Sarah Blow is trying to get a women geek dinner together in London.

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Here are a few things that keep biting me when I return to working on a web services app using wse3.0. I have blogged about some of these before, but need to keep them in the front of my mind!

1. ASP.NET Project NTLM Authentication: If NTLM Authentication is on and you are not set up to use it, you will get a 401 Unauthorized error ("The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.") when trying to start up a web page or access a web service.  This was a new project property setting as of Beta2.
2. Using File System and not IIS? Check your port #.  When trying to hit a web service and the port # of the Development Server has changed, you will get an error message saying "Stream was not writable". This happened to me when I moved a solution from one computer to another and I needed to change the port # in the web reference.  In an ASP.NET application you will get this message "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it" when your port # has changed.
3. Permissions to read certificates Depending on your environment, a particular windows account will need READ access to the web server certificate. Normally, it would be the ASP.NET account. I found that when developing with a non-admin account, I needed to give that non-admin account access to the certificate (in a development environment). If you have not set this up properly, you will see a message indicating "Bad Key" in the soap fault when looking at the trace info. This will come back in the TraceInput of the client application. The Security Hands on Lab for WSE3 (found on this page) has instructions for setting permissions on certificates.

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If you have seen Wally McClure's many posts on AJAX lately, then this great news will come as no surprise. Congrats!

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When INETA began, Christian Nagel was our man in Europe. When INETA was divided up into the five regions (North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East Africa and Europe) he took the lead of Europe. Now that region is very organized. Christian did a fantastic job and also brought a lot of great people on board to help him out all across Europe. As with the recent evolution with INETA NORAM, Christian decided it was time to let someone else step up to the plate and the obvious choice was Damir Tomicic who was already on the INETA Europe board. Damir lives in Bavaria where he runs a .net user group and is an MSDN Regional Director. He blogs at www.tomicic.de and you can read his bio here.

I know he's already doing a great job!

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If you have done any work with the TabletPC SDK, you are probably aware that there is a COM API and a managed API, but that the managed API is really just a wrapper to the COM API. You are also probably aware that the Tablet API is VERY tightly bound to the windows API. Everything that you do is through windows handles. If you have tried to add ink to your web pages, you probably learned this lesson well also.

Shawn van Ness was fortunate enough not only to have been born with a pretty good brain, but he was also lucky to be working at the Leszynski Group when they got very involved with doing TabletPC development hand in hand with Microsoft. Do you know that it was the Leszynski Group that wrote the super cool Physics Illustrator app? And that Shawn was one of the authors of that program? Shawn has also authored a great many Tablet PC development articles for MSDN Online.

So I was definitely not surprised to learn in February that he had finally gotten scooped up by Microsoft to ink-enable Avalon. And I was not surprised when his recent blog article came out talking about ink being baked directly into Avalon.

What is interesting is how differently it is all going to work. Because Avalon tosses our dependence on Windows handles, working with ink had to be rethought from the ground up. Shawn is a very good teacher and he offers a great explanation of how and why this will work and how it is compares to our current Tablet PC SDK development experience.

And no, I have NOT played with Avalon yet. Aaargh!

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One of the projects I have been involved with for the last year is the formation of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance. The Vermont Business Magazine just published a great article on the organization and I was very happy to see this paragraph.

Included in that number is a one-woman software consulting firm with an international reputation. Julia Lerman, who does some of her business via thedatafarm.com, works with Microsoft on software development projects while giving speeches around the country and serving as a mentor to young software companies. She moved to Huntington six years ago from the New York City area because of the state's skiing and riding opportunities. Lerman says she had wanted to relocate to Vermont sooner, but it took her a while to realize "how much tech is going on up here."

There are a lot of awesome companies (vertical, consulting, large and small) in our area. Not just the .NET folks that have made Vermont.NET such a success, but many technologies. We are darned lucky to have our cake (live in this beautiful place) and eat it too (do the work we love).

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Keeping up with the Joneses #2

Keeping up with the Joneses #2: AJAX, MSBUILD, IIS7 and Certifications [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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Doug Reilly interviews Shawn in his Database Geek series. Shawn lives in New Hampshire and we were very lucky to have him speak at one of the very early Vermont.NET meetings. This was before there was an INETA Speaker bureau even, which of course, Shawn is a now member of!

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Mike was on one of the trains, luckily, many cars away, that got bombed in London. Although he notes how fortunate he was not to get killed, he notes that many who left physically unscathed, will still suffer emotional scras for a long time. Here's his blog post. (by way of Szymon Kobalczyk).

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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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