Many moons ago, when I made the transition from FoxPro to Visual Basic, my first resource I hit up was the newsgroups. There was Kathleen Dollard not only present but answering questions and she was the only woman's name I saw anywhere in those groups. She was very nice and answered some of my really dopie newbie questions. I emailed her offline and said that i really appreciated her presence there, I didn't feel like such an alien.

Years and years later, I have now developed a wondeful friendship with Kathleen, but only get to see her at random events like TechEd, DevConnections or the MVP Summit. So I am truly thrilled that she is coming to speak at Vermont.NET on Monday - thanks to the fact that she is an INETA speaker! She will be flying in on Saturday and so we get to play for a few days before the meeting.

She will then be heading up to Montreal to present at GUVSM on Tuesday night - again, courtesy of INETA. If I can get enough work done, I will go up with her and give her a mini tour of that beautiful city.

Kathleen will be presenting on Tracing in VS2003 and VS2005. I am not great at tracing, so when Kathleen says it sucks in VS2003 and has been overhauled and is wonderful in VS2005, I believe it! And I certainly need to get this lesson myself.

We will also have our 2nd .NET NEwbie session on Monday. After Laura Blood's wonderful job at beginner OOP in .NET in June, Rob Hale from IDX is going to follow up with a presentation on Inheritence and Polymorphism in .NET.

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This is something I have learned is very confusing to people, as it was the most often asked question in my Security Basics for WSE talk. I have learned now to explain it as part of the talk, but thought to put it here as I had the same question asked in an email this morning.

You can encrypt data with either the public or private key.

It depends on your goal.

If your goal is confidentiality (i.e. only the recipient should be able to read/comprehend the message) then you want to encrypt with their public key so taht only their private key is able to decrypt the message.

If your goal is authentication (for example, when encryption is used as the process of digital signatures, the source of the message needs to be authenticated) then you need to encrypt with your private key. The recipient then uses your public key to decrypt and that will ONLY work with a message that was encrypted with the correct private key.

If you encrypt with a private key, you can only decrypt that message with the public key from the pair.

If you encrypt with the public key, you can only decrypt the message with the private key from the pair.

It is definitely confusing when you see some cases (eg: confidentiality) where the public key is used to encrypt and others (eg: digital signatures) where the private key is used to encrypt.

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Scott & Omar want to include more themes in the next dasBlog update. More here....

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I'v been heads down this morning with major IIS problems on my web server. Something about a windows 2003 server patch, Application Pools mucked up, Service Unavailable on everything. Anyway, I uninstalled and reinstalled IIS and am now updating windows 2003 SP1 again, and had a minute to look at blogs and saw lots of pointers to the Tablet PC Memory Leak fix.

When I solve my server problems, I'll blog about it. Thanks to Brad Kingsley and Mike Campbell for lots of help with that today.

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Scott Hanselman & Omar Shahine continue to work diligently on dasBlog. Scott reports that there is an update on the horizon.

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My sister used to sell Sun systems to universities and corporations. She definitely has the sales person gene in my family - my dad, sister and brother have it. She is ballsy and smart and friendly so that was a great formula for success. But after a while she got sick of high tech and decided to start her own business that was about as far from high tech as you can get - dog stuff. It has been a successful venture (personally so far, and hopefully someday financially as well) and I am really proud of her. So I love this article that was written about not just her products, but about her business by one of her vendors.

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ahh - awesome. time to catch up on all the sessions I missed!! (Well maybe not at the moment, but nice to know they are there when I have the cycles.)

The TechEd US Sessions are now online on the TechEd attendee site. (Requires attended logins). (Thanks for the pointer, Varad.) If you were not an attendee, the DVD is only $195. That's incredibly cheap. It looks like it's the same price for attendees and non-attendees. Also there are 12 sessions online as webcasts for any and all to see. You can get at this stuff from the TechEd US home page.

If you are going through withdrawal, TechEd Europe is just starting and there are lots of folks blogging about it! Not sure if TechedBloggers.Net is going to pick it up (nothing there yet) but the only group blog I can find is at http://teched.developers.ie/.

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This .NET error message is misleading (although in the long run, it is still correct) and brings up nothing at all in Google, so I am going to put it here again: "The row doesn't belong to the same DataSet as this relation". Miseleading because I was focused on the row.

This is the System.ArgumentException error that will be thrown when you attempt to either XMLWrite a DataSet with tables that are related through a DataRelation, or when you attempt to GetChildRows on one of the rows of the parent table.

The error will happen if you have forgotten a key line of code in setting up a DataRelation  -- that is to attach the DataRelation that you have just created to the DataSet.

Dim ds As DataSet = GetSomeData()
Dim rel As DataRelation = New DataRelation("sitestodocs", ds.Tables(0).Columns("ID"), ds.Tables(1).Columns("ParentID"))
rel.Nested = True
ds.Relations.Add(rel)   <-- this is the likely missing code!
Dim dr as DataRow=ds.Tables(0).Rows(0)
dim tbl as DataTable=dr.GetChildRows(rel)

This is for VS2003. The documentation says that the exception's message is ""The relation and row do not belong to the same table". I wonder if that would have shortened the time that it took me to figure out my really stoooopid mistake. So hopefully, this little bit of google text will help the next person who is having a similar brainf*rt.

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I was just cruising around Leon's blog to get a link to one of my favorite posts ("You are not Inadequate") and started realizing something. I started reading his blog because it was (and still is) hilarious. But there are also so many really deep, thoughtful, interesting posts on there. For example, one where he analyzed the famous Spolsky API Wars article. I also noticed he had grouped his archives in a way that reflects what he was writing about. It would be interesting to look at our own blogs that way. I definitely go thorugh periods for example, where I was working on ADO.NET 2.0 heavily, making so many interesting discoveries. I was writing gobs of technical posts. Right now, the focus of my work is a little different and my blog is a little less technical and probably a little boring (sorry). I consider about Scott Hanselman's blog and how heavily it is read and why.

