I've been fiddling some more with Virtual Earth Ink.

I discovered that there are cases where the tiles don't get realigned before going over to the inking interface. In order to realign the tiles, I need to use the map object's SetCenter command and pass in the current lat/long values of the map.That actually calls SetCenterandZoom, before recreating the map anew with fresh tiles (in the order that I need them). This is creating a big problem for me. When I zoom, I need to realign the tiles. But in doing so, this puts me in an infinite loop. So I have to come up with another way around this. In the meantime, if you pan a bit after zooming, the pan will fire off the realignment. Then when you go to INK the tiles, they will be in correct order.

The other thing I have been playing with is setting pins upon a search, which is not a problem. However, I want to persist the pins to the inking surface. I know how to do it, but am having trouble with calculating the position. I just have to keep at it, which of course, I will.

 

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I finally gave in and am trying out VPC.

It took minutes to install but then setting up a "whole new computer" on there is taking forEVer.

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It was 52 chilling degrees when I walked the dogs this morning. That was at 7am. I shudder to think what the low temp was overnight. What happened to the "dog days of August"?

Posted from BLInk!

There, I said it. With permission.

I am SOOOOOOOOOO excited. I have never been to Africa before and plan to definitely get some exploring since we will be right next to Pilanesberg National Park.

There is ONE more person who will be making this announcement and flying together with me from JFK to Johannesburg. I will wait for that person to blog, rather than spoiling the fun for him or her. Then I will link back. That didn't take long. It's Kate Gregory (oh big shock, right?). Kate and I are good friends so this will make it an extra special trip. And we are even looking forward to the 10 hour layover in Frankfurt. We will definitely go into Frankfurt and have a look around.

Oh yeah - my talks!

What's New in Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0
Introducing Indigo
Integrated Innovation: Using ADO.NET 2.0 with SQL Server 2005

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Kate Gregory  has amazing business sense and is able to share it with great clarity which always has me in awe. Kate wrote a blog post yesterday about what she calls Fail Fast - basically about the value of trying something out and getting it over quickly if it's going to fail rather than debating the possibilities endlessly or pursuing the project in a way that you won't find the point of failure until pretty far into the game. I have actually used this theory in my pre-marital days of dating. You know --- the totally flaming hot prospect that fizzles fast. "Damned good thing that happened sooner than later, but it was fun while it lasted!" I'd say.

I have a client who also subscribes to this philosophy that has been a key to his company's success. He would rather invest in something and try it out than wonder forever if it will work or not. The odds work out for him because for every time this causes a loss for him, there are many gains.

I definitely subscribe to this myself. Usually I try to identify the hardest parts of a project and see if I can't work them out first, before I make any larger scale commitment or planning effort. Of course, you can't let your ego get in the way of this as I did with my Virtual Earth Ink application. I was determined not to give up until I had exhausted every possible idea I had to get it to work.

Go read Kate's post if you do any business decision making and I would also recommend Michael Kaplan's thoughtful response to Kate's post as a chaser.

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If you have ever used a SqlDependency in .NET 2.0, have you ever inspected the object before you execute your command?

In the object is a property called Callback ID. When I am running both the .NET code and SQL Server on the same machine or same network, this is set up to traverse back through TCPIP.

 "<MachineAddress>tcp://192.168.0.5:58343</MachineAddress>
<AuthType>None</AuthType>
<Key>a55f6539-5d30-4e67-b87a-a4e3ebb85131</Key>" 

192.168.0.5 is the address of the client machine and 58343 is one of the ports that SqlDependency is pre-defined to use. This is using Beta2 bits and I expect that this will change when I load the next CTP onto my computer. But for now, it's interesting to see.

I am now curious to see what the message looks like when it arrives in SQL Server's clutches, before it strips out the query and sends it off to be processed.

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I learned on the WSE newsgroup that there will be an August CTP for WSE 3.0 to go with the August CTP of VS2005, though it will be a "couple of weeks".

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I noticed this on the Tablet PC home page, but finally checked it out when I saw a link to a Channel 9 video on Loren Heiny's site.In it Emily Rimas, a PM on the Tablet PC Team demo's the (free) product for Robert. It has features from Agilix' GoBinder Lite in there and definitely looks like bits of xThink's equation translators. I wonder if the FlashCards are from Loren? I remember he was working on something a while back. There's more in there. I just sent the link off to my friend who is the Dean of a local college (part of UVM) where all of the students are required to have TabletPCs. Here is a post by Loren where you can get a quick overview of what's in the pack.

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Fabulous ad for Australia's Carlton Draught beer. Thanks to Esther Schindler of www.devsource.com for sending it my way.

By the way, Carlton Draught's website is asp.net (which is why I moved this out of the Purely Personal category ).

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Now this is exciting. Somasegar announces that RC1 will be coming out in September. That means we're almost there! It gets the heart patternig a little faster than “CTP”, doesn't it? 

