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Loren Heiny asked "if you have $10million to promote TabletPCs, how would you do it." Robert Scoble suggests buying 5 tabletpcs for every airline so people can play with them while they are flying. Oddly enough, Don Kiely emailed me the other day to tell me that Lenovo (the makers of the new ThinkPad TabletPC) had a kiosk at one of the airports that he flew through on his latest multi-user group INETA trip and he got to play with it for a while (and was hooked!). It makes perfect sense, all of our best stories about showing Tablets to strangers are those which happened while we were in airports or airplanes.

There is a growing list of comments to Loren's original post.

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Jim Holmes is in the process of starting a .net group in Dayton, Ohio (Dayton .NET Developers Group). He has written down a list of things he is doing as tips for others starting user groups. The tips are great. It is important to remember that every group is different and everyone's approach is different, but there are definitely a lot of things that many groups can share with each other. As Jim points out, it's a lot of work and you better know what you are committing yourself to! I know that when I started VTdotNET, I wasn't nearly as organized as Jim is in starting up this group in Dayton. Somehow I've made it work, but I do believe that (outside of the phone call thing - just not for me, but may work for others) it is all great. One of the great resources Jim has in his area is Drew Robbins who went from User Group Leader to Regional Director to MSDN Developer Evangelist! And it was through Drew that I found his post.

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Hmmm - “this just in” in the Microsoft Downloads Notifications: 

Microsoft Agent 2.0 and Tablet PCs
Learn how to use Microsoft Agent 2.0 in a Tablet PC application. Code examples are ... [read more]

[A DevLife post]

 

 

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I was truly amazed to see this new web services book at the checkout counter at the grocery store the other day!

I'm going to start a new category. It is called "Keeping up with the Joneses".

Here I will get to vent for each time I see someone working with a technology that I haven't had the time to play with yet. Every time I see someone writing about their Indigo or Avalon projects, there is a little demon on my shoulder whispering "you are SUCH a loser and a dumb-ass, cause you don't even know how to do that yet!" Of course it's all very silly of me. I spend a lot of time on certain technologies and who can do it all? And the folks doing those Avalon projects are probably focused on Avalon and not working with a lot of other technologies either. I keep telling myself that, anyway.

So today's Keeping up with the Joneses is:

• Firefox Update  Nope I have never even LOOKED at Firefox
• New WS SecurityPolicy Published Whoa - *this* I need to look at! But I'm stuck on this darned Sharepoint (with a tight deadline) project
• Hacking MSN Virtual Earth I've been thinking about Virtual Earth. Check out Dr. Neil's project.
• Small CodeSmith Template effort launched Nope, never done any CodeGen. Not used any of the tools. Happily, Kathleen still likes me.
• Concurrency: What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps Ahh yes, threading. I grok it okay I guess, but I would like to be much more knowledgable about it.

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my website is broken and I am testing again

of course, my last 3 posts were there for a while and then disappeared into thin air, so we will see what happens!

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Tablet / Mobile PC Webcast Series 2005

Tune in as presenters from the Tablet/Mobile PC team share our most popular sessions: showcasing introductory and advanced Tablet PC topics, Mobile PC development considerations, and network awareness and data access strategies.

The series of 7 webcasts starts July 12 and runs through the end of the year.

 

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[this is for v 1.1]

On a web page I have an ImageButton with some server side action to take place when it is clicked. But there are scenarios where I would like it to be disabled. The Enabled property disables any command action, but you still get the "index finger" cursor when you hover over the icon. I didn't even want that. I think that's pretty confusing because it still looks like the user can *do* something.

To make it more interesting, I have this happening inside of a Data Repeater. Here is how I got this to work.

Just after the ImageButton, I placed an <asp:image> with the same image as it's source. The default "visible" parameter on this is False. Since I am doing this in a Repeater, I am hand coding it, so remember to add runat=server. In my case, I actually have a different image, so it is extra obvious to the user that the state of the icon has changed.

By making the visible property false, not only is the image not visible, but it does not take up any real estate on the page.

<asp:Imagebutton id="CheckOut" runat="server" ImageUrl="images/checkout_red.gif" AlternateText="Check Out"  CommandName="CheckOut" />
<asp:Image ID="CheckOutNoLink" Runat=server ImageUrl="images/checkout_small.gif" Visible=False/>

In the repeaters "ItemCommand" event, when the state calls for the inactive image I just flip the Imagebutton's visible property to false and the Image control's visible property to true. Again, by making the Imagebutton not visible, it no longer takes up the space on the page, and the Image slides over to fill in the hole that the Imagebutton left behind.

              CType(e.Item.FindControl("CheckOutNoLink"), System.Web.UI.WebControls.Image).Visible = True
              CType(e.Item.FindControl("CheckOut"), System.Web.UI.WebControls.Image).Visible = False

 

I'm sure this has been done plenty of times before, but I didn't intuit the solution at first and couldn't find anything on google, so here ya go!

