Today has been an amazing day at PDC, and a very long one at that.

I think this morning's keynote was four hours long. I have 16 pages of handrwitten (Tablet PC Journal) notes of this and as so much has happened since [read more ...]

[A DevLife Post]

 

Posted from BLInk!

This tool is part of the PAG VB6 to VB.NET Migration Guide that is being developed and is on GotDotNet. It is still a work in progress and they will be happy to have people test it out!

Though there is an enormous amount of detail in the report, the most interesting was it's assessment of man hours and cost to migrate your application. There are caveats on the assessment of course.

The one I tried, which is a big app that has been evolving for 7 years, would take 9 months and cost $86,000.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I know - it sounds awfully formal, but INETA is getting all organized and grown up.

When I began as a volunteer in the User Group Management committee almost 3 1/2 years ago, I was the liaison for all of Canada and all of the northeast and a handful of other states as well. Slowly that has shrunk. Bill Zack came on board and I gave him NY and CT. Chris Pels came on board and I gave up RI and MA. Ohio and Pennsylvania eventually found more local liaisons and now there are 5 liaisons covering Canada. For the past year or two I had responsibility for communicating with the 5 groups (including my own) in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.  Now with INETA's overhaul including a major restructuring that board member, Chris Wallace, has orchestrated in the Membership Division, I was happy to pass on these groups, and my buddies Pat Tormey, Joe Sarna, Tim Durgan and Phil Denencourt, to such good hands.

But those NH and Maine groups aren't rid of me yet. Now I get to go visit them as an INETA speaker. That will be great fun and I look forward to it.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Excellent news from JSawyer

If you are going to the PDC, there will be a Birds of a Feather session that will talk about how technology can be used to respond to a disaster like Katrina.  It's called "Katrina Relief through technology" and will be on Monday, September 12 at 7:00 PM. 

I and some other members of the KatrinaSafe.com team will be attending.  Join us to hear how we used technology to build the KatrinaSafe.com system. 

Hope to see you there!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I  just sent in my powerpoints for DevConnections and am laughing at how all four topics are completely different:

• Leveraging SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications in ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0
• What's new in WSE 3.0
• Customized Debugging in VS2005
• Demystifying C# for VB Developers

Now I have to prepare a presentation on yet another completely different topic: Virtual Earth, which is one of my 4 (4? what was I thinking! ) for Code Camp Developers Gone Wild.

But what I am most excited about is preparing for my Indigo talk at TechEd South Africa.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Last night was our annual neighborhood potluck. Everyone waits with baited breath for the arrival of our neighbor Gary and his family. Gary works at Lake Champlain Chocolates. He brought a HUGE box of truffles. Dozens and dozens of truffles. I still have two upstairs waiting for me. Mmmmmmmm.....

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Since nullable has been baked into .NET, I had to see if that carried over to ADO.NET. Now I know that datasets' behavior with Nullable types was so broken that it was removed from the scope of  .NET 2.0, but I wanted to go back and look at my previous tests with dbnull and Nullable types.

Nullable may be "fixed", but there is still no correlation between them. I know that the fix was for totally different reasons, but I just still had to see.

It is still necessary to test for a dbnull before trying to populate a Nullable<DateTime>, for example.

Any attempts to return date data that is nullable with a datareader.GetDateTime() will give a runtime error. DataReader knows this value is a dbnull, but you will just have to check for yourself and do the little bit of extra work.

nulld Nullable<DateTime>;

'get some data into a reader and read it

if (myReader.IsDBNull(mycolumn))
{
 nulld=null;
else
 nulld=myReader.GetDateTime(mycolumn);
}

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

With the recent changes to Nullables in v2.0, I wanted to go back to some old tests that had not been very satisfying when I ran them over a year ago.

One was comparing the speed of using a Nullable<T> and testing to see if has a value or not with HasValue to the speed of a just checking for either a null or default value in a system.type.

Here were my results from doing this in July 2004

You will see that a Nullable<Int32> test was much slower than Int32>0 and a Nullable<object> test was slower than object = = null (or IsNull in VB).

Now with the August 05 CTP, things have sped up. One thing to note is that you can't use Nullable<T> with already nullable values as you could before. So now I am only testing against int.

Using the same 500,000 interations with a Nullable<int>, although the  gap is shrinking, is still somewhat slower. Three tests gave these results

• Nullable<int>.HasValue   vs. int>0
• 4.7668 ms       3.2459 ms
• 5.9834 ms       3.4426 ms
• 4.0203 ms        3.8122 ms

Still, I much prefer Nullable<T> over the other test. What do you test for with dates?

