Keith Pleas' "Guidance on Patterns & Practices: Security" hits the MSDN site.

Security Digital BlackBelt WebCast Series schedule is online.

http://www.AcehAid.org

By bidding, of course.

read more from Stephen on how to help.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have to find me a Mac to play on because I have heard that the Real products for Mac are awesome. I won't even let Real anywhere near my computers (all Windows machines).

http://www.AcehAid.org

ahh that again

On the one hand you have Rocky Lhotka's perfectly reasonable "NO", on the other hand ADO.NET  not only encourages you to use and "abuse" webservices by enable the passing of DataSets from one end to the other, but with ADO.NET 2.0 we can pass DataTables too! And we will. Many many many of us will. Many more of us than the tiny percentage of .NET developers who do any interop. At the same time, ADO.NET 2.0 fixes the icchy dataset problem with remoting by making datasets now transmit as BINARY data, like the rest of the remoted objects. (I never had this problem because I have not coded ONE remoted application - ever. “My name is Julie and I'm a web service abuser“.)

Then of course is the whole new twist on this problem: teaching people how to use WSE with .NET clients and services. I do it all the time. I use it this way (because it is an easy way to implement security in the web services that I shouldn't be using anyway) and these are the samples I use when I teach other people how to use WSE. And I'm not alone.

And to confuse us just a little more, here's the latest  on .NET Remoting in .NET 2.0. Just remember: "no, nyet, niente, shake head vigorously."

So here are the messages:

1. Using web services in an end to end .net application is bad
2. Use remoting for end to end .net applications
3. Don't put all your eggs into .NET remoting because, if though it's not dead, in the future, you should be doing everything via services.
4. Here's how to do remoting in our closest future technology.

Maybe this isn't the message that is supposed to be coming down to people like me, but that's what it is sounds like by the time it does reach me. Am I consfused? Is Paris a city?

http://www.AcehAid.org

Doug Seven put our charity auction into the rotating ads on both the DotNetJunkies and SQLJunkies websites. Very kind. Go bid!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Soma announces that we will have new icons so we can build programs that look like the programs we USE! Hip Hip Hooray!!!

many cheers for Microsoft responding to this very loud roar from developers.

I know I was one of bajillions who asked for this.

The icons and bitmaps that are given to us in VS2003 to use in our apps are the same as the ones that have been around for as long as I can remember ... maybe even since FoxPro 2.5?

http://www.AcehAid.org

feel free to use this button and link to our ebay auction!

Too busy to download and upload to your own blog? Here's the html which will use the image directly from my server. Remember to strip any excess formatting before you paste!

<A href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&amp;item=5552696499"><IMG src="http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/content/binary/auctionimage.jpg" border=0/></A>

http://www.AcehAid.org

It seems to be a bad joke on everyone. Snow where it hurts and now snow where it hurts (our economy here in Vermont) not to have it. Uggh.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Drew Robbins got his bid in at Jan-23-05 06:00:14 PST! That's 14 seconds after it went live. I call that love!

Here's the link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5552696499

http://www.AcehAid.org

Tonight is Robert Scobles Cheesy 40th Birthday party.

Happy belated birthday and have a great time.

The big 4-0 was one my favorite birthdays (so far.... )

http://www.AcehAid.org

and here is the link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5552696499

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have had an old Micron laptop hanging around for years that I can't give away. Nobody wants it. It only has 40MB of RAM and it is not possible to increase it. Therefore you can't put Windows XP on it.

However, today I am upgrading it from Win95 to Win98SE, putting IE6 SP1 and Office XP (extra license) to give to a family that lives up the road from my parents. Their house burned down to the ground on Thursday and they have nothing. Not even their toothbrushes.

