A quick post from Las Vegas! I'm at DevConnections in the incredible Mandalay Bay, there are, I believe, about 1500 attendees which is phenomenal.

This year I am in the fortunate position of being a speaker which means getting to hang out in the speaker lounge where we are all working on our talks!

I had the best luck this morning to have sitting across from me, Durga, who just happened to own a pieceof .Net2.0 that I hare been very confused about. He even had a demo of what I was trying to do. So after seeing his demo, I finally was able to fix my demo on that class! (and then share it with others.) the conversations in here are amazing so its a lot of fun!Of course I want my talks to be perfect, but I also want to go to some of the great talks that are going on today and the Next few days. There are a few Burlington people here, too, which is always a big treat for me!

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Sorry, still laughing about Scott Guthrie's OOF TLA PPS post from yesterday. It's about midnight. I have to get up at 4am. But of course, that requires going to bed first. I'm off to Las Vegas for ASPConnections although I'm going a little early as Kathleen Dollard and I are going to drive out to Zion National Park for a few days. Hopefully we'll get back in time for the big Dot Net Rocks party on Saturday night.. It's supposed to snow here tomorrow!

In case I haven't mentioned it yet (ha ha) I'm doing 3 talks. Web Service Security for Dummies with WSE2.0 (which will be a nice precursor to Michele Leroux Bustamante's Advanced WSE2 talk), What's new in the .NET 2.0 Base Class Libraries for ASP.NET Developers and Developing Ink Enabled ASP.NET Applications. There will also be a TechEd Cabana like hangout which I'm looking forward to. But mostly looking forward to geeking out for days on end with lots of friends (old and new). Awww shucks.

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Although I was expecting some syntax changes, so far, my debugger visualizer that I wrote with the March bits and ran with the Beta1 still runs in the October bits.

Two things to note: if you have the debugger visualizer project open in the same solution as the app you want to use it in, you will get a wierd error when trying to use that visualizer in run time. I actually haven't dug into how to debug these things. They are not like a project that you reference and debug into. But if you are testing it, you would just open it up in a separate instance of VS, then compile and copy the dll into the directory and test again.

The other thing is that when you create your visualizer and, as per the Beta1 bits, have to put them into mydocuments\visual studio\visualizers folder. In these bits, the folder does not pre-exist. However if you use one of the canned visualizers, then the folder gets created automatically.

Here is another pointer if you are moving a d.v. from older bits to newer bits.

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Steve Smith and his famous red pen encounter Iraq's fabled Camel Spider. Don't forget to read the last sentence at the bottom - I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

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My husband teases me when I say "hey, I had an idea" by responding with "ahh - I thought I smelled smoke". So just imagine when....

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Sounds like another perfect project for me if I weren't so darned busy. So here...anyone?

Visual Studio .Net Developer with emphasis on VB and ASP aspects. Prior experience in Database conversions a plus. Location will be partial on site in the Vergennes, VT area, balance from home or personal office as mutually agreed on. Contract status options: Hourly, either on a 1099, corporation to corporation or W-2 basis. Duration projected November '04 through April '05. Will be part of a team effort involving 4 to 5 other programmers, some very senior, some more junior.

Interested folks should call Chris Johnson at Technical Connection, toll free 1-888-854-TECH or email resumes to Vermontjobs@aol.com(let him know you found out here...)

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A#1: uninstalling all previous bits. Uninstall takes forever. Longer than install I think.

(oh and if I had an A#2 : that darned 870MB J# Redistributable)

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http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/11/02/1934.aspx

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Aaron Junod has posted a Windows/Cisco Admin job in the Hartford, CT area.

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Just for fun, I'm going to put the latest CTP of Visual Studio on my laptop that I will be using for my What's New in BCL Whidbey for ASP.NET developers presentation at next week's ASPConnections. Maybe I'll even try to run SQL 2000 Developer Ed. and sql 2005 express side by side. Just have to watch out for that sqldmo problem (though maybe it's fixed now) 

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Hooray John Bristowe for the WSEFAQ. This will be a great resource.

