Here's the description:

This will be an opportunity to continue conversations begun at PDC as well as the TechEd 2004 Women in I.T. Luncheon. Meet other women who are programmers and discover that you are not, in fact, an alien! Chat about our visibility in the industry and other related issues that sometimes make us scratch our heads and wonder.

I tried to word this carefully so that nobody would start in on me. If you have any questions in that vein, just read this. The session is not intended to be some political bra-burning event. Do you know how expensive bras are, anyway? At PDC we had a cool discussion that involved also a lot of men who were curious about their daughter's future in tech or trends they have noticed in university etc.

Personally I just love meeting other women at conferences who are programmers. I don't feel quite so out of place. We have an abnormally high percentage of women in my user group, too.

There is also going to be a Women in Tech luncheon with a panel, similar to last TechEd. So I will pull some strings to ensure that this BOF is AFTER that luncheon.

Oh and go vote! It's www.ineta.org/bof  then “proposed sessions”.

There are a bunch of other great sessions up there already, too.

For some reason, I have not been that interested in code generation up until recently. I have looked only briefly at some of the tools out htere and not at all at others. I guess I saw them as an all or nothing situation - rather than leveraging code generation for bits and pieces of my development and then going back to my old control freak usual self for the rest. However, recently two things have been turning my head. One is constant exposure to it through Kathleen Dollard and the other was seeing an example of code generation that Jason Beres showed in our user group meeting on Monday. I watched him, with a button, create pieces of code that I am writing by hand - the way I would write them. It was a “v-8” moment. Can't drop everything and play with it at the moment, but it will happen - hopefully before the next time I start coding up a class full of properties that are more than 50% matching the structure of a table in my database.

I have been using Anil's fantastic weblog as a study guide in my attempt to make myself more knowledgeable and hopefully helpful at my next DevDays talk (Boston 3/16).

My client has a recent hire with the last name O'Dell. In seven years of working with them, this is the first employee with an apostrophe in their name. I am suddenly discovering a few gaps with my applications. He's a good egg and isn't taking it too personally.

From Ali the plumber:

http://www.aliaghareza.com/2004/03/writing_a_multi.html

[Warning - I am NO Indigo or ws-messaging, etc. wonk , but] this post, by Rich of the indigo team, which references a post by Omri, caught my eye.

I learned a while ago why DIME can suck - if you have a large attachment, you can't truly leverage the fluidity of streaming since the entire thing needs to get cached first.

So when someone writes about DIME and web service attachments I pay attention.

Rich Turner writes today about MTOM which is still a little wobbly but (from the best I can get from Omri's post) will be worth the wait because of how it will be able to work with ws-security down the road.

For today, Rich says, we are still stuck with DIME (if Simon Fell ever followed me to my new blog, surely he is cringing with that statement... ) and its limitations and (though I recommend you read Rich's and Omar's entire posts) do heed Rich's advice: “...we strongly urge you to consider chunking your messages into smaller payloads at the source and and de-chunking them at the destination.”

I love any excuse to make reference to the the iLoo! (evil laugh)

And I found a new excuse: Leon Bambrick has a funny (well, all of his posts are funny) look at some software that he things should be written - the toilet reservation system. Watch  out for those puns!

I wonder if Jeffrey will sell these on eBay

http://mcmanus.typepad.com/grind/2004/03/free_marketplac.html

Although Jason is an INETA speaker, he recently started working for Infragistics and it was Infragistics that sponsored him coming to speak to Vermont.NET monday.

Jason was such a hit with our user group (see this example on Dave Burke's blog), I am still getting emails from attendees thanking me and Jason for this great meeting. Jason talked about the many interesting solutions he came up with when working on a multi-tier windows application. He didn't even point out any of the infragistics controls he used. I was pretty impressed. I know that even if he had said “oh by the way... that's an infra grid” or something like that , nobody would have run form the room screaming “eek marketing!”

Jason is a fun, nice nice guy and he has a ball presenting. Thanks so much to Infragistics for sending Jason, buying pizza for the night and for the two licenses to NetAdvantage that Jason raffled off at the end.

I am *so* happy to see this. Sam did this talk at Vermont.NET last summer. It is a phenomenal presentation that made everyone in the group (from newbies to experts) feel like they gleaned a real inside understanding of .NET. And Sam is a lot of fun when he gets going on this topic that he is so passionate about.

