Vermont IT Jobs: Two .NET developers in Williston, VT

February 14, 2006JobsJulie

.Net Software Developer

MyWebGrocer seeks bright, motivated, energetic and inquisitive software developers. Projects vary from E-Commerce and Handheld PDA applications to Interactive Shopping Circulars, Recipes Engine, Interfaces and Websites. We are a small dedicated team that is looking for 2 additional developers which share our enthusiasm and dedication to developing market leading solutions. The successful applicant will have experience with ASP.NET, C#, SQL, Visual Studio and JavaScript. Exposure to Web Services, SQL DTS and C++ considered a plus. Salary commensurate with experience.

Please send your resume and salary requirement to jobs@mywebgrocer.com.

MyWebGrocer, a privately held LLC, is the leading independent E-Commerce service provider to the American Grocery marketplace serving hundreds of retailers nationwide.

The jobs are in Williston, Vermont

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

My parents’ dog in the Westminster dog show

February 14, 2006Purely PersonalJulie

My mom is at Westminster this year again because Bumper was competing in this, the biggest dog show in the U.S. I think Bumper is the third one of my parent’s dogs that has gone to Westminster. Oddly, the man judging the Newfoundlands picked one of his own dogs (a dog he had bred) as Best in Breed. It’s astonishing that there isn’t a rule about something like that, but boy are there a LOT of politics in the dog world.

In 1999, Annie (who is now 9 years old) won an Award of Merit at Westminster, which was a big big deal.

Here’s a picture of Bumper and a link to the BlueHeavenNewfoundlands website.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

46 Attendees at our joint VTdotNET/VTSQL meeting last night!!

February 14, 2006dotNETJulie

Vermont.NET turned FOUR at our meeting last night and we had a joint meeting with the Vermont SQL Group which is a spin off of VTdotNET. This was the 2nd of our two launch events (the first was related to INETA and the 2nd to PASS) so we had 5 more VS2005/SQL Server2005 licence packs to give away.

So, I counted 46 at the meeting. That is our 3rd largest meeting ever.

1) Ken Getz (INETA): 50
2) Keith Pleas/Thom Robbins/ INETA 100th Speaker event and MSDN film crew: 50
3) Laura Blood/Roman Rehak/SQL2005 Launch: 46
4) Rocky Lhotka (INETA): 40
5) Laura Blood/VS2005 Launch: 40

Laura and Roman did an awesome job. Laura presented the slides that MSDN created for these events. That was some chore because each slide was jam packed with information, so she pointed out highlights. Then Roman did the demos and he used a lot of his own (from his job as SQL Server guru extraordinaire) and also a few from some other sources that he acknowledged.

The most interesting thing to me was my new persective on Service Broker. I have only really looked at it from what it provides for Query Notification and didn’t really “get” it’s real purpose. Now I realize that the reason for this is because I am a) not a DBA with the problems that it solves and b) not doing big time enterprise work. I understood the queues and the services but was missing the big picture. But I finally got it and it’s really easy – by sending processing chores off to the service broker, you can distribute your processes (much more easily than the previously available methods). Some examples: Scenario A is where you send a process such as executing a particular query off (asynchronously) to a service broker on a different box. Scenario B is where you queue up requests to be processed over night. It was a real “AHA!” moment.

He also did a great xml data type demo where he showed the difference between finding a needle in a haystack of xml formatted data stored in a (???) varchar field and finding that same needled with the data stored in an xml data field. The xquery/xpath was much more efficient, cutting a 40 second search down to a few hundred millseconds. Then by applying some of the indexing you can do with the xml data type, it got down even more.

There were many other great demos – CLR in SQL Server, and a B.I. demo – something I have never looked at or considered before – from Integration Services. Very cool, very impressive.

Thanks to Laura and Roman for a great meeting.

A few other highlights: cake for our 4th anniversary and goodies from local MSDN DCC Susan Wisowaty. Susan lives in Burlington, but is the DCC for New York and New Jersey.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Pablo Cibraro and the WSE Newsgroups (and solving the WSE3002 error)

February 13, 2006WSEJulie

Pablo Cibraro (who should be an MVP) is, in my opinion, one of the most knowledgable WSE guys around. He is up there with Michele and Softwaremaker (who have both moved on to be WCF gurus, of course). But besides having a wealth of practical knowledge, he spends an inordinate amount of time sharing it in the WSE newsgroups, answering myriad questions and following up on many of them.