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont SQL Server Special Interest Group Next Meeting

When:  6-8pm, Tuesday, September 13th.   ** Different date than usual! 
Where:  Competitive Computing, Inc. Colchester, VT. 
Speaker:   Rushabh Mehta

Rushabh is a business intelligence consultant for Solid Quality Learning and the principal ETL architect for Raymond James Financials. In the past 4 years, Rushabh has been instrumental in the design and development of major data warehouse initiatives for clients in retail and finance. He has architected and developed BI and ETL processes for systems ranging from a What-if analysis system that determine pricing strategies for a retail client; to a multi-terabyte financial decision support system. As the principle ETL architect, Rushabh is currently helping Raymond James Financials shape and achieve their enterprise BI strategy.

Rushabh is also currently serving on the board of directors at PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) and he regularly speaks at conferences on SQL Server and Business Intelligence. He has also authored courseware for SQL Server Integration Services which is delivered through Solid Quality Learning. 
  
Topic:  Highlighting the SQL Server 2005 Relational Engine

SQL Server 2005 provides developers and DBAs with many new enhancements for indexing and performance. In this session we will discuss some of the more important relational storage engine highlights: -Table and index partitioning -Indexes with additional columns included -Correlated datetime statistics -Snapshot Isolation Level -Indexed view enhancements -Persisted computed columns -Disabling indexes. At the end of this session you will have a clear picture of how and when to use these new features to drive development of more highly performant, scalable SQL Server-based applications. A working understanding of SQL Server 2000's indexing features is recommended but not required.

Meeting Notes:       
                - Pizza for the meeting will be provided, big thanks to Quest Software for sponsoring. Please RSVP to rsvpsql@vtdotnet.org
                - If the elevator doesn't work, please take the stairs to the 4th floor

Donald Trump is getting some flack for going gaga over one of the new Apprentice contestants, saying that she is one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen. The funny thing is that I looked at the photos to see who he was talking about but found every single one of the women there to be very beautiful. The one he is nuts over actually is a little too Barbie doll pretty for my tastes.

I happened to look at this article because Robert Scoble pointed to it with a mention of Bill Gates appearing on the show.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

If you are looking for me at PDC, you can be sure to find me in this session by Pablo Castro!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I finally learned how to use Camtasia, which is awesome, just to send this in for the PDC Showoff. It was a pain in the rear getting one long video where I didn't do something dumb. But finally, I got something. We'll see how it goes. I didn't record audio over it. And no, I am not putting it on the web - that's one of the rules.

update : guess I am going to be adding audio to it. That's worse than trying to record a "hi leave a message" message  on the answering machine.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Read J Sawyer's blog and see what they ahve done and are doing. It's really awesome!!! Nice to have not only the techonology of Microsoft behind them, but also the support of the company.

www.katrinasafe.com

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Loren Heiny points to Gateways newest 14" widescreen TabletPC which apparently weighs in at over 6 pounds.

Loren says I'm not so sure what I'll think of the wider and heavier Tablet design, which suggests to me more that it's a "notebook" than a "Tablet."

Loren, it's still a Tablet, maybe just not so "mobile". Tablet does not mean mobile, just that you can write on it, right?

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

A reminder to myself since I kind of missed the note in the VS2005 Documentation that says:

The DebuggerBrowsableAttribute is not supported by Visual Basic in the .NET Framework 2.0

Scott Nonnenberg was kind enough not to point out my mental block.

I somehow looked over it a number of times when looking for a clue about the problem I was having.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I just wrote down my travel schedule through the end of 2006 all in one place and nearly passed out when I realized what I have done! I thought I would put it here as a reminder to myself.

9/12 - 9/17 - Fly all the way across the country for PDC

9/19 - present at VTdotNET on what I saw at PDC

9/24 - 9/25 - present FOUR talks at Code Camp (stil have to start that Virtual Earth talk )

10/4 - 6 - travel to Syracuse for a quick visit with my parents and speak at CNYDevelopers.NET

10/21 - 10/27 - travel to South Africa to give 3 talks at TechEd

11/5 - 11/10 - back across the country to Las Vegas for DevConnections

11/10 - 11/15 - a little vacation with my ol' man

12/5 - 12/7 - (not firm) potentially travelling to Virginia for my first INETA gig and to visit my brother and his family

And to all of you wondering why I am not flying to Seattle for the MVP summit at the end of September, perhaps now you understand why!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Right now the INETA stats are:

799 Groups (worldwide)

422,090 members (of those groups)

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here are the timeslots allocated by the PDC organizers for the BOFs.

Monday (pre-con day)
7:00, 8:15, 9:30

Tuesday
9:00pm
10:15 pm  (Tablet PC Developer BOF is here)

Thursday
9:00pm  (Going Solo BOF is here)
10:15pm

Stuart Celarier, who is leading up the INETA charge to coordinate all of the BOFs reports that there are 7 rooms during each session and the BOFs really filled up!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I will never remember this - so I'm blogging it.

If you use your middle mouse button to click on the tab of an edit window in VS2005 it will close the window. Caught that as an aside while watching Scott Nonnenberg's debugging presentation on the TechEd DVD's.

In fact, right click has also been enhanced.

VS2003 right click on tab:

VS2005 right click

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org