Juval Lowy is at it again. Not only is he creating .NET 2.0 components that we can use today in .NET 1.1, but now he is creating VB components for C#. This from the man who is definitely a C# guy! What's next, Edit & Continue for C#? (Just kidding Juval, besides I think the E&C for C# camp already won that battle....)

Okay, sorry, I know Juval highly values the variety of languages that can be used to code against the .NET framework.

Anyway, I definitely have it on my todo list to check it out, but in the meantime, no reason why you can't! It is on this page, about 1/2 way down "My for C# 2.0"

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but you don't control the webserver box (i.e. it is on a webhost somewhere out in the world).

I asked how to do this with DPAPI when you don't control the webserver. Paul Glavich and Rich Dudley were way ahead of me on this one. They both write web apps that can do the DPAPI on the webserver, then they remove the apps from the server! Aha. That, I can do!

Here is Rich's solution which leverages the DPAPI wrapper that Carl Franklin wrapped up after DevDays last year.

Here is Glav's download page where he has his DPAPI wrapper.

The irony here is that I talked about this at DevDays and wrote about it too. I even did it on servers that I have control over, but, I never did get to the two applications that are hosted elsewhere because of this problem.

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Just yesterday I was working some last minute review of a Customized Debugging in VS2005 presentation for DevTeach that I will be doing early next week and was stunned to see the "List" property gone when debugging into a rows collection of a datatable. Had the ADO.NET team taken this stuff back under the covers? ...

[A DevLife post]

Earlier today I wrote about celebrating the VS2005/SQL Server 2005 launch while I am at DevConnections in November. Now I have found this great banner on their home page (though I admit seeing it first on fellow speaker (wow, I get to be a "fellow speaker" with Dino??!) Dino Esposito.

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I just got an email from Paul Litwin who is the track chair for ASPConnections.  Since DevConnections is being held right when the official launch date of VS & SQL 2005 occur (Nov 7), they are going to be a part of the celebration. If I were home in Vermont, I would not have this opportunity. Microsoft is very involved with the DevConnections show. The first day of the show, since I have been attending and presenting, has always been Microsoft Day. All presentations from Microsoft people. So, they are going to have a live feed of the central event from San Francisco, a big party and the biggest news I think is that all attendees will be getting a free license to Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. (Version has not been determined yet, but since it's Vegas, I'm betting that it won't be Express!)

I'm doing two sessions at ASP.NET Connections and two sessions at Visual Studio Connections.

Here is a link to the conference brochure (pdf).

The C++ is a special show because they will be celebrating the 20th anniversary.

    

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I was just updating some old "About INETA" powerpoints to use at the Candian User Group leader summit that is being hosted on June 18th at the DevTeach conference. The slides were from April 2003. I had to change the numbers on the slides from

April 2003

275 User Groups

87,000 Developers

41 Countries

TO

June 2005

775 User Groups

374,819 Developers

65 Countries

Wow!!!

The database has not yet caught up to the fact that INETA has 5 worldwide regions. That will change soon. But for now, here are some additional statistics I have pulled together.

 

NORAM (U.S./Canada)	251
LATAM (Latin America)	200
APAC (Asia Pacific)	120
MEA (Middle East & Africa)	49
EUROPE (Europe J)	217

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I'm still thinking about the Turnkey Security Scenarios I saw demonstrated by Mark Fussell at TechEd as part of the WSE3 overview. I look at these scenerios as too canned and wizard-y for me, but ...

[A DevLife post]

 

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I do it, so my site should be safe, right? Well it turns out that the answer is "wrong"!!

One of the websites that shares a webserver with my site left CustomErrors="Off" in their web.config when they deployed their site.

How does this affect me? Well, there was a problem in the machine.config on the server. That website exposed the error because it had the customerrors off which basically does a little stacktrace dump on the webpage. In the particular case, it happened to show the bad line from the machine.config. What was the bad line? It set up impersonation for 4 websites on the server, of course mine being one of them. So browsing to that other website, showed anyone going there the logins and passwords for four domains.

So, now this is not a best practice, it is a rule. There are plenty of web.config settings that should not get to production!! Pay attention. Please.

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I would just like to point out that the word Indigo is now appearing on Michele Leroux Bustamante's blog. Watch this space for lots of Indigo insights!!!

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okay - there just went the folder with all of my blog images

I am downloading fast and furiously

To whatever a**hole is doing this: Thanks so very much. It would be nice to be able to get some billable work done today. Help my clients. You know, the little things in life.

