Well that was fun. I just did a webcast with DCC Glen Gordon on MARS, a new feature of SQL Server2005 that is leveraged in ADO.NET 2.0. (I'll post a link to the on-demand version of it when it gets posted)

Although I have looked at, experimented with, presented on and written about MARS previously, this was the deepest I have gotten into it. Glen and I had a lot of interesting talks in advance of doing the webcast. One thing that I really have learned a lot more about is transactions, where we can benefit from MARS the most.

Doing a webcast is fun, but for me the downside is not having the interaction with a group of people that you get doing a live presentation. You can see on people's faces when something is confusing, or if you are going on a little too long about something you may think is really fascinating, but they don't. and make adjustments as you go along.

MARS is very powerful, but it's so important to understand what it does and how it works before you start leveraging it. Otherwise you have the potential, as Christian Kleinerman says in his excellent MARS article, to really shoot yourself in the foot!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I just had a call from a client with some big problems on their server that has IIS and SQL Server on it.

Their most used application that interacts directly with SQL Server was having problems - from many computers and randomly throughout the application.

I watched the SQL Server profiler and saw rpc requests coming in and occasionaly that request was not being followed by a BatchCompleted.

Also on that server, things were really slow.

A quick peek in the task manager showed a very bloated ASP.Net worker process (w3wp.exe). On the first call to a particular webservice, it was flying up from about 108,000K to over 550,000K.

Restarting that application made the memory drop back down to 108,000 or so.

I checked everything I could think of and tested each time after I made a change. Still the worker process was bloating.

Finally, I targetted two little seemingly innocent lines in my web.config. The flags whcih enable wse2 to trace it's incoming and outgoing messages to xml files and also policy tracing. These are simple settings in the WSE2 config tool.

I commented them out and voila - all was well again.

Lesson learned - remember to turn of the darn analysis tools in a live app when you are not using them.

Crisis averted - phew!

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Speaking of Sam, he is coming to Vermont.NET on June 13th to talk to us about SOA and Indigo. This is an INETA event - so thanks once again to INETA.

We are definitely looking forward to it. Maybe I'll have to wear my Indigo shirt (oh what a geeky girl I am...)

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Sam's in Redmond and Michele found him at Starbuck's and knew he was there before she even saw his smilin' face!

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Very cool. Green Mountain Oracle Users Group. Lots of cross-pollination opportunities here with VTdotNET. Now we have a SQL group AND an Oracle group (as well as a Flash group) right in Burlington. Kewel...

Their kickoff meeting will be June 22 at the Wyndham with Tom Kyte, VP Core Technologies of Oracle.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I hope everyone got to catch the ADO.NET 2.0 (What's New Overview) webcast that Mark Dunn and Glen Gordon did yesterday. If not, look for it to show up in the on-demand webcasts soon.

Tomorrow at 12pm EST I will be doing another ADO.NET 2.0 webcast with Glen, specifically on the topic of MARS (Multiple Active Result Sets). This is a great feature of SQL Server 2005 that is leveraged by ADO.NET, but before you use it, you should understand what it does, where you will benefit from it, where you will be better off without it and some potential booby traps to avoid.

MARS will let you do some really interesting stuff with transactions as well as help you write some cleaner code in your ADO.NET.

Register here for the MARS webcast.

http://www.AcehAid.org

This is for my young friend Michael, who's 4 day old daughter is in very critical condition... all good vibes Mei's way...

http://www.AcehAid.org

Well, Chris is already on the boards of many non-profit organizations (including INETA lucky for us), but can you picture him in the Trump boardroom?

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okay - would you all please get OFF of the www.msteched.com site for a little while so I can look at the session schedules, too?

The site has been timing out and I just can't get at the session schedules or the tool to let me schedule. Hopefully, they will have the promised RSS feed ready SOON so we have easier access to the info. I would definitely be interested in using Rob Rohr's OneNote tool to schedule my sessions, but he can't finish it up until the RSS is available.

http://www.AcehAid.org

That Kate Gregory is something else. It's one thing for her to go round the world training developers, but when she gets invited to Microsoft to train the 'softies, I'm even more impressed. Kate recently did a tour of Canada teaching about VS2005 Smart Client programming and is bringing her expertise to Redmond next week.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I ordered something from PC Connection yesterday. Their site is awesome -- quick and easy to get around. The ordering process was quick safe and I'm sure very secure. I have no problems with that.

However, since I was a dummy and typed in my credit card info off the top of my head, I did get a number wrong. So they sent me an email about it.

I originally deleted the email along with all of my other spam. It was from a girls' name (@pcconnection.com but I didn't notice that quickly enough) and the subject said Order ######## (with the real number in there) like so very many spam emails that come through the pipe.

This is what the email looks like (except I have masked the name of the sender as well as what might be the direct line etc...)

