We are very happy to have our very own D.E., Thom Robbins, coming all the way to Vermont tonight to present on what's new in VS2005 and also show a little of Team System to the Vermont.NET User Group. I also plan to talk more about our .NET Newbie Sessions (starting with our next month's meeting) and see what the concensus is on my dream of having a VTdotNET Code Camp.

 

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Rob Garrett was at the Mid Atlantic Code Camp (and I think Devscovery, too, since he looked so familiar) and wrote up his thoughts about the sessions he attended.. I was thrilled to see that my Web Services Security talk had the affect I was looking for, but his write up also made me very disappointed that I wasn't able to attend Sahil Malik's talk on Concurrency with ADO.NET 2.0.

I have also been getting some nice emails from attendees thanking me for finally demystifying security for them. Since I do this talk because I used to be mystified as well, and didn't think it was fair for experienced programmers like me to have a topic that made us feel like dopes, it makes me really happy to know that I am able to get the info across successfully.

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Camey says that Logicalis, the company where she works (and she loves her job and the company) is hiring.

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Wow. Here is a company that listens to its employees!

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/misc/05-06-05StevebPublicPolicy.asp

(via Microsoft Watch)

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I had my favorite geek t-shirt on yesterday for my WS Security talk at Code Camp. It is the shirt that the WSE team did for the WSE 2.0 release last year. Below is the best picture I have of it, which I scraped from Bill Ryan's blog. Below the image it says “I'm Secure“.

I didn't even think about this when Wally dropped me off at the airport. When I went through security and had to take off my fleece, the security guys had a good laugh over it.

I was just a little embarrassed.

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Code Camp in D.C. was a blast. Though there were a lot of people helping to make it happen, Andrew Duthie went above and beyond. I know how hard he was working as I stayed at his house on Thursday and Friday night. There is lots to talk about and I can't get it all in at once. I met *so* many people that I have never met in person before and I met a lot of new folks. Andrew pulled together a user group leader meeting on Friday night so I got to meet 12 u.g. leaders from all over Virginia and Maryland. Many I had been acquanted with from some type of communication with INETA over the past three years. I also had a great time talking at dinner with Anil John, who I hadn't seen in over 2 years and Wally McClure.

The highlight however was the new love of my life, Andrew and Jennifer's two year old son, Joseph.  

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Flying home from D.C. to Burlington late last night, on a small plane, I sat in an aisle seat with Judy Dean on my right and Howard Dean on my left, on the other side of the aisle. I didn't realize that it was Judy until we were departing the plane in Burlington. She is a lot more like me than any kind of Washington political wife. She was reading a book that I had wanted to like but gotten bored with and only made it half way through. I asked if she liked it and she said she was finding it kind of slow. Howard was wearing a suit. But like me, Judy was wearing jeans and a fleece, no makeup, nothing specially done to her hair. Some call it weekend attire - although that's how I dress seven days a week. I remember criticism that she wasn't wearing makeup for his public appearances. I totally understand that (not the criticism, but her desire to just be hersefl). I guess the older I get, and the more some people think I might need makeup, the less willing I am to wear it. All of this visibility must be really hard for her.

The stewardess, a pretty young girl from the midwest, said to Dean while she was serving the beverages, "If you ran for president in 2008, my whole family would vote for you!" He asked if she was from Vermont and she said, no, from Missouri. It was as though he thought maybe only Vermonters would vote for him? Everyone else was ignoring Dean, really just trying to give him his personal space. Also, in Vermont, everyone is like neighbors. Phish is the local band. Dean had been governor for 10 years. Despite his rise to national fame during 2003/4, he is still one of us - someone who loves Vermont and chooses to live here. The stewardess was clearly excited to have him on the plane so I thought it was very sweet of her to pay him a little homage.

It was only an hour and a half flight. We all just kind of read, looked out the windows and snoozed. I was thinking how cool it would be to tell him about the Vermont Software Developer Alliance and some of the things we are hoping to do to help the software industry in Vermont. I wondered what Robert Scoble would do if he were in my seat. I wondered if I had had my tablet and started working on it if Dean would have taken interest in it. But in reality, we were all just some really tired people flying home to the place we love the most. Napping and looking at the stars and lights below was really all any of us wanted to do.

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I have been at Devscovery for two days now and am learning so much. I am jumping around into different tracks and getting a fantastic smorgasbord of information. It would be nice to just have every session lined end to end and attend them all. Or just have them zap it all into our brains. Like any conference, picking and choosing is always hard. But having to constantly choose between deep internals with Richter, serious asp.net with Jeff Prosise, hard core debugging with John Robbins and the many other great topics and Wintellect presenters is really just a big pain in the butt.

Sara Faatz has done an amazing job of putting together a top-notch and intimate conference. Sara is also our marketing guru for INETA and her contributions there are beyond amazing.

 

I have already posted this in the comments to Robert Scoble's blog about restarting Team99, but I highly recommend Amanda Murphy. (I hope she doesn't kill me )

Amanda is a blogger, a .NET User group leader, a sharepoint geek, an XBox fanatic and a tablet pc enthusiast. This is definitely one person who is very excited about technology, knowledgable, smart and loves to talk about it all!

I am really excited that Amanda is coming to the INETA NORAM User Group Leaders Summit at TechEd. She was one of the scholarship winners.

Carl and the insane gang have created mini-outtakes from Mondays for busy people who need a good laugh but have to work harder to find the window for the full show. Here are two really silly ones that had me laughing pretty hard.

