I was surprised to see this as the front page story in Monday's Burlington Free Press. It is about the requirement of laptops in local colleges and also focused on the fact that the UVM Business School is requiring Tablet PC's (which they referred to as “laptops on steroids”). The article is title Luxury of Laptops.

Please note that the free press only archives one week's worth of news stories. I just don't understand this policy.  So since the link will break shortly I am pasting the article here. IT IS OWNED and COPYRIGHTED 2004 BY THE BURLINGTON FREE PRESS , Gannet News etc. here is the legal copyright info on that (this link is permanent thank goodness)

I just opened up a generics example I wrote in the tech preview of VS2005 in the Beta1 refresh. THe converter turned all of my VB generic declarations from this:

Dim JulieDate As New JuliesVBClass(Of Date)

to this

Dim JulieDate As New JuliesVBClass([Of] Date)

I'm sure it's a known issue by now so I'm just sticking it here as a reminder to myself. The compiler picked up all the errors of course that the brackets around Of created.

Someone emailed me to ask where they will find the best leaves driving from Boston to Vermont next week. LOL. I guess my nice photos of the leaves in front of my house are seen by more than just you geeks! Anyway here is a link to a page from the local daily paper (Burlington Free Press) that tries to help keep up with where the colors are.

This will be helpful to me also as I promised Rocky Lhotka a nice leaf peeping drive when he comes to Burlington to speak at Vermont.NET next week.

Congrats to Zeeshan Muhammad who is the leader of NED.NET User Group in Pakistan for being awarded as the INETA Middle East/Africa Region's best volunteer!

Here's how it went...

Yesterday Rich and I hiked south on the Long Trail from the Appalachian Gap. From near the Theron Shelter there is a great ledge where we ate lunch looking east at the Green Mountains and beyond to the White Mountains.

Here is a photo (well, 3). Click on it for an larger wide view. My camera does not do justice to the real thing.

It's a great day for a drive and good thing as I am heading up to Montreal for a few days.

I am speaking at two user groups. Tonight I will be presenting at GUVSM, basically translates as Montreal Visual Studio User Group. They will be getting the first outing of my Web Services Security for Dummies with WSE2 presentation that I have been working on for quite some time. The group is run by Regional Director Guy Barrette and the ever-charming Eric Coté. Mario Cardinal will also be doing a presentation on the Microsoft Application Blocks tonight. Mario is slated to do an extended version of this talk for Vermont.NET in January, also.

Tomorrow night, I will be speaking at GUMSNET - this is the Microsoft Montreal .NET Architecture Group. At this meeting I will be presenting on What's new in the .NET 2.0 Base Class Libraries for ASP.NET Developers (aka there's more to asp.net than system.web). Thanks to user group leader Sylvain Groulx for the invitation and for covering my overnight stay since it is about a 3 hour drive each way.

I will update the VTdotNET site and email everyone but for now this is the quickest I can do. Joe Stagner tells me that the powers that be have changed their minds about the location of the MSDN event and it will be IN BURLINGTON, not Montpelier. It's been a little confusing...  

Change is hard, but this is heart breaking. I know that the dynamics of being at a small all women's college was one of the defining factors in becoming the person that I am now. There is an interesting article here about the evolution of many women's colleges in central new york to co-ed institutions. Notable on that list is Cazenovia College as I grew up in Caz and remember the hullabaloo over their going co-ed.

Ahhh Wells. It is a very special place and in reality, I don't think that the addition of male students is going to change that. When I lived in Dutchess County, I had the great example of Vassar College nearby. That went co-ed many years ago and remains a very very special place. The spirit of what is special about Wells College is quite embedded into every brick, every blade of grass on that campus and in the hearts of every alum. So I have great confidence that this won't change.

well it wasn't a late night when I started.

I had to do some reconfiguration on the machine that I am using to do my wse2 demo tomorrow night at GUVSM in Montreal.

I am recreating some of these demos from scratch so I was practicing...

Suddenly I was getting errors on my user of an X509 Certificate.

