Here is another point that I will be making in my Whidbey BCL talk.

Most people have seen this Base Class Library diagram many times. Here's a picture you have seen a thousand times before where the namespaces are organized hierarchically. There seems to be an attempt to stack them as though they were building blocks, with the fundamentals on the bottom and the UI stuff at the top.

If you look at the WinFX namespace diagram (to which Whidbey is an evolutionary step) you can see that the classes are now grouped not by namespace, but by functionality. I don't recall seeing the classes organized like this before I went to the PDC, though I could be wrong.

Thanks to the Chilean MVP website, I was able to find some jpgs of this poster that I have on my wall. Here is a small one , click on it to get a HUGE one that you can actually read (warning the big one is almost 1MB)

What you will see is, for example, pieces of System.Web in the “presentation” bucket, in the  “Data” bucket in the “Communication” bucket and even in the “Fundamentals” bucket.

Though of course, it will always be important to understand the hierarchy of the classes, this shift in perception will make a developer's evolution to Avalon easier.

Though I wrote about DevDays 2004 eons ago (and that attendees will be getting Whidbey!!), since I am speaking at two events (Hartford 3/2 and Boston 3/16) I just signed up for the devdaysbloggers.net site.  Here is my little “I'll be there” graphic. It doesn't really give me the same jitters as going to PDC, but it's a very important event, because it will reach a lot of developers that would never get to a TechEd or PDC.

I received an “order confirmation from Amazon” email and of course, I hadn't ordered anything. Out of curiousity I looked at the source of the email. It is filled with tags that I don't feel like deciphering or examing, but it looks like it's some secret message or something! If you are curious, I have uploaded a screen shot of the source, rather than paste the text in here and give them some google juice!

This is just a splice. Click on the message to view the whole jpg.

Just because I have had one or ten roadblocks every step of the way of rebuilding my server, I thought that this was very funny (thank goodness my sense of humor has returned after a good nights' sleep!)

When trying to install SQL Server 2000 Ent from my 12/03 MSDN Universal CD on to a Windows 2003 server with all updates applied:

“SQL Server 2000 SP2 is not supported by this version of windows”

hahahahahahahaha

Of course I'm not the first person to see this, but it was a little suprising and the  solution is really just to ignore the message as I see in the many posts that google showed me.

Seems I have gotten side tracked with a lot of hardware issues lately. About two months ago (more?) I decided that I needed more hard drive space on my server. I upgraded to sql server 2000 so that I could accomodate things like Reporting Services and SourceGear Vault (single user). I just couldn't eek along my old 4 gig scsi drive anymore. So a friend sent me a spare 18gb scsi drive, but it was a different type of scsi and I finally received a new scsi adapter card and cable and went to town with my server box on Saturday afternoon. What I really wanted to do was start absolutely from a clean slate and with Windows 2003 server while I was at it. I have to say I went though my own little hell - some incompaitibiliites between the scsi cards, the fact that the floppy disk drive hasn't worked in 3 years (but who cares, right?) and that no matter what I did, the CD refused to be used as a bootable drive and lastly of COURSE, my ethernet card was “incompatible” with win2k3 server (though it turned out that the winxp drivers worked just fine). Because of the scsi problems, I still have some issues to work out with getting my cd player and old drive back into the mix, but I'm not concerned about that - I can just keep moving cables around till it works.

Speaking of cables, there was a little issue of the improperly seated cable which really broke the camel's back!

Anyway, now I am rolling along, have gotten AD setup, IIS installed and have just a few more things to do. One thing I like is that when I set up IIS the first time, I just dumped everyhting into the default web server - now I have set up a separate web server just for my stuff. So what I have left is pull my web sites back intot he new IIS, install SQL 2K and bring the databases back in, install Reporting Services and install SourceGear.

Then it's back to the regular work.

Why do I say Win2K3 instead of Win2003? It saves me ONE keystroke!

Not to say that they are the only ones, but these two really stood out for me. Was it just because one was about a great outdoor gear chain and the other had something to do with Vermont? No, they both go much deeper than that.

The first gives some true visions from a successful retailer on future technology and how it will help his business - and this is something we developers should be paying attention to! It's almost like a hot stock tip! And notice how Robert slips in that the guy uses a tablet?

The other is Robert's take on why he is suddenly very disappointed with the whole phenom of the dean blogging thing. I have watched Halley Suitt and Robert get very caught up in the campaign (and Dave Winer was here helping them out just last week) and I wasn't sure if it was because it involved blogging or because they are really behind what Dean wants to do for the U.S. I sure hope that he (Dean) is kidding when he says he wants the whole country to be just like Vermont - land of the $7.50/hour service jobs (and many people who need to have more than one job), taxes that are out of synch with incomes and let's just say a little problem when it comes to health insurance. Robert accepts that the Dean Blog isn't blogging as he knows and loves it, but politics as usual. There's more than politics to Robert's post and I dug the whole thing.

Rich was kind enough to try to help me after all of the illogical trouble I was having wtih my server installation. He took a close look in the box and said the scsi cable wasn't plugged in properly. “Oh No!” I sasid, I have reseated that a # of times, it's a software problem. I was at a point where if I booted up to the win2000 disk, I could see, format, partition, read, etc. the NEW disk, but when I tried to continute the win2k3 server setup onto that new disk, I kept getting the blue screen of death. He finally convinced me to let him at it and - gulp - he was right. The install is now almost done. Damn! There's a developer joke in there somewhere about it really being a hardware problem after all, but the real issue was that I was so focused on the software side of things, I didn't take the hardware end seriously enough. Embarrassing? Not really, it could have been a thousand things - incompatible hardware etc, and I *had* considered and reseated those cables. Educational - yup!

