I still have a pile of VS2002 60 day demo dvds to give away at my user group. Still haven't known of any for the current version.

Greg Robinson bemoans the fact that his magazines are collecting dust on the shelves since he needs to stay focused on .NET development right now and he is seeing to much focus on Longhorn. If you consider that many developers haven't even made the leap to .NET and most of those that have are busy working away in .NET up to their eyeballs and still need plenty of information. Not sure which mags he is talking about, but I too have noticed more and more articles on VERY future stuff which I don't have quite as much time to focus on these days. What percentage of subscribers are really ready for all of that?

Extracted from here:

My problem with many n-tier examples is that while they are getting better at separating the logical tiers, there is nothing about how to separate the tiers physically.  It can't be done easily, because everything is coupled with the web.config file. 

In this essay which questions why it seems people are not leveraging .NET to do real scalable enterprise apps, Sam reinforces a point that he has made often and states again in his comments on this post . Too many developers pick up Visual Studio.NET and kind of start where they left off, without looking to see what's new in there. They get stuck on the IDE improvements or the server controls and don't look deeper to the stuff that lets you build really awesome applications. Even if you are like me and not in a situation where you are building huge apps, you can still use your smaller apps as a playground for learning how to use these things and STILL realize a great benefit, not only to your skills and understanding of .net, but the applications will benefit. Sam seems to be mourning the fact that people are once again writing client/server apps because this is what the IDE wizards create and also that there are too many samples out there that demonstrate code without middle tiers. Joel Semeniuk talked about this exact same problem this morningin Trivial Samples? How about Patterns? 

I am not writing gigantic enterprise apps, yet everything I write for my clients, I write with some type of scalabilty in mind. I have one client that has gone from 15 to 100+ employees in the last 6 years and I think in another 5 they will have operations around the country. Everything that I write for them now, I try to build with that in mind. Even though I fear it will all be legacy code by then... Sometimes I know that what I am doing is overkill. Often I even don't charge them for some of the extra work I do on their apps that is possibly more for the sake of my education. Reading what Sam says definitely reinforces my justification for this.

Sam and I think very differently and work differently (if he's reading this, he probably just spit out his coffee). He writes big, I write small. I often get something different out of what he is writing than what his main point is (which tends to make him nutty - especially when I then go write about it in public...). But even I have slowly evolved my own methods as I have gotten deeper into .NET. In the past, yes, I too started out by seeing what's new in the IDE. I have, in the last 2 years though, learned a LOT about .NET and am working with a lot of pieces of this that always seem terribly daunting at first. BUt I know that by learning them and using them I am taking advantage of what .NET is all about.

Sam knows .NET from the bottom up, not the top down (in my mind) - take heed of his message. It was Sam that inspired me to really want to more than a developer using .NET but to be a .NET developer.

After Rich and I returned from a dog show (where I took these pics of Theo), I looked at our poor 10 year old Newfie, Tasha and realized she looked like a bear. So she got a day of beauty. First we gave her a big haircut (okay, a hack job). Her hair was probably 6 or 7 inches long!!

Here she is standing in front of the cupboard where her cookies are after the first part of her torture. This is SHORT hair!

The best part of the day for her was the ride in the car to the place where we can give her a bath.  She LOVES to go in the car.

Then there was the bath.

Lucky for us, we don't have to clean up the mess!

She's such a good girl! Afterwards, it took most of the day and night for her to dry off enough to comb her out. Now she's all beautiful again and smells good too!

My folks got two new puppies from France this summer, Celeste and Theo. They are actually 2nd generation puppies from their own kennel. Their mother, Rudy, who lives in France, is  a Blue Heaven doggie. Celeste and Theo are now 9 months old. Theo was with my mother and another one of her dogs, Bumper (2 yrs old) in Saratoga 2 weekends ago for a dog show. Rich and I went down. I haven't seen Theo since he was about 3 months. I am in love but I can't have him. He is very big already for his age (140 lbs) but incredibly balanced which is highly unusual. Here are some pictures of Theo and two with Bumper in my mom's hotel room. I love these and they are fun to look at so I hope they brighten up someone's day. Lots more pics here.