In a time of blog overload, it's that much more important to think about what you are writing about - but on the other hand, by doing that, I worry that I am losing the sponteneity that I think has made my blog stand out in the past. With hundreds of posts pouring into my feed every day, I am very selective about which I actually read. Generally I check out the post titles and anything that interests me I'll look at, maybe read, maybe not. Then I go by who wrote the posts (a big chore in the msdn feed or weblogs.asp.net feed) and pick out ones by people who I definitely want to "check in with". But I'm not reading as much. And I know for sure that not as many people are reading my own blog - for the same reason. Just too much to read overall and a post has got to be really worth anyone's time to be read.

Then it gets back to the most important thing. Why are we blogging? To be read? To get lots of comments or referrals? To get famous? No. I don't think any one of these should be the driving force (though I know a few people who do blog for that reason...and now you are all twitching in your boots wondering if I am referring to YOU heh heh). I think just saying what's on your mind and what you feel like when it strikes you (with some reservations obviously - like not ranting every time GWB opens his mouth because he makes me crazy - yes, I've learned NOT to do that Andrew, James and Avonelle! ) is what the whole point of blogging is. So if I am so excited about a new discovery in .NET that I just had to tell SOMEONE (and my dog just isn't interested), I'll blog it. If I'm looking out the window at the tree that makes my heart skip a beat every time I look at it,  and I just want to share it with the world, I'll blog it.

Anyway, I should be outside getting my kayak on the car roof rather than rambling away. But Leon's blog is really great and I decided that thought was worthy of mention.

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Quite often, when coding, I'll have to do something in .NET that I haven't done in two or three years. For example, today I have to write out an xml file from a DataSet that contains two DataTables that are related to ... [read more]

[A DevLife post]

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This is a side benefit of having blogger friends from around the world. Once in a blue moon, Malek Kemmou, writes his blog posts in his own language and I get this beautiful artwork in my feedreader:

I have no idea what it says, but that's okay. Another thing I love about his blog (besides all the usual stuff) is that he has an entire category called: "don't read if you're not Stephen Forte". If you know Stephen, you can only imagine the content of those posts!

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Jeff Schoolcraft asks some good questions about growing a User Group (he is one of the leaders of WinProTeamVienna) - how to increase awareness, why do people go, why do people NOT go?

I have heard these questions before.

Sounds like a perfect survey for INETA!

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After fiddling with Sharepoint WSS for most of this week, getting advice from some Sharepoint geeks, reading the documentation,googling a lot and hanging out in the newsgroups, I have finally worked out that what I want to do is use a combination of all of the methods of working with WSS.

My plan at this point (and don't hold me to it) is to use [...read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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Hey, cool. That was a good idea on the part of the MVP program. A perfect fit for Don Kiely, Anil John, Robert Hurlbut and as Don says "Keith Brown (of course!)".

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I just took a look at the WSE newsgroup and noticed that there are gobs of unanswered questions up there. Hey, WSE gurus, come help out!

I will go take a crack at ones I am confident on over the weekend, but many are out of my scope. There are much more knowledgeable people out there than me.

(microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.webservices.enhancements)

 

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You *know* I'm focused on something when I'm not blogging a lot. Though I'm not making any great new discoveries that would be revelations - just learning stuff that lots of people know.

I spent most of yesterday struggling with Sharepoint and getting frustrated with the limitations of the WSS U.I. even with a lot of customization.

I hit up the three sharepoint gurus that I know (Dave Burke, Eli Robillard and Amanda Murphy) who basically all encouraged me in believing that I could just write my own front end with sharepoint driving the backend.

Dave is the best for this because he hates Sharepoint but has written a lot of major stuff with it. That, to me, is an advantage, because he has found his way around it pretty darn well. He gave me lots of pointers. I have a lot to learn in a short period of time. We'll see how it goes.

There are a lot of great sharepoint resources out there, but I'm really lucky to have a few I can lean on when I have spent too much time researching or trying to figure out one little thing.

At least Dave has been blogging up a storm, so I'm happy someone's keeping the geek blog level up high in Vermont!

I definitely will have to write about the problems I have had (still unsolved, but found a workaround) with installing WSS on my webserver!

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http://www.unix-girl.com/blog/archives/2005/06/the_good_the_ba.html

She should have come to TechEd and attended the Women in I.T. luncheon. There are more and more women attending at every conference I go to. Even the ladies room isn't always empty!

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There is nothing more fun than having a new project to work on and new things to learn. Yesterday I got involved with a project for my client where I am going to get to work with Sharepoint Windows Services for the first time. I have been a ... [read more]

[A DevLife Post]

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"The Scoop on Wi-Fi" article in Fortune Small Business this month is all about how businesses are levering wi-fi and becoming REALLY mobile. Tablet PC's are a highlight of every one of the businesses that were featured in the article. The issues (July/August) isn't online yet, but last month's issue with the cover story about Microsoft's anthropoligists who learn how businesses work is. Just before I received that issue, Rich and I watched a film named Kitchen Stories, about Swedish researchers who were sent to Norway in the 50's to watch the patterns of single men in their kitchens. They had to be silent observers in the homes of their studies. Wonderful movie. Strange occupation. It seems that Microsoft's do the same: sit quietly in an office and watch someone work. Hard to pretend they aren't there.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Since February, the blogosphere has been abuzz with AJAX, which had been used by GoogleMaps and impressed the pants off of a lot of web developers. AJAX incorporates XMLHttp but is not limited to I.E. Now it is "hold the presses" at Microsoft who is planning [read more]

[A DevLife post]

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881