Why is it not possible to find someone who is able to make simple changes in Frontpage to websites and knows how to FTP them, has a "good eye" (RISD diploma is unecessary) and doesn't charge $80/hr? This is a $25/hour job, don't you think? It's pretty basic. Some simple html. I'm always frustrated by this. When people ask me "oh do you do websites?" and I know they just want something easy and don't want to pay a lot of money. I can't afford to do these favors too much anymore.Where does one go? Where does one send these people, my friends, my family, to someone who can be trusted to take good care of them?

http://www.AcehAid.org

I finally got my copy of the April 2005 issue of MSDN Magazine in the mail this afternoon and am very proud to have my first article for them in there. It's on ADO.NET 2.0. I wrote this article in July against the May bits.I had to update the article for the October bits and then again for the November bits. Then I had to go through it one last time before it went to press in early February.  I learned soooooo much in the process of doing this as some of you may have seen by my frequent posts about different things in ADO.NET 2.0. I also had a lot of help from the very patient Pablo Castro, the PM on the ADO.NET team. No amount of Lake Champlain Chocolates can readily repay him, but I did try.

I do not envy people writing books during alpha and betas of a product.

http://www.AcehAid.org

this took me a while time to find via MSDN Library or Google. That's because I didn't notice it at the bottom of the "switch" explanation on C# (duh!). (And because the fantabulous C# & VB.NET Conversion Pocket Ref doesn't have an index and I couldn't find the listing for this in the TOC.) It's hard when you don't really know what you are looking for! That is my driving reason for doing the C# for VB programmers talk (at Code Camp this weekend and at DevConnections in a few weeks)

VB lets you put optional cases together as in

Case 3 Or 4 3,4   '(duh, I guess I should have gone and looked at one of my many examples of this in my real applications!)
  'do something if it's 3 or 4

C# does it this way

case 3:
case 4:
 //do something if it's 3 or 4

This seems to be referred to as "stacked case labels".

http://www.AcehAid.org

sure to be fun!

I'm doing 3 talks - two are brand new talks that I am warming up for DevConnections - "What's New in ADO.NET 2.0" (with a slant towards asp.net development since it is for ASP.NET Connections) and "C# for VB(6) Programmers". I just decided at this moment to put the "6" in parens because this is just as easily C# for VB.NET programmers (my original intent), but I make special accomodation to focus on things that are specific to VB6 programmers who are new. This talk is mostly about syntax. A lot of fun. I'm thinking of letting the attendees challenge me to try to code an if statement or a new class in C# from scratch and see how much I rely on the compile time errors to show me where I have forgotten the special syntax - left parens out of a method call or something! But at least I can decipher the error messages really quickly! Here's a crazy example:

Correct:
string[] names;
names=new string[5] {"John","Mary","Rich","Julie","Kat"};

Incorrect:
string() names;
names=new string(5) {"John","Mary","Rich","Julie","Kat"};

The incorrect syntax throws SIXTEEN build errors and none of them say anything about ( ) or [ ]!

 I am also going to do what I think is a very important talk - "Getting Ready for WSE 2.0: Security Fundamentals and a Brief Intro". This is where I focus on explaining things like encryption, hashing, digital certificates, digital signatures, etc. I LOVE doing this talk. I will be doing this as the first part of my 3 hour pre-con workshop at ASPConnections on March 20th.

http://www.AcehAid.org

This is very cool news. Bill Vaughn has recently been added to the lineup for DevTeach 2005. He'll be doing a morning session on ADO.NET and an afternoon session on SQL Server Stored Procedures. This will be a pre-con on Saturday, June 18th. There are also pre-con sessions by Rod Paddock, Jim Duffy and Carl Franklin. The conference is Sunday - Tuesday. Here is the info on the pre and post-cons for DevTeach.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Markus Egger writes about something that we had a fantastic talk about this summer at the TabletPC DevLab - auxiliary displays. We had a brainstorming session on "what would make a perfect mobile device?" Getting access to some key information without having to boot up the whole darned laptop was one of them - and this is just the solution we talked about. The other, of course, is to enable this same machine to act as a cell phone also. It has wireless, can easily have gps, has all of your phone numbers in it. Leave it closed, leave it off even (though we have the auxiliary power and display to help us)! But plug in a headset and using voice commands dial up someone in your outlook contacts. No this is not supposed to be the replacement for a phone. But just one more feature to make the laptop be the perfect mobile device!

http://www.AcehAid.org

This happens on March 31 - a few weeks away.

I'm still thinking about how this affects me and trying to keep in mind how it will affect many companies still on VB6. Remember, that not all support is going away. We still have a chunk of it for 3 years.

Although all of my development since spring 2002 is in .NET, I do have 2 big VB6 legacy applications for two separate clients that I have no intention of porting to .NET. Client A has a ton of new stuff in .NET but the VB6 app is at the center of their core day to day operations. Client B only has their VB6 app, nothing new. But they use it also in their day to day operations. Both clients could not function without these applications. Client A's VB6 app has minor mods made to it every once in a while. Client B's app has been static for a long long time. I have never needed to go beyond google, msdn online or the newsgroups to do any troubleshooting for the VB6 applications.

For both clients, financially there is just NO reason to port the applications. Client A's app is huge and would cost a fortune (this is relative of course to the size of the company). CLient B is a small company and it would be awful for them to have to port the application over. Sure they could be better, but they are very good and run their businesses and there really is no justification.