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The recent discussions about Sharepoint have piqued my interest (since I have been struggling with it for a few weeks) but not distracted me from my goal yet! Amanda Murphy, however has a LOT to say on the topic. She has a lot of experience with Sharepoint and her company, InfoTech Canada, dpes a large amount of Sharepoint work. I would definitely recommend reading this post of hers.

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This bit me (again) today. It had been so long since the last time that I had to google for help.

Problem: Select colA, colB, colC from tableA UNION Select colA, colB, colC from tableB when one of the columns is an ntext will result in this confusing error:

"The text, ntext, or image data type cannot be selected as DISTINCT."

Thanks to this Wrox forum thread, I got a  quick lesson of why I get an error regarding a clause that I'm not even using (DISTINCT) and a reminder to use UNION ALL instead of just UNION.

In case that thread ever disappears I will paste the key info from Jeff Mason.

The UNION operator by default eliminates duplicate rows from the resultset.  The duplicate eliminating operation is similar to a SELECT DISTINCT.  You can't use SELECT DISTINCT on a column that is text type.

Try UNION ALL which will not remove duplicates, or remove the text column(s).

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Wow. James Kendrick has done 16 Tablet PC podcasts already. Here's the link. I'm definitely going to have to listen to these!

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I'm a developer. Why do I have to spend so much time dealing with system administration problems? In the past week, two Windows updates to my in-house server have cost me about 12 hours of headaches so that I could get back to work. This costs... [read more]

[A DevLife post]

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Oh, more lost hours in admin hell. Here's some pointers if you are upgrading your web server to SP1.

- Remember the firewall problems when moving XP to SP2. You will have them here!! <g> Pay attention to what ports are opened up.

This article is a good reminder of that wiht a section on what applications to allow through the firewall on the remote server

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;833977#27

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In addition to the free ASP.NET online learning, there is  VS2005 E-Learning (free for four months) and SQL Server 2005 e-Learning, also free for 4 months.

The launch page for all of this stuff is at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/learning/

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My 2 year contract was ending with Verizon. They have called me 3 times now to renew a contract and see if I'd like to pick a new phone - either free for heavily discounted. Each time they have called I have looked at the phones while on the phone with them and couldn't make a quick and informed decision. I know I would like a camera phone with Blue Tooth. Their "free" phones don't have blue tooth. I can get one with bluetooth for $100, but then I think - geeze, maybe I should just fork it over and get a BlackBerry or better yet, a smartphone, but they don't have those in their promotion. I finally just said forget a new phone - just renew my contract. So now I continue with my plain old phone. I cannot justify $500 for a phone. I have a pocket pc and I have a phone. Yes I want to smoosh them together and have just ONE device (and have it also be an MP3 player that I can listen to in my car). It was easier just to make NO decision, than to have to choose. So welcome to the life of a Libra!

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Loren is a developer who definitely is a "big brain" when it comes to thinking about WHAT we can do with ink, not just how to use it.

I can't point to this post of his without quoting him: I've heard it said many times: "I'm a developer. I type code. Why do I need a Tablet PC or even ink?"

Check out what he has done (well, is still working out) in regards to inking notes into your IDE code or while debugging. Very cool!

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Don Box reports that the first Indigo book is on the shelves.  He refers to author David Pallman as an "indigette".

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To appease the masses (okay it was just Dave Burke's loud whining), Kathleen will talk a bit about Code Gen at our VTdotNET meeting on Monday night. Her regularly schedule presentation, Tracing in VS2003 and VS2005 is a 90 minute talk. So we will take a break after that talk (app. 8:15 for the break) do our raffles, etc, then Kathleen will spend 1/2 hour talking about some high level CodeGen concepts and also how Generics in VS2005 is going to have an incredible impact on Code Generation. We will probably continue the conversation at a local pub in downtown Burlington.

So check the website  - which I will be modifying shortly - for the new schedule.

We have a box of goodies from APress - lots of books (including Kathleen's Code Generation in Microsoft.NET book), t-shirts and more and I'll also be raffling off a copy of Infragistics NetAdvantage!

Remember that we have our .NET Newbie session (OOP: Inheritance & Polymorphism in .NET) at 5:30.

Thanks to INETA for bringing Kathleen our way.

She heads up to Montreal to do a full 2 hour Code Gen talk at GUVSM on Tuesday night (in English ).

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I Win! I Win! I am smarter than the computer HAHAHAHA! Don't you know that feeling? When you figure out how to do something that seemed like it couldn't be done? I'm doing the little I WIN I WIN dance right now, having figured out how to display Sharepoint workspaces hierarchically on a web page...[read more]

[A DevLife post]

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