Halley was here...and I missed her. Damn! Well getting into Burlington wasn't really an option over the weekend anyway with 2 1/2 feet of snow falling here. We did manage to drive 7 miles over the App Gap to get to Mad River Glen yesterday though of course. The parking lot was jam-packed so I'm sure many from Burlington made the trip. Over the mountain was interesting, to say the least.

(I have to confess that though I have her misbehaving.net blog in my aggregator, somehow her real blog wasn't. She was blogging about Vermont starting on Thursday and I missed all of them - aaargh! Of course, that's corrected now.)

Regarding this big storm that I have been so gleeful about, sadly there was a storm-related fatal accident north of Burlington where I used to live. A mother and her 15 year old daughter who were from Fairfax died in an accident on a road that I know well and is very hairy in bad weather. The roads were horrible and for some reason the 15 year old was driving.

I have noticed a pattern that when I have worked on a WinForms project for a while (weeks...months) and then start on a new ASP.NET project, I have two problems:

1) I forget about the darned postback. It takes a couple of “hey where'd my value go?” to do one of those “could've had a V-8” D'OH forehead slaps.

2) I don't notice that the fact that new web form pages are in grid mode is an issue. I start placing controls on the page where I want them until this nagging thought in the back of my head says “something is not right with this picture”. Oh yeah - it's not a windows form, I want flow layout mode. I know that there is a nice little message with really subtle faint grey text when you create a new web form - but do YOU read it? I don't. Happily this default is changing in Whidbey.

I should have a mechanism that kicks in when I create a new Web App project that pops up a window with big red letters and maybe even a little bell that reminds me of these two things.

Boy “catastrophic”... Sounds pretty horrible, huh? It's really just a little problem created by Win2000 SP4 if that SP is implemented before installing ASP.NET on a remote server. This was my case because I only recently (finally) put .NET 1.1 on my in-house webserver.

So anyway, I didn't waste too much time with my little “catastrophy” before I just hit google, got to KBAlertz which had the MSDN solution listed. Here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q827559

This is surely old news, but it was new to me so I thought I'd just stick it in here.

I just pulled a login page from an ASP.NET app I wrote last year into a new ASP.NET application. These are applications that live on my domain that are web based utilities for some of my clients or just myself and I haven't had to write one in quite some time. When I opened up the login page I saw something that I had put in there which I had completely forgotten about. I had written a login web service that I can implement in any of my applications. I have one table in my domain's sql database that has the logins for users of my various little applications. That way I can use the same login page in any of these applications. The web service requires authentication before it will even attempt to validate the user login/pw. That way I don't have to worry about anyone else using my web service.

So here is the  code I discovered (yes, I surprised myself!)

Private Sub LogIn_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.ImageClickEventArgs) Handles ImageButton1.Click
 Dim sResults As Boolean
 Dim auth As New mydomain.Authenticator() 
 auth.UserName = "IAmanAuthenticatedApplication"  
 auth.Password = "IAmThePassword"
 Dim objService As New mydomain.WebServices()
 Try
 With objService
   .AuthenticatorValue = auth 'this attaches the auth object as SOAP
   .Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials
   sResults = .ValidLogin(Me.txtLogin.Value, Me.txtPW.Value)
 End With
 If sResults Then
   Dim FormsAuthentication As New Web.Security.FormsAuthentication()
   FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage(txtLogin.Value, False)
 Else
   msg.Text = "Invalid User: Please try again“
 End If
 Catch ex As Exception
   msg.Text = ex.Message & vbCrLf & ex.StackTrace
 End Try
End Sub

This may not be the best way (and it makes me nervous to have my code available for certain people to possibly look at and have a chuckle) but it's darned useful.

It's funny to look at this having just written a little about Indigo going to message based transactions. Because doesn't that mean that my little “auth” object that I'm passing in to my webservice will go away? Of course! This is what they (ok Don Box but I'm not going for google hits, here) were talking about when saying that even security is going to be a LOT less complicated to handle. I remember when I first tried to get my head around how all of that was working - soap , my authentication object, etc. Though it all seems so obvious to me now, I remember how incredibly confusing it was for me back then.

(edited this because there seemed to have been a little drag and drop action that messed up my original post, oops...)