First one is a good poke at the finger in the chili at Wendy's: here

Second is some more silliness with high tech and a guy with an unfortunate name here

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Well, a cover at least. HEck, it's like hanging out at the MVP summit. I know all those guys! <G>

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One of the killer problems I originally had with SqlDependency was that I was trying to use it against an old pubs database. Finally I discovered the database property called "Database Compatibility Level" and it was set to Version80. When I changed it to Version90 the SqlDependency worked again.Well, I didn't have to do that this time and the "Database Compatibility Level" property is nowhere to be found. Well, at least *I* can't find it anymore. So that's one less thing to worry about with SqlDependency. Here is all that I had to do to get things working with the latest bits of SQL Server 2005.

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Sheesh first it's David Chappell at Boston.NET and in another few weeks in D.C. Brad Abrams and Kit George are in Atlanta as part of a CLR tour.

I know our beautiful scenery, great maple syrup and small but very warm and engaging .NET community aren't enough for Microsoft to justify spending big bucks to get people like that here. It requires bigger reasons than a user group and outside of IDX, there really isn't a potential client big enough in Vermont to justify the trip. Heck we don't even get MSDN events anymore.

All the more reason for a Vermont.NET Code Camp.... don't ya think?

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Robert is tasked with recreating Team 99. Since they are only talking about 20 people, think hard if you really are up for this. Sure it's an honor and sounds cool, but will you install Longhorn? Play with it a lot? Talk about it a lot? Evangelize it? These are the things you should be willing to do. I know that I definitely can't make that commitment. I'm too busy with Whidbey and WSE and wegular work (sorry couldn't help it).

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It didn't go well.

I used the VS2005 Cleanup tool and then uninstalled all sql server 2005 stuff from the add/remove programs panel. Maybe I didn't do the sql correctly.

VS2005 Beta 2 installed charmingly. I did not install SQL 2005 Express with that.

Then I ran into a not uncommon problem with my SQL Server 2005 install which told me that all of my key SQL Server stuff was still installed.

Indeed it was still there. And I could not get rid of it.

I found info (thanks Wally) about using MSIINV.EXE (here's a link to download) to list the offending products, grab their GUIDs and then use MSIEXEC -x to uninstall them but the MSIEXEC failed too... on every single one.

So after the 5 hours I have invested in this, now it's time to give in and just repave the entire machine.

Since I have to travel with it (so I don't have to carry two computers) I also need to install a bunch of other stuff on it, so I think my day is shot.

:-(

(No, this box will not handle VPC but thanks in advance for the many suggestions to do so. I will, however, install the base stuff and ghost it before I install any of the beta bits.)

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Don Kiely has an article in the June MSDN Magazine (I still haven't gotten my copy yet but it is online now) where he looks at what he thinks are the most interesting security enhancements in SQL Server 2005. It's called Hackers Beware: Keep Bad Guys at Bay with the Advanced Security Features in SQL Server 2005. This is all good stuff for us developers who have to work with SQL Server all the time but still are not DBAs. This will be good reading for my plane trip I am taking tomorrow.

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Last year, Rob Rohr created his TechEd session schedule in OneNote, but did it manually. This year he is dreaming up an automated way of creating his schedule with the OneNote API. He learned that the schedules will be out in RSS in mid-May so his plan will be doable. Sounds like something lots of people might want to leverage. Rob is another one of us Vermont geek, by the way.

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Getting this computer fulfilled some of the satisfaction of the Mac Minis, I think, since I got it for a steal!

This box has a really small footprint at about 10" x 10" x 3". It has an Intel 3.2 Ghz processor and usb ports for keyboard and mouse. The video is DVI so it's ready for digital and multi monitors. It came with 1 GB Ram, a DVD/CDRW combo drive and even a 64MB thumb drive. I got the whole thing (no tax and free shipping) for $374! Okay - so it's refurbished from the Dell Outlet but it has a 3yr warranty. This was the best geek buy I think I have gotten away with in a long time!!

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Michele is thinking about ".. how can ASP.NET developers lessen the pain of returning to 1.1, and better prepare to migrate their code to 2.0? " and will be posting blogs on a variety of ASP.NET 2.0 topics. Keep an eye out...

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I had two problems calling web services with a VS2005 app that I moved from Beta1 (Feb CTP) to Beta2.

I have a client asp.net and a web service app. Both are running on a file based web server, not IIS.

The web service was functioning properly when I ran it directly, but not when I tried to call it from the client app.

Problem #1: Web Server Port #
Error: "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it."

When you set a web reference to a web service, the port number currently associated with that web service is embedded into the web.config file inside of the <app settings> section.

<add key="localhost.Service" value="http://localhost:1719/MyServices/ServiceFoo.asmx"/>

I had mucked around with moving my files around enough that the saved port number was still in my web.config, but the computer had assigned a new port.

You can edit the web.config to identify the correct port number or just remove and readd the web reference which will update the web.config for you.

Problem #2: Authentication problem
Error: "The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized."

This threw me because I was not using IIS and that is such an IIS message. I had an inkling that it was because I had been trying to run vs2005 as a non-admin and I had messing with folder permissions, file sharing, etc. After hours and hours of googling to no avail, I finally noticed the new "NTLM Authentication" setting in the [still very unfamiliar feeling] property pages for the web projects (Start Options). I crossed my fingers and turned off the NTLM Authentication on the web service project, and my problem disappeared.

I believe that this might be related to something that I found listed in the VS Known Issues doc for Beta 2. There was a reference to getting 401's when doing unit tests in asp.net and the workaround suggested is to remove the credentials.

I hope my pain and suffering saves someone else from wasting a Sunday afternoon.

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