He has answered questions for me too.

But today, he really impressed me even more. I was runing up against a problem that I could not figure out or find the answer to anywhere. In fact, I found two other questions on the web with the same problem but no answers.

The more I dug into the problem the more I learned and I finally was able to google the right keywords. And where did I find the solution to my problem? In Pablo’s blog (see below). He does not post very often, but boy am I glad he wrote about this. I had even been fiddling in the right section of my web.config file, but just wasn’t tweaking quite the correct thing.

So thanks Pablo!

And for google’s sake, the problem was some encryption being done in a request for a securityContextToken in WSE3.0. On Windows 2000 machines, it was encrypting the requested key with RSA15, but WIndows XP clients were encrypting with OAEP and the win2003 server was expecting OAEP.

Windows 2000 does not have the ability to wrap with OAEP. So I had to force all clients to wrap security tokens with RSA15 (Win2000 will do it by default, but XP won’t) and then force the server to use RSA15 also.

But I couldn’t figure out how. Pablo’s post on using the web.config in WSE 3.0 to override the default encryption led me to my solution. He also followed up with a reply in the newsgroup as I was typing this very post.

The error

An unsupported signature or encryption algorithm was used —>
System.Exception: WSE3002: The receiver is expecting the key wrapping algorithm to be http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-oaep-mgf1p, but the incoming message used http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-1_5. You can change the key wrapping algorithm through configuring security token manager.

The solution in both web.config of the service and app.config of the client (inside of the security tags of the microsoft.web.services3 tags):

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Best in Show for Innovation at MacWorld goes to an 18 year old from Burlington, VT

February 12, 2006VermontJulie

How cool is this? Here is a college kid at Champlain College in Burlington who started an Ipod accessory company and is making it big! (And he’s probably all of 19 years old, now.)

Mophie is a developer of innovative, value-added solutions for the digital lifestyle accessory market The Company was founded in March of 2005 by an 18 year-old optimist with a head full of ideas and a renegade marketing consultant with an arm full of tattoos. Our goal was to create a funky product development firm built around good people and great ideas.

The products start with a base case to put your ipod in and then is extended by a variety of forms that the base case fits into.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Deeper in .NET April 22- One day conference hosted by Wisconsin.NET USer Group

February 12, 2006PresentationsJulie

This spring I will be heading out to speak at the fourth Deeper in .NET event that is hosted by the Wisconsin.NET user group. This is Scott Isaac’s first time coordinating it, as former group leader Brian Tinkler has gone to work for Microsoft.

This will be a one day event with 5 talks. Michele Leroux Bustamante will be (very appropriately) doing a session on WCF. Scott Hanselman, Rob Howard and Jason Beres (returning for his 4th year!) are also on the roster.

I’ll be doing a talk on ADO.NET 2.0 integration with SQL Server 2005. I could easily spend at least 1/2 of the entire day talking about that, but I will limit myself to my 90 minute slot.

An added benefit of going to Wisconsin is that I am going to spend a few extra days there visiting with a friend who I haven’t seen in too many years.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

No blizzard in Northern Vermont

February 12, 2006VermontJulie

I’m sure all of the big cities in the Northeast that are getting seriously dumped on today would gladly send their snow here if they could. And we would be happy to have it. Once again, the big dump has missed us completely. Countless ski resorts will suffer greatly this season which will also have a big negative impact on Vermont’s economy.

It’s not even snowing here. And this picture from Charles’ window in Manhattan just makes my wanna cry. It reminds me of a magical moonlit night out in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) after a huge snow storm nearly 15 years ago. I went out there with my dog and there were hundreds of people out there walking and even cross country skiing. Of course, normally, going to a NYC park at night is unheard of.

This is what many of us live for here in Vermont. But alas, there are only about 3 inches of snow in my front yard and no base underneath. It is so bad that we can’t even use our “rock skis” in the woods. Just a pair of regular hiking boots will suffice.

Well, good day to continue getting through my myriad commitments that keep me in front of the computer.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

IE Developer Toolbar (beta 2) and Virtual Earth images

February 12, 2006Virtual EarthJulie

Here’s a cool trick you can do using the new IE Developer Toolbar if you want to find out meta data about a Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local) map. [Read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org