Carl Franklin

Kathleen Dollard

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I'm heads down doing my ado.net 2.0 demos. I added a little extra pressure by loading the Feb CTP on my test box yesterday. So much for my demo that returns a DataTable from a Web Service and then does a DataTable.Merge with cached data on a web page. (Hopefully the DataTable's iXMLSerializable functions are only temporarily broken - or maybe I'm just being really dumb. Or maybe Scott Hanselman put a hex on that demo because I was returning a DataTable from a Web Service...how know.)

Luckily Rich is around. He finally walked the dogs, took care of the screaming cat ("where's my dinner?"), is now feeding the dogs and if I'm lucky making dinner, too!

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Just a reminder!

Birds of a Feather sessions are not presentations or panel discussions. There are no speakers and no slides. A microphone and whiteboard will be available, but there will be no projection equipment.

By proposing a session you agree to host it and moderate the discussion at the conference. You do not have to be a subject matter expert in order to host a session. You have to have a genuine interest in the topic. You may propose more than one session, however preference may be given to allow more people the opportunity to lead.

Submit proposals here
Vote here

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Prepare to read this probably on every single blog! It's VERY newsworthy!! They are not really purchasing Ray Ozzie. They will be hiring him as the one of their CTOs.

*thanks for the clarification Mike!

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Microsoft is letting people sign up for their "2nd Shot" program. If you fail a cert test you get a free do-over.

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Can someone explain to me what drove me to uninstall the November VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 bits that were running all of my ADO.NET 2.0 demos perfectly well, and replace them with Feb CTP bits? Two days before I have to do a presentation that requires those demos? I'm not the bungee jumping type...really!

update: just to test my nerves a little, the new sql server bits wouldn't install. Said I didn't have the minimum config. I finally discovered that somehow it forgot about some of it's RAM. I thought maybe the virtual DVD ROM was responsible but even disabling all of the drives didn't help.

Finally I took the box apart and pulled the ram chips out and put them back in and started up. Now I was down to 256. I moved them around and got the beep beep beep (you know - moved them into bad spots) so I put them back in the original positions , restarted and my memory was back and my install went fine.

Over now to my compaq evo laptop which I use to demo whidbey stuff since I have to start updating that now, too. I haven't used it in november. I couldn't remember the password! Finally I got in as admin and changed the user password so that it matches my other computers. Oh lordy lord. What a fun night.

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This is spinning around the blogs right now. Joe Jackson - one of my faves during college and beyond - he definitely elevates William Shatner a few notches. So let's see hwo's next? William Shatner and Elvis Costello. William Shatner and David Byrne. William Shatner and David Bowie.

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wonkette.com posts a great picture of a tax payment on the way to the government

Maybe they should have one from Vermont that puts the word "married" at the start...

 

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Mike Gunderloy, one of the most prolific technical writers on the planet, has been doing reviews and columns for ADT for quite a long time. Mike is now going to do the reviews on his own larkware blog and you have probably already seen them. He has also done something that I think he totally deserves to be able to do and I have waited a few weeks to see what I thought of it. And I think it's totally fine. He has sponsors on his Daily Grind blog posts. This is not the gross sponsorshop that a number of "a-list" bloggers recently did by contracting to find something to say about one particular totally unknown company in their posts periodically. I really did not like that one bit.

But having totally relevant companies subtly added at the end of the Daily Grind's works for me. Mike works pretty hard on that feed and it is full of relevant and interesting information every single day. I also much prefer having the reviews come to me. I'm not one to go looking on a website every day to see what's new.

How he finds time to explore so much software and so many books to do these reviews is beyond me.

I do look forward to Mike airing more of his opinion[ated ] pieces on the blog. I think he does a great job of keeping many of us in line!

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I got this idea from attending and speaking at GUVSM meetings in Montreal and have been doing it at Vermont.NET since October of last year. I prepare a powerpoint deck of what's going on in the area, upcoming events. other things people should know (eg. Microsoft's 2nd chance certification which I will put in my march deck). I run the deck as a slideshow when people are arriving and getting settled. THen at the start of the meeting, I use the deck as talking points to let everyone know what's going on so I don't forget anything. Any links, etc that are in the deck, are also on my user group website so people don't have to take notes from it.

Here is the deck from our March meeting. http://vtdotnet.org/docs/vtdotnet_mar_05.ppt

Feel free to steal this idea!

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hmmm - about a foot of brand new snow, blue sky, beautiful sunny morning but it is only FOUR degrees out! Aaargh. I am just finally getting over 3 weeks of cold/flu/bug thing and can't afford to get sick again with upcoming travel.... Maybe it will warm up later. I don't need to get the virgin pow that badly. There's always untouched stuff to find off the beaten path anyway....

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from a trusted source!!

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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?

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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