I highly recommend you (John) peruse the newgroups to see what types of questions people are asking - especially the over and over ones like "X509 is not an option for me/my company ...now what?" Aaaargh!

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I've been looking for news on this all morning and the Burlington Free Press finally has this on their website.

Preliminary results: Voters reject technical academy
Updated 11:14 a.m.

FREE PRESS STAFF REPORT
Preliminary results show a ballot proposal to build a new Regional Technical Academy was defeated 43,834-34,371 Tuesday, Melissa Hersh, the project manager for the academy, said Wednesday morning.

Slightly more than 56 percent of the votes opposed the academy proposal, while 44 percent supported it.

Voters in 25 districts in northwestern Vermont cast ballots on the proposal Tuesday. Ballot counting went well into early Wednesday morning. Officials had difficulty with the counting machines and some ballots had to be counted by hand because they had been folded.

Hersh cautioned that the results were preliminary, and poll workers still had to make sure all the ballots matched names on the voter checklist. She said firmer figures would be available late this afternoon.

The $44 million project would have merged the Essex and Burlington technical centers into a full-time, two-year academy. Planners had envisioned the school eventually becoming a four-year diploma granting institution.

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I can see it brewing already. One of the interesting things about our community is that it has brought a lot of people together who have in common our absolute passion for programming and technology which is an incredible thing as it crosses every divide I can think of.

However, I think that sadly, the politics of the u.s. is right now driving a huge wedge between people and as many (like myself) can no longer hold their tongues about their feelings, I worry about the animosity that it could create between us. I know that I have many strong and respectful relationships with people that have different political views than myself and I have no worries about those relationships. It's the people that we don't know well, as we hold up our political badges and that becomes our key identifier.

We'll probably get past it after a few weeks and get back to our programming rants and raves but for now, be careful about who you target with your criticism - let's not get personal.

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Hypocrisy, I say!

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It was snowing this morning when I first looked out the window. I thought maybe hell had frozen over, but then it stopped - so maybe not quite yet....

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Thanks Benjamin for this info on how to encrypt a UsernameToken. I didn't happen to see it anywhere else. I mostly liked looking at the soap message to see the effect (note that username="John", password="Doe" and I am hashing the password in both cases and then encrypting the UsernameToken in the AFTER). Cool! I love this stuff. It's like a big game. Based on the length of the encrypted UsernameToken, can you tell what I used to encrypt it with?

BEFORE

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Dave Burke found it first! (how fitting )

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Geeze since March! Subscribed. Their second post is about what I need to do: dynamically embed an image into a report at runtime. Of course, it's on www.ASPADVICE.com!

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You probably know that Crystal was bought by Business Objects last year. Crystal is a great product with a horrible support reputation. That's not about individual support people (I spoke with an awesome one last night) but just an overall problem. I have suffered plenty as well. I will never get past the experience of upgrading from 6.0 to 8.0 and how it horribly shattered many of my client applications and the deployment nightmares I went through (and my famous $500 phone bill for calling the free support line in Canada). And still, when I do have a problem, I sometimes cannot find the solution to it (granted at this point I have wierd problems, but still....)

But they are really trying. Now they have a .NET Developer Zone. It's still a work in progress, but the more we use it, the better it will get.

I know that we all want it to be a good resource. So use it and if you don't like it, let them know about it. Let them know what they can do to make it good so that we don't roll our eyes when talking about Crystal Reports.

This is the tool I have used for years and am still using it even though I do keep looking over at ActiveReports and SQL Reporting Services. The hook for me is I know how to use Crystal. I only run into trouble once in a while, but I just don't wnat to have to spend 4 hours researching a problem and still not come up with a solution.

Posted from BLInk!

Well, you can't really vote more than once...JUST VOTE! Vote Vote Vote Vote (of course, I mean if you are a u.s. citizen). I bet there are a LOT of people around the world who wish they could vote in this election.

Posted from BLInk!