Cannot figure out why I suddenly have to manually code in controls.add and controls.setchildindex when trying to add controls to an inherited form I haven't added anything to in a while. Strange and annoying.

Shelley Powers did it.  I am thinking of doing the same. Can anyone tell me what it's good for besides tallying how popular you are?

“You are connected to 26313 people through 14 friends.”

Why do I need 26,299 new friends?

Steve Smith, Mr. ASPAlliance etc is coming to speak to the Vermont.NET User Group on Monday night, Feb 9th and then he is on to Montreal for the GUVSM.NET User Group on Tuesday night. His Tuesday night talk in Montreal is an INETA sponsored event. Monday is a Julie & Rich's Bed & Breakfast sponsored event. Steve is coming (sans Michelle boo hoo) on Saturday and we are going to have some Vermont fun with him. I have decided not to make him ski since I don't want to be blamed for broken bones. We will take Steve snowshoeing in the Green Mountains as we have done with Chris Kinsman and Stephen Forte before. Steve is going to do a presentaion on Caching in ASP.NET and Whidbey. I (and many) are really looking forward to this.

Don't you always wonder what mysterious things are going on when suddenly a rash of (or even just a few) bloggers announce that they are going to “campus”. Oooh aaah. I remember last year James Avery talked about it a lot. I'm starting to see it pop up again. But you never hear WHY anyone goes. Everything is shrouded in mystery. Rory was the only one who said “I'm going because it's fun and my birthday”. There is definitily a big event coming up in April which is the MVP global summit. So you will hear a lot of people talking about that.

Blue Heaven's Ch. Silk Stocking

Silky at 3 months in 1994.

Silky the Champion at 2 years

Silky at 5 years

Silky is my parent's dog. I have always loved him madly - he's a hollywood hunk and a big love. But he's 10. 10 for Newfs is generall pretty old. He's feeling pretty badly now and they are putting him down today. He'll feel so much better after that and will always stick around. Especially to be with his best best friend in the world, Daisy. This is always outrageously heartbreaking. Here are more of Silky's family and progeny.

I actually went skiing yesterday. Rich and I went to Mad River and we skiid in the woods all day. THis is a big deal for me. I am afraid of trees. I do things like snow plow, make a turn and stop for  3 minutes, etc. One of the reasons is that even though I have skiid most of my life, I switched over to telemark skiing a few years ago and just don't have that edge of being able to ski on absolutely anything anymore (yet). But after a few hours my confidence was great. I wasn't swooshing down through the trees by any means, but I know that I can go in there and be in control and even enjoy myself a little. The rest of the ski area (open trails) was pretty windblown and classic eastern skiing while the woods had gobs of fresh (hard packed) powder. One spot that we skiid on not once but twice was (well seemed!) almost totally vertical for about 150'. So now I know that I can get down stuff like that too. And heck, I can even walk today.

Here are some great videos of awesome tele skiiers skiing in the woods, on the bumps and all over at Mad River.

We actually watched a good part of the super bowl, little of the 1st q and the full 4th q - apparently missed the half time tata show. Anyway, we were really curious about how they get that orange 1st down line and it was darned easy to find the answer on google.

This happened about 3 weeks ago. Surely it got blogged by millions and I still missed it.

http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press/press2004/comp_capstone_08012003.asp

My client and I are getting ready to start sharing reports via the web with clients.

These are the same reports we have in windows apps (VB6 and Winforms).

I want to generate the reports dynamically because there will be so many. There are thousands of clients (though only maybe 50 active at a time) and each client could have a number of projects and depending on the type of project, a *huge* variety of possible reports to choose from. We looked at this a few years ago with a company that had a whole management front end written that would juggle pdf or other doc types. But we would have had to export and send every single report for every single client. Egads. Dynamic generation please

So I seem to have these choices

Reporting Services
Win/Web Report Design: Web reports created with Microsoft's VS.NET based design tool
Still need to create my Windows reports with Crystal or ActiveReports
Management: built in
If we keep our current set up of webserver and sql server on the same box, we are golden with no extra licensing fees

Crystal Reports (this link may come as a surprise to some...)
Win/Web Report Design: Likely will get two for one creating report that can be viewed in WinForms or ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Pay through the nose to license Crystal for use on the web

ActiveReports
Win/Web Report Design:Two for one report creation for Winforms/ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Affordable Licensing

Other thoughts

I can easily have an ASP.NET front end to get at a report and a WinForms front end to get at the same report.

