Kate and I went on an incredible 3 hour game drive today with our guide Humbu. We saw so many animals and took gobs of pictures. Kate has blogged some here. Here are a few of mine but I must get focused on my afternoon session - ADO.NET 2.0 & SQL Server 2005 Integration.

These are wildebeest. They are a strange looking animal and are said to have been created with leftover parts of other animals.

These are impalas. We saw them frequently on the drive ...

...but not nearly as many as the zillions of zebras we saw. These are a variety that also has a faint brown stripe. The type with only black and white are not in Pilanesberg.

This was our 2nd elephant siting of the morning. The first was in the distance behind the "vacation club" where we were staying. Our eagle eye tour guide spotted them as we were headed to the park. This one, he saw from a distance and drew up a road to show us. Unfortunately, it was a road to a private lodge ("for princes and presidents" as Kate says) and he got yelled at by an employee of the lodge who was also headed up the road. She was very unreasonable and we wondered if her treatment of Humbu was reminiscent of previous relations in South Africa.

If you are doing an UpdateBatch with ADO.NET 2.0 and do not explicitly set an UpdateBatchSize parameter, this will default at one - meaning that one row will be sent at a time to the server for updating. Whatever other number you set it at is the number of rows that will be sent in a batch and of course you need to consider a variety of factors when choosing this number (such as network latency, how many columns are in the table, etc - bigger is not always better!) This is hardly new info at this point, but there is one other setting - zero. I am listening to Pablo Castro's ADO.NET 2.0/SQL Server integration talk from TechEd (DAT320) and laughing because he says (this is not a direct quote - I am paraphrasing) "If you set it to zero, there will be no limit to the number of rows....[pause]...which isn't really very good for performance .. [pause].. I don't really know why we put it there, but...[you can practially hear him shrug his shoulders] .. we did". Pablo can totally get away with this... the audience laughs with him and he moves on. Funny how if some other teams said something like this this, they would probably have many detractors. ADO.NET is just a happy API!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rather than wind myself into my usual pre-travel panic (leaving today!), I am ironing my clothes. Yes, in advance. My mother would be shocked. It's very calming. Perhaps I will even go get the rest of my lilies into the ground before I leave.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Are you a video jockey? Create a screencast starring Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 or Biztalk Server 2006… and you!

 

I am happy to announce that the East Region Evangelism Team and TechSmith have come together to promote the Launch Tour 2005 with a screencasting contest. To join the funs – and competition – download a free 30 day evaluation of Camtasia Studio. Then record you on onscreen action, your audio, and even your webcam feed.. To show off your rock star personality.

 

Winners will be selected for the following tour cities only: New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Orlando. All winning entries will receive a backstage pass to these events and rock star treatment at the event, as well as various prizes includes a copy of Camtasia Studio.

 

The grand prize winner will be flown to New York City (from within the continental US) to give a demo live, onstage during the during the Steve Guggenheimer keynote!

 

The winning screencasts will be featured on Channel9

 

Ready to go to Rock School?

 

1. Register for the event that you’ll be attending
2. Send your AVI screencast submission to Thom Robbins. Entries must be received at least two days prior to each event.

 Official rules, Camtasia download information and additional details can be found here.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Kate Gregory and I leave tomorrow for South Africa to present at TechEd. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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Tim Ewald's recent talk at Vermont.NET got me fired up about contract first again. Read more here...

[A DevLife post]

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We have not seen the sun in two weeks. It is here to day. Glory glory! I'll have to take a picture.

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I have CA EZ Antivirus on my computer. It decided to install the firewall. I don't want it and am happy with WinXP's firewall. It's on my demo machine so I don't have to deal with it often but it's stupid. It says "do you want IIS to run" and I select "remember this setting" and click "Allow" which is dim, but still active (doh) and next time I turn on my computer it asks me all of those questions again for a series of apps. SQL Server, svchost and more. The big problem with this is I get sick of it and say "yes yes yes" without looking. I turn it off and turn on Windows Firewall, but when I restart the computer it's there again. Next step is to just uninstall it. My recommendation is to avoid this program. (Sorry CA) 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Laura Blood is a .NET consultant in vermont who has been programming for a looong time! She has also been an invaluable help to me with the Vermont.NET user group as well as being one of the founders of VTSQL.org. Laura has jumped into the blogging fray which makes 3 Vermont.NET bloggers now.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

All I can say is "lucky us"!!

Tim is driving up (or is that over) from New Hampshire to give a fantastic talk I saw/heard him do at TechEd to the Vermont.NET user group tonight.

We are also lucky to have a new convenient venue for our meetings at Vermont Technical College and a sponsor for pizza & soda tonight: Technical Connections.

And just for icing on the cake, I recieved a big box filled with phenomenal O'Reilly press books today!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I just got my annual letter from MVP which made me look back to see how much it has gone up since we started.

