http://money.cnn.com/2004/11/19/news/economy/bush_debt.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes

Posted from BLInk!

Anyone want to place bets? He's not a geek by the way. In fact, he has a poster from Milwaukee Tools that says "nobody ever got a splinter building a website" and another one that says "people that don't sit at a desk all day live longer." You know what they say, opposites attract!

7:30 pm est (even though the website says 9-11) http://www.franklins.net/calldotnetrocks/

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Yippee!! I'm hoping to hear about one more that would be part of VSConnections, not ASPConnections.

The best part is I will get three hours to do my WSE talk which is a combination of a thorough explanation of the security tools (signing, encryption, etc) which are what WS-Security depends on completely and then a look at the API (the security part), how to code up the basics (real life stuff including a authorizing against a sql database), what policies are and what they look like and how to get at some of them via the Settings Tool. I love love love this talk and getting people off the ground with WSE.

The ADO.NET 2.0 talk is going to be fun for me since I have an article on this topic coming out in MSDN Magazine sometime soon and I had a blast digging through this stuff because I am a database developer first and foremost. Pablo Castro was an amazing resource for me.

The BCL talk is going to keep evolving as new bits come out and it's fun to do and to make sure people see some of the really useful stuff in the framework that aren't really getting a lot of heralding.

Congratulations. You've been accepted to speak at the Spring 2005 Microsoft ASP.NET Connections in Orlando, March 20-23.

ADX252: What's New in ADO.NET 2.0
ADO is here to stay and Microsoft just keeps making it better. ADO.NET has been fine tuned to increase ease of coding, flexibility and performance as well as adding better integration with SQL Server. From the provider independent data access to asynchronous SQL Commands to batch processing to the beauty of the DataTable class now implementing iXMLSerializable, this session will run through the many wonderful enhancements that make ADO.NET 2.0 Evolutionary not Revolutionary.

AGN252: ASP.NET Beyond the System.Web Namespace
A lot of emphasis has been placed on the IDE features of ASP.NET 2.0. This session will take you deeper into the many new things available in the fundamental class libraries that you can use in Whidbey to write more powerful Web applications with ease.

APR301: Web Services Security for Dummies with WSE2 (Half-Day Precon)
If you believe that you shouldn’t have to read a 20-page white paper four times in order to secure your Web services, then the new version of Web Service Enhancements has been designed with you in mind. Although WSE2 has a lot of new tools for plumbers, it is possible to do a lot of very cool and necessary stuff without having to comprehend and code all of the nasty details. This session is designed to explain the key parts of WSE that can and should be part of the basic functionality of any Web service dependent application that you are writing in your corporate environment. The talk will focus on the basics rather than fly through them.

Posted from BLInk!

This is not the first time I have had a referrer come in from the IAEA website. That's the International Atomic Energy Agency that we hear about in the news all the time. I know they are not linking to my blog so it must be some hack or something. I got these two this morning

You got a referral from

http://www.iaea.org/

on your weblog entry 'Larry O'Brien's blog'

(http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0af18678-2417-40fa-9c23-6243457bc5d4)

--------------------------

You got a referral from

http://www.iaea.org/

on your weblog entry 'Dare's other mission'

(http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=e9432c8b-b274-401e-bdab-5307bce50e5c)

 

Posted from BLInk!

Scott Hanselman (who does a LOT of presentations) adds some more presentation tips here.

It reminded me that I wanted to share one I learned from Paul Litwin while I was at DevConnections.

How to avoid showing ugly powerpoint IDE.
Since I have all of my shortcuts on my desktop, I would have to stop PowerPoint, minimize it and go to the shortcut I need.  (this reminds me - I hate when someone does that and you can see their speaker notes. It always makes me think someone else wrote the content and they are not the expert.) Normally, I have all of my vs.net projects running and I just alttab between them. But in this case I was running whidbey demos and did not want to chance having multiple instances running on a box with only 512MB RAM. So I had to get to the desktop and you can't alt-tab to desktop icons. Paul suggested this great idea. Create a folder on the desktop and have that open. Then you can alt-tab to the folder and click on your shortcuts without having to stop the powerpoint. I still sometimes just stop the powerpoint - that's a habit to break.

I think there was something else he taught me that was new for me, but I have to remember which it was.

Another one hard learned from me
If you are having trouble sleeping the night before a morning presentation and you have to take something to help you sleep, make sure you take something that will do the trick! I took two Tylenol pms at 3:20 in the morning knowing I had to get up at 8am. Somehow I still did not sleep. So when I did get up, the Tylenols' basically had the effect of my feeling drugged which is a lot worse than being tired. And it did affect my presentation - just in some really stupid ways - which I am still really upset about. I'm really not someone who likes taking anything at all - I will suffer through a headache rather than take aspirin or go for something homeopathic than allapathic. But I think this is a good warning nonetheless!

Posted from BLInk!

As I will be doing a talk at the Windows Anywhere conference (InDepth Tablet PC Web Development) which is in tandem with VSLive 2005 San Francisco, that means I'll get to go to Indigo Day (except of course during the time I am doing my tablet session). That is something I'm excited about.

($300 discount if you register before Dec 8th)

 

Posted from BLInk!

umm how come I didn't know Larry had a weblog? Sheesh. Subscribed.

Posted from BLInk!

Chris Pels posted about what sounds like an awesome job in Connecticut.

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I don't think I had seen this site before and I have to say I am completely astonished. Scoble pointed (probably not the first time) to Larry Larsen's blog. I am having a hard time believing this, but these are "painted" using ArtRage on a tablet pc.

Posted from BLInk!

