I was at the Vermont Business Expo yesterday and spent a good part of the day yesterday with a Linux guy who kept bringing up how much we hate each other, even though we don’t. What’s up with the non-stop hatred for Microsoft? [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

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I decided not to leave the last two paragraphs on that blog so here it is:

The politicians were there doing some booth by booth campaigning.

I had nice chats with Martha Rainville, who, up until she decided to run for congress was (I’m copy/pasting to be sure I get my facts straight) “the first woman in the 370-year history of the country’s National Guard to serve as a state Adjutant General.”. She was the head of Vermont’s National Guard from 1997 to earlier this year. Like everything Vermont (our syrup, our cheese, our leaves, our rock bands), Vermont is extremely proud of  it’s National Guard and I believe we have the highest proportion of guardsman deployed in Iraq and environs per capita than any other state. Martha’s actually pretty cool. We were so disappointed when she decided to go on the Republican ticket. I’d love to have a strong woman representing Vermont (we only have one congressional seat), but I fear she’ll get swept up with the party line. It’s going to be a hard vote in November.

Rich Tarrant was there too. He recently sold his software company, IDX, to GE  for $1.2 billion (to be fair, I believe there were 8 partners) and decided to run for senate against Bernie Sanders. A sad way to throw all that hard earned money away. Rich spoke at a VTSDA meeting recently. We were hoping to get a glimpse of what it took to build a billion dollar softare business from scratch (he started it with one partner in the early 70’s). We heard a little about that and a lot about how he was going to change the healthcare system in the U.S. He smiles a lot. Hey, I would too if I someone bought my business for $1.2 billion. 😉

Like Al Gore inventing the internet*, Oracle tries to reposition SOA as SOA 2.0.

Christian Weyer says it best : “now it gets ridiculous“

*just kidding.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

“Rig” is the all-encompassing Vermonter term for something big – generally used for a truck or an evaporator used for boiling sap to make maple syrup. Or of course a honkin’ computer! Vista has a means of analyzing your computer and rating it. [Read more…]

[A DevLife post]

I have installed the latest CTP build of Vista on my Toshiba M4. Here is what I noticed right away. [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Last week I downloaded version 5365 of Vista. Today I finally had some time and went to burn the image onto a DVD to install onto my laptop, only to discover that 5381 was now available. I have mid-speed DSL so these suckers take a good 12 hours to download! But it didn’t make sense not to get the latest, so I’m now closing in on hour ten and hopefully will get a peek at the latest sometime tonight. Much of this is thanks to Kate Gregory’s blog post about how much she is enjoying build 5365.

I did install Office 12 VS2005 on one of these builds, but it takes so long to do that I don’t want to do it again until I’m willing to upgrade Vista not reformat and install anew.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some big brains duke it out over objects vs databases at the DevTeach panel. Read more…

Though I sadly had to miss this weekends Code Camp 5: Code Frenzy in Waltham (stay tuned here for a report from Dave), I will get 3 days of communing with geeks up in Montreal at DevTeach. This is DevTeach’s fourth year. It is a fun smallish (200-300?) conference in a beautiful city with a host of top-notch speakers. I am proud to be countedin the ranks of this great group of presenters.

The pre-con is today, the post-con on Friday, with the main conference running from Tuesday through Thursday.

Rich & I picked Alan Griver (who after successfully overseeing the phenomenal implementation of data tools into Visual Studio, has now moved on to his second love, working with he developer community)and the brilliant and [oh my god] energetic Beth Massi up at the Burlington airport last night and after a stroll on the Burlington waterfront, took them to Burlington’s phenomenal traditional Chinese restaurant, A Single Pebble.

We will drive up to Montreal this afternoon and Alan is doing the keynote tomorrow morning. Beth and I have three talks each over the next three days. Thursday afternoon we head back to Burlington for the VTdotNET meeting.

It’s a beautiful time of year to go to Montreal and I’m really looking forward to seeing so many people – speakers and attendees – (note to self – stop at Lake Champlain Chocolates on the way up to get some truffles for Kate) as well as attending sessions myself.

I know that hungarian notaton is supposed to be totally uncool now, but I am just not giving up using it on controls so I can easily tell the difference between buttons, textboxes etc when I’m reading my code (or coding my code).

From hereonin (is that one, two or three words?), this blog post from Charles Petzold is what I will point to anytime somebody gives me sh*t for continuing to do this.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some pics of my fun trip to Deeper in .NET in Wisconsin and a look around WI afterwards!

Flying out of Burlington VT, I finally got a decent picture of Lake Champlain. Of course this is nothing compared to what I was looking at.

Flying into Chicago here is the torquoise Lake Michigan.

Avonelle and Val	Bill Hatfied and Korby Parnell	Dinner at a local brew pub
The wings of the Milwaukee Art Museum. This building is amazing. Look for pics on the MAM site.	Local legend Dale Chihuly at MAM	My dear friend Martha Downs and Korby at MAM.
What? Skiing in Wisconsin!	The Tyrol Basin Golf Course, err, Ski and Snowboard Area.

a VERY impressive woodpile!

I’m in Milwaukee for the Deeper in .NET event that is happening today. Five speakers back to back all day starting with Michele Leroux Bustamante doing a talk on WCF, then Scott Hanselman, my (data access talk), Bill Hatfield and Jason Beres. I hear there are nearly 500 people registered. Wow!

Yesterday I had a great look at and taste of some of the specialties of the area.

My first surprise was the Bloody Mary that had something a little different in it

Yes, in between the celery and the lemon is a sausage. It’s just the way they serve them here! This drink was ordered (and consumed) by Chris Barwick who I didn’t think I knew until he told me he was OptionsScalper. Oh! I sure know him by that alias! Chris picked me up at the airport and I was amazed to learn all of the brainy things (like F# research at Microsoft’s Cambridge UK research facility) that he’s involved in.

There was a dinner last night for the speakers and some other locals and out of towners which was “taste of Wisconsin” – all of the Wisconsin treats. The bratwurst was awesome and they also had, get this, Beer Cheese soup. Had to try that and it was tasty.

It was a blast to get to meet Avonelle Lovhaug in person finally and Val the C# Gal too! Casey Chesnut is here and I divulged to him the secret of how I got ink on Virtual Earth. It’s a big deal for me that I actually figured out something that Casey the mad genius got stumped on. Probably the only time *that* will ever happen.

Oddly there is a small FoxPro conference here too so it was a great surprise to bump into my dear friend Ceil Silver and some of the ol’ FoxPro gang.

(links later)

Milwaukee is a city filled with beautiful old buildings (it was the 2nd biggest inland port city after Chicago in the 1800’s. I’m looking forward to strolling around tomorrow to see more.

Scott Isaacs and co. have done an amazing job and I’m really looking forward to the day.