My mom told the teenage boy in the family that helps my her and my dad with their dogs about the computer (and that it's old and does not have the latest cool stuff on it) and he is beyond thrilled. It was certainly worth holding on to!!! So just remember that next time you look at that old hardware that you think is too dated to be of value to anyone.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Big thanks to the guys at thinktecture who found themselves a little late to reply "YES YES OF COURSE!!" to being in the first .NET Celebrity Auction to Aceh Aid at IDEP. They have offered to cover the eBay seller fees that Stephen and I have to pay for this auction. We have tried to contact eBay about removing the fee of 1.5% for any amount our auction recieves abouto $1,000 (that's the total not the 30 individual donations). eBay is very careful about trying to protect buyers from the many many fraudulent "charity auctions" and unfortunately it has made things extremely complex and difficult for Stephen and I in trying to make this thing fly.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Update: it was cancelled

In case you were wondering about the status of the mini Code Camp this weekend, it is totally on, regardless of the forecast.

Thom Robbins has said that if for some reason they do decide to cancel (sounds highly unlikely) he will post something over here on his weblog.

http://www.AcehAid.org

VTdotNET member Zachary Kent has set the date for the first Vermont Code Brew. It will be February 2nd from 6-8pm.

Zach has created a Yahoo Group to help manage this.

Group name: VTCodeBrew
Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VTCodeBrew
Group email address: VTCodeBrew@yahoogroups.com

The first meeting will be at his office so except Root Beer not Draft Beer!!

He's getting the knack of the blog world since his first Yahoo group post points to Bill Evjen's Code Brew post and Robert Hurlbut's Boston Code Brew post!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Just an FYI - PCConnection has a rebate up until 1/31 for a 128MB thumbdrive ($4.95 after rebate) and a 128MB SD card ($1.95 after rebate)! (plus shipping)

http://www.AcehAid.org

I just went through an interesting process with Michael Stiefel who is also presenting on WSE2.0 at the Web Edge conference.

What we are doing is basically a part one and part two talk.

His talk, "Securing Service-Oriented Architecture with Microsoft's WSE 2.0" is a more advanced version of my part two though it covers a lot of the same ground.

So after talking back and forth about it, I finally decided that I can just literally remove the 2nd half of my presentation. It was hard to do. All of my hard work at trying to learn this stuff so I can explain it - gone. My nature is to want to stay in the room for the entire day and tell people every single thing I know about a topic. But our allotted time is only 50 minutes! So this was the realistic approach. At least Michael's talk is at the end of the day, so he actually can go long if he needs to. I added the subtitle "laying the groundwork".

For all of us very independent people I think it's a good exercise to do something like this. Hopefully it will help me in the future where I always feel like I am being remiss if I am not telling every single detail of my topic.

http://www.AcehAid.org

One of the groups that is intimately involved with Aceh Aid at IDEP is the local surf guides from Sumatran Surfariis.

Okay - yes they are adorable and hunky young guys, but that's not my point. They are part of the amazing effort that is being made in Sumatra. They have been writing about what they are doing and seeing and it's really interesting reading. Right here.

http://www.AcehAid.org

There is  a LOT going on around the Web Services Edge East Conference that is in Boston from Feb 15 - 17th.

Right now there is still a $300 discount available until Jan 21st.

15% discount to MSDN Subscribers (that's on the registration page).

There are a TON of special events that are free.

So, you can register for FREE to get an EXPO Pass (normally $50, but free courtesy of Microsoft) which also gets you into the Keynote (Ari Bixhorn from MS and Matt Ackley from EBay are doing keynotes).

Or you can register for that and the FREE tutorials.

All of the above is detailed on the registration page.

The INETA Sponsored Cabana night is free and requires no registration.

If you are in the Boston area, you should DEFINITELY at least take advantage of all of the free events going on!! Stay tuned for more details about the INETA Cabana night (Wed 2/16 6pm - 8pm).

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have a new client that I am doing some mentoring for. I think that I love this more than any other form of billable work.My mentoring clients are mostly companies that are just now getting started with .NET, so with my nearly 3 years of .NET experience and a bizarre memory of many resources ("oh yeah, I remember there was an article on that by so and so last summer"), I can really help VB6 developers leapfrog past a lot of their learning curves for the specific tasks they need to do (including planning and architecting the program).  I really really enjoy doing this. Getting paid for it almost feels like a bonus.

http://www.AcehAid.org