I have actually emailed some software companies that I know that are still dependent on VB6 to see how this affects them. And I even emailed the entire VTdotNET member list to get their comments as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Next week's luncheon meeting of the Vermont Software Developer Alliance features technology in the goverment sector expert, Amy Santanello of MetaGroup. See the VTSDA website for more info on on this meeting. IT's at noon in downtown Burlington. $8 for VTSDA members, $15 for non-members. Food is darned good, too!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Must be nice to have Fritz Onion living in your backyard! Though Vermont is nearer to Maine than, say, California, it's a long drive!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Max'IT is a neat little (well, for Vermont standards, mid-sized...) software company in So. Burlington, VT. They have a Programmer Analyst position and a Junior Programmer position available.

http://www.AcehAid.org

streaming video! Check it out.

I was there live. He did a great job.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Looking at the list of DevTeach 2005 speakers, I see a bunch of folks MIA (Christian Weyer, Rob Howard, Richard Campbell) but am happy to see many  pals returning that I never get to see enough. There seems to be a whole new New England contigent that has discovered this sweet conference as well!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Dino Esposito has an article in the current Code Magazine called "Implications and Repercussions of Partial Classes in the .NET Framework 2.0". It is a good, thoughtful look at partial classes, what you might want to do with them, where they are obviously beneficial, and where they are possibly beneficial. One of the approaches he was suggesting (as doable, not necessarily a best practice) was using partial classes (in SMALL apps) to organize your business logic, data logic, etc. As I was reading that part, my temperature started to rise and then I got a great laugh when he writes:

"Is this approach recommended? It depends. It surely provides you with an alternative. If you're a design and OOP puriset, you're already putting a curse on me. So, guess what? In this case, I woulnd't even suggest this to you. Onthe other hand, if you're moroe open-minded and used to looking at final results, you might want to take a closer look at this approach."

http://www.AcehAid.org

Geeze - nearly 3 years of working in .NET and I just noticed this today - 'cause I went looking for it.

For the super curious (and this hardly satisifes anything beyond that), how do you know when you are using a system type vs. a “keyword“? It's easy with VB's Integer (keyword), or C#s int vs. Int32, but what about String and System.String?

But now I see it....

Note the text color of the System types vs. the text color of the language keywords. Subtle. Not earth shattering, but still interesting. In a why is the sky blue kind of way...

http://www.AcehAid.org

well it's about time winter finally arrived in Vermont!

"Winter storm watch in effect from Monday afternoon to Tuesday evening"

http://www.AcehAid.org

As I am looking at my presentation for the 3 hour workshop I am doing on WSE Security at Connections in a few weeks, I am really excited about it. This the first time I won't have to cram all of this information in a short session - or skip a lot of it. I am going to have plenty of time to go over the security fundamentals as well as the basics of WSE 2.0, such as what they are, how they work and how to work with the API and Policy.

Remember that this is not a regular session at ASP.NET Connections, but a pre-conference Workshop on Sunday afternoon, which you have to register for additionally. There don't seem to be any other WSE 2.0 focused talks at the conference, although there will be some Indigo sessions and Christian Weyer and Malek Kemmou will be doing sessions on Web Services . So if you want to get started with WSE and also be prepared to start learning about Indigo, I highly recommend the extra session so that you won't feel lost at the higher level ones!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Jackie Goldstein points out this important reminder.

What's changing:

Extended Phase (through March 2008)

• [Still have] Standard support offerings include Premier Support, paid telephone and online incident support, and free online self-help tools.
• Critical Updates will be available for a fee.
• Free telephone and online incident support will no longer be available.
  

Don't throw out those old MSDN Library DVDs!!! (Though the online support won't go away for 3 more years.)

http://www.AcehAid.org

Drew Robbins, who I have known since the beginning of my INETA days as a very involved user group leader as well as someone who has been a great community leader in Ohio, has just become the D.E. for Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky. Many of you may also know Drew as the co-creator of PDCBloggers.net and TechEdBloggers.Net as well as a few other compilations.

Drew replaces Alex Lowe who has been, from all accounts, an awesome D.E., but just couldn't resist the call to go work with his ASP.NET homies at Telligent Systems.

http://www.AcehAid.org

As I'm digging further into my C# for VB6 programmers talk that I am preparing for Code Camp and also DevConnections, I noticed something funny - that case-sensitive C# doesn't seem to care if you use String or string - while it cares plenty if you try to use "Int" or "Bool", etc. 

I realized though that it is really because string is the C# type and System.String is the .NET type, so they both are okay. So byte/Byte are both okay but you can't get away with int/Int32 or bool/Boolean. The funny thing is that when I am coding in VB, I try to use the framework types. I always use Int32, never Integer. But I was trying to be a cool C# coder, so I was using the C# types instead. Go figure! Actually in VB, Integer is more work than Int32, but in C# int is faster than Int32. So that's probably my good excuse, eh? Anyway, these seem like silly things, but definitely will make a VB coder stop and think for a minute which is why I'm doing my best to try to save them a few steps!

This talk is almost just as easily C# for VB.NET programmers, except that since there were syntax changes from VB6 to VB.NET, I will be incorporating the VB6 perspective as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

See what blogger's are nearby...