The Rocket Scientist/Carpenter reference is because Rich's college degree is in physics, but he now happily works for himself as a carpenter.

I'm trying to replace my hard drive with another one and then install win2k3 server on the new drive. Of course for some reason I can't boot from the setup cd and have fiddled with all of the cmos/bios and scsi settings. Switching jumpers (scsi doesn't do that ma..../sl.... thing). Damned good thing I'm stubborn. But I fear I'll be at this all night!

ok so I got invited, just for fun I joined and I think I'm already being “stalked” <g>

I thought I would share some of the things I am putting in my talk. They may already be old news to some of you (which seems such a funny statement considering the product is only in alpha!) but to those of you who haven't ventured in, I would love to leave a crumb trail to entice you to look further.

The class for Garbage Collection, System.GC, has two new methods: AddMemoryPressure and RemoveMemoryPressure.

Although the way GarbageCollecton works is pretty complex (and fascinating) here's a simplified explanation. GarbageCollection is triggered by the amount of memory being used by your managed objects and based upon different triggers, it goes and cleans up objects that are no longer being used. If one of those managed objects owns an unmanaged object, that unmanaged object's memory allocation is not taken into account. Imagine the confusion (and inefficiency and possibly worse...) created when a small managed object instantiates a very large unmanaged object.

Using these new methods, you can add or remove a value that is used in the GC's calculations that help trigger it's functionality. The value that you pass in could literally represent the size of the unmanaged object, or just be your own value that helps to almost “rate” or “rank” the priority of the object.

If you don't have the Whidbey alpha, you can still read more about these methods online in the SDK Documentation. AddMemoryPressure  RemoveMemoryPressure . I have to say that the explanations in the documentation are really very clear and I recommend that you look into them for further details. Also Brad Abrams wrote a much more indepth explanation of Memory Pressure in December.

I always notice that Jason Salas posts lots of reviews on the AspAdvice forums and on his blogs. I think that he puts them on the ASPAlliance site also.

We get a lot of books from publishers coming to our user group. We even have a book review page! I do have the opportunity to grab what I want before I push them out to my members. Usually I just ask if I could get my hands on them afterwards. But I generally find I don't ever have time for leisurly reading as opposed to being VERY happy to have these books around when I am trying to learn a particular thing or solve a problem. I would love to be able to find the time to do what Jason does, which is why I always notice when he posts yet another book review.

Werner got a way-cool laptop. The kind a rocket scientist should have! But he's already having second doubts about it.

• In early december he ordered the machine. Here is his post about that.
• Earlier this week, he recieved the box and expressed some dissapointment as well as some hope for it.
• One day later, he is now thinking about a Dell. Here is why.

I wonder how his laptop compares to the Longhorn machine that Clemens Vasters is now toting around Europe.

• Here is where Clemens lays out the specs of the box.
• Here is where he receives it.
• Here is where he installs Longhorn on it and realizes that he will have to make some concessions, though raves about the support from the manufacturer.

No, I'm not announcing it's availability. I just shipped it off to Sys-Con but it's not where I want it to be. By the time the conference rolls around it will be a thing of beauty. The process of doing this talk (What's new in the Whidbey BCL) has been incredibly educational. It has forced me to dig much more deeply into the documentation to explore what is in there than is my nature. Having now been through that experience, I highly recommend it to everyone who really wants to learn about the tools that they are trying to use! I sure hope that brings a smile to Sam's face!

“Europa” by way of Robert Scoble.

Having been a FoxPro developer for many years before I switched to VB4, there is always a soft spot in my heart for the product, though moreso for the community.

Robert Scoble pointed out the TabletPC Tour that is bringing a hands on tablet pc experience to 7 cities around the country in late February and early March. It's not a developer event as it is targetted at IT Decision makers -- i.e. come see why you need your company to use tablet pc's. Anyway, still a good way to get a hands on educational experience with Tablets if you are interested or trying to get your client or boss to get interested so you can start having fun writing ink-enabled applications!!

SecretGeek, aka Leon Bambrick. This is the guy who brought us the famous VB Refactoring menu in Whidbey (I'm pointing to my post on this because we already crashed him once with so many) . Have you read his blog lately? Are you even subscribed?

from Microsoft-Watch

Microsoft has something free for Linux fans

I'm happy I'll get to see Brian in Boston as he will be speaking at the EdgeEast conference also on BizTalk Server 2004.

But today I had a special treat when my two new copies of ASPNetPro arrived and there he was talking about INETA.

I struggled with webclient for a while trying to ftp and naturally, I blogged about it.

Enter  System.NET.FtpWebRequest as well as my favorite sentence in its' remarks: “You can also use the WebClient class to upload and download information from an FTP server.”

Though I still have to play with it to believe it!

Michael Lane Thomas also gets into the FtpWebRequest class in his excellent article in Code Magazine. If you don't recognize the name, it's probably because you know him as “The .NET Cowboy”.

http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/

This ad itself is killer.