I'm always interested to see what Sam Gentile and Robert Hurlbut are working on together. Always BIG projects that seem to have the scope of large architectural blueprints which demand that they dig deep into the roots of the tools and languages they are working with. My projects are so teeny in comparison and I don't touch half of the tools that they talk about.

Today Sam writes about a “grand managed (.NET) distributed architecture for one of my clients and my team that will take the next 18-24 months to do and deploy.” Wow, THAT is impressive. And also that he and Robert converted all of their build processes to NAnt this weekend. NAnt is a frequently blogged about tool that builds your .NET projects rather than letting Visual Studio .NET build them -- and there is a new release out. I haven't spent time with it, but I am guessing it allows you to have more granular control over the build.

Sam has teased me about the fact that I have mentioned this before - that I'm impressed. There's also a (small) part of me that would like to be involoved in projects like that. I say small because they sound daunting! “It's all just programming” he has told me. I guess that I get to play with new stuff too, such as working with tablet applications. But I just don't have some of the big challenges in my projects that these guys are out to solve. So all of this stuff that people do down deep is really impressive to me, that's just the way it is and the way it will remain.

Also, Sam talks about ShadowFax which let's you do in .NET today what Indigo will be bringing us tomorrow. This was one of the big buzz concepts at PDC - that we will move from object oriented design to service oriented architecture which is message based. It's awesome to keep having these messages constantly coming in (via blogs of people who are really out on the edge) so that when I'm ready to start playing with that stuff (which I am not at the moment) I won't be totally clueless.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this. Fellow blogger, Liz Lawley, who I admire a lot, wrote yesterday about a recent terrible tragedy in her family. Her sister's new husband (of 6 months) was killed in a head-on collision when the driver of the other car swerved into his lane because she was busy doing something to her bagel. Think about that next time you are drving while...[searching for a better radio station/eating your lunch/talking on the phone/settling a kids fight in the back seat/checking your email/trying to dial a phone #, etc.]. Pull over if you need to be so distracted for god's sake. Although I start to cry every time I think about this, I also have some sympathy for the girl (driver of the other vechicle) who just wasn't using her head - but now has to live with the horror of what she is responsible for for the rest of her life. It's too high of a price for everyone to have paid. And I am just as guilty of this type of occasional inattentiveness as most people.

I haven't done this myself yet, but as per Clemens:

The Releases section over at the GotDotNet workspace has three variants of v1.5:

"Source ZIP" with the code, "Web Files" with the runtime files (to update existing installs and do manual installs) and "Web Setup" which is an MSI to install the web site. Because the feature list keep growing, but we haven't done a language update for the various local languages, yet, updates to the string tables are welcome in the workspace source control system. And before you update: make a backup.

I am running v1.5 here without any problems. Let us know in the GotDotNet workspace message boards if you find any. I likely won't be able to answer any support questions this or next week.

Please note that you must not have the Whidbey Alpha version of ASP.NET mapped to the web into which you install this version; it can be present on the box, but not on the web for dasBlog. Otherwise you will get all sorts of assertions and error messages that aren't my fault ;)

Hey! We moved to Vermont for a reason. We've got 4 lousy inches of snow right now. Already we are getting the same insult as last year. We moved here from the Hudson Valley where they are expecting 12-18 inches of snow (okay so it's a blizzard) in the next few days. According to Sam Gentile, Boston's buckling down to get hammered. We are VERY happy to have snow storms here. We just camp out at home for a few days and then strap on our skis or snowshoes. It makes us very happy. It is what we live for. But nooooo - everyone else who does NOT want the snow gets it. This is what happened last year. A gazillion snowstorms everywhere that is south of us. What is going on here? We WANT THE SNOW!

I have been using the Personal Update dashboard for about 3 years. I really love it. I open up outlook and see highlights of my calendar, the weather, headlines of topics I have chosen, and the state of my paltry stocks.

I was SO VERY SAD to see this today. I'm sure there is a replacement somewhere, but I don't have time to look. Hey, maybe its just built right into Outlook 2003 and I didn't realize it! I'll have to look into that AFTER I do my client work!

(click for larger image)

There is no snow in Burlington - 20 miles north (and a little west) and about 1100' higher in elevation. We can't quite ski yet - only 4 “ of fluffy stuff...

It's also 5 degrees out!Brrrr

Omar Shahine, in my comments, says “tell me more...”. So with the presumption that he hasn't read my blog previously...here's a little history.

