This is not even new news. But it's new to me. And the best is that Jon Box's company, Quilogy, is the one that wrote the software.

Here is a page with a description of the project and a great video about it.

Most notable is that the Zoo was honored with a 2003 InfoWorld 100 Award, as well as a Microsoft Best Innovation in Education runner-up award at the Public-Sector Partner Executive Summit in May 2004.

Now this is an event I would love to have been at with these two clowns! Jon & Russ are smart, fun and great presenters and I hear there were ribs, to boot!

Yes you read that right. A 4th of July tradition in Bristol VT (which is the closest “real town” to where I live being 12 miles away) are the pre-parade Outhouse Races. SInce we used to live much further away, this will be the first time we have watched them. Apparently the rules are they have to be human powered and there has to be someone sitting inside (a “rider“) and there has to be a door (“for privacy, of course“)! The above link has the actual rules.

I had a new table to add to a sql server database. The table was already pre-defined in a dataset schema in vs.net. I thought”wouldn't it be nice to create a table from an xsd as easily as I can create an xsd from a table?“

I could have created the table by hand in 2 minutes.

But instead I went over the XMLSpy website to see if they had that feature and it looks like they do. So I installed XML Spy Enterprise 2004 from my demo cd. I went to register for the 30 day trial and got a message that said it was an outdated version and I needed to download a new one. So I downloaded XMLSpy Professional latest version and isntalled that. Then I downloaded the software that integrates it with VS.NET. Then I waited while the help file updated. So now it has been over an hour. And let's see how much longer it will take me to figure out how to do that task in XML Spy so I can save myself 2 minutes. Isn't this typical for all of us, though?

Update: 10 minutes. That was only because there were multiple tables in the dataset with relationships and I had to do it over again so that I could get just the one table I wanted. Very nice and easy. Of course this is about  .05% of XML Spy and the entire product is a bit overkill for just that but now that I finally have it installed, I will surely begin playing with its new features. This particular feature is not in the free XML Spy Home Version. The feature-rich Pro version is $500, which I would be hard pressed to buy unless I couldn't live without it. I did pay $300 just for one XCeed component - the .NET Stream Compression tool. So it's not that I'm cheap or unwilling. Although it did kind of kill me to recieve a few free licenses to raffle to my user group 4 months later.

This was a REALLY difficult problem to track down so I am adding it into the world for google to help someone else (or even myself again).

I used one cyrstal report as a basis for another. So I literally copied the report files to a new folder.

When running the report an error was thrown that I could not debug:

What is strange about this error is that the namespace MDTTests is from the original report. So I knew that it was left over somewhere in this report. It took me over an  hour to find it. Now it seems obvious and easy to find, I don't know what took me so long to try this

Once in here, I could see the offending code that just needed to be deleted. This is related to linking a sub report but does not show up in the dialog for linking a sub report and it does not get cleared on it's own for some reason. In fact you can see that each time I went to fiddle with this setting through the link sub-report dialog, it just kept adding to the list.

I removed all but the last of these lines and my report came up perfectly.

My MVP award ended yesterday. But thankfully I just received an email that I am an MVP for another year now.

Oh great, something to look forward to this afternoon. Mind you I live in Vermont, not Kansas. Generally this means shutting everything down and completely disconnecting from electrical outlets and phone lines. I learned my lesson well about 10 years ago.

That's what I thought too when I first saw the headline earlier this week on CNN that the IRR's were being called up and it was the first time since Desert Storm. I thought that's what Steve Smith was and he got called up in April. So I decided I must just be confused, but Steve confirms that they are talking about the exact same class of reservists that he fell into.

I had a nice surprise the other day when I was automatically signed me into i.m. by opening up a vpn connection. I got pinged by Steve who was on leave for a few days, so I got to chat with him for a while. Ever the geek, he told me he had just finished downloading Whidbey Beta1.

He's back at Ft. Bliss now and due to go to Kuwait any day now and then Iraq shortly after that. Think good thoughts...

I give up. I really truly lost my pocket pc. I think I left it in my room in the hotel in Montreal last week. I didn't realize that I was actually that attached to it. It had my name & address & phone # on the back and can't be much use to anyone without the perpherials (battery charger, etc). Maybe it will show up in the mail someday.

I think it's replacement will have to be a pocketpc phone though.

Update: Dec. 15, 2005! It's back after 18 months! Check out this new post.

There is a super duper young guy at one of my client's who is a very talented graphic artist with plenty of java website experience - you now... one of those Mac users . He was tasked with adding a little more flare to some of the internal websites I have done for his company. I was a little nervous about how this would affect my websites. I sent him the html for the pages he was to work on and he sent me html pages back. All I had to do was copy and paste the key segments from the html he returned back into my original pages and upload the revised aspx along with some stylesheets and a separate images folder and voila - new look, same old functionality. That was my first experience partnering with someone on the UI portion of asp.net sites. So I'm glad it worked out well. Oh, I had warned him not to touch the <asp: > controls or I would chop off his head, so that seemed to pay off. (And I believe his ego has recovered from the threat...)

Hooray.

