Rich & I visited a good friend in the hospital yesterday who is a .NET programmer. She was waiting for her next pain meds and was feeling pretty crappy when we got there, but she's a total trooper. I brought a handful of my favorite novels and a newly minted tech book. Even in her pain, her face completely lit up when I showed her “Best Kept Secrets in .NET” by Deborah Kurata. I mean, she had been very happy with the chocolate croissant I brought, but the book definitely took the cake for her!

by way of The Daily Grind

Do you read tech blogs? We're looking for you to tell us which are the best of the best. Right now, it's your chance to nominate your favorite independent tech blogs.

What kinds of tech blogs are eligible?
All blogs that cover technology and are published independently of a major publishing company are eligible.

Here are some examples of the types of weblogs you can nominate.
1. Personal weblogs, discussing technology from one individual's perspective
2. Personal weblogs, digesting and disseminating technology news
3. Group weblogs, digesting and disseminating technology news

Ten finalists, one winner, $500 worth of coffee, a whole bunch of promotion.
Ten finalists will be announced on November 1 and will receive a "2004 Best Tech Blog Finalist" logo and six months of promotion across TechWeb Network sites. Voting begins on November 1 and on November 15 the winner will be announced. The winner receives a special "2004 Best Tech Blog" logo and (to keep those blogging juices flowing late into the night) a $500 coffee card from Starbucks.

www.sevendaysvt.com (they only leave stories there for one week) just featured local political blogger, Jerome Armstrong (www.myDD.com) of Howard Dean blogging fame, on in the popular, independent, Village Voice for Vermont-esque weekly paper.

Paul Wilson mentioned that his blog was featured in the local paper where he lives.

If you are experiencing installing Visual Studio Beta 1 Refresh from the DVD that was distributed at the current round of MSDN events, read Bernard Wong's blog here.

From today's Burlington Free Press

About 600 Vermont Army National Guard soldiers were mobilized Friday morning to provide security in support of the U.S. war in Iraq, but Vermont's soldiers are not scheduled to go into the turbulent country. They report for training Nov. 15.

Also two soldiers with Vermont ties died in the past few days in Iraq.

Norwich University graduate U.S. Army Maj. Charles Robert Soltes was killed in Iraq this week when the Humvee he was riding in was ambushed. He becomes the 14th with Vermont ties to die in Iraq.

Michael Voss, 35, moved to North Carolina nearly 20 years ago; many of his family members remain in Enosburg Falls. Voss was killed near Tikrit, Iraq, on Oct. 8. The service is to be held in North Carolina.

I have made some pretty good headway with my complex App Updater Block needs, which I wrote about the other day here.

However I have run into a roadblock. One of the things I was trying to accomplish is actually doing authentication and authorization before the user even got the updates. I have a reason for this. However, I realize that now getting the user info to the new process that my stub application starts up is going to be a task which is not what I want to start hammering on. Although...maybe a combination of reflection and getcurrentprocess and then adding in a method to my main exe to pass an object in and then I can invoke that method and ...and...and.. oh I'm too tired for this tonight! I have used reflection with assemblies but never with a process, so I could just be on drugs with that idea.

.NET 2.0 's version of the ProcessStartInfo class actually has username and password as well as  LoadUserProfile (boolean) properties that will help me do this next year, but not now. And of course, we'll have ClickOnce then anyway...

I will probably have to rethink my architecture again and another way to accomplish the result I was after that was the reason for putting the authentication right up front in the stub application.

Quick - name the first five “famous“ women developers (authors/conference speakers) you can think of (sql server included...)

Let's see - I go: Deborah Kurata, Kathleen Dollard (my VB roots are showing), Kate Gregory, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Kimberly Tripp.

Now quick name the next 5 that come to mind...

uh oh, this picture looks like it spells trouble...  Click on the picture to read about the latest “The .NET Show” on Connected Systems. For those of you who have not had the privelege...this is Doug Purdy (left) and Don Box  (right). And no it's not trouble, I'm kidding. Doug and Don have a very unique way (it's a good one ... if you are not grokking my tongue in cheek, here) of delivering information on this topic that will drive the future (and for many of us, the present) of how we write software while delivering their message ...well, on any topic, actually. If you need a map to figure out that very convoluded sentence...just leave a comment. Next time I'll try to write it with Indigo.

I keep forgetting that this application is pretty much usable now but I have to fine tune some things (and deal with the bullshit of the icons...uggh). I'd be happy to have some people play with it and give me some feedback. Basically it lets you create posts off line and then upload them, but more importantly, it lets you use ink. It leverages the built in TIP to ink and recognize text and then has a way to create and embed (and upload) drawings. I don't have a “category“ ability built in and you cannot edit posts that are online.

If you want to save posts to upload later (or keep forever) they are persisted in xml.

The settings allow for BloggerAPI and MetaWeblog API. There is an issue with post titles with BloggerAPI so I just use MetaWeblog. It has all of the downsides of these two apis such as your logins being sent in clear text (uggh). The app settings that are used to post to your blog and ftp images are encrypted and persisted locally.

There are a few things that bug me about it still, but maybe I'm just being way too picky which is why I have sat on it. I'm embarrassed for anyone to see it unless it's perfect, but at this point it seems a huge waste to have it just laying around on my tablet which I don't use all that much on a daily basis.

Contact me offline. I will not put this into too many hands until I am more confident about it. I have to rebuild the MSI etc and just be warned I'm really over-committed right now so I might not get to fixes quickly.

I have no plans to share the code because I hacked it together and would be completely ashamed for anyone to see it. It was all just experimental to work out some ideas.

