Last year Rory was just another [wierd] guy at the xml dev con. Then he wrote about seeing Chris Sells and Don Box in the men's room. And he wrote and he wrote and he wrote. Now Rory is a Microsoft employee (in a dream job for him) and is back at XML DevCon only 1 year later (well not really one year since last years' was in July) and whadya know, in case you haven't heard yet, he's writing hilarious stuff about the conference.

It's interesting reading Rebecca Dias' analysis of Tim Bray's talk and the reading Rory's. And so far Becky's got the best shoes.

There are so many great postings from each session. Becky Dias, Shawn Morrissey, Chris Pels, Robert Hurlbut and John Gossman oh and Scott Hanselman, too! have been keeping us well informed and others probably too I haven't read. So I am definitely feeling in the spirit, sitting here with some Chili Lime Tortilla chips, tomatilla salsa and a Corona, reading about Tim Bray's, Chris Anderson's, Don Box's and even a talk that thrilled all of the gamers from the Dept of Defense.

Of course I wish I was there. Well, no I wish the whole conference was here!

Posted from BLInk!

Scott's Top 10 dirty little xml secrets. Very very funny.

I got sick of trying to figure out what to do about icons in my ink blogging application and just wasted the morning creating my OWN. Some are just from scratch, some take the images that are part of the Microsoft dev tools SDKs and modified them a bit.

I finally gave up on finding a little infinity sign for doing a hyperlink and the butterfly is for inserting images.

Now, to either get back to my original plan this morning - adding categories to Blink, or actually doing some work for my clients, working on some articles or my presentations for Connections.

The Mobility Road Show is well under way and Microsoft is now ready to trade your mobile application samples for a Smart Phone, Pocket PC or other mobile device.

Read more about this awesome contest on Thom Robbins weblog.

Now that I have just refreshed the WSE2 samples with their original versions (thanks Bristowe), I am very happily debugging through them to see Don Smith's lovely code for creating and issuing custom security tokens. My frustration had a lot to do with the fact that I know there is a goldmine of info in the samples and stepping through them with the debugger brings me so much farther than just reading explanations that don't cover every single step.

And now I grok this stuff well enough to dare to dig in again and start mucking with it.

Here are some tricks about debugging into web services and into httphandlers that you never really understand until you have to use them.

Debugging web services from a windows client is sometimes a real mystery. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I never really understood.

I had this experience when debugging into the custom username token manager - sometimes I just couldn't get at the code. (John Robbins ....I need to read your book cover to cover and that is all there is to it!!!) Hervey Wilson reminded me of Debug/Processes which helped enormously. I learned finally how to attach to a process that I couldn't get into normally to debug. With the custom security token it was a bit different since I needed to attach to an httphandler that was not loaded before I needed it. Here you just need to attach to the aspnet worker process (aspnet_wp.exe) when you are at a point in your code that you know it is being used - and tada - you  can debug into the http hander. In the case of the CustomXML Security Token Sample, the httphandler is where all the goodies were.

One of the downsides to being part of our incredible international community is that everytime some awful news hits the press, no matter what part of the world it is in, I start worrying about people I know who live there. Oh - I am a big worrier - as I try to explain to my husband ...it's my job to constantly worry about “what if”. We all do, as programmers, right?

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.