But I have a lot of pro/con weighing to do now.

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who has gone through this thought process to solve this same type of problem...

4/14/04: Now he tells me: I misspelled Casey's last name in the title and below and am correcting it for google's sake. But my misspelling, for those of you who came here for the laugh was “Chestnut“.

I haven't looked at Casey Chesnut's weblog in a long time. Not since I was fiddling with doing some work on the pocket pc for a client but that turned into a tablet/laptop app.

Don Box recently pointed to Casey's blog. I have been looking around there. I have a sinking feeling after looking at what he is doing which is something along the lines of wondering who I think I'm kidding sometimes when writing about the things I am learning. This guy is damned smart and he doesn't have to work too hard for it to show.

I am so unfocused - one day trying to rebuild my server, another day playing with ink controls, the next day looking at wse2 the next day Whidbey bits and then Lonestar and  around and over and under and back and forth. And all in between trying to do my own work, etc.  I don't get a chance to stick with any one thing long enough and I am looking at just too many things at once. Not sure where I am going with this thought. Part of me (and everyone I know) says I need a major vacation. But then of course I'll only fall further behind.

(Subscribed of course.)

there's a good joke in there somewhere...

Oh no. Here we go again. My client asked me to make a minor change in their old website which I did in InterDev. I never updated it to asp.net since it is a rarity to make a change.

I couldn't open up my project in VI6 because I don't have the FrontPage98 server extensions on the new box.

After googling for a quick fix (for over a quick 90 minutes) I just finally went into notepad on the live machine and modified the damned file (late at night - not a problem).

For those of you who asked... (or TOLD!)

W hotel

arr Sunday Leave Thursday

Seder on Monday

When I started working on my Edge East presentation (that I have written about a lot lately) I was really focusing on the fundamentals of the BCL. The conference organizers had picked the same title as Kit George's talk at PDC which was absolutely about the fundamentals. But the more bounced some questions around the more I realized that because the literal definition of the Base Class Libraries is ALL of the classes, that this is what most people also tend to lean towards.

So I really struggled with trying to decide if I should aim “high” - for those people who might be expecting a wide variety of things from the classes including System.Windows or System.Data (lots of interesting new things in system.data!) - or aim low at those who are in fact looking for the fundamentals.

I am not duplicating Kit's presentation. Even if I wanted to it would be impossible since he used different bits (and knows this stuff a little better, heh)!

I rewrote my abstract 4 times. But as I wrote earlier, I eventually decided where I wanted to be and finally got going on it.

Though 80% of my choices are still from the fundamentals, I currently do have in there some of the new System.Data classes/methods as well as a mention of a property that falls into the windows name space.

Kit George has been kind enough to talk with me about this and I am again inspired to stay low and focus on those classes that do fit in to the Fundamentals area that I look at every day on my beautiful WinFX poster.

The real problem goes back to here - so many new great and interesting things and only an hour or so to talk about them.

All of this angst for an hour long talk. But really it's fun because I am learning a lot of things that I might not have taken the time to focus on right now. And it is only going to make the presentation that much better.

Pink for Marcie who is going to work for Code Project.

I told her “blog your new job and then I can blog it, too” and then my computer sent me dark for hours and hours. So better late than never.

Hooray Marcie. These Robillards are one productive pair!

Look for more [professional] splashes from Toronto from these two coming up.

Okay so now I am getting something like spam in orkut. You can send an email blast to all of your friends (I have like 10) or to the whole network of friends of friends of freinds... mine says 12,858. So I can't say the messages I'm getting are coming from 10th generation friends or anything - in fact they are only one away, so each of these is from someone who is a direct friend of someone who is my own personal direct friend. I just don't know... I will keep looking at it. I am not inviting anybody else in. I only invited 2 people who weren't already in and one of them really is anti-orkut! Don't take it personally. It doesn't make sense for me to do that when I don't quite believe in whatever it is yet.

I do have to say that I did get this apology in a message though:

“I shoulda done the math on friend of friends before pushing the button. yeeeeagh! “

So, maybe also a lot of this is just that people have to figure out how to use it and what they want to do with it...