Here's the schedule that I have gleaned from his blog (though you can find the entire upcoming ineta speakers schedule on the www.ineta.org website).

These are all INETA sponsored events.

New Hampshire .NET 3/18

Maryland and Pennsylvania Microsoft Users Group 4/29

From Don Kiely

The Code Generation Network's Jack Herrington recently interviewed Kathleen Dollard about code generation, her new book (Code Generation in Microsoft .NET), and the state of programming in general and .NET specifically. It's an interesting read; Kathleen has some interesting thoughts about where programming should go.

Read the interview here. I've been using her techniques along with Rocky Lhotka's CSLA framework (the book and his site) for my current projects, and it's a sweet combination.

Incidentally, Kathleen also has her code generation Web site up and running. Check it out!

Oooh I am so looking forward to the dataset merge and datatable merge functions in Whidbey.

In the meantime, I have some little functions that I use in my .net apps to do this. This topic came up in our user group meeting last night and I mentioned my work around and many people asked me to share the code with them. It's not a big secret - the trick is two-fold. 1) Accept the fact that a datatable that is part of a dataset is superglued, stapled, chained for life to that dataset and cannot be added to any other dataset. Period. The only way to detach it is to kill it and once it is dead it can't be married to another dataset anyway. 2) check out importrows!

So here is my routine, and it is overloaded.

Public Function MoveTabletoNewDS(ByRef DestDS As DataSet, ByRef SourceTBL As DataTable)
   Dim newTable As DataTable = SourceTBL.Clone
   newTable.TableName = SourceTBL.TableName
   Dim oRow As DataRow
   For Each oRow In SourceTBL.Rows
     newTable.ImportRow(oRow)
   Next
   DestDS.Tables.Add(newTable)
End Function

This overload is so that I can also work with strongly typed datasets. I want to pull a datatable out of one dataset and put it into another strongly typed dataset.

Public Function MoveTabletoNewDS(ByRef DestDS As DataSet, ByRef SourceTBL As DataTable, ByRef NewTable As Object)
   'newtable has been created from a strongly typed object
   newTable.TableName = SourceTBL.TableName
   Dim oRow As DataRow
   For Each oRow In SourceTBL.Rows
     newTable.ImportRow(oRow)
   Next
   DestDS.Tables.Add(newTable)
End Function

Here's the home page for Christoph who did the OpenHack demo at DevDays in Houston.

Here are some recent entries - he is following up from his talk (and questions he was asked) at DevDays and with more info and how-to's

• DevDays:Restricting access to IIS websites.
• DevDays: A simple way to configure a domain account to access the database
• DevDays: OpenHack and encrypting the encryption key

Infragistics recently scooped up Jason Beres (lucky them) and he moved from Florida to New Jersey. Tomorrow they are sending Jason, who is also an INETA speaker, to speak at Vermont.NET. Jason will fly in in the early afternoon, get a quick tour of Burlington, do the meeting then we'll head back downtown to check out some of our famous college bars. Of course, it's monday night - things are a little quiet. But all are free to join us. I know - there are *SO* many bloggers in Burlington. Actually there is Dave Burke and Roman Rehak. We used to have Joy (sniff sniff I miss her) “Cleverhack” Larkin who moved to PA to go to law school.

My user group is VERY spoiled. Read this prior post to see our list of hot .NET speakers who have come and are planning to come to Vermont.

Here's the scoop on tomorrow's meeting:

Who: Jason Beres
When: Monday March 8th 6pm-8 or 9pm
Where: KnowledgeWave, 300 Community Drive, So. Burlington, VT
Topic: Writing an N-Tier Windows Form Application
This presentation will look at the Tracker reference application and eBook as a real world example using key Microsoft technologies: Web Services Enhancements WS-Security, allowing secure authentication from the Windows Forms application to a web service for data access Microsoft Data Access Application block Microsoft Exception Management application block Microsoft Application Updater application block Multithreaded Windows Forms application for data access Structure for implementing online and offline data access without using Datasets XML Web Service data access or data access directly to SQL Server
Why: Well d'uh - to learn a lot, to eat free pizza to get great swag (courtesy of Infragistics)

Jason will be the next victim to stay at our house on the mountain and will then head up to Montreal on Tuesday to speak at GUVSM.

MSDN was very generous in purchasing a booth at each DevDays event for local user groups to share in order to let attendees know about the user groups.

