I am sending files to a web service in a vs2005 app using, of course, WSE 3.0. The only way I knew to prove to myself that it was really going up their using MTOM was to use Simon Fell's TCP Trace program that I wrote about in this past post.

Here is with the MTOM "Client On" setting. Note the MIMEBoundary data and xop. That's how the binary data gets sent with MTOM.

and here it is with the check mark off in the wse 3.0 settings. Note the lack of the MIMEBoundary info. If you saw the entire, contents of this, you would see the streamed data included - the array of base 64 bytes.

How do we keep at this when computers like to make you feel like an idiot or "looks like Julie is having a crappy day week ..."  Read more here...

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

As our HMO plan with MVP went up over $100 this year ( 17 %), Rich and I finally caved in and signed up for a Health Savings Account plan. It is high deductible and we spent a long time trying to weigh the worst case scenarios against the best case scenarios. Check back with me in a year and I'll let you know how it pans out!

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I am not much of a math geek anymore, but I have a pal who I know would be very interested in this (if he doesn't know already!)

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Because I didn't realize there was something really cool about this! I finally just happened upon it accidentally. One one of the times I rebooted, I noticed the pretty little icons for cds, thumb drives and more below the toshiba logo at startup. Pressing the left and right arrow keys highlighted the icons and voila I was able to boot from my selected device - CD.

Yah , I know - RTFM. I don't happen to have it. But now that I knew what I was looking for, I was easily able to find it online.

From the manual,

"You can also manually choose the boot-up sequence by sliding the power switch, then quickly pressing the right or left arrow keys."

Very cool feature!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

www.SystemNetMail.com. Great resource from Dave Wanta. I just went right there when I was having some trouble with this class (which has been moved from system.web to system.net and given some shiny new buttons) and found the answer lickety split. Thanks Dave!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My old HP Laserjet 4si had buttons on it that allowed you to control a lot of it's settings. The new fangled printers do this through html based application that you install on your computer and it is driven by java. I didn't mind that it was Java but it was definitely the source of many problems

After installing this for our new Laserjet 1320, I was having a number of odd problems on my computer. Lots of hanging, for example, when attempting to open an Word doc attached to an email. As soon as I killed the javaw.exe process, word opened right up.

It was also creating problems with some old foxpro 16bit software with the same symptoms. I would attempt to start up that software and it would do nothing, until I went into the task manager and ended the javaw.exe process again.

It was also a bit of a memory hog.

I finally uninstalled the HP toolbox software and hopefully I can do what I need through the WinXP drivers, although the toolbox does control a lot more stuff.

So far, things have been much better.

There is one other problem that is not HPs, but the fault of our Canon LiDe35 scanner who's CanoScan software is incompatible with this printer (and according to tech support, others as well.) I am no longer able to use my scanner as a copier with output to the printer and have to scan to pdf's then print the pdfs. Uggh. Canon said they are revising their software.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

When you live by rss feeds, you miss stuff like this beautiful redesign of Michele's blog!

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aha!! I was wondering... (and feeling a little ashamed that I didn't realize...)

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Micky Gousset points out that Billy Hollis is done with floppies. So much for his Christmas present. Coasters, anyone?

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I have not yet played with this stuff but have noticed some moaning and groaning around this topic, so this looks like good news!

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A good clarification for me. One of the great and under-rated features of .NET 2.0 is the System.IO.Compression namespace which allows stream compression. But it's important to understand that this is not file compression. For example, if you want to zip up multiple files, this is not the class for you. I will definitely use these classes where it makes sense, but I will continue to use the XCeed components for more full functioned zipping in .NET.

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You never know what you might find when you start digging around in old boxes...

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From Brad McCabe's blog

Free VB 2005 and ASP.NET Training

With the holiday’s coming lots of people have some extra time on their hands, with this in mind MSDN and Microsoft Learning got to together to give you something to do, free training!

We were trying to figure out what course to give away and decided to let you pick.  That’s right pick one of 6 courses about Visual Basic 2005 or 9 courses about ASP.NET 2.0.  In addition, after you have completed your free online course you will receive 30% off the price of the next one.

You have to hurry, the free code is only good until January 4th, 2006.  You don’t have to take your free class by then, but you have to sign up and select your class before that day.  You have 90 days from the time you sign up to do the course, but with spare time this holiday season why not do it now?

Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/learning/elearning_promo/ for all of the details and to get the free training code to sign up.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

With no New Year's resolutions, this was unplanned but a very significant event in our household. A visiting friend offered to help me do something that I have been unable to do for a long time, clean out my closets (and boxes) of long unworn clothes.

