I am going to be doing a webcast with DCC Glen Gordon on the topic of MARS - Multiple Active Resultsets - on May 25th. This is one of a pair of ADO.NET 2 talks that Glen and Mark Dunn are doing together, but I'll be filling in for Mark on this one. MARS is a topic that I have been digging into for almost the past year as part of my explorations of ADO.NET 2.0, so I'm looking forward to the webcast which will be full of how-to's and watch-out's!

The first webcast is an ADO.NET 2.0 overview that Mark & Glen will be doing on May 23rd.

Glen has a deep level of experience with SQL Server, so I am really looking forward to his perspective on MARS and am happy that Mark thought of me when he realized he had a difficult scheduling conflict.

You can register here for the MARS webcast.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Sahil Malik is in the final phases of his upcoming ADO.NET 2.0 book!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Atlanta's Code Camp and the "Developer Developer Developer" event in the u.k

Here is a blog post from Plip on the u.k. event which is modeled after Code Camps.

Here is one from Atlanta Code Camp by Chris Williams.

Surely there will be more.

http://www.AcehAid.org

One of the things that I have been invited to do this year that I am really looking forward to is participate on the Advisory Board for the Software Engineering Department at Burlington based Champlain College. The funny thing about that links is that there is a picture of myself and architecture guru Keith Pleas on the page! That was taken at the Vermont.NET's June 2003 meeting where we had Keith come in as our INETA Speaker, Thom Robbins spoke also, MSDN was filming us as part of their video on how great INETA is and we helped celebrate INETA's 100th Speaker Bureau event! There were 50 people at the meeting. Champlain is proud to host our summer meetings.

Champlain is a very advanced with their technology and even just built a new building dedicated to it. They have a degree program in Software Engineering and even a offer a masters degree in I.T.

So as a software professional, someone who has lots of involvement with Microsoft and also someone who spends a lot of time looking at [some] of the future products coming down the pipes, I do have something to offer the college as they plan for the next academic year of preparing students for the real world!

http://www.AcehAid.org

A component walks into a bar and ...

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am not a gamer. I don't know how to play Xbox, but I can spell it at least. Either way, I am really impressed by something on their new site that REALLY goes out of the box (no pun intended) with thinking about websites. It is something I have been heralding the geniuses at Hi-Res for years.

What is great is that you get to think and explore the site. It is not filled with hand holding explicit links. There's not much there, but what I love so much is the page you get to by clicking on the question mark. It forces you to think and play with it rather than being hammer on the head obvious. Brilliant stuff. And when I finally followed my instincts and found success, it was really gratifying.

http://www.AcehAid.org

This time it is about 30 miles from Padang. 6.9. Here's some minimal info.

Padang is in southern Sumatra whereas the earlier disasters were in the northwest, in Aceh Province.

Here is a map on the AcehAid website (IDEP Foundation) so you can see where all of these places are relative to each other. IDEP continues to work night and day in response to the nightmare tsunamis that happened in December and continue to rely on financial support.

http://www.AcehAid.org

The links on their site are currently a wreck, but you can go here http://www.ejhs.k12.vt.us/ to get more info. I have copied and pasted from their site, but again, thee links in the descriptions won't work very well. I have emailed them so hopefully they will be fixed soon.

Position:	Network Administrator
Deadline:	May 23, 2005
Description:	Full-time, 12 month position available to direct, coordinate and maintain local area computer network activities of the Chittenden Central Supervisory Union, Union #46 School District and Essex Junction School District.  BA in Computer Science or related field, plus 3 to 5 years as a network administrator preferred.  Certifications in or ability to obtain certifications in Microsoft, Novell and/or Cisco required.  For additional details please refer to the job description.  Excellent benefits package including family medical and dental insurance; life insurance; a retirement plan with up to a 200% employer match; tuition reimbursement; 11 paid holidays, paid vacation and other paid leaves.  For consideration, please send letter, resume/application and three letters of reference and salary requirements to the address above.

and these two which you won't retire early on but...

Position:	Microcomputer Specialist – Westford School District
Deadline:	May 25, 2005
Description:	Part-time position available, starting July 1, 2005 to serve our Westford School by performing a variety of specialized computer installation and support functions. Position pays $13.78/hour for 20 hours (2½ days) per week. For additional information please refer to the job description.  For consideration, please send letter, resume/application, and at least three references to the address above.