I thought I had beat the most famous non-admin problem of running quickbooks by using the “run as” option. My days as a non-admin user were almost becoming a full week of success until I tried to revisit a VB6 project and compile it. Throw on the breaks. System Registry access problems. I logged out and back in as admin and gave myself full perms on the hkey_local machine section. Back to my own login - still no compilation. Log out. Log back in as admin, well it's trying to register these classes so it needs access to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. I really don't wanna do it, because anything that invades my computer in an email will now have access but - what's a girl to do. Full perms on the classes_root, chug chug while it goes through all gazillion of the. Log out, log back in as me the non-admin, pretty background screen and then....nothing. Nothing nothing. I can get to task manager, get to the dos prompt from there, etc. but I cannot run explorer. Hmmm says I. Back to admin login, everything *looks* okay in documents and settings. Fiddle around for a few hours. Try to do a safe mode login - same thing basic effect with out the pretty picture, but I get all the “safe mode” bits in the 4 corners.

I create a new local login and login as that. Same.

Create a new domain login and login as that. Same.

I go back to admin and gulp - make myself an admin and all is well again. except now I'm back to being a non-admin and feel very exposed and wasted many hours today. Oh well.

Halley, I totally hear ya! I just don't GET it. Yeah, I got invited, and checked it out and invited you too, but that was about a week ago and now I am really wondering what the point is. I *have* a network. In fact, sometimes I think I am overnetworked. I don't know what Orkut adds to the mix. Except flattery. I was flattered by some of the invites I had. But [wo]man cannot live on ego alone!

Hooo whee did I have fun yesterday and once again learned a lot about something that was low on my list of things to learn! This is about solving the problem of the default IIS6 security account not having access to SQL Server and some lessons in managing that security account.

I have a new Win2003 Server with IIS6 set up. I'm not sure in Windows creates this account or IIS6 does, but IIS6 defaults to using the account “NT Authority/Network Service“ as it's main security account. You can actually change this if you want. In the Application Pool you see in IIS, you have an option to change the identity of the main security account for IIS. There are 3 defaults or you can select your own account.

I have a domain controller. In Win2000 Server, I had to use the IWAM_Server as my main security account. That means I had to give this account NTFS permissions on my web folders and also in SQL Server. I don't know if there was a way to change the account in IIS5, but if there was, it was elusive. In fact, I had to deal with this when I made some changes to my Win2000 Server and suddenly couldn't debug ASP.NET, etc. It's because I now had to give taht IWAM account access to everything. In fact, here is the post where I learned that lesson - the real lesson was thanks to a comment by Mark Pearce.

On to Windows2003 and IIS6. I was able to debug, but my asp.net apps now didn't have access to SQL Server.

Googling, I saw that I could via TSQL, just add the Network Service account to SQL Server. Through Enterprise Manager, that account is not exposed, but you can do it through TSQL (and then see it in Ent. Mgr). But I didn't do it correctly the first time. I added it to a user database (Users), and not to the “master” database, which is the same as adding it to Security/Logins. So thinking that it just hadn't worked, I looked a little harder which is where I got my big lesson. What I did not want to do (even though this is just my development environment and used only by me) was just switch over to mixed authentication. I was bound and determined to use integrated security!

Remember, I am a developer, not a “real“ dba or sysadmin!

What I learned, thanks to some help from a Dave Burke post and also a conversation with Brad Kingsley from Orcsweb on the ASPAdvice security listserv, was how to change the security account in IIS (Application Pool/Identity). Not only can you choose from one of the defaults, but you can also choose any of the server accounts (well, they may be filtered) but my IWAM_server account was what I wanted and knew how to work with so that's what I chose. This cleared up all of my sql access problems, because I had set up that account when I installed SQL Server on that box. But, it was the NETWORK SERVICE account that had been given all of the appropriate permissions on my application folders. I started getting errors left and right when trying to run/debug my asp.net app. Not even on the folders where the application was, but the windows/.net framework/v.../aspnet temp  folder and other folders on my system drive (my app folders are on a separate drive.)

I started hacking - permission here permmission there, but the problem didn't go away AND I did NOT like that I was doing this manually because I might have been creating another bad effect elsewhere. I did think later that maybe some tool like IISReg might have done this for me. I'm not saying this is a bad option. The nice thing here is that if you need to, you can have this type of granular control over IIS. Me - I don't happen to need them, gimme those defaults and thank you for all of the automated setup!!!

But instead, I set everything back to the defaults, including the IIS security account, and went back to SQL Server. This time, in TSQL, I went to the master database and typed

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!