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Essex High School is looking for

"Microcomputer Specialist to perform a variety of specialized computer installation and support functions"

They are also looking for an AV Technician

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Vermont Energy Investment Corp has two job openings

more info here

DBA and Senior Applications Programmer

Work as part of our IT team to specify, design, develop, and support databases and database applications. Requirements: 3 Years experience designing and administering SQL based commercial database system, and 5 years experience developing database applications. Experience with MS Access, SQL, at least one SQL Programming Language, and VBA required. Oracle & Delphi experience preferred.

Applications Programmer

Work as part of our IT team to design, develop, and support database applications. Requirements: 2 years experience developing database applications. Experience with MS Access, SQL, at least one SQL Programming Language, and VBA required. Delphi experience preferred.

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I was looking at some of the links of the TechEd Worldwide page for upcoming events.

TechEd Taiwan I can't make heads or tails of

Tech Ed South Africa is sold out already and it's not for two more months.

TechEd Asia features four talks by my pal who goes by "Softwaremaker" who is becoming an Indigo guru!

There are 3 TechEd events in China (big country, lots of people!) Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai.

Australia is in only a few weeks. Charles is blogging up a storm about it.

There are more, but the links are a little harder to find....

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Have you tried out the new ASP.NET 2 Migration tool that the ASP.NET team was hoping to get feedback on? Time is running short. I tried a small app. It's small, but criticial to a client and does file transfers, file reads and writes, database access, forms authentication and a huge amount of inspection of very complex xml files.

If you don't count the time I took to recreate my database on the test machine, setting all the proper permissions etc, the migration took about 30 seconds and then another 5 minutes to test all of the functions of the application which worked perfectly.

Great job folks.

If you have some free time in the next few days,  go run the tool and send your feedback (including the conversion.txt file) to webwish at microsoft.com. Here is Scott Guthrie's post with more info and the links for the downloads.

The more complicated your application is, the more useful your feedback will be.

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Microsoft's Channel 9 has announced the winners of two contests: Cod'n My Way to PDC and Blog'n My Way to PDC that rewarded airfare, hotel and conference passes. The first contest: Cod'n My Way to PDC has two winners: my buddy casey chesnut (he's a big fan of lower case letters) who I have never met in person (so I'm really happy about this) and Peter Jousovec from [read more...].

[A DevLife post]

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Microsoft is pushing a lot of great info out on ASP.NET 2.0 for the imminent November 7th release of VS2005. Here are some documents that went public recently: [read more]

[A DevLife post]

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Every time my husband or parents have to update their Norton Anti-Virus subscriptions I get irate. Their upgrade process is so confusing and I am confident that iit s inentionally designed to get people to buy more than they need when they upgrade. For example, when Rich gets into the upgrade path from NAV 2003 it shows him only three options: 1) update NAV2003 subs for $24.95 with no more tech support, 2)update to NAV 2005/ PasswordMinder bundle for $39.95 or 3) a 3-pack of NAV 2005. There is no link anywhere on that page to find any other options. He doesn't need Password Minder. So instead we go directly to the Symantec site and choose Products then Upgrades. We say we have NAV 2003 and want to upgrade. It shows us our options. NAV2005 and Norton Internet Security. In the NIS block it says "protect yourself from x y and z viruses" as though you get that with NIS and not with NAV. Additionally, NIS basically does what Windows Firewall does, doesn't it?

In the grid showing differences it does not have "windows 2000/NT/XP" checked for NAV 2005 but it does for the other. I patiently make my way through to order the upgrade to NAV 2005 with subscription and it's only $5 more than renewing the NAV2003 subscription. That's cool. Then it shows him another option - renew for 2 years, not just one, for only $5 more. That's good. We won't have to go through this nonsense again for 2 years. Then the checkout screen finally arrives and it is $41.95 instead of $35.95. They ahve added a 60 day download option in case I don't download it today. I uncheck that and update the cart back to $35.95.

This is just SO aggravating and they have used this trickery for years. Remember when you bought the program and paid $3.95/year for virus subscriptions?  I know there are SO many more viruses for them to keep up with and I don't have a problem with paying more for the virus subscriptions. But it ticks me off that it's this confusing for someone like me - imagine what an average home user goes through.

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Brian Goldfarb points to this just released document: Major Changes for Visual Web Developer 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 from Whidbey Beta 2 to RTM . Thanks for keeping us up to speed!!

Here's one that I've been waiting for.

SqlCacheDependency.Start method required for cache dependencies based on SQL Server 2005.

If you are creating cache dependencies based on SQL Server 2005, you must call the System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDependency.Start method to initialize SQL Server 2005-based dependencies.

 I am still on Beta2 and will be downloading the August CTP as soon as it's available because I have great faith that the issues of using SQLDependency as a non-admin will be worked out. A number of us have been tearing our hair out about this one. Don't worry, I'm not bald yet.

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If you are planning to program with Virtual Earth, I highly recommend having a JavaScript reference handy! I have definitely been making use of  the O'Reilly JavaScript Pocket Ref by David Flanagan though it looks like I'm behind a few editions.

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