One of the local votes on Tuesday is to go ahead with the plans for the Regional Technical Center here in Vermont, bringing together and expanding upon the success of the exsiting Tech Centers in Burlington and Essex Junction. This has been a big controversy in Vermont and one that seems to be fueled by misinformation (or so say those on both sides of the argument). A lot of educators are against it even some that work at the existing Tech Centers. The problem is not in the desire to have the RTC, but in the actual current plan that is being voted on. My understanding is that voting against this plan does not mean that you are voting against the RTC but you are insisting that they go back to the drawing board and make a better plan. I really have had a hard time keeping on top of the arguments pro & con. Of course, everyone wants to see more opportunties created for people in Vermont and it will also benefit Vermont businesses - though this should not be the primary goal, otherwise, we are creating a worker mill.. I wish that teens did not have to worry about their careers at such a young age and can focus on developing life skills. I lived most of my life in NY State where BOCES has been a great success.

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Have you see Jeff Prosise's planes? Here's another one.  I thought they were real, thanks to the way the photos look... until they started accumulating! I knew that he couldn't have so many. Then I looked a little closer and then finally saw this video. Very very cool, Jeff!

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KVM stands for Keyboard Video Mouse. Since I bought a new desktop this summer, my former daily driver was sitting in a corner doing nothing. I just bought a KVM 2 Port Switch made by LinkSys that is one sweet little cable with all of the connections built in. I can now switch between that computer and my regular one without moving any more muscles than my little index finger to tap on the Scroll Key twice. Love it! Now all I need is Ghost so that I can use that machine either to test additional beta software or to emulate a clean client machine to test installations, etc.

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Jim Blizzard is an organized guy. I would never have thought of enabling

• Bulleted
• Lists

or

1. Numbered
2. Lists

in BLInk! without him.

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Bliz has kindly agreed to play around with BLInk for a bit. Hmm - spell checking hadn't thought of it!

I appreciated all of  his nice comments but just wanted to clarify something.

One thing he misunderstood was about the API limitation on categories and titles. That is only for the Blogger API. I saw the common workaround but could not get it to work from my application and finally ditched it. However, the Metablog API absolutely supports titles and categories. I also use dasBlog, as does Bliz and am posting with the Metablog API from BLInk! with titles and categories. No problems at all with that. I don't have to go back to my blog and add those things in after the fact.

.Text and dasBlog support both APIs.

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I'm sorry - is it just me? This is on the windows forms home page. "Just in case you didn't know that there are chicks that write code, we wanted to bring your attention to this gorgeous woman's chest."

Then there's that other picture we've seen a lot of that really cool looking chick in the green shirt. Something about that picture is all about her chest also. I double checked with a number of people when we first saw that photo over and over again during the MVP Summit and they all conferred that it was hard to see the rest of the photo. Something about her boobs - like she wasn't wearing a bra or something - just totally drew your eyes (and mine - totally heterosexual woman, here) right to her chest.

I dunno - I just figure there's got to be a happy medium here somewhere.

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Cool!! This might finally enable me to rip that Access database out of one last of my old VB6 projects.

It also made me wonder why I haven't even played with this stuff yet and then I realized I've kept myself busy with WSE2, ADO.NET2 and a host of other new things. Oh, to be able to just spend all of my time playing with the new toys and call it a job. Yeah I know some people actually have that as their job definition.

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details here from NASA website

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Here's a picture of Richard Campbell atop of Kilmanjaro. Hooray! Richard went with a bunch of RD's and some other folks, too.

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I need to see something that is in the latest ctp of the beta. However, I don't have a good setup on any of my machines for VPC, and therefore I can't download and install the VB.NET Express AND C# Express and wipe out my current full beta bits. I need to see both language implementations of this function which I know has changed.

My other option is to download the full app CTP from MSDN which then also requires the latest SQL 2005 Beta. Sam Gentile said it took him two days to install this. I don't have that kind of time to mess around.

I have about 5 minutes of research I need to do in the ctp right now so I'm kind of bummed. I was excited to see my MSDN universal disks arrive today but alas - the bits weren't in there.

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I was sad to hear today someone say that they did not switch their applications to .NET because of the poor U.I. They were actually talking about an ASP.NET application, but just kept saying  “.NET application“. And seemed to be unaware of the smart client with a web back end option.