I have moved households five times in the past 15 years, but have been quite unable to do major purges of clothing in those moves. What this means is that I have so many clothes that are old, outdated and unworn for years. Every time I have attempted to get rid of them, I have found that I have too many emotional or other ties to them. I was a bit of a clothes horse when I lived in NYC and had pretty expensive taste. There are also clothes of my mothers, additional beautiful things, that she gave to me when she could no longer wear them. And then there are things like a sweater my grandmother knit for my dad when he was young and it is still in perfect shape. I I wore it for years as a funky winter dress.

When Rich and I made the last move 2 1/2 years ago, I searched high and low for the organization that took clothes for women returning to the workforce. Finally I contacted them and was told that they no longer do it and to just bring it to the Salvation Army.

So, after putting this off for many many years, Debbie and I spent hours going through closets, storage containers and boxes. My husband was thrilled beyond belief. We are now well on our way to taking back the "box room" and gaining a second guest room in our house. It was a very trying and emotional thing to do and probably hard for many to understand that. These clothes had a lot of memories associated with them of my many past lives. Debbie was astonished at the gamut that ran from Italian linen skirts from Paul Stuarts to the London designer clothese from Charivari. Who would have guessed I would end up in flannel lined jeans from Eddie Bauer and fleece socks?

In addition to this I actually unpacked a lot of other boxes that have been untouched for these 2 1/2 years, finding places for what Rich likes to call my knick-knacks.

Had we planned this - put it on a list of New Year's resolutions, it would probably not have happened for many many months to come. It was an amazing thing to do. I got to visit my past and let go of a lot of it as well.

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Everybody's gotta have their list, right? Here's mine...

[A DevLife post]

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As long as I''m in the middle of a gaggle of learning curves (eg advanced ClickOnce deployment, uncommon UI threading issues, and a host of other things I'm dealing with as I port a particular app to VS2005), I added another one today - contract first web services. In addition to porting the application, I am adding in some enhancements that my client has requested. One of them required a new web service. So I thought it was a perfect time to drop everything and learn to do contract first, of course using thinktecture's WSCF tool (testing out their not yet released VS2005 version). But I'm not just learning how to use their tool. I am such a weenie when it comes to schemas, WSDL, etc. - like many non-plumbers. This process is requiring me to get a little further under the sheets with this stuff, too. One wonders why it takes me so long to finish something. Of course this is not including the hours I had to take out dealing with compatibilty issues between our scanner (Canon LiDE 35) and our new printer (HP Laserjet 1320) and continued research on DVI KVM's (I think I found what I'm looking for here) and while I was at it ordering a DVD burner (finally) so I can freakin' install the new Vista bits.

Anyway, back to it!

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:Larry O'Brien, an independent programmer/writer, talks about the limitations on living off of your time. Since you can't make more time and there is a limit to how much you can charge for your time, you definitely have a limit to how much income you can earn. Larry, I hear ya. I want to work less, not more. But I sure would like to get rid of this mortgage!

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This seems to happen occasionally when I type into the code while debugging. So I say Cancel, i.e. no, and the question keeps coming up over and over. So if I say "ok" I know I'm in trouble when I get the screen about "large sections of the file may be include". This always ends in a hang. (No there are no 3rd party add-ins installed). And then I just have to give in and open up task manager and trash it. Or wait for it to finally time out, but then I get the error "The Vbc taks failed unexpectedly". Well, 10 of those errors, in fact. What a pain. Oh well. I'm sure the fact that I've got this wierd application that I am moving from VS2003 to Vs2005 has something to do with it.

I can't tell exactly what the pattern is, but it is certainly not a random act of nastiness.

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The application that I am porting to VS2005 has off-line capabilities. In VS2003, after looking at a lot of options, I chose to store the data in the App folder of the All Users area in c:\directory and settings. One reason for this is that it is possible that a laptop will be passed off from one user to another and they need a common area that they can access. The other reason is that occasionally we might need to get at that data manually if there is a problem. This is the main reason why isolated storage was not an option.

I was able to get to this folder with

System.IO.Directory.GetParent(System.Windows.Forms.Application.CommonAppDataPath)

Not so in ClickOnce.

ClickOnce installs apps into a user's local storage - (Directory and settings/user/local settings/apps). This means that on shared computers, there may be multiple copies of the application. I don't like that and will see if there is a way around it since I am manually generating manifest files anyway, but I can live with it.

It also means that the above method returns the data directory defined by ClickOnce, which is inside of this install (rather, in the same parent folder). Not just that, but there will be a different one for each update of the application. This is bad bad bad (for my application).

You can read more about this here in the docs, online.

Even though the LocalSettings  folder is a safe folder as far as CAS is concerned, I don't like the idea of hardcoding that file path (or making it a resource). But at this point, I think it's going to be the solution. Bah!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org