--------------------------------

We are ready to ship your order but the credit card has declined.  Please call us at the number below between 9am and 1am Eastern Time.  Thank you,

N******* ***********

Loss Prevention Analyst

PC Connection Services

**********@pcconnection.com

Phone:  800-800-**** Fax:  603-355 ****

www.pcconnection.com

The name is in  "reply blue" text as is half of the fax #. The hyperlink is to file:\\pcconnection.com, which of course fails. Therefore you would resort to calling the phone #. The phone # is not the same as the phone # on the website. So I came to the conclusion that my email and order # were scraped from somewhere along the pipe and not secured as I'm sure the credit card info was and they were luring me to call a different phone # to give my credit card details to god knows who!

I did call the phone # on the website and got my cc cleared up but had a long chat with a customer service rep about the fact that most professionals I know would advise everyone and anyone to ignore such an email and they should really reconsider how they communicate with their clients about stuff like this.

Sheesh!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I had a very strange problem with SQL Server 2005 April CTP today that I have "solved" but just want to put it out there in case anyone has this happen too!

I installed VS2005 Beta2 and SQL Server 2005 April CTP Developer on a completely repaved clean machine. There is nothing else on the box.

I did this before I went to D.C. so that's about 2 weeks ago. I ran through all o fmy demos and everything worked great. I went away for a week and still didn't turn that machine on for another week, until today. I was unable to log into the sql server from code or from the Mgmnt Studio interface, not even into the default database. On both the lowly user or even the admin account, I was getting "invalid user". I couldn't run any of my demos from Visual Studio. I tried all kinds of stuff and finally gave in and uninstalled and reinstalled and everything is now fine.

I would be very interested to know if anyone else has had this behavior. I know it's just a beta and expect wierdness, but am still curious.

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This is not something I normally do, but is why I do have a "Purely Personal" category on this blog!

>
> TOP 10 (8 actually. The other 2 must have gotten deleted in  forwarding)
DOG PEEVES ABOUT HUMANS
>
> 1.  Blaming your farts on me...  not funny...  not funny at all!
>
> 2.  Yelling at me for barking ...  I'M A FRIGGIN'  DOG!
>
> 3.  Taking me for walks, then not letting me check stuff out.  Exactly
> whose walk is this anyway?
>
> 4.  Any trick that involves balancing food on my nose ... stop it!
>
> 5.  Any haircut that involves bows or ribbons.  Now you know why we
> chew your stuff up when you're not home.
>
>
> 6.  The slight of hand, fake fetch throw.  You fooled a dog!  Whoooo
> Hoooooooo -- what a proud moment for the 'top' of the food chain.
>
> 7.  Taking me to the vet for the "big snip", then acting surprised
> when I freak out every time we go back!
>
> 8.  Getting upset when I sniff the crotches of your guests.  Sorry,
> but I haven't quite mastered that handshake thing yet.

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Well, wouldyalookatdat?!

MS is going to include 5 seats for Foundation Server with any of the team system skus.

This will make lots of people happy.

However I am scratching my head a little because, if I understand Thom's explanation correctly the other night at VTdotNET, Foundation Server is aimed at huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge shops with lots and lots and lots of developers.

Anyway, I know a few small companies in Vermont that will be happy to hear this!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Microsoft New England is sponsoring a free showing of the new Star Wars flick that Rod Paddock says he would see again and again! Here are the details on Thom Robbins' blog.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Egad - Microsoft is now talking about Hawaii which is THREE product cycles out from what we are working on today.

VS2003

VS2005 (Whidbey)

VSxxx  (Orcas)

VSIhopetoberetiredby then (Hawaii)

http://www.AcehAid.org

Since I have an interest in WS-Federation and Liberty, I found this post from Tim Bray (by way of Robert Scoble) also notable. It's very difficult to always know what the big picture is of things like these - especially since I am pretty uninvolved in Interop still.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I found this interesting article on raising your hourly rates when you are a consultant. It is not directed at IT consultants, but just at consultants in general. I find it to be good objective advice. I had been billing the same rate for many many many years and have finally been adjusting to a new set of rates (still with a special rate for long-term clients) over the past few months. I know a lot of developers within our blogging .NET community that have made the leap to consulting in the past year or so. I have been working as a contractor since 1989, yet I sometimes need the same advice as a consulting newbie!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have been thinking about the Birds of a Feather session that I am leading at TechEd called "Life on the Bleeding Edge" and hoping that there will be people there that are already heavily into technologies like Longhorn, Avalon, Indigo, or have used .NET for so long that they are almost bored silly with it. Tablet PC users, etc

I did not create the session because I have the answer, but becasue I think it's a really interesting question and am very hopeful that there will be a mix of early adopters and VB6 devotees for an interesting dicussion. Here's the info

http://www.AcehAid.org

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