In the long run they ended up keeping with their current app (a fantastically architected VB6 application) and distributing it via Citrix ($$$) but are happy not to have to tax their thousands of non-technical end users with the requirements of a machine to run a desktop app. I never really knew very much about Citrix. The capablities that he was describing blew me away.

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when I spoke in Montreal, I got to use a remote control (had used on at DevDays also). I love the freedom it gave me to wander around. So I ordered one after some recommendations and am looking forward to using it. This one is by Atek.

I know it looks like it might double as some kind of sex toy...but I'll never tell.

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Dare Obasanjo asks for prescriptive guidance for developers on when web services and ws-* should be used. This goes past the "web services or remoting?" question that we have all seen that chart for. (sorry , can't link to an example - but surely you've seen it). I am using web services in a non-interop solution where I own both ends of the pipe (over the internet) and have even implemented wse2 ...because I saw this as an "easy" way to solve my problems. In some situations, this could be a very bad choice. I would absolutely like to see what Dare is asking for. Including myself, we sometimes get so caught up in how to do something, that we don't stop to think whether or not it's what we need. I just spent weeks shoving wse2 down the throat of a production app that worked perfectly fine. Admittedly, I did this mostly due to a bit of an ego problem (and that I wanted to get past my “in theory“ only understanding of WSE2).

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This was great to hear! I'm really looking forward to being and speaking at DevConnections in Las Vegas in a few weeks.

>

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I have been waiting for Kate to pop her head up. She was on a vacation in Europe and then home for just a few days and then a long flight to Johannesburg to hit TechEd in Sun City.

So there she is and here are her first thoughts about being in that phenomenal place.

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One of the cool things about working at Microsoft is that there are so many interesting ways to pursue your interests. Recently we have seen people who are very strongly associated with particular technologies move to something totally different - Dan Fernandez Eric Gunnerson (sorry, I was stuck in C#, too) and Keith Ballinger come to mind the most quickly. Dare Obasanjo wrote that he is moving from the xml team to go work on the back end of things related to social software - which has been an interest of his. Opportunity abounds. Don't think this means that you can just post whatever nonsense comes to mind about XML! I'm sure he'll continue to keep us all in line . Have fun, Dare!!

Don't forget to change the endpoints in your policycache files!

(she says, having learned the hard way, once again...)

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I realize I made a bad design decision for using this method. (previous post)

I did not want the application constantly polling for a new version so I just check once before I start up the app. Unfortunately, the process of checking (not even downloading) takes about 8 seconds (on my fast client machine). So everytime they start the app they have to wait. Which is why you want it to happen in the background. Maybe the polling isn't so bad after all.

I don't like the options. I would like to find a happy medium. But for now because I have spent so much time trying to get this worked out (was it even worth it) and my client needs me to move on to other projects, I'm going to have to leave it. So all in all I'm very unhappy that I went this route. I wish I had known enough about the process to realize this problem in advance.

I never really discussed this part of my design with Chris Kinsman when he offered to work out the other issue I was having. I probably should have. He knows this stuff better than almost anyone.

The people who are in-house hitting the web server locally are going to be the big losers with this solution. The people who are using this application over the web (the back end is a web service) will definitely benefit since we couldn't figure out how to push out updates to them. So I may end up modifying this again to handle local connections differently.

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You know hep - like totally hip!

I discovered Iggy Kin's groovy TabletPC weblog through my referrers. And with a tag line "a tablet pc in every hand".

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I have a very complicated application to deploy and update. I mentioned a while ago that Chris Kinsman helped me overcome a limitation of the application updater block. After that I had to work pretty hard to get it to work with an insane set of rules and layers of applications. A few things I had to deal with:

1) I did not want to download complete applications (including all dll's) for every update. THerefore I needed to have a special folder to dump updates into and launch my application from.
2) I have three different related applications to launch and wanted them all to be responsible for downloading the same bits. Therefore, they each had to have knowledge of the latest version downloaded even if that was from a different application
3) My webserver location is dynamic
4) complicated configuration issues abounded
5) I had to do a lot of customization of the updater block to get it to work my way.

When all of that was said and done I still had a huge task ahead of me: creating an MSI that would install this whole crazy mess. I have been working on this all day and am near the end. I just learned how to use the launch conditions to force WSE2 to be installed as well.

It is amazing how entire days get soaked up with things like this. However, now I have a very intimate understanding of the Application Updater Block. I have not looked at ClickOnce, but I sure hope I'll have as much access to make changes I want as I do with the raw code supplied with the AUB.

I miss weekends.

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