Werner reports positively on having Bill Gates at the Cornell Campus. Quite a different view fromt Ajay's report from Carnegie-Mellon!

The folks on the infrastructure committee for INETA, especially Devin Rader, are building a phenomenal new website for INETA. They are spending a lot of their personal time on this, as it is a volunteer project, and would welcome some volunteers with C# and ASP.NET experience to help them out. Read more at http://www.ineta.org/developers/

just time for a couple of quick notes on Edge 2004 East

I finally got to meet Dave Seidel in person - we have a bit of a funny history so it was fun to meet up.

Carl Franklin, Pat Hynds, Ted Neward and Michael Steiffel all came to my presentation. I decided not to be daunted and was extremely fortunate to ahve some great feedback from these very experienced speakers after the fact.

After I did my talk, I found an email from Kit George with all kinds of great pointers to improve my deck! I'll implement them anyway <g> Thanks Kit.

I got a pre-press copy of Paul Vick's new VB book for Addison-Wesley. Thanks Curt! And met another one of my email pals from A-W...Heather Mullane.

I was interviewed by Jeremy for sys-con radio to replace my (so bad I have never listened to it) interview they did at PDC. Only got asked one ringer question, the interview was fun.

I almost died of a heart attack as a back seat passenger of Pat Hynds car driving around Boston. I'm sure he and TEd are still laughing their asses off at me.

Thanks Derek for taking us to “Cheers” for dinner. After being surrounded by so many Java people for the days there, it was great to be with many of my .NET pals!

I attended Pat's ASP.NET Security talk. Can't hear these things too many times (especially in prep for next weeks devdays talk.)

Had a total blast with Ted Neward - he and another pal of his from TSS and I went to the OLDEST restaurant in America  - the union street chowder house.

Gotta run... Hopefully I'll get to come back and link.

I have had the good fortune of meeting one of the two Dave Chappell's, this one, at TechEd and again at PDC. Right now I am sitting with the “other” Dave Chappell. But now he is the other other Dave Chappell as he has recently [and quite proudly] lost 60 pounds.

Today, I was looking at a little website I did for my mom's book in 2002 and really surprised myself at what pretty website it is. I just wanted to show it off. Getting stuck with design work is really daunting for a developer. It's just a little frontpage site that uses bcentral, but it was perfect for them. They have sold hundreds of books from it too!

I have also always been very proud of the site I did for my sister's company, Katie's Bumpers. That is also a Frontpage site that ueses bCentral for e-commerce. I started this site for her when she began her business in January of 2002. She now has her products selling in over 500 stores in the U.S. and Canada and also some catalogs!

I have to admit that I really struggled with both of these, since I was given no direction really as to what the “look” should be at all. I know what I like and don't like, but not how to get there. So I just kept changing and changing and changing it until I finally liked the way it looked.

I thought this was funny - but geeze Ted, you HAVE a real, grown-up title now!!

This is just the schedule of when we are getting interviewed by Sys-Con Radio while at the Edge 2004 East conference. I need a replacement for my bomb interview (well, I never listened to it really but I'm pretty sure it sucked) that they did at PDC.

Latest goody in the spam box:

a company in Thailand that is offering polygraph services for potential and current employees as well as hand-writing analysis and on-line ethics tests. A new low...

Pre-employment   polygraph    testing After you interview your candidates and you choose the one you think youwould like to hire, we will polygraph them to verify their CV. It is thefastest and easiest way to do it instead of trying to verify previous educationand employment by phone or letters that takes a long time. And sometime doesnot get the response on time or at all. We can provide you with pre-employmentpolygraph testing. This will verify the information on the CV from thecandidate him self. And usually you will get all the information you need thesame day or the next.
Periodic     screening For any size company that need to check on periodic basis that employeesare keeping with company roles and regulations. We will polygraph a fewemployees on monthly or bi-monthly basis. The employees never know when thetesting will take place or who will be tested.
Fact   finding    (specific issues) When ever company roles and regulations are broken or any kind ofdisputes, polygraph is the best way to get to the truth.