Note: This post has been misinterpreted twice in other blogs. I hope it is pretty clear that I am saying WinFS is MUCH more than google for your desktop.

So everyone is blogging about Google Desktop and many are joking that they won't need WinFS now anyway. Where are the Longhorn people to remind us that, although that was the easiest part of WinFS to grasp, that there is a lot more to it. I know I saw a post about this in the past...just can't find it. But I'm surprised that I haven't seen a new one since everyone started blogging about this yesterday.

I see this tree all day long while I'm working. This tree is like the ocean. In the summer when it is full green and the wind is blowing, it is absolutely mesmerizing to watch it. I have never loved a tree before, but I love this tree.

Uggh . Just got my annual letter from MVP telling me my next year's rates.

We have the absolute budget HMO and I get some break since I'm getting it through my corporation. But for 2 adults (no kids), $25 co-pay, [I think] $500 deductible, NO prescription help here is what we have paid here in Vermont.

2001: $425/mo
2002: $527/mo (yes a $100 month -- $1200 year increase!)
2003: $568/mo
2004: $597/mo
2005: $617/mo

Sad part is we hardly ever get sick and don't go to the dr. much. Last year Rich had a wierd dizzy spell that freaked out our doctor (thought it was a precursor to a heart attack) and ended up in the hospital for 3 days getting every test known to mankind and got a clean bill of health. A $7000 physical! We joked that at least we got something out of our insurance money.

My poor hubby has also had a lot of dental problems and that is 100% cash out of pocket so add about another $4000 on top of our health insurance costs. I'm more sad for Rich though than for our wallet.

Each year we spend many hours reviewing our options and determine (when thinking about maximum out of pocket what-if situations) that this is still our best bet. This is a big problem in Vermont (this is the health care that Howard Dean wanted to share with the whole country) because we have run most of the competition out of the state.

I'm thinking about the problems Shelley Powers had when talking about her finances on her blog - somehow the tax department read them and used that info against her. I think I'm okay with this here, though.

Kate's speaking at TechEd South Africa which is a great stroke of luck for attendees.

But lucky Kate, too! Check *this* out!

I am sure that many of us use PaintShop Pro. I have since version 4,though I stopped upgrading after version 7 as it has about 4 gazillion times more things in it than I need.

I found it interesting news that Corel acquired Jasc Software (announced today - all users received an email).

Rocky seems to have had a major aha! moment today with SOA and is kind enough to share it with us. It definitely was enlightening to me. But coming from Rocky it is pretty deep because one thing I learned about him on Monday night at our user group meeting is that he has been focused on distributed architecture before since the he first started playing with computers and seems to have been on a quest through all of the work he has done in all of these years.

But his brain was already full steam this morning when he wrote a “rambling rant” about languages which includes a lot of history and also stream of conscious ideas.

(Just kidding about the Vermont air thing - I don't think there's anything wrong with this guy's brain...)

Vermont's SQL Server group (VTSQL) has it's next meeting on October 18th at Competitive COmputing in Colchester, VT.

Here are the details.

I love the whole Imagine Cup competition and have always been excited about it in the past. The 2005 registration has just gone live. I already emailed the head of the software engineering department at the most technical of our local schools, Champlain College, to encourage a team to enter although there are no .NET courses in the undergrad level (yet...).

After 2 years of just giving up on updating my .net apps through the web server, I finally went to patterns and practices guru, Chris Kinsman who helped me figure out how to combine a feature from the AppUpdater component (that is unavailable in the Application Block) with a feature from the Application Block (that is unavailable in the component).

Basically I wanted to be able to update on demand, before my application loads and then not do any updating after that while the application is running. In addition, I wanted my updater to be able to discover dll's that it would not be able to identify through reflection within the execution path. These dll's are randomly added to the application and are loaded dynamically.

So - Chris worked out that part of it, whipped up some code for me, and I have been working out the problem of incorporating this into my application so that I can go through this process:

1) user starts up the app by way of the stub application (the appupdater program)

2) user logs in using WSE2 for authentication and authorizaton

3) upon being properly authorized, the app updater component does it's job, checking for updates and downloading them. If the user is unrecognized, it just fails. If the authorization returns some “interesting“ information about the user, something “interesting“ will happen to the application on the client machine.

4) the app udater then fires up the latest version of the program I want to run

Sounds simple - and in hindsight it will be, but it has been a bear! At some point, I will dig in to Chris' code to see what magic he worked to make the app block deal with my needs, but for now I am just happy that I have the update working!

Most of my difficulties with implementing the solution he sent revolved around the fact that the basic setup for the application block is dependent on local host. So I had some setup and configuration problems and then had to understand how to use the manifest utility to create and ecrtypted manifest that actually uses digital signing to verify the downloads to the client.

It is completely senseless to remain stuck on a problem and be so bull-headed to think that additional instances of whacking your skull on a brick wall is going to somehow solve the problem. There are some incredible resources available in our community to sub-contract even for little pieces of expertise. Chris has proven to be one of those people I know I can turn to help me solve some problems that I just don't have the skill or knowlege for.

it's FROST not SNOW! But this is what we awoke to this morning. I think I'm finally capturing that color! It's impossible to miss even with my little camera.

(click on the one below for a larger view)

Well, Duncan is going back to coding which is awesome! (And Duncan and  his wife and his son have a new baby girl in the family, too!!)

But this means Duncan is leaving behind some big shoes to fill with his job. Here is the description on Matt Powell's blog. As a person who mostly programs in VB, I have a vested interest in this site. Duncan has done an amazing thing with the MSDN VB space in the past few years. It is not a job for telecommuters, by the way.