Rob Bushway is doing an excellent poll and the responses are educational. If there are 1,000,000,00 tablet pcs out there, there is a potential for Rob's comments to get a little long!!

by way of Loren Heiny

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The BOF sessions that are being organized by INETA at PDC will be set up like this:

In total, there will be 7 time slots spread out over a few nights for sessions. My guess is maybe 3 on one night and 4 on another, but I truly have no idea.

During each time slot there will be 6 rooms available.

Therefore, there will be a potential of 42 BOF sessions at PDC.

Right now I see 30 sessions on the PDC BOF site for voting. I know that there are at least two more that I just submitted, so there may be more submissions waiting in the wings for the BOF committee to deal with. But surely, there will be room for more.

Remember when coming up with a BOF idea that the purpose of a BOF is to be a discussion among all of the BOF attendees with one or a few people leading the discussion. It is not a presentation and there is no presentation equipment available (eg projector).

So go submit a proposal or vote. You can vote for up to 7 sessions, so if you want to vote for my Tablet PC or Going Solo sessions, you'll have to wait until they are on the list.

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One of the problems of going to lots of conferences is that it eats into possible vacation time throughout the year. Last year, Kathleen Dollard and I took two days out when we went to Las Vegas for DevConnections to visit Zion National Park. This year, since I am going to speak at DevConnections again and it is in Las Vegas again (and not to be missed if you can make it!!!) I have convinced my hubby to come out at the end of the conference and he and I are going to head out to the desert for 5 days. It will be mid-November, but it is going to have to count as our summer vacation. That is going to be some awesome week. Las Vegas. DevConnections which also means staying at the awesome Mandalay Bay resort. The big VS2005/SQL Server 2005 launch party that is happening at DevConnections. And then to top it off, a vacation in a phenomenally beautiful place with my husband. That's hard to beat. Although going to Sun City South Africa for TechEd with my dear friend Kate, and including a meetup in Frankfurt with our pal Christian Weyer during a 12 hour layover, will be pretty close!

Posted from BLInk!

PDC is getting closer and you can feel the level of excitement in the blogosphere. Once again, the event has sold out. This always amazes me -- that Microsoft could sell out events with over 10,000 attendees. This has been happening for PDC and TechEd for a few years now that I know of [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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Camey relays a conversation that may bring [un]fond memories to many developers... but go ahead, torture yourself anyway and read it.

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I JUST submitted two BOF sessions, so I don't know when they will show up on the list. Voting ends Monday, so go vote!

TabletPC: If you build it, will they come?

The TabletPC SDK has been around for a few years now and has some great innovations for developers to write really cool inkable applications. But where are our users? This BOF is a chance for Tablet PC Developers to get together to discuss their shared passion for this incredible technology and their shared frustrations with the slow growth of the Tablet PC market.

 

Going Solo

Have you ever thought of going independent? This session aims to bring together independent developers with those who have toyed with the idea to share advice, lessons learned and more.

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over to Kate, who has all the info!

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Since I didn't see the release notes are not on the website for WSE3.0 Beta1,  I thought I would put the key bits here.

Main Features Updated from the July CTP Release

• Wsewsdl3.exe can now produce ASP.NET proxy clients from an ASP.NET Web service over TCP using the /type: parameter. This setting determines the default proxy type to generate. Choose from 'webClient', 'soapClient'. If you choose webClient, a proxy class deriving from WebServicesClientProtocol will be generated, otherwise, a proxy class deriving from SoapClient will be generated. The soapClient is the default.
• The policy framework has new assertions for <requireSoapHeader> and <requireSoapAction> which enforce constraints on the received messages to require that either a SOAP header is present or a SOAP action is present. See the product documentation for more details. The schema for the WSE policy, wsePolicy.xsd, can be found in this directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas after WSE 3.0 is installed.
• WSE generated proxies have the same asynchronous pattern as ASP.NET 2.0 generated proxies.
• More detailed tracing when a policy fails during the processing of a message.
• The SoapHttpRouter class now works with the policy framework to enable you to secure messages with policy files. See the quickstart samples for an example.

Known Issues

• The WSE Settings may not be integrated with Visual Studio 2005. This occurs if you install Visual Studio 2005 and then install WSE 3.0 Beta 1 without first having started Visual Studio 2005. Ensure that you start Visual Studio 2005 before installing WSE 3.0 Beta 1. Alternative you can use the Visual Studio 2005 Add-in Manager available from the Tools menu item to manually install the WSE 3.0 Settings tool.
• WSDL files produced by the Windows Communication Foundation (formally codenamed "Indigo") Beta 1 cannot be consumed by WseWsdl3.exe
• Using WSE with Web services hosted in ASP.NET, SOAP section 5 encoding does not work.  Set the Web service to use literal encoding instead.
• With Microsoft Windows 2003 Server SP1, all Web services that run under the Network Service account cannot write WSE diagnostic trace files. To enable these services to write diagnostic files, either add write access permission for the Network Service account to the directory where the diagnostics files are being written or alternatively run the service under an account which has write access privileges.
• WSE 3.0 and the Windows Communication Foundation (formally codenamed "Indigo") Beta 1 cannot be installed on the same machine as they use different versions of the .NET Framework.
• Wsewsdl3.exe cannot produce ASP.NET proxy clients when just the .NET Framework Runtime is installed on the machine. The .NET Framework SDK is required.

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Because I have been watching the download site like a hawk for the August bits of VS2005, I noticed this and thought I would share:

Outage Update:  The MSDN Subscriber Downloads site will be undergoing a system upgrade on 25 August 2005 starting at 5:00 PM Pacific Time.  The Subscriber Download site will be unavailable and any in-progress downloads may not complete successfully.   Our expected outage time is 2 hours.

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The WSE 3.0 Beta was released today (or was that yesterday). It requires the August CTP of VS2005. Too bad I'm still waiting for the VSTS version of that since only the VS2005 Express bits are available for August CTP.

[thanks Nathan]

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As the Windows 95 memories fly around today on the 10th anniv (gawd it's only been ten years? it seems like hundreds) of it's launch, here is a fabulous story by Raymond Chen about how Microsoft tested Windows 95's compatibility with existing software.

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I recently received my TechEd 2005 conference DVDs which allow me to now catch up on many awesome sessions I was not able to attend while I was there. One session in particular that I just watched which is filled with great prescriptive information - not just how to , but when and why - is “DAT421: Client and Middle Tier Data Caching with SQL Server 2005” by Pablo Castro and Steve Lasker. One of the gems in there is this slide by Pablo, who is the PM on the ADO.NET team. [read more]

[A DevLife post]

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I have no idea how I did this. I was using WS-FTP to downlad a 2+ GB file. It took MANY hours - overnihgt + most of the morning - 12? 15?

When it was done, I got the message "overwrite file?" I thought that maybe this new version had cached the download and was now ready to overwrite the little starter test I had done. Nope. Within 1 split second, by the time I realized and hit pause, I had just replaced the 2GB file with only about 1 MB of the new download.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Okay, maybe I'll have this thing downloaded by midnight.

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http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/08/23/google.messaging.reut/index.html

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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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