On my dotnetweblog check my tablet category. You will see that I've been writing some business applications for a tablet as well as playing with the general features and also trying to push for a little more developer interaction from Microsoft (heh).

At PDC, I took furious notes at the keynotes in ink using Journal and posted them immediately up to my blog:

here, here, here and here.

Although it was very satisfying to just take the notes and post them, I was very frustrated with two things - my handwriting was atrocious and no links! Frankly, I can type just as quickly as I write (and a lot more legibly) so it didn't make too much sense except I got to doodle a little and draw little smiley faces instead of the ol' . I think there's a lot of reasons to blog in ink but there is no reason not to leverage the handwriting recognition and what is a blog without links.

So this was on my mind. THen the tablet team put up inklog.com. At first glance, cool - blogging in ink. BUt truly, they had the same problem. Crappy handwriting and no links. It was easy to discover that the blogs were gifs.

I just kept thinking about it. How it would be logically and technically possible to implement it. One thing I though about a lot was placement. If I was drawing all over the page, I would basically need to do some real acrobatics to have as close a snapshot of that as possible. I'm still thinking about that. But in reality, it's a blog. A blog is mostly a stream of conciousness - or an article. It is not a designed user interface that should require tables to place elements etc.

So this is what I came up with and you see the basic implementation in my two previous posts. I actually had not used any of the ink tools from the SDK yet because my business application was using Infragistics tools which are ink enabled.

So I started playing with them yesterday morning and that's what I have come up with so far. The thing that held me up the most was editing html in Windows Forms. But I already talked about that in a previous post. I did find another tool by Carl Nolan (MS) on the Windows Forms site Control Gallery , but I'm sticking with Nikhil's and thinking of extending it a little. I'm still thinking about where the implementation goes next and have figured out how I will handle posting without writing my own blog engine (absolutely not something I am interested in doing). So I can use it with dotText or dasBlog or whatever I want.

Hey, I just thought of a name - BLInk!

NOTE: IMAGES ARE NOT CROSS-POSTING - PLEASE GO TO MY REAL BLOG TO SEE THIS STUFF!! www.julialermaninc.com/blog)

This is my new bogging tablet p.c.app. Can you read my handwriting? And what abort linking to my user group? or a graphic link? e' have to copy t paste my html, and upload my little inks but next step is to build in posting!

(NOTE: IMAGES ARE NOT CROSS-POSTING - PLEASE GO TO MY REAL BLOG TO SEE THIS STUFF!! www.julialermaninc.com/blog)

Before I post my tablet blog - I am just using the web based part of dasBlog right now to show you these two images. These are thumbnails, click for larger view. This is just my experimentation based on a lot of thinking over the last few weeks. I want to blog from the tablet but my handwriting is illegible and I need to link!

I know it is just a start, but the www.inklog.com that the tablet team did is really lacking so far -- because all they are doing is grabbing their ink in gifs and posting it. Bad handwriting and no links is a huge problem. I could not get this out of my head so I had to do something. I'm sure they will be coming out with something a lot better than what I have done today!

I could not get far with the dhtmledit control (no documentation etc.) but found a great amount of work that Nikhil Kothari posted as a windows based html editing component. I have a lot more to do here. But I'm just happy that I was able to get pretty close today.

Then I will post the actual blog next.

Wow! Lots of “tests posts” on the dotnetweblogs yesterday. And did you notice who they were from? A whole bunch of folks from Microsoft. That's pretty cool that this is where they want to be and it says a lot about this blogsite as well as the great tool that Scott has built.

This morning when I opened up Sharpreader and looked at the mainfeed from there. I have to say it was overwhelming. Because the authors are not exposed in the display of post titles, it is really hard to pick and choose what you want to look at when you just cannot look at them all. I actually just went elsewhere though I came back later and started digging through the posts.

I think I went “south”  (to my new blog) just in time. I don't know why, when presented with so many new posts, someone would choose something of mine over something from a Microsoft developer/program manager/etc that is more likely to be full of useful technical content. I know that only people who are explicitly looking for my posts will ever read them anymore rather than the coolness of having someone discover something you wrote because they were looking through the main feed. But I knew that when I moved my weblog.