Position:	Microcomputer Specialist – Essex High School
Deadline:	Open Until Filled
Description:	Full-time position available immediately at our Essex High School to perform a variety of specialized computer installation and support functions. Position pays $13.43/hour, with an excellent benefits package including family medical and dental insurance; life insurance; a retirement plan with up to a 200% employer match; tuition reimbursement; 11 paid holidays, paid vacation and other paid leaves. For additional information please refer to the job description.  For consideration, please send letter, resume/application, and at least three references to the address above.

http://www.AcehAid.org

SENIOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR
(full-time - Vergennes)
DR® Power Equipment, an information-intensive direct marketer, is looking for a Senior System Administrator to join our Information Systems Team. The ideal candidate will have 5 or more years of experience in the following areas: day-to-day systems deployment and administration, designing and managing infrastructure architecture, project management, systems security planning, procurement and supplier management, and budgeting and cost management. Our technical environment includes a multi-point wide area network, multiple Windows/ UNIX/MPE servers, an internally hosted eCommerce presence, stateful firewalling, 200+ desktops and Call Center ACD equipment. Key technologies include: Windows 2000/3, Exchange 2000, Oracle and SQL server, Cisco routers, and a host of supporting technologies.
We have several exciting initiatives in our plans and are looking for a self-starting team player to join us.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Rebecca Dias: WS-* and Liberty

Matt Powell Excellent News around Web Service Federation

Hervey Wilson Moving On...Federation Calls...  Active Directory Federation Server/Indigo/WS* - cool!!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Late last night my poor doggie went out to pee before we went to bed. Normally I stand outside and keep and eye on her becuase we are surrounded by woods and a black dog can disappear in the black night pretty easily if they see something interesting to chase. But instead, I had a similar urge (to pee, not to chase deer) and went back inside for a few minutes. When I went back out she was not back up on the porch as I would have expected, waiting to come in. I called her (not too loudly, since it was past midnight) and still didn't hear her panting and trotting back towards me. I went and turned on some more flood lights. Still no Tasha. Finally I put on my coat and shoes and went out. Then I heard her tromping through some dry leaves and a funny snorty noise. Tasha appeared in the light and was bobbing her head up and down in a strange way. When I got up closer to her I saw that her nose had a great display of porcupine quills sticking out of it. Nose, lips and the roof of her mouth. Not a ton - maybe 20 or so total. She wasn't even whining.

After calling our vet who was on call that night twice and my mother (a breeder who has been through this with her dogs), the vet assured me that if Tasha had no complaints at all about this she would be okay through the night. Since she is old and the ones in her mouth might require sedation to remove, he did not want to do that in the middle of the night.

Tasha slept without complaint thanks to some Rescue Remedy - which I probably should have taken myself. I didn't sleep much because I'm a big worry wart and I was concerned because she is an old dog and who knows what could happen? Were there any in her chest, in her throat? I kept waking up and checking on her - sleeping soundly and breathing!

This morning we brought her to the vet first thing and he was again amazed that she still had no complaints at all - except that we hadn't fed her breakfast yet. He was able to remove all of the quills without sedation. The larger quills from the older porcupines are easier to remove for some reason so we were lucky. There is not even a bump or anything on her nose as proof that she went through this.

The stoicism of Newfoundland dogs never ceases to amaze me.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I just discovered another MVP in Vermont. Anne Stanton, a CRM MVP. Anne also runs a user group, NH/VT Upper Valley IT Consultants, which seems to focus on Small Business Server. In fact, the user group is how I found her. Someone emailed me looking for an IT Pro group in Vermont and I went to Culminis and searched on Vermont.

That makes three including me, that I know of. In addition to Anne, the 3rd is Zoe Hart (Zoe rhymes with GO ) who works at C2, a Burlington Gold Partner. Zoe is a Commerce Server MVP.

http://www.AcehAid.org

There's a fairly new u.g. in town - it's the VTFUG. They meet monthly in Burlington and have been doing so since November 2004. It's nice to keep some friends with design skills around, y'know? They meet on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, which is one night after VTdotNET.

There is another Flash/Macromedia group in Brattleboro. They have been around for a while. That is the Northern New England Macromedia User Group, aka NNEMUG. They meet on the 1st Tuesday of the month.

http://www.AcehAid.org

http://www.AcehAid.org

SqlDependency is really easy to get working if you are an admin, but when using it in a web app (whether via the System.Data.SqlDependency or System.Web. Caching.SqlCacheDependency) it is not so easy when you are not running under an admin account, which is what you should be doing (although maybe Don Kiely and Andrew Duthie will make exceptions for Betas!) When  you deploy your apps to a web server, you will need the Network Services account to the SqlDependency work.

In addition to enabling the service broker, I had to do two additional steps when working as a non-admin.

Grant Notification Permissions to specific database
  GRANT SUBSCRIBE QUERY NOTIFICATIONS TO [MyDomain\MyGroup]

Grant NotificationErrorsQueue Perms to user (this is for all of SQL Server, so do it from Master)
GRANT RECEIVE ON dbo.[QueryNotificationErrorsQueue] TO [MyDomain\MyGroup]

But this still didn't do the trick. In Beta2 there is still a problem when SQL Server is trying to send notifications to the web server that requires opening up ports. There is a wide range of ports to open up. I tried a few but still was unable to get through. This is a known issue and will not persist through to the release mode. I will keep at it and blog the key to success when I find it.

During my presentation at the MAD Code Camp, when I got to this demo, I had to log in as admin to run it.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I use SQL Server nearly every day and I know nothing about it. Two months ago I saw Rod Paddock running stored procedures line by line in SQL Query. I never knew you could do that. (highlight the lines you want to execute and hit run.)Today I was trying to do a query that was case sensitive. I guess in all the years I have used SQL, I have never needed a case sensitive search. So I didn't know that I had to have my field as a varchar so that I could cast it to varbinary in order to do the comparison. (See Michael Kaplan's post on an even better way to deal with case sensitivity!)