Cryptography_CSP_NoPrivateKey

That was easily googled and the answer (in the newsgroups by the master himself ... Jeffrey Hasan) with the notion that there was something wrong with my certificate installs.

That made perfect sense since I changed my windows login password today and that wipes them out. However I checked them and they were still there, so I didn't worry. But now, I deleted and attempted (note that key word...) to reinstall them.

I was able to install 2 of the 3 sample certificates but was getting an error when imorting the private server certificate into the Local Computer/Personal store. The error is

“an internal error occurred. The private key that you are importing might require a cryptographic service provider that is not installed on your system.”

So I googled and found lots of problems with windows 2000 server. After about an hour of this, I was grabbing at straws, installed the certificate elsewhere and then just dragged and dropped it into the place I wanted. Tada. Problem solved. (Temporarily, since I do want to know why I can no longer import into that store.)

Almost.

However, in my reproduction of my demos I had forgotten something important.

I was now getting a new error message when running my demo that said :

The certificate's trust chain could not be verfied with the following reaons: A certificate chain processed, but terminated in a root certificate which is not trusted by the trust provider.

Now I was really frustrated. I googled again with no real luck. Then poked around the newsgroups again and saw something that triggered my memory that I needed to check “Allow Test Roots” in the WSE Settings (or just hand code this into web.config).

So all is well now and I have added some google juice to future people who may have these problems as well.

And as we all know, these lessons are painful and exhausting, but they are the lessons that really ingrain this stuff into your head.

Suffice it so say, constructing a secureconversation without the use of a web server certificate is not for the faint of heart. That's all I have to say on the subject at the moment.

I have been reading a lot and looking at the sample, but not until I literally stepped through step by step in the samples for SecureConversation and CustomXMLSecurityToken that are part of the extensive list of samples provided with the WSE2 SDK, did I really start grokking things enough so that I can do the type of customization that I need to do.

These are fantastic learning tools and quite often seeing them in action helps when your brain just can't put the pieced together on it's own.

I have gotten stuck on something in my WSE2 implementation (read lack of x509 cert on server is a huge pain in the butt). In trying to find someone who has dealt with this problem, I started finding newsgroup posts by SoftwareMaker, and after a bit of research realized that this is actually MSDN Regional Director (with his permission) William Tay. Here's his awesome blog.

by way of the Microsoft Tablet Team: Nine Tablet PC MVPs spent a week at Microsoft evaluating over one-hundred entries for the first round of the Microsoft Tablet PC Developer Contest, “Does your App Think In Ink?” Microsoft and the judges are very pleased with the number of new high-quality and innovative applications submitted. PC Magazine will announce the winners in November.

Although I have learned plenty about WSE2 from reading, thinking, going through the Hands on Lab and creating demos, I knew that if I really wanted to sweat, really wanted to cut my teeth, I would have to implement WSE2 into an existing application. One that wasn't designed in advance for WSE2 or to implement ws-security, etc. In addition, I have the greatly educational challenge of not having X509 certificates (for the moment) at my disposal on my client's web server. One thing this means is that I cannot just click “make this a secure conversation” in the WSE2 Policy Configuration Tool and be done with it. I will have to implement symmetric keys for this as well as for encrypting the response from my web service.

(by way of Hervey) First it was Eric Gunnerson(goin' to the movies), now Keith Ballinger (to Media Center)? Keith Ballinger? How could it be? Well, I can understand wanting to do something new....I get to all the time!   It's just so...hard...to....grok! (hmmm Hervey's link to Keith's post seems to be wrong so just go to Hervey's post for more info...)

Keith is the first person who really got me (and SO many of us) excited about web services.

Keith is the first person from Microsoft that I had personal contact with when Microsoft started their whole community thing. He replied to a question I posted on a newsgroup and I ran into the kitchen to tell my husband “Keith Ballinger actually just replied to a question of mine in a newsgroup!!” My husband was ummm, beyond confused, and just gave up, shrugged his shoulders and said something like “that's nice, honey.”