I can subscribe to some dasBlos rss feeds in Sharpreader but not to my own (for testing purposes) and not to a few others (eg. Damir Tomicic). Is anyone subscribing to my feed in SharpReader successfully? The rss looks fine in a plain old browser.

I have been using reflection for a while to open up forms dynamically and have been past the form properties and form methods hurdle for quite some time. I just had to raise an event from my form that is being loaded dynamically. A quick article by Dino Esposito on VB2theMax made it relatively easy to add this little bit of functionality into my .net quiver. Since I am doing it a bit differently (using a form, rather than a class) here is how I did it. This isn't my exact code, since I have stripped out some other trickery that I don't want to get in the way of what I am trying to show here.

Dim asmAssemblyContainingForm As [Assembly] = [Assembly].LoadFrom(“AssemblyContainingForm.DLL“)

Dim TypeToLoad As Type = asmAssemblyContainingForm.GetType(“assemblynamespace.formclassName")

Dim GenericInstance As Object

GenericInstance = Activator.CreateInstance(TypeToLoad)

Dim f As Form = CType(GenericInstance, Form)

'//here is the event setup

Dim frmEventUpdateTree As System.Reflection.EventInfo

'//“TreeSourceChanged“ is the name of the event being raised from my form

frmEventUpdateTree = TypeToLoad.GetEvent("TreeSourceChanged")

Dim frmDel As [Delegate] = [Delegate].CreateDelegate(frmEventUpdateTree.EventHandlerType, Me, "SetGetNewTreeTrue")

frmEventUpdateTree.AddEventHandler(f, frmDel)

Geeze - first it's someone on www.Geekswithblogs.net experimenting with a p_rn (don't want google) rss feed yesterday. Now this afternoon, just coincidentally I get this in my aggregator. I'm not offended or anything, it just seemed kinda funny. I didn't circle Patch your.... on purpose...

I just had a great idea from reading someone other people's blogs. I can say this:

I have been spending a lot of time with Avalon and Longhorn since I got my bits at PDC and I just love all of the things I have been able to do with it. It's really an amazing platform for developing stuff.

Did it work?

When I moved away from weblogs.asp.net, I was adamant that I wanted to be able to cross-post back to there. That way I could write whatever the heck I wanted here and then push only .net related stuff over there. I started to get frustrated by having a split personality, by having comments there and not here and finally by realizing that many people were reading my blog there as part of the main feed and not realizing that I am over here. So I haven't cross-posted in a long long time. (Though I did make two “teaser” posts that pointed to posts that I wrote here.) So I noticed today that on the new blogs.asp.advice feed that Jeff Julian has a blog there. That confuses me. I think that personally I am more of the mind that I want to read what someone says all in one place - I am after the person, not the topic so much. Steve Smith moved over there, too but i think that is going to be his only place for posting. Alex Lowe is there which now adds to his posts since he is also on blogs.msdn.com (aka weblogs.asp.net/MainFeed.aspx?GroupID=2). However Alex clearly states on the new blog that “This blog exists only to highlight interesting discussions on AspAdvice.com. Stay tuned for pointers! "

If you own a newfie then this is a BIG deal. Westminster is the crowning dog show in the country and  a Newfie won best in show. Josh is a Pouchcove dog. (Hmmm, maybe someday a Blue Heaven Kennels dog could win...) He's a beautiful boy.

Westminster is commonly won by small dogs. It's really nice to have these beautiful special creatures touted at such a high level.

Here's a little welcome to blogland, Robert! (from the Code Magazine party at PDC)

Learn more about Robert on the 12/16/2003 edition of .Net Rocks

Sorry to see Burlington, VT isn't on the upcoming tour.

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.