Much better and easier (and faster) access here. I never understood why they were relegated to gotdotnet.

Here's the main info area for BCL
msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/bcl/default.aspx

And here is the team
msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/bcl/BCLTeam.aspx

And here is their blog
blogs.msdn.com/bclteam

(thanks to BradA for the pointer...)

Thanks to whichever one of you recommended me to Paul Vick's VB Blogger list.

Ahh - looks like Sam gets to do this as part of his .NET Supreme Wonk Architect job. Darn it's not fair . I still had my clients calling me today with all of the usual stuff and code to write that they are waiting for.  Then since dinner I have managed to knock off a few of my Vermont.NET and INETA tasks that have been piling up. So I am relying at the moment on what I'm seeing in blogs and on some lists and these three posts of Sam's stuck out in the crowd for me.

I was thinking about the void between the .net mvps and the other MS technology mvps at the mvp summit in April and wondering if there is going to be a similar community gap between vs express developers and ummm ... what will we be called ... “real”?... developers. I imagine there will be many people who just stop with the express products rather than using them as a stepping stone to .NET development. Will they be embraced in our community or treated like 2nd class citizens? Hey, does that mean VB developers will finally have someone to pick on now*?

Seriously. I really was wondering about this as I was considering Avonelle's post on trying to understand the VS2005 Express products in relation to VS2005. This probably means it's time to go to sleep.

*kidding...I'm KIDDING!

Every week or so I go back to the Pearson Vue site to see if Microsoft has released the results of the Security beta test that I took in early May. It was a bit of a traumatic event as you can see from the blog post I wrote when I got home. Being a beta test you never know when you will get the results. I haven't received any emails. But I just checked the site and...

Though I am no expert, I am glad to see that what I confidently know about .net security combined with the intuition that I have acquired over 20 years of software development saw me through. Phew.

I believe that I am able to use this test towards my certification. It is an elective toward MCAD or MCSD. So I guess that makes me an MCAD. Now I will have to take the web services to be an MCAD and the architecture tests for an MCSD. Someday....

I am a die-hard NO WAY JOSE kinda girl when it comes using the visual data wizards for my apps. No for connections, data sets or anything. I like to write my own data access thank you very much and then hook everything up at run time. However, I got really stuck because not only do I not use them , I don't  even know *how* to use them. I have let all of those demos slip out of my head to make room for things I need. But I got bit when I wanted to design an Infragistics UltraWinGrid at design time due to the fact that my datasource was somewhat complex and it is nice to see what I'm doing. I had a nice little typed dataset class that I created and wanted to assign it to the datasource at design time. Something I have never done! But the class was not available in the drop-down for the DataSource property of the grid. Finally I figured out to drag a “dataset” from the toolbar onto my form and that's where I was able to select my dataset class.

I have to say, it was pretty handy! I wonder if it's time for some remedial VS training...

I'm laughing because I'm thinking of Sam Gentile and his disdain for all things drag & drop - but Sam, I just had no way around it this time!

Though the cat got out of the bag a little early, the betas just launched! And a beautiful new MSDN developer center to go with them.

VS2005 Beta 1 (released June 29th)
How to get it MSDN Subscribers will be the first to receive Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, which will be available for subscriber download within just a few days. MSDN Subscribers will also receive Beta 1 in their next MSDN shipments. Within a few weeks, non-subscribers will also be able to order a copy of Beta 1 for a nominal fulfillment fee.

Express Products (Beta)
VB Express, C# Express, Visual C++ Express, Visual J# Express, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL 2005 Express!

SQL 2005 Beta 2
hmmm - maybe they didn't announce it yet - still looking...

Congrats to all at MS, including MSDN,  for so many launches!

From MSDN maven (ooh - that sounds old, but she's not!) Sara Williams, this new feature of MSDN just went live:

At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions.  You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions.  You can vote for your favorites.  You can share workarounds.  And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams.   Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes. 

Now that I have switched to non-admin there is one problem that forced me back to admin last time I tried this. Building VB6 executables. This may be due to the fact that this app has been worked on for years as an admin, but as a non-admin, I do not have access to particular registry keys that need to be modified during the build. (And I once did attempt to deal with that, but really screwed up my whole system!) So I finally figured out a workable solution. I can do all of my development in my non-admin mode. When it is time to build (which is rare these days anyway), I just log out, log in as admin, build, do a few QA checks and then when I 'm happy, log back out and back in to my non-admin login.  THen do the QA checks again and all is well.

I tried to “run as” admin when starting up VB6 but that wasn't' working very well (can't remember what the problem was...). This solution seems to be okay. Just so long as I am not LIVING in admin mode. Then

Peter Rysavy loves tablets more than anyone I have ever met. He is sad that people don't just love them like he does. I think Robert Scoble understands that when Peter is unhappy about this, it is just as (or maybe more) valuable to those who are trying to market the whole concept of ink as when he coos about them. He's just frustrated. Tablets are more than the next new thing or something cool or a meme to him. He really truly loves  and believes the technology. I think that Carl Franklin should write a blues song for Peter's as-yet unrequited love.