But the funniedst thing I have to say about Keith is my surprise the first time we met in person at how young he is. I figured he had to be at least way older than me since he new so much. So it was also my first real eye opener to how much incredible talent Microsoft has reigned in (or maybe that was my eye opener to how old I really am? since now I think young=under 40!)

I have been heading to the WSE Newsgroup lately to deal with some of my questions. Since I have a policy of trying to answer at least one question if I am asking a question, I  have been reading through lots of the questions. Of course, I haven't found one that I could answer that hasn't been tackled yet. And...even so, not many I could have answered anyway. Hervey Wilson seems to be mostly responsible for answering questions right now until there are more people with some expertise. But I am seeing a lot of really cool questions as people are digging into some interesting scenarios. I am definitely learning a lot by perusing this list. I recommend it.

Today we had the first meeting of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance. There were 40 people there and we had an amazing array of business types represented. Not only across technologies (where Microsoft had about a 60% share) but everything from contractors to businesses to upwards of 60 employees. There were companies who do consulting and companies who have software products. There were companies who consult for any type of business and companies who have expertise in particular markets - very strongly represented in Vermont is Health Care software but there was also representation of folks who have expertise in software for accounting, manufacturing, insurance and other industries.

It was really exciting since nothing like this has happened in Vermont before, while there are many state or regional software business associations around the country.

I'm equally thrilled to be able to accomplish something I have been trying to find a way to do for a long time - which is to share my now extensive resources with my local community beyond just learning about .NET programming.We have formed a temporary board to replace the steering committee which I was on and I will be on this board as we really bring this organization into being a legal entity and after that, we will vote for a real board of directors.

If you are in Vermont and are in the business of software, definitely check out the website www.vtsda.org where there is already some info, a place to list your information and take a survey so we can continue to understand what types of needs we all have as a group!

Thea Burger is happy to discover that there will be a women's luncheon at the TechEd in South Africa at the end of October. I look forward to hearing what it is like!!

A number of things gelled together this morning that necessitated this post.

a) this post by Jeff Prosise of Wintellect about the conundrum he has when asked so many questions in an email that are already answered in one (or more) of his (and others') books. But he is concerned (from experience) that suggesting the book as a reply, that the person would think he is only attempting to promote book sales. However, if you saw the email Jeff recieved, it is full of incredibly basic questions and way beyond what is reasonable to ask in an email to a stranger. Jeff is very generous with his time, but this person was basically asking for a personal education by email from Jeff.

b) I asked a question on the WSE newsgroup that turned out to be not about WSE but my own lack of good debugging knowledge. I haven't read John Robbin's (what I know is an) excellent book on Debugging in .NET. John is another one of the 3 founding partners of Wintellect. Also thanks to Hervey Wilson for his patience in answering my many recent questions in the newsgroups!

c) In July I had a conversation with Jeffrey Richter who was curious about how I found the experience of trying to work in C# when my real knowledgebase if coding in VB. The things that I found confusing astonished Jeff who (very politely) asked if I had ever read his book on programming with .NET.  I know that this book (Applied .NET Programming in  C# or VB version) book is a bible. I have had it here and passed it on to a vtdotnet member and had looked at bits and pieces but not read it. I actually have re-ordered it and am still awaiting my new copy (which I won't give away this time). Jeff, of course is the 3rd of the Wintellect founding members.

So what am I getting at here? Clearly there is SO much excellent information out there. Clearly it is impossible to get to and digest it all. I wish I was able to find the time and energy (like the amazing devourer of .NET books, Jason Salas) to read all of these books that I have heard SO many wonderful things about. But I also wish I had time to take my dogs for longer and more fun walks, etc. etc.

I think it also gets back to the wonderful point made by Leon Bambrick that reminds me not to beat myself up that I am not an expert (or even 1/2 of an expert) at debugging in .NET. There are SO many things in .NET that are fascinating and important to know and leverage. I *do * know that in time, I focus on one thing after another and learn more and more and more -- just not all at once. It's been two years already! Eeek.

So I just suppose that this post is a reminder to myself and anyone else who could use it that you and I are not inadequate! <g>