When I got asked to present on ASP.NET security at not one but two DevDays events, I accepted [of course] and then afterwards started wondering where I was going to find the time to create a high quality presentation for such a big event. I have a few others that I am currently working on and it is hard (though rewarding and if you are really lucky, educational) work. Since this was my first time at bat for DevDays, I didn't learn for a few more days what is beautiful about this event. You may know by now of course, from reading Brian Goldfarb's weblog that he and Jeff Prosise have created the content for the web security track. Boy oh boy, this is like having my cake and eating it too. So you may be getting locals (and in some cases even local yokels) doing the presentations, but Brian and Jeff will be in many ways right up there on stage with us, feeding our brains...and yours! Of course a lot of the presenters are more than capable of creating their own session materials for this, but the benefit is that there will be very high-quality consistency for every single date.

Considering that she is a pretty attractive woman, I'd be going after the courtroom artist, if I were her!

How often do you have to set up IIS on a remote server and configure it to be accessible from a client box using Visual Studio.NET? Daily? No. Monthly? No. Maybe once every year or two? More like it. I just want to kick myself when I have to go through all of the same problem solving! Oh yeah, forgot to install remote debugging. Oh yeah, forgot to include myself as a VSDebugger group member. The most interesting one this time was getting my webserver to show up in the windows explorer on my client box. I think I am almost back to programming now!

Joel Semeniuk asked me why I haven't written a book and have turned down offers to do so. My joke answer was that I'm too busy with my user group and INETA (he also runs a user group and is on my INETA committee).  I pointed Joel to Chris Anderson's post which perfectly answers this question.

Hey look at that. Guy Barrette who runs the .net user group in Montreal just emailed to let me know that he has become an RD. This is great news. Montreal has been without an RD for a while. Guy and I do a lot of user group stuff together since we are only 2 hours apart so we try to share resources. He also helps out on the user group relations committee  that I chair for INETA. He works with the user groups in Quebec. 

Guy and I got together to bring Steven Smith from ASPAlliance on a little cross-border tour. He will be here in Vermont in a few weeks to play a little and speak at VErmont.NET and then drive up to Montreal to speak at Guy's user group. His Montreal gig is an INETA sponsored event. His trip to Vermont is a “Julie bribed me...“ production.

More on that though later...

I love reading Rick's blog. He's a really smart and innovative guy who has been working with .net for a long time. He is writing applications and also experimenting and his weblog talks about some of the hurdles he runs into while trying to write software and how he gets around them. Very practical, very engaging and educational. Rick lives in Hawaii. I'm always waiting for some surfing pictures! I have fun emailing him once in a while to tell him the temperature - like when it's 20 below (F). It's pretty funny going to a conference and hanging out with Rick from Hawaii and Don Kiely from Alaska.

Farhan - way to GO! Farhan is one of the INETA board members, an author, etc. See more here!

Hip hip hooray. This is my friend who gives me CRAP when I write about him in my blog if for example, he's doing a presentation at a conference.  Hey, somebody's gott brag about you, John.

nah nah nah nah

Big fat congratulations, buddy!

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.