If you are a user group leader and are NOT set up to do this and want to be for an upcoming DevDays event, contact ugrelations@ineta.org asap.

If your user group is about to do a booth and has any questions, needs to talke with other local u.g. leaders or whatever, let us know and we will help you.

Lastly, if you already have done this at a now past DevDays event, again, let us know how it went!

Well that quote comes from this post (On the Road to Indigo - is .NET REmoting Dead?) by Microsoft's Rich Turner and it caught my eye. In it, Rich explains the future of .NET Remoting.

I personally don't have a lot of (well...any) experience with .NET Remoting. Once I got through the learning curve of web services (since that was what MS was pushing at the beginning of .NET) I got lazy and used web services even in situations where I knew that .NET remoting would have been more efficient.

So when I was at PDC listening to Don Box talking about Indigo and saying that if you want to use indigo, just keep using web services and and forget about remoting. I felt so justified. But according to Rich, I (like many, I am sure) missed the point.

So if you are using .net remoting and concerned about it's future, go checkout Rich's post because I am NOT the person to be explaining this to you.

Now that my awareness is up about the issues with XP SP2 from this Infoworld article, I caught this article from Microsoft Watch that has some more information. (I really have not had time to look into this so I am grateful for Joris Evers and Mary Jo Foley's articles on this topic). Mary Jo notes that there will be some service packs for VS.NET 2002 and 2003 in the wings to help with some of the breaking changes. However, everything else seems to be up to us - oh all of those VB6 apps I have out there...sniff sniff. I wonder about my older FrontPage and ASP sites and my friends who run their businesses with Access database.

Though I'm sure she  didn't invent the phrase, Mary Jo Foley's article on the MVP Summit is the first time I ever heard anyone refer to MVPs as the volunteer army. That's pretty funny. My husband probably wouldn't laugh though. The common joke around our house is that Microsoft has become my favorite charity organization, though the image of the red bucket and little bell doesn't seem to fit.

A new article in InfoWorld highlights the issue of breaking changes FOR DEVELOPERS in the SP2 release of WinXP. According to Pat Hynds (New England RD and CTO at Critical Sites) if we a) are paying attention to the security messages for developers such as at DevDays and b) take note of the information that is on this MSDN page that is for developers to prepare, things shouldn't be so terrible.

Apparently Microsoft has been getting the word out to developers. I actually hadn't noticed that yet. I know we are getting lots of info on how to write secure apps (and I am sharing that as well). I just hadn't heard yet that this is a breaking change.

I think what it means for me is 2 3 things:

1) I have to test ALL of the apps I have in production against SP2 before any of my clients start upgrading (ugggh...)

and

2) I need to be aware of what I will need to do differently in my development environment. Hopefully, this is akin to dealing with the change from IIS5 - ASPNET account to IIS6 - Network Service account. That wasn't so horrible.

3) (added) Oh yeah, and I don't have a spare computer that I dare install the SP2 on to do all of this testing. This is a big problem. I have whidbey on my laptop and need it to work for learning and for upcoming presentations. I already have the Lonestar beta on my tablet and have to assure that I can use that to do my DevDays demos at Boston, plus I don't feel like installing all of my apps and dev tools on there anyway. My husband uses his computer for doing paperwork for his business. So I'm kind of up a creek right now anyway.

From that page (link is above):

To developers these technologies will have impacts on the applications that they create and the tools they use. This page contains resources to assist developers in dealing with these impacts.  

From the article (quoting someone from MS)

Large vendors of software are getting help from Microsoft to make sure their applications are compatible with SP2, Goodhew said. Smaller vendors and others, such as enterprise software developers, need to do their own testing. "It is really up to developers to do the due diligence," he said.

If developers do find that SP2 breaks their applications, it most likely means that they were not following best practices in terms of security when writing their applications, according to Goodhew.

Definitely pay attention to this!!!

In the long run it is a good thing of course. I just wish someone from Microsoft would come to *my* home office and make sure everything is still working! Pancakes and maple syrup anyone??

I was thinking about the Whidbey bits in the DevDays bags. This is not the same audience of leading edge developers that go to PDC. I wonder if it's just “yet another cd” in the bag or if people are tripping over themselves to get home and install the bits and check out Whidbey. Has anyone heard any type of buzz about this from attendees?