I love this post from fellow Vermont resident (we are only “flatlanders”-- the definition of “Vermonter” is “five in the ground”...) on his geeky desire to have an excuse to really dig into xml serialization that was battling with the sanity of not overextending his architecture on a simple website that he is doing for a local charity. Read on...

- 935 Pennsylvania Avenue
- Washington, DC 20535, USA
- (202) 324-3000

Unbelievable! Well, no, actually, the sad truth is that it IS believable.

http://www.brianstorms.com/archives/000276.html

I love this book title and description!

I started the day reading “feh!” in a Kent Sharkey post and ended it with Ted Neward peppering a worthwhile rant  with “chutzpah” and “oy”. It made me smile.

This is probably old news to many who have been playing with VB.NET Whidbey for a while...

I noticed that when debugging, if I didn't have have NEW in a custom class, the debugger stops on code that instantiates that class, givint a little popup message “There is no source code for the current location.” You can hit okay and then just continue and all  is fine. This is not affected by Option Explicit or Option Strict settings.

Probably something that has been duly noted by now. I wish I had time to do this stuff this summer when it would have been useful for the VB team.

Scott Nonnenburg, the Debugger PM, just posted a blog about visualizers and it's not just a teaser it's is a how-to.

Oh this is torturous! I want to drop everything and go play with this, now!

hmmm-- not quite! I got a run time error not compile time. Any working examples out there?

SPOT outtage! Day old stock quotes. Yesterday's weather. Hahahahah. Oops! Sorry, Scott, Sorry Peter.

The DevDays web track last session goes over Microsoft's entry to eWeek's 2002 OpenHack contest - now renamed and even updated. Though we are reminded that Microsoft's application was not hacked once even after 80,000 attempts,  Oracle's app did suffer a few hacks. Okay they were minor but... (here's eWeek's wrapup of that)

a few days ago I posted a some code  that (if you trust me, if you really really trust me...) you can drop into your asp.net application folders to get a quick look at the various paths returned by server.mappath or directory class and stop the nonsense with the guesswork!

Rick Strahl just posted a nice examination of ASP.NET paths, so I wanted to put them both together in one post. (ummm - that's the one you are reading at the moment...)

Duncan Mackenzie posted a little code sample that shows the sweet syntax of

For Each cust as Customer in Customers
 ...
Next

which I so very much prefer over

Dim cust as Customer
for each cust in Customers
...
next

Simple, minor, but just a nice difference. I always hated that extraneous line of code. And hated it more when we moved to vb.net and could just declare a variable and give it a value all in one line.

However! ...she said with a grin.

Why stop there?

Why do I even have to (re-)define what the objects in Customers are?

Why can't I just write

for each whateverthehecktheobjectsareinmycollection in Customers
 ...
next

and have .net look at that and say “well d'uh, I know what whateverthehecktheobjectsareinmycollection is going to be because Customers is filled with Customer objects, so I will just implicitly cast the whateverthehecktheobjectsareinmycollection to a Customer.

?

Just an idea... maybe it's already there and I haven't discovered it yet...

Or how about if I have a generic collection of generic objects?? Oh dear, it looks like I won't be going to bed early tonight after all... Damn!

Do you, Mr/Ms Developer, think Security is boring? Well after seeing most of the content for the DevDays web track - my answer to that is : TOUGH SHIT!

DevDays is doing a big job of trying to make this stuff accessible and palatable because it is THAT important that the secure development practices message and the HOW-TO get pushed out there.

I recognize a lot of my own mistakes in what they are trying to teach you not to do, even though I have really made an effort to do things securely.

I love my track because the first few tracks teach you about all the REASONS you need to write secure code. I get to be the knight in shining armor. Hmmmm - are there female Knights - cause I don't know if “lady“ works for me! Anyway, I get to save the day with all of the solutions! Thanks Thom for assigning me this session!

Check the cities. See if one is near you and go!

(Darn, if only I was getting a commission! )