I think the app updater component (different from the app updater block) is great for helloworld apps. (I should say really, it's great for more than that since it will also grab dependency files). But I spent all day trying to get it to work on something a little more complex and am now giving up.

This is the 3rd time in 2 years that I have spent countless hours trying to leverage smart client type auto updating from a webserver. And the 3rd time it has nearly driven me beyond the pale. I do not feel like spending another 3 days in newsgroups and on forums trying to get this to work so my client is going to have to live with their old-fashioned script updates on the network and ftp download and copy for those who are on the www. Still. Aaaargh!

If  someone as smart and experienced as Sam Gentile has this much difficulty with the current SQL Express (BETA), imagine the poor user who is their actual target audience! Granted it's a beta, but Sam is used to working with very early bits...

(update: Read Brian Randell's response... and don't miss the comment thread)

Kasia points out that iEmployee.com, a web based timesheet application, looks pretty loosy goosey when it comes to security. Not having access to that portion of the application, I can't see what she is referring to. But if she says it's lame, it's lame.

I just came across a problem debugging a windows .net app that I have never seen before. I would hit my break point and then I did not have control of the app to step to the next line. After about 10 seconds control came back. If I tried to view a value in the Quick Watch window most of the values just had “error: cannot obtain value” in them. When I pushed the debugger and just kept trying to step through I eventually received a Threading Exception with the message “thread was being stopped”. Naturally I googled to see if I could figure this out - but google did not return anything for this phrase.  Eventually I came across this sample chapter from John Robbin's Debugging Microsoft .NET book, searched on the word “obtain” and before I actually read anything, the phrase “watch window” popped out at me. So I went back to my app, deleted the contents of the watch window which were hanging around from many previous debugging sessions, and voila, the problem was gone. I'll have to go back and read that chapter at some point!!

I see Elisa Johnson and the Canadian crew are there and I think I saw Joel Semeniuk's i.m. said something like T-17 since he's flying there too as a judge.

You know it's kind of a joke among those who really understand networks and system admin that people turn off their windows xp firewall in order to solve computer problems.

I'm probably going to spend a good part of my “weekend” trying to avoid being one of those people.

update: maybe I'm not so stupid - according to this kb article, at least

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!