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This could be an endless post - shout out to so many bloggers I met in person for the first time at TechEd.

First and foremost is Amanda Murphy who I have known virtually for over a year and meeting her was like meeting a younger sister. Amanda runs a user group in St. Johns Newfoundland (practially out in the middle of the ocean). She won one of the INETA Scholarships to TEchEd (after a) the invitation to apply had landed in her junk mail box and b) after I got her to FIND the invite, still almost didn't apply becasue she thought she would never get it.) Ha. Watch this girl - I think she is definitely an up & comer in the .NET community.

Also, I loved meeting Chris Williams & Jason Olson, seeing a bunch of the guys from MAD Code Camp again (like Frank LaVigne and Jeff Schoolcraft). Lorenzo Barbieri seemed a little surprised that I recognized him - the value of a good blog, having your picture on it and a few years of Italian in college (plus some help from Google language tools). I am going to try to find a GURU shirt for myself.

Oh, of course there are hundreds more. You know who you are!

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Can someone email me my posts from today - maybe they are still in your aggregator??

There are a bunch missing, but now I think everything is all cleared up on my server and with my blog update.

Thanks!!

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Here is the abstract for the talk Sam is doing tomorrow night at VTdotNET as our first INETA event of 2005.

There have been a lot of arguments in Blogs and elsewhere lately about SOA and two themes seem to emerge from some: SOA is bogus because there is a lot of hype around it and SOA is bogus because it’s nothing new. We will dispose of both of those arguments early in showing that SOA is a real and excellent way to build loosely coupled, distributed systems despite being over hyped beyond belief There are parts that are not new but what is different is clear focus on services as DISTINCT from objects. After looking at what SOA and SO are, we will looking at how to implement services using WSE3 and .NET 2.0 on the Microsoft platform. The culmination of this approach of course is Indigo and now that Indigo is public we will take a deep dive into Indigo. All throughout, we will focus on a practical approach with simple code demos to reinforce the concepts.

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Too much comment spam - server problems, etc etc. I am going to do a clean install of the latest dasblog and maybe captcha as well. Ahh, Sundays. I have always gotten gobs of referral spam, but since I don't show referrers, I didn't worry. But now the comments spam is coming on fast and furiously.

So - for me, the hottest coolest new thing I saw at TechEd was the TabletPC Thinkpad by Lenovo. I kept telling Arin Goldberg that I'd be MORE than happy to trade my Toshiba M200 with 1GB for it. Oh well. But now I see Avonelle's got one on the way. Thatta girl!!!

Posted from BLInk!

I just received an email from my awesome webhost, Alentus, saying that they had to move my website to a new server. Although not even in the top 10 of bandwidth there, they said my site was contributing to the heavy load at about 30GB a month! Oh my.

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I can't believe that I just found a picture on Kirk Allen Evan's blog documenting what had to be the BEST TechEd session this week.

I was sitting at a cabana table this morning with some of my favorite German and North Carolinian guys, and the topic of transactions came up. I am admittedly pretty light when it comes to distributed transactions, but have had to dig deeper into them as of late, for example in preparation for the MARS webcast which I did with Glen Gordon (who I got to meet in person this week!) and also in yesterday's conversations about DTC. Mentioning this, I suddenly found myself having a 20 minute private training session with Clemens Vasters, Rich Turner and Christian Weyer all teaching me about transaction resource managers. Just me. Three brilliant instructors, one student. 

Clemens walked me through a transaction resource manager that he has written and I was introduced to a whole new flavor of programming model. I have been limited to thinking about transactions only in the scope (ummm, no pun intended) of database transactions. I always feel that I am pretty much representative of the bulk of developers out there, so surely this is not an uncommon misconception.

Kirk posted a bunch of TechEd pictures and as I was looking at them tonight, I  was surprised, but happy, to see that he had captured the moment!

I think that we will soon all have our eyes opened up a little more about leveraging DTC to create transaction resource managers.

Also in the photo are Don Smith and Don Browning at the same table, and Robert Hurlbut (who also knows a thing or two about DTC) at the table behind us.

Posted from BLInk!

Oh, now here's a big shocker! Kate, who I love, admire, respect and trust, both as a professional and as a great human being, has been named RD of the Year by the MSDN Regional Director program. My understanding is that all of the other 120+ RDs around the world have a vote on this.

Here is a fantastic blog post all about Kate and this lovely honor.

And here is a post by Kate which is a great insight to what really makes her tick.

 

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