It is really pathetic (and kinda scary) to know that there are thousands and thousands of people like me who end up being responsible for doing all of the SQL Server work, but we are too busy learning our development tools to *also* be a pro at the database tools, too. Oh, to have Roman Rehak spend just *one* day a week working with me. Heck, I'd take one day a *month*. Boo hoo. I know that looking at my database would probably give him a coronary anyway, so maybe it's better this way. Actually it would be better not to have someone wiht a public blog look at my db anyway. That way they couldn't humiliate me as readily. Of course, maybe I could bargain with him using my ADO.NET 2.0 deck and demos for his PASS talk!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Thanks to everyone who attended my Web Services Security and ADO.NET 2.0 sessions. I have had so much awesome feedback on the security session which I really appreciate.  The ADO.NET 2 talk is also one of my favorites. I could go on for days with that one as well.

If you are looking for the slides for the sessions and the demos from the ADO.NET talk, they are all posted on the MAD Code Camp site (that Andrew created using the ASP.NET 2.0 Clubs starter kit!!) for download as well as on my own site, on the presentations page.

Keep spreading the word that security does not have to be a mystery!!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

[I wrote this while at Devscovery]

When I FIRST learned about exceptions 3 years ago, I was told that exception handling was for handling exceptional situations. Jeffrey tells us that this is a myth and is just wrong. Exceptions are when a method cannot perform its expected behavior. There may be many reasons for this. There are plenty of exceptions to allow you to handle much of what comes along.

Of course, performance came into question since it more expensive to catch and exception than to test for it. A good example of this is looking at catching a DivedbyZeroException vs. testing for zero and not wasting the resources used by the exception. This is a matter of balance. If the possibility of a zero being passed in is a rarity, then the exception won't be hit very often, yet an if statement would be hit 100% of the time.

Jeffrey is on a mission to get the word out on this because the myth has been alive for way too long. I realize that based on this myth, I do more error handling than exception handling in my code. Of course, this is especially important for component developers, who may not know how their components are being used down the road.

Of course, I learned a lot more than just this about exception handling. I won't be able to look at my old code in the same way again and will probably end up going through and making some serious revisions.  

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.

In his unit testing and code coverage talk today, John Robbins pulled up the www.CodeBetter.com website and said I wish Darrell was here just so I can ask him to take a bow. He had such great stuff to say about the work that Darrell, Grant, Sahil and others are doing on that blog site.

Our Microsoft D.E., Thom Robbins, drove up from NH yesterday to present at the VTdotNET user group. It's a longish drive, so happily it was a beautiful day and he had lots of geek toys to entertain him on the way up.

Our pre-meeting preamble was a little longer than usual, because there is so much going on (starting .NET Newbie sessions in June, considering doing a Code Camp, a few conferences in our area, etc) so Thom didn't get started until 6:45. Also, because there were so many new people at the meeting, I asked everyone to go around the room and do their 10 second elevator pitch. It took less than 10 minutes and I think was a really valuable exercise.

Then we let Thom go to town. The first and most important thing he did was explain all of the SKUs for VS2005 and Team System. I know there is so much confusion and misunderstanding about that, so it was really important to get that cleared up. There aren't any huuuuuuge development companies here, outside of IBM. Although there are  large companies, like Goodrich (but not with a large group of developers) and IDX which probably has a few hundred developers, none that fit into the typical Foundation Server model, as far as Thom was able to explain. There are a lot of small consulting shops (3-10 employees) and also gobs of indies like me. The rest represent develoeprs who work at non i.t. companies.

There are a handful of people inthe group who have already been either playing with the Beta (and even Beta2) and even someone who is already working on a serious application. Thom went over the IDE and showed lots of new enhancements, and given the short time, highlighted a variety of different things - many new features in ASP.NET (master pages, personalization and membership, the SqlDataSource and ObjectDataSource components) as well as things like Edit & Continue, Code Snippets and partial classes. People who had already been playing with the beta were able to ask Thom pointed questions about things that they were having trouble with. I tried really hard not to say "ooh show them this, show them that" but apparently was not able to control myself quite enough.

It was nice that local Susan Wisowaty was able to make the meeting. She is now working as one of the D.C.C.s but unfortunately is doing this in the midwest and has to travel a lot. Thom is an excellent presenter. I know that even I was watching him as much to learn from his presentation style as much as I was trying to absorb what I could about VS2005.

If Thom didn't have to make the drive back after the meeting, I'm sure we would have been happy to let him show off VS2005 for as long as he liked! I hate making him drive up to VT, especially when he just drives up just for the meeting and then has to go back, but we really love having him present at the group so everyone truly appreciated his being there.

I think with all of the new stuff coming down the pipes, we could easily have 2 meetings a month. Maybe I'll have to make a bargain with the devil to get the MSDN events to come back to Burlington.

http://www.AcehAid.org