from Clemens Vasters' blog

I am presently doing some intense research on services, service patterns, message exchange patterns and many other issues related to services (No surprise there). However, I can't do that without external help and since many people are reading my blog, I can just as well start asking around right here:

I would like to get in touch with companies (preferrably insurances and banks) who afford a corporate history department. The ambitious goal I have is to reconstruct a few banking or insurance or purchasing business processes of ca. 1955-1965.

more on his blog...

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TabletPC Stuff
Doodle Application: www.thedatafarm.com/doodle.aspx
TabletPC Developer Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc
Lora Heiny's sites (the tablet pc "guru" that Brian Noyes talked about in the chat room)
www.whatisnew.com and www.tabletpcpost.com

ADO.NET 2.0
Angel Saenz-Badillos weblog (ADO.NET Team Member) http://weblogs.asp.net/angelsb/
Watch for article by me in MSDN Mag sometime in the spring.

Web Services Enhancements 2.0
Dev Center, including articles and Hands on Labs http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/wse/
www.wsefaq.com
www.dasblonde.net
www.benjaminm.net
www.softwaremaker.net/blog
Watch for article by me on the DevCenter sometime soon

INETA and .NET User Groups
www.ineta.org
(my user group... www.vtdotnet.org)

IMAGINE CUP
www.imaginecup.com

Base Class Libraries in Whidbey
Dev Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/bcl/
BCLTeam Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/bclteam
Watch this page as I will upload the latest version of my BCL Whidbey deck: http://www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx
Watch for article in Code Magazine by me on DebuggerVisualizers!

Upcoming conferences I'll be speaking at are listed at www.thedatafarm.com/blog (requires actually browsing to my blog)

Thanks Carl & Rory & Geoff. It was a blast!

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Since Microsoft says WindowsForms controls only work in IE, I have never tried anything else. I don't have FireFox on my computer. I did not reply to the recent request from Netscape to beta test their new browser and don't want an AOL screenname just to do so. Has anyone even tried it? I'd be curious if someone with a tablet and the latest O/S browses to www.thedatafarm.com/doodle.aspx with Firefox or the new beta. Let me know.

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Rob Windsor sent me the transcript from the chat room during the DotNetRocks show last night. I had a great laugh at the reaction from these guys when I started talking about the fact that I worked at Penthouse (hey, and OMNI, okay?) Magazine during the mid-80's and then Playboy a few years later. Not like working with models or anything. Just doing computer stuff of course. But I did get to travel all around the country because of a little program I wrote for Playboy's advertisers to do some whiz bang analysis. One of those trips out to L.A.(where I got to go the VERY cool Chiat/Day in Venice, CA who was really breaking the mold with their Mac ads) coincided with a Playmate of the Year party. So I actually got to go to Hef's mansion for the party. And of course I worked in an office environment where it was totally acceptable for the guys to have posters and calendars of naked girls in their offices and cubicles. I somehow managed to justify it all. I had a great job, got to travel a lot and was getting paid pretty well at about 27 or 28 and lived what seemed like the high life. It was the 80's in NYC. Right after Warhol had died so things had started changing, the club scene was evolving, Reagan was president. We transitioned from the larger than life Ed Koch who seemed to represent what NY was all about to David Dinkins. Ahhh I begin to wax poetic. Back to work.

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Last night on DotNetRocks we were all over the map and when we were talking about the tablet, I wanted to mention how he XThink Calculator had really helped me think out of the box for tablet applications. But my mind just couldn't find that name, which was buried deeply under all the other muck in there. So I described the application and I also learned that someone in the chat room kept typing 'it's XTHINK!', but I wasn't watching the chat room.

I've written about othe program before. (almost exactly one year ago!) It's really cool.

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I've read about MARS, thought about MARS and written a little about it what I learned. Now I'm going to divert my attention from WSE for a while and start playing again wtih ADO.NET 2.0. The first thing I'm going to do is take Angel's MARS FAQ blog post (he's on the ADO.NET team) and try out some of this stuff with the new bits, especially with transactions. Someone asked me about them, but I hadn't played with them yet so I didn't have much to say. :-( 

He also references an article on TechNet about MARS and transactions.

So check out Angel's post. I know I have to experiment before I can truly understand what's going on, so I will play with MARS a little more and figure out what you can and can't do and report back!

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

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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.

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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)

 

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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!

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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)

 

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

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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.

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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.

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