I'm feeling a little burned out. I got a taste of life before user group/ineta/blogging/etc when my friends would not let me near my computer for the entire long weekend of Thanksgiving. I finally got to hike on the parts of the Long Trail that are accessible from our back yard and also on Camels' Hump which is a mere 4 mile drive to that trail head. So I'm trying to focus on my client work (though I have to get out the INETA Newsletter for December!!) and some non-technical things that have been catching my attention.

I finally noticed how many damned posts I wrote in November. It's completely insane. But I had SO much information bubbling around in my head after PDC that I absolutely had to get it OUT of my head and blogging was the perfect outlet and better storage system than my poor brain. I think now I'm just feeling a little drained (err “empty headed”?) and now need to focus again on some of my client work. But then I look and see how much is going on with people's experiments with Whidbey, Avalon, Longhorn, etc and am already terrified of getting stuck in the mud and falling behind. Eeek! It's a pretty scary trap to fall into.

Danah Boyd, a completely hip chick - geek, sociologist,academic - who blogs over on misbehaving.net was profiled in a NY Times article this past Saturday. Danah is an academic who is very involved in social software and is putting her academic eye on phenomena like Friendster. NY Times says “Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.“ Not only is it very cool to see Danah in this type of spotlight, but it says a lot about what is going on in social software/blogging/etc. that profiles of this type are featured in non-technical venues. Though it was the technology section. Thanks to Liz Lawley for making sure we didn't miss this.

I like to point out achievements by others in our community, so I decided to just create a “Community Cheerleading” category.

There are a few that I have been holding on to. Here's one

Jason Nadel mentioned on Sunday that he would be part of a performance at Carnegie Hall! That really impressed me. It's easy to forget that we see only a slice of the lives of folks in our community and often our friend's talents abound - even beyond their programming skills. Way cool Jason. I hope it was great fun! What an experience!

In the comments of this post, I was asked a few questions about dasBlog administration. I had all of the same questions. Many were answered in the Message Boards of the DasBlog Community Workspace on GotDotNet. But to directly answer Martin and Steve's Questions:

Steve: The trick for cross-posting to dotText is in the configuration. First check Clemens Vasters post about the version that first implements cross-posting and then in the config for the Cross Post Site (here are my examples)

hostname: weblogs.asp.net
endpoint: yourname/Services/Metablogapi.aspx (so I have “jlerman/services/met..)
api type: MetaWebLog

Martin: The permissions are explained at the very bottom of the Setup page on DasBlog.Net under the section “Post Installation Steps”.

I am still having to get used to the interface for administration of dasBlog. It's very nice, but I was completely spoiled with dotText. Scott has been working on that application for such a long time and has had so many people to please so there were a lot more bells and whistles built in. Either way, I certainly have no time to do something like this myself and both applications are fantastic achievements and great contributions to the blogging community.

Well, if you found your way here then you read part I over there.

Thanks to Clemens and Omar and everyone for creating dasBlog and answering my dumb questions and also thanks to Bill, a support guy at Alentus (my web host) who went above and beyond the call of duty. I asked for someone to look at the admin requirements for dasBlog to see if they were doable (since I can't totally admin my site) and Bill just went ahead and installed dasBlog for my on my website! Another thanks to Stephen - because knowing that he can bare to do this outside of a database (he's a database kinda guy) then I can handle it.

I have a little housekeeping to do -- links, categories, etc. For now it's the dasblog defaults.

I was getting kind of embarrassed at my name being almost at the top of the list of the dotnetweblogs -- just because I have a lot to say. After 5 days away from my computer I almost wanted to just stop altogether anyway. So this seems to be a good solution for me.

We'll see.

I am moving my weblog to www.julialermaninc.com/blog. Though I do prefer [what to me is] the security of having my ramblings stored in a database, I have chosen to use DasBlog which allows me to cross-post and therefore continue to maintain my blog on weblogs.asp.net. There are things I would like to talk about that just don't seem appropriate for the dotnet weblogs and I don't want to add to the noise. So if you have any interest in Women in the Development community, my thoughts on blogging and social software, what great novels I am reading, my life, Vermont, or random news that catches my interest, then subscribe to the new blog. Otherwise you will still see my .net related posts (hmmm - what do I do about those VB6 posts? ) on the dotnetweblogs. I will always be grateful to Scott Watermasysk who so generously invited me to join before I really knew what was going on over there (here?) and impressed with the fantastic application he has built as well as creating an incredible community.