I had to laugh when I read the first part of Avonelle's post on wanting to learn about Reporting Services:

“On my increasingly long list of things to learn...” she says.

How true! It goes with the increasingly long list of books to read.

I am working on a form and have to make sure that the columns all are the correct width for the maximum data that can be entered. Some cols may have data like “111” (which will require a wider column for “333”. Some cols may have “9999.9”. So in order to properly set the sizes, I created a handly little function that will not be on in run time, only design time. It just tells me what I have resized the column widths to, so that I can go back and apply the correct widths in my grid formatting code.

Private Sub UltraGrid1_AfterColPosChanged(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.AfterColPosChangedEventArgs) Handles UltraGrid1.AfterColPosChanged

MessageBox.Show("col width=" & e.ColumnHeaders(0).Column.Width)

End Sub

If you have a boolean that indicates you are loading the form, you might want to wrap that around the messagebox function so you don't get a popup for each cell as the form is rendering.

Not earth shattering, but a nice trick instead of guessing!

I was just chatting with Peter Rysavy (TabulaPC and SPOTman) who wanted to know why I had an “out to lunch“ hung on my i.m. status (I was bored with “busy“) and then he was trying to convince me that I just had to have a SPOT watch. I think I replied with something like “see spot run, see julie run from spot”. Just in a silly mood, nothing personal Scott! heehee

So then we got to talking about ink logging again and he had me look at Loren Heiny's totally groovy WebCamNotes application - well the output from the app. I had looked before and thought “cool” but that was just a quick look. This time, I did a closer look ala “view source” and damn, he's doing image mapping to make hyperlinks. Totally AWESOME solution. I didn't think of it. It still doesn't bring both things together that I dream of - recognized ink (i.e. legible) combined with inky ink and then links too. So if you did a view source on one of the BLInk! posts you will just see html that is text then a gif then some more text. Boring, but legible. I like the image mapping. Neat neat neat. Good thinking Loren!!!

Also he just posted some thoughts about what we are all trying to solve while working on our various blog in ink projects. It's really quite similar to the thoughts I had while I was trying to think what would make a userful ink blogging tool and then going through the pros and cons of each idea I came up with. But heck, I still never thought of that image mapping!

Here is another item that I am putting in my BCL talk. It's not earth shattering but it's sure to bring a round of applause!

I have a presentation I have done a few times on Streaming in .NET Tips and Tricks. Trying to explain the ins and outs of streamreaders and streamwriters, that they are not containers - just transporters, that you use Read to write and Write to read (think about it...). All VERY confusing to non-plumbers. If you are using streaming to open a file up and see it's contents or create file, you have a lot of concepts to understand and a lot of lines of code. And then don't forget to close the file stream or is it close the file or ...oh god. I better go look at my slides again.

Which is why, even if it is one of the more seemingly pedestrian changes in .NET, File.ReadAll and File.WriteAll are very welcome new methods in the Base Classes.

With this one short line of code:

Dim str as string=File.ReadAll(“c:\mynicefile.txt”)

(and you can do this in C# too and in this.net and that.net cause it's in the BCL...)

I now have a string filled with the contents of my text file. I don't even have to instantiate an object. I don't have to close any resources.

No research, no acrobatics.

One very good point that Kit George makes about this is that it's intuitive. Certainly you have started by typing “File.” and looked up and down the intellisense list for something that would do this. Well, now it's there. Thanks guys and gals!

Ahh, if only it could be forgotten, my favorite Microsoft story ....

from http://www.business2.com/b2/web/dumbest/winners

I'm very unhappy that I have not been able to get back to working on my little pet project lately.  Peter Rysavy was a real pal in going through the program and giving me a hit list of things that can turn it from an experiment into a useful program. And I have a whole class of blogging elementary students and teachers now waiting! I'll get to it, I promise!

It is amazing the amount of coordination that is going to happen to get the various speakers in 32 different cities all on the same page.

If you are anything like me you get a gazillion emails a day and set some aside to read later. Better not do that with the one you got from the DevDays coordinator. There are some serious action items that need to be attended to pretty quickly. Just thought I'd mention it here in case your email is buried already. It was only yesterday afternoon, but it feels like it was days and days ago already!

Update: Even after doing the intelligent updater, my NAV continued to say that I was only running the 1/18 definitions. I finally checked my activity log and saw that indeed, since I ran the Updater, NAV has been catching “W32.Novarg.A@mm“ which is one of the names of this virus.

I could not figure out why my latest virus definitions kept saying 1/18 even after I manually ran live update. Here's why!!

LiveUpdate
LiveUpdate is the easiest way to obtain virus definitions. These virus definitions have undergone full quality assurance testing by Symantec Security Response and are posted to the LiveUpdate servers once each week (usually Wednesdays) unless there is a major virus outbreak. This is the easiest option for most home and small business users, and it provides a very high level of protection along with ease of use.

Intelligent Updater
Intelligent Updater virus definitions have undergone full quality assurance testing by Symantec Security Response. They are posted on U.S. business days (Monday through Friday). They must be downloaded from the Symantec Security Response download virus definitions page and installed manually.

This is just too much, but it made me laugh...

This time it's Eli!

per Kent Sharkey:

Eli Robillard has his triumphant return to MSDN (OK, so he's got two headlines right now) on the ASP.NET Developer Center. This is one on creating a custom framework for handling the assorted errors that may happen on your ASP.NET sites.

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.