As ScottW says: Come and Get it! The Community Server project grew from the merger of Community Forums that evolved from ASP.NET Forums, .Text and nGallery.

Posted from BLInk!

Jeremy Wright is compiling jobs that bloggers are putting on their weblogs. That will be a great resource. If you tend to post jobs on your blog (I do for my user group and Chris Pels does too) let Jeremy know!

Posted from BLInk!

One of the problems with it getting dark early (besides that I still don't get up until 7am) is that I have to walk the dogs way before 5pm which really breaks up my work flow. It's 4:05 and already really dull out and looking like it's going to be dark soon anyway. Poor doggies. Add to this the many feet of snow we will have on the ground in a month or so and not only does their day get shorter, but their world shrinks. They can't get through the deep snow, so whatever paths we can create with the snowblower plow around the yard and then the road are basically all they have for walking all winter.

Even stomping out trails with our snowshoes doesn't pack it down enough for them not to post hole through it, which hurst their little leggies. (I'm talking about one 10 year old and one 11 year old Newfoundland - so that's really a big worry.)

Why can't winter have gloroius snow only where you want it and still at least be sunny until 9pm?

Posted from BLInk!

I plan to reveal some fun tidbits of my deep dark past on DotNetRocks this Friday night. Stay tuned! We'll see if Rory can exhibit any self control at all when he hears this stuff. heh heh heh.

Posted from BLInk!

Each time I talk to people about WSE2 in my presentations, I mention that we are relieved of the dependency on HTTPS and not only can we work with HTTP, but we also get to work with TCPIP naturally in the API. I have seen Keith Ballinger demo this twice now but have not played with it myself and am really curious about it. Pal and plumber, Ali Aghareza was at my talk on Monday night and it was the piece that also piqued his interest.

Posted from BLInk!

Now I see why Betsy's posts are such gems!

"...when I was an MFA poetry graduate student..." from her latest blog post: My Text is not My Own

She is evidence of what makes the fabric of Microsoft so interesting. I think it would be a true bore if the company were made up of nothing by Comp Sci nerds (says this History major who spent most of her time in the art studio).

Posted from BLInk!

I had a hard time remembering how to do this and was not using the right keywords in Google.

There are a few ways to do temp tables in SQL. In SQL7 we could use a #tablename, but there are issues with that. It becomes part of the returned resultset and you have to remember to delete them.

In SQL2000, you can still use that syntax but in many cases a table variable is a much better route. It is a variable declared in your stored procedure, it is local so you don't have to worry about deleting it and it does not affect the result set.

NOTE: You must include “SET NOCOUNT ON“ at the beginning of your stored procedure to prevent that extra gunk in the result set that ADO retrieves. I found that this works with table variables, but it does not fix the problem with #temptables.

Here's a useful article on it: http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=9454 with syntax and caveats.

I had a sproc using the #temptable method that worked just fine here on my test server which is SQL2000. When I deployed it to my client's production server, also SQL2000 with latest service packs, ADO (in VB6 , not ado.net) was having an issue against the production database with recordset.next that did not show up when I ran against the local database. So I went with the table variable instead.

Posted from BLInk!

Scott Dockendorf, who I know one of the guys that runs the Dallas .NET User Group, just went on board this week as the latest addition to the TelligentSystems team.

Posted from BLInk!

One of the advances of Crystal in version 8 was that we had the ability to create TTX files from our recordsets and then use the TTX files to design reports from. This alleviated a huge headache of being forced to either use that mistake of a database environment or hooking directly to databases to create reports. Building these dependencies between the report and one of those resources meant confusing memory problems when you ran the report. The TTX file was just a little text file that contained the schema of your recordset. Once the report was designed, you didn't even need to tote the ttx file around anymore.

In .NET, this evolved to the ability for the report to be designed from an ado.net dataset. You do this by creating a dataset object in your project and linking to that when you design the report. I generally create the object by doing a dataset.writexmlschema in my code initially. Once that file is created, I comment out the line and bring the schema into my project and generate a dataset object from it. (Did you know you can do that in vs2003 by right clicking on the xsd and selecting the mysterious "run custom tool"?)

Many people are still unaware of this feature and do what comes naturally, which is to point directly to the database for desiging a report. This is one of the causes of the dreadful "please logon" message we get at runtime when trying to view a report. (Another one, I discovered was passing a dataview to the report's datasource instead of a datatable and apparently passing a dataset can do this too.)

Here is a PDF from the Crystal Reports .NET DevCenter on the Business Objects site that explains how to build reports from ADO.NET.

Also, here is an article by Susan Harkins that I found for someone that explains how to create an XSD file from Access.

Posted from BLInk!

Just listened to the awesome Kate Gregory's recent DotNetRocks show. Here are f a few funny quotes from the show.

"Typing is so 2002" (re: intellisense)

"I am a device for converting caffeine into code"  (re: soda for breakfast)

"Be scared of Enterprise Services" Why? Becuase MS's recommendation is don't use it unless you really really need it!

"If you believe that there is a little guy in your computer who kind of runs around and carries things around for you, you're going to have a much better time in my course."

Posted from BLInk!

This from Carl's blog:

Speaking of DNR, you're not going to believe how awesome this week's show is (it will be online by Wed. morning). It started as a Java discussion with Mark Pollack and Ted Neward, and then Ted invited Don Box to join us, and I basically sat back and let the three of them talk for 2 freaking hours! The fur was flying a couple times, and the discussion was great! I added what I could to it, but I was really outclassed by these guys. Mere mortals should study this discussion in great detail. Lots of good stuff. I'll post it's availability here, and of course you can subscribe to the podcast feeds to automatically download it.

Posted from BLInk!