(update: added Expression graphics stuff down below)

Links that I referred to last night in my "what I saw at PDC" VTdotNET presentation

first - Code Camp 4 "Almost Agenda"

VISTA

Tablet PC on Vista

Tablet PC on WPF (Avalon)

Atlas Website with Hands on Labs and Forums

LINQ Site

C# 3.0

VB9

Office 12

Channel 9 PDC Show Off - watch for videos to get posted, including the one for the robotic ride!!

Channel 9 has videos of Raymond Chen's session as well as demos of lots o fthe new technologies

Windows Workflow Foundation

Last but not least, there is now a webcast of the presentation we were hoping to have by Dr. Neil Roodyn on Network Awareness. I did not realize that it was broadcast live just today! (Tuesday)

Expression "family" (Acrylic Graphic Designer, Quartz Web Designer and Sparkle ("Sparkle" - sounds like something from the Barbie Family) Interactive Designer)

If I have forgotten anything, let me know.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Okay - this paragraph at the end of a review of the new Acer C200 is annoying

In summary, the C200 is a welcome breath of fresh air in a category which was supposed to be all about innovation - yet has become woefully stagnant due to the lack of software fully exploiting pen based input capabilities. Granted, it won't run Doom IV, but at least future owners are sure to raise an eyebrow by the mention of it having 256 MB of VRAM.

The tablet pc BOF that I hosted last Tuesday night at PDC was jam packed. A large number of people from the Tablet PC Team were there as well as developers who are currently programming for tablets, developers who were "tablet-curious" and even someone from Motion - who has the best tablet out there (for non-developers).

There was a lot of discussion of the usual question - why is the tablet so slow to come to market. Developers are frustrated because we are hoping to make some money writing apps or consulting to companies that are writing apps. Manufacturers are frustrated, although I did explicitly ask the guy from Motion if they are satisfied and I think they are somewhat. They do look forward to the expansion of the market and the success of other manufacturers. The ability for manufacturers to make white box tablets can also change things dramatically.

I don't think there was any one in the room that didn't think that eventually a digitizer and stylus will just be part of a laptop and it won't be a special thing - a Tablet PC - just a laptop again.

Koji Kato who is a PM on the Tablet Team brought up a really good point - maybe the real problem is that of expectations. Who set the expectation that Tablets had to explode on to the scene? (And stop comparing them to IPODs - that's just not an, err, apple to apple (sorry couldn't be helped) comparison.) There is a big worry that the media is drooling for it to fail - just because it will make a good story. So because it is not going fast, it's a problem and then the blame game begins. It's the manufacturer's fault for not having cheap enough models. It's Microsoft's fault because, well just because it's Microsoft. And it's the developers fault because, as the journalist noted above, we aren't writing enough apps.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I bought a Nano today - thought I was so cool. But realized they gave me the 2GB not the 4 GB and went back to fix the problem but there were no 4GB in stock. So now I have no Nano anymore. I like the idea of 60 hours. I can fill that up with .NET Rocks and podcasts for my trip to South Africa and also my trip to Las Vegas.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I was having a bit of trouble last night with Atlas.

Here is why.

You will notice on the Atlas site a note saying that the currently available VSI's for Atlas run only on VS2005 Beta2 right now.

I read that but inferred my own interpretion. My bad. Here's what you need to know:

Beta2=Beta2

Beta2!=June CTP

Beta2!=July CTP

Beta2!=August CTP

Beta2!=RC Bits distributed at PDC

Hopefully this will save someone else some time.

Posted from BLInk!

Ahh - I had such good intentions and lists of sessions to see but ended up talking with lots of people yesterday at TechEd which is such great fun. I also picked up more swag for my lucky user group! After seeing Ray Chen's 10am session I went to the "big room" where the expo and track lounges are, just for a few minutes in between sessions, but I ended up in there for many many hours. At some point I headed back in the direction of lunch but never quite made it in - too many people to see! [read more, much much more ... ]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

I have been trying to do some of the Atlas Hands on Labs.

First, I tried them on my newly set up Vista machine. I had problems getting the file system (aka ASP.NET Development Web Server - so is that called WADWSF now?).  Finally I decided that there is just something WRONG with Vista and the file WADWSF. Even with a simplistic web site that did not involve Atlas, the web server would not consitently start up. I don't seem to have IIS installed on this box, but Plip has a solution for using IIS on Vista over here (first post, second post).

Next I decided to use my regular laptop (WinXP). Dumb me, I installed the brand spanking new RC bits that I got at PDC, and then discovered that the current Atlas bits only work with Beta 2.

Aargh. So tomorrow morning, I'll just plug my external USB hard drive in which has Beta2 on a VPC.

I am so hoping to give my user group quick looks at Vista, Atlas and LINQ tomorrow night at the VTdotNET meeting.

Posted from BLInk!

A tragic hiking accident has stunned the FoxPro community this weekend.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Yesterday (Day Two) I managed to curtail my socializing enough to attend four sessions! It is so incredibly difficult to choose, but mostly I focused on Indigo which I really need to get sooner than later. I had been told by Angela Mills who is the Group Program Manager for XML Enterprise Services in Indigo (phew long title) that Shy Cohen's Reliable Messaging in Indigo talk had some to-die-for demos, so it was one of the ones that I was sure to see. Shy is ...[read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

I'm sitting in Raymond Chen's "5 Things Every Win32 Developer Should Know" talk. Ray is one of those "oh my god" Microsoft big brains, however, his blog has definitely made him feel like an old friend.

Ray is talking to the packed room about being conscientious about your environmnet when you are writing applications - how is your app working with memory paging? [read more ...]

[A DevLife blog]

Posted from BLInk!

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