I am having great difficulty getting back to Dare's blog this morning and I wanted to comment on a post he wrote on 10/18 so I'll just do it here.

Dare, dude, I did not say Google Desktop replaces WinFS. In this post, I pointed out the fact that many people were saying that and that WinFS is a whole heck of a lot more than just finding files faster. I've been trying for days to get to your old post that addresses just that point, but having trouble with your site (as you know). Dare did post more on that yesterday. Go check it out.

Burlington Free Press wrote a nice story about the Vermont Software Developer Alliance. Here is it. (of course that link will be gone in a week... aargh)

yeah - I'm pouting. Whine whine whine...and whimper, too.

I'm coming up against one brick wall after another after another trying to run some of the wse2 samples so I can try to understand how some of these things work. I don't know if I'm setting things up improperly or what. I wish I could get Don Smith to just come here to Vermont and sit with me for one whole day. I know I could figure everything out with someone to just point me in the right direction every time I go astray. But unfortunately these “astray-nesses” take me off track for hours and sometimes entire days.

So I'm pouting. Maybe just tired and time to call it quits. nah - that's like giving up.

update for the kind souls who tried to comfort me after my very satfisying rant: I had two places to test this. The second is my tablet where I could use localhost, but I had mucked with the code a while ago and broke it and was not adept enough to figure out how to fix it. So John Bristowe was kind enough to email me a new sample directory (save those samples - you have to reinstall wse2 to get them again) and at least on that machine it's all working again. But I learned a LOT as usual trying to track down the problem.

When Bill Evjen first dreamt up INETA, the problem he was trying to solve was how to enable small user groups to have world-class speakers present to them. This is what we now know as the INETA Speaker Bureau.

Rocky Lhotka spoke at at the October Vermont.NET meeting as an INETA speaker. Rocky lives in Minnessota. There is no way we could have had him at our group otherwise. I recieved this email from a user group member today and with her permission am sharing it here:

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how to pass info from one managed application to another that is in a separate process. I'm thinking of all of the tools that I know how to work with and none of them make me happy. The information is user information as I have the user login to one app and then that app starts up another app in a separate process - but I don't want the user to have to log in again.

I started thinking about this over the weekend and mentioned the problem in this post, thinking that it was just because I have limited knowledge, but the solution was probably just out of my reach, yet common knowledge to many others.

Some of the paths my brain has gone down...

 - persist the info - using some type of encryption, temporarily write the info into a file and then read that file from the second process. I dno't like this because I come up with way too many what-ifs.

- pass the info as args within the startprocessinfoclass. No way. Too easy for someone to then start up the 2nd app on their own without credentials.

- pass the login and password as args and then force the new app to quickly re-authenticate the user. No - I have no clue how secure or inaccessible the command line args are.

- get a securitycontexttoken within the first app (that is already doing wse2) and pass it to the 2nd app. Hmmmm... that could work - although since my client won't have x509 certs on the server (don't ask, please!) this won't be as easy as I would like.

However, I think that this last thing is going to be my best chance. Hooray WSE2.

Now to figure out how to accomplish this. Oh - it is never ending...

Michael Gerfen and Andy Gray have started the www.TabletDev.com website which contains a [community] blog, forum and resources. It is targetted to TabletPC development. There are not a whole lot of people writing about TabletPC development yet. Loren Heiny and Casey Chesnut are probably the most prolific tablet development bloggers (that I know of). Shawn van Ness writes a lot of articles for the Tablet Developer Center on MSDN online and then we have occasional posts from a few other well-knowns like John Robbins, Jon Box and Jeff Richter.

I know they have wanted to do this for a while so I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

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).