scripting and UNIX shell scripting including Awk
  • Experience acting as a liaison between non-technical business users to create appropriate business requirements
  • Data analysis experience helpful
  • Database maintenance including backup and recovery, space management, and consistency checks
  • Responsibilities to include monitoring existing processes to populate data warehouse, improving performance of existing SQL processes, assisting in the development of new processes for data gathering, completing project documentation, and development and maintenance of data dictionaries

 

For immediate consideration, please contact:

Anne Keehan

Partner

Brandywine Technology Partners

Phone: 302.656.6100 x225

Email: akeehan@btpartners.net

http://www.AcehAid.org

Code Camp III windup

Just Rambling

wowee! what a fun fun weekend. Even with a snowstorm there were a good 300 people at code camp on saturday. More on Sunday. There were even speakers who came from afar – Seattle (Rod Paddock who is speaking at Vermont.NET tonight), Chicago (Raj Das), North Carolina (Rob Zelt and Josh Carlisle), NJ (DonXML).

There were a lot of first time speakers and that went great! Dave Burke gave his presentation on Customizing .Text , which I couldn’t attend as I had a talk at the same time, and really enjoyed presenting. Dave got in a very scary accident on his way down and we were all happy to have him there and well.

Sam Gentile had to deal with my low powered laptop to do his .NET 2.0 demos since he had problems with his machine – but at least it worked!

I had fun with my talks. I did the security fundamentals talk again with a look at wse2.0 and love doing that one! I also got to try out two new talks. What’s new in ADO.NET 2.0 and  C# for VB programmers. They were both fun.

I know that during the ADO.NET talk, there was something I said, “hmmm – will have to check that out and blog it, but someone has to remind me” – I need the reminder because, as I expected, I don’t remember what that was – outside of checking the perf differences between using row add to add many rows to a table or using dataset merge and modify row state – as expected – no difference. I tried it with 400 new rows. So I have to find a better scenario for my demo!

The C#/VB talk was a total blast. Although the sessions were a generous 90 minutes, mine was before lunch. So at the point my talk was supposed to end, everyone just went and grabbed their lunch and came back and we played for another 45 minutes. Even though I don’t know the ins and outs of CodeRush too well, I spent about 10 minutes demoing it. I think it is a great tool for people who are used to one language and have to do some coding in the other. We got a little deeper into delegates than I meant to. I believe that delegates are the A#1 biggest hard to grok thing for VB programmers but I have found a way of explaning it that I think works. I think that I will get myself better versed in them and put together a session on delegates and event handling in .NET for VB programmers.

Thom Robbins did an extraordinary job putting this together!



http://www.AcehAid.org