Brian Dear wrote about an “orkut moment” he had recently, which led me to the realization that in most cases, orkut is a good way to just see what people look like. My account is still active, so I just looked him up (knowing he is a member) and now I know what he looks like. Of course there are obnoxious people like me who post pictures that are only representative of themselves. Here is what I have used for my orkut picture.

I had planned on changing that to a photo of my kayak in the spring.

Avonelle points out this t.v. ad for Vermont Teddy Bears which is one of Vermont's most well known businesses and #2 tourist attraction after Ben & Jerry's (though I can't figure out why...with so many other treasures). Anyway, I was amazed by the ad - it's kind of sleazy and low class - opposite of the image that they usually portray of themselves.

Sam Gentile did a presentation at VTdotNET in September that really took the time and care to explain the many terms that define the .NET programming that we do. Although one of the very minor points of his talk, in there he happens to clarify the BCL vs. FCL, which I talked about in this post and discussed a bit with Ian Griffiths from Developmentor (in the comments) as well as Kit George from the BCL Team at MS via email. There really is a lot of misinformation and confusion about these definitions which don't really impact too many people, but I just somehow got curious.

Here are just some basics that may be totally redundant to some, but may have never been really clear to others.

BCL=Base Class Libraries which are part of the ECMA specification for Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). The CLR is Microsoft's an implementation of that. Rotor and Mono are other examples of implementations.

In .NET, Microsoft has taken the BCL and added to it all kinds of goodies like WinForms, Data, etc. This is called the FCL (Framework Class Library).

Really - how many gazillions of times have you seen this already?

I am going on and on about this because I have heard many people say “the BCL is ALL of the classes in .NET“.

I even happen to have a copy of Addison Wesley's Common Language Infrastructure Annotated Standards, but the real definition of the specs is downloadable from the ECMA site (above) if you are curious. I actually have done so, but must now stop the insanity and get back to the programming work I have to do this afternoon!

If you care to understand any of it - where the class libraries come from, what people mean when they say BCL, BCI, ECMA etc etc, I highly recommend checking out Sam's deck (this page and find the sept 2003 presentation) or even requesting him to come to your (U.S. or Canadian) User Group via INETA. If you view the powerpoints, be sure to turn on your speakers. (heh)

The ASP.NET Resource Kit (similar to the VB.NET Resource Kit) in fact, it's not even listed on the www.asp.net home page yet! But just got released yesterday (2/9/2004). Thanks to Scott Watermasysk for pointing it out. There don't seem to be any details anywhere yet (though Scott does quote a few...) , but I would just keep checking the www.asp.net site.

Steve Smith and I had to miss the DevDays (web track) speaker training last night because of the Vermont .NET User group meeting. But I know we will have plenty of opportunity to make that up.

Today is the last day for the DevDays discount. If you wait until tomorrow, you will have to spend $24 dollars MORE (well it is an additional 33%...) to attend the day and get not only lots of great training but WHIDBEY bits!!!!! (and more) My point is really the whole days is so damned cheap to attend - $75 with the discount and still only $99 without.

The user group meeting was awesome - Steve is a phenomenal presenter - I learned a ton. But I have to write more about that later.

I have a bit of an affinity to Newfoundland dogs. I have one, Tasha, she is my 5th. My parents breed them (www.blueheavennewfoundlands.com) and keep almost as many as they sell so they have a LOT.

That's why this is of interest to me! This isn't one of my parent's dogs, but Josh is a beautiful gorgeous thing.

Westminster is the biggest and most important dog show in the country.

Oh wait, he's *in* the La-Z-Boy. The chair is a remnant of my husband's past bachelorhood and was allowed a spot in the basement office. Steve Smith has been honkered down in this chair for a few days by the fire. The cat is none too happy either. That's *his* chair! Steve is here to speak at VTdotNET tonight and then on to GUVSM in Montreal tomorrow night.

I did it. I quit. maybe someday there will be value. Right now it looks to me like nothing more than a public popularity contest.

Drew expresses like a grown up what I have been whining about lately (or did I manage not to publish those posts?). I guess it's that fatherhood thing that gives him such an adult outlook!

oh give me a break!

Brian Dear takes a look at what's happened to some of the gazillions of ____ for Dean websites.

Christian Crumlish sent an email out to his entire network (if mine's 30,000+, I'm sure his is at least that)

subject: is orkut over?

text: looks like everybody got bored. does anyone have tetris?

heh heh...

Damn! This is the next in a line of cool stuff Ryan is doing with Longhorn. Very impressive. Trying to remember what I did with all of the free time on my hands when I was 20 (ish)...

Business People Liken Stress of Travel to Trip to Dentist, According to New Survey Released by Microsoft

Company Is Introducing New Microsoft Office Live Meeting Service In Series of Events to Dramatize Unnecessary Hardships of Business Travel

(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/sep03/09-15BizTravelPR.asp)

This caught my eye because I am in the throes of trying to decide whether or not to accept an unsolicited invitation (request really) to speak at the Mobile Devcon. It would mean 3 trips to the west coast in the course of two months (MVP Summit in April and TechEd in May). I live in Vermont. I am stressed out just contemplating this and I really owe them an answer.

"Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman," Bush said in a statement. "If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage."

Have you seen these funny commercials for people with [I assume] mild incontinence? The lady in the jury box in the middle of a trial, the lady stuck in her car with the grandkids at a drive through safari?

It makes my husband laugh and tease me. Why? Why am I even writing about this? No,  I don't have that particular problem. However, I do seem to sit in front of the computer, knowing I gotta go, but... just gotta finish this last thought in my blog or... try this last line of code to see if it does the trick etc. Hours can go by. God forbid I have to sneeze! (hee hee) Rich is always amazed. He think Microsoft should stop sending me t-shirts and mugs and maybe send me Depends instead.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are probably a lot of geeks who do this, too.

Oh well, gotta go...

There is a barely documented problem with Crystal Reports for .NET that occurs if you try to pass a dataview as a datasource to a report. The report has been built via a project dataset (XSD).

Here is the tech support entry. It has a tracking id of “CR ADAPT00117088”. I probably don't have the latest patch but there is no reference anywhere else to this track id.

The work around is just to pull the dataview data into a new datatable. Crystal doesn't give a sample so here is one for anyone who may be looking.

First here is the long way around if you need a table to move into a dataset.

Dim tbl As DataTable = myDataView.Table.Clone
Dim iRow As Int32
For iRow = 0 To dv.Count - 1
    tbl.ImportRow(dv.Item(iRow).Row)
Next
mycrystalreport.SetDataSource(tbl)  'this assumes you only have one table for your datasource

(I need to make a confession - I have been so stung by the problem of trying to move a table from one dataset into another that I didn't stop and think that I was sending a datatable not a dataset, so I did this the long way around. Thanks to Mike below for pointing out my silliness...see his comment for the easy way.)

I saw on Halley Suitt's blog this a.m. and was reminded in an email from O'Reilly press this p.m. that Joe Trippi just got added to O'Reilly's Emerging Tech Conference next week. They have a whole day  called the Digital Democracy Teach-In. I read somewhere that it is Joe Trippi that people run to for autographs during some of the (past) Dean travels.

Interesting post from 2003 PASS track chair, Roman Rehak, on the evals from the conference. Besides been a .NET developer, Roman is an absolute whiz with SQL Server and has been doing a lot of talks for developers on what they should really know about working with SQL Server. Keep an eye on his weblog for some great pointers and insights - and occasional recipes. He happens to be an awesome cook - I have been fortunate to partake in some of his wonderful meals.

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.