For the two of us

2001 $425/mo
2002 $527/mo
2003 $568/mo
2004 $617/mo
2005 $697/mo
2006 $721/mo  ($8,652)

70% increase in 6 years.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

From the PAG Service Orientation workspace:

Just Released: October CTP featuring WSE 3.0! (10/15/2005 •  News)
We invite you to check out the latest release of the Web service security patterns. This release is a substantial improvement over the past releases. We’ve added even more patterns and updated the implementation patterns to take advantage of the latest advancements in WSE 3.0. Please note that the WSE 2.0 implementation patterns have been removed from this release. We will add them back for the final release, but if you would like to review the WSE 2.0 implementation patterns in the meantime, check out the August CTP.

Developers can build secure Web services easier with WSE 3.0 by using its simplified and enhanced policy framework and by taking advantage of features in the .NET Framework 2.0. When you combine that with solid architectural, design, and implementation guidance, you have a much better chance of choosing an appropriate solution and saving some time in the process. While the WSE team just released the WSE 3.0 October CTP, these implementation patterns were tested against the WSE 3.0 Beta build.

The following patterns have been added since the August CTP release. These patterns have all been through the workshop process, but haven’t all been through an initial editorial pass ... that’s why it’s a CTP ;)

• Message Replay Detection
  
• Perimeter Service Router
  
• Message Validation
  
• Exception Shielding
  
• Trusted Subsystem
  
• Protocol Adapter
  
• Delegation

As we are ramping up to release the final version of this content, we’re really depending on you, the community, to provide the feedback needed to make this the definitive resource for Web service security guidance. We would also love to hear from you if you’ve used this content as the basis for decisions you’ve made regarding your production Web services.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have a self-hosted service which I am calling through it's proxy in a client app.

When the service has multiple endpoints, svcutil adds "ConfigurationName" properties to the endpoints in the config file. With a single endpoint, that parameter is not necessary.

When instantiating the service via the proxy, I was following a single endpoint example and forgot to indicate *which* endpoint or configuration I wanted. Thus my code:

ServiceProxy myproxy=new ServiceProxy();

gave me an error when it hit the proxy's constructor and I was given the following exception:

could not find endpoint element that references contractType [whatever my contract name is]

Oddly, if I found that if I removed ConfigurationNames from the config, the app will actually run and somehow randomly selected from the multiple endpoints.

The exception message led me on a very wild goosechase. But luckily, Softwaremaker, who is quite the Indigo guru already, asked me a key question: "how are you instatiating the proxy?"

Since all of this stuff is so new, I am placing this mistake out on Google for the next person who makes this mistake.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

It has been raining for about a week with intermittent major downpours (like right now). We are in northwestern Vermont and not experiencing the dreadful flooding that surrounds us in New Hampshire, Southern Vermont and other parts of the NorthEast. Rich and I have discussed what would happen if there was indeed flooding around here. Though living on a mountainside and far from the mountain streams prevents us from worrying about our house being flooded, we have to cross bridges in two directions to get off of our road so we could be screwed if the bridges were ever washed out. All of the disasters of late have made us think about the what-ifs and what we need to do to be prepared. Not only do we have to think about food and water for ourselves but also our pets. And of course we would stay here with them. Funny the things you take for granted. Hopefully it will turn us all into little boy  & girlscouts.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I bet you didn't know that the Emily Post Institute was based in right here in Burlington Vermont! They are now reporting that good manners are on the decline in the U.S. Dear oh dear!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I figure if Don Box can do Indigo demos in VB, then I should do them in C#. That of course, will make my demo take a tad bit longer as I will likely have to compile a few times to find all of the VB syntax I typed into the C# code.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This is a Wissif Wippif

(it's a Toyota Avalon in Indigo Bunting Blue - so an Indigo Avalon - WCF WPF... get it? I'm sure this is already an ancient joke but it sure had me and Kate giggling today)

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have a 512MB memory chip for a Toshiba Portege M200.

They are on sale right now at Crucial for $50 so if anyone wants to buy mine, I'll sell it for a little less than Crucial. I bought this a little less than a year ago and the M200 is not my daily use machine. You know, only driven by a little old lady on Sundays.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here is an excellent article on using ADO.NET and SQL CLR inside of SQL Server: Managed Data Access Inside SQL Server with ADO.NET and SQLCLR. Besides the obvious code, there are things you should be aware of such as context connections, how transactions work and most importantly, when not to use ADO.NET in the SQL CLR. The article is by the ADO.NET master himself, Pablo Castro, who is the Technical Lead on the ADO.NET team.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

One of the talks I will be doing at Visual Studio Connections is "Deciphering C# for VB Developers". One of the BEST resources for converting your code back and forth is O'Reilly's C# & VB.NET Conversion Pocket Reference. I have a slide in the presentation devoted just to the book. Now I have dozen copies of the book to give away at the presentation. Thanks to Marsee Henon of O'Reilly!

Here is the description of the presentation

As a Visual Basic developer, have you ever searched for a code sample and then found one that is exactly what you need but written in the C# language instead? The differences between the two language syntax are substantially more than just semi-colons and curly braces. This session is intended to help you understand such idiosyncracies as backwards variable declaration, stringent rules for scoping variables and methods, compound assignment operators and more. This session will be given by a Visual Basic programmer who has felt the pain both deciphering and writing C# code and wants to help you avoid some of the same pitfalls.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org