note - this is very clearly categorized under Purely Personal - so don't give me any grief

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/20/port.security/index.html

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Did you hear that the ADO.NET 2.0 indexing engine screams? But not in the way I was expecting! [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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Sorry, couldn't help it but I can't think of Rich without thinkng of the phrase "No! Nope! Niet! Non! Negative! Nuh-huh! [shake head vigorously]!!!" in response to the question "is .net remoting dead?"

He's off to be p.m. for InfoCards, whic makes perfect sense. I think outside of Microsoft, Michele is the one person who knows anything about InfoCards so far - but that too, is a natural given her work in interop.

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Wow, what a surprise but such a great one. INETA just added 5 new speakers

Scott Cate
Richard Hundhausen
Wally McClure
Sahil Malik
Robert Green (hey Robert, where's your blog?)

Although out of this bunch I have only ever personally attended sessions by Richard, the other 4 guys are not only some of the top experts in their fields, have done a ton of presenting and written a host of books, but every one of them (including Richard) are really nice guys and will be awesome to have at your user groups.

Congrats guys.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 4:45 PM
Subject: why do you auto highlight your pages? (via Julia Lerman Blog)

---

It took my like 300,000K of my memory, 50% of my CPU and 10 minutes to load one of your pages.

Why do you torture your visitors by doing highlighting at all, and even worse, by doing it on their side?

I didn't even read the content because I was so bothered by the fact that it was trying to highlight everything, including the letter 'i' whereever it occured.

 

****************************************************

 

Dear Chris,

 

Is this for real or does everyone with a dasblog get this email?

 

The only way you would possibly get this behavior is if you did a search (using the search tool built into dasblog) on the letter "i".

 

Here is the url when you use that search tool to search for "julie" in my blog:

 

http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/SearchView.aspx?q=julie

 

So clicking that link you will first get a definite lag time while everyone of my posts is searhced for the word "julie" and then when it renders (with EVERY post on my entire weblog that has this word in it), it will highlight in yellow the word "julie" on the resulting page.

 

So imagine doing the search in the letter "i". It will take quite some time to search through all of my posts and then return hundreds and hundreds of posts which will take a long time to render and THEN it will go through that entire rendered page and highlight the "i" s. And if that took ONLY 10 minutes, you must have one fast machine!

 

On the other hand, if you are searching for every time I used the letter "i" in a post over the last 2+ years, you have much bigger things to worry about.

 

Julie

For anyone who hasn't noticed, Infragistics and Telligent are both hiring. Telligent's growth never ceases to astound me! Both are great places to work where your .NET skills and your brains will be used, challenged and heightened.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Jean-Rene sent out a great email about DevTeach today. Here are some key elements from it:

Save 200$ by taking advantage of DevTeach early bird.
This year, we are offering an early bird of 200$ CAN for attendees that are registering before February 28th, 2006. Registered attendees have accessed to the DevTeach 2005 Archive sessions material for download.

User group members rebate at DevTeach 2006
The User Groups Rebate program is back in 2006. We are offering 50.00$ off the registration cost to all members of user groups registered with INETA, Pass, Culminis or the Universal Thread User Group Meeting Tracker. To benefit of this rebate, members need to enter a rebate code when processing their registration. This rebate can be combined with the early bird discount which gives a 200.00$ rebate until Fabruary 28th. User group leaders can request this rebate code good for 50$ off the registration by sending an email to jrroy@DevTeach.com.

Get to know our speakers by reading their blog and listening to their talk show interviews.
Most of our speakers write regularly in their blog and have been interviewed by the Dot Net Rock Talk Show or the Visual Studio Show. Get to know our speakers by reading their blog and listening to their latest interview on talk shows. The DevTeach conference include a top selection of speakers having a strong experience in various areas. Most of these speakers are presenting at major conferences around the world on a regular base and in other areas as well such as user groups, corporate training and class training.

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Hip hip hooray. Blue House Group in Richmond, VT has created a beautiful and informative website for VTSDA. There is still some tweaking to do, but the new site is now live. www.vtsda.org.

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Greg was my A#1 contact for all things INETA down under, so I was happy to see this announcement on Frank Arrigo's blog this morning.

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I'm not sure if I should cry in relief or frustration. I just spent hours and hours trying to get at the cause of a NullReferenceException being thrown by my application. I could not trap it, inspect it or even get rid of it by grabbing a straws. I finally got rid of it, but only by a stroke of luck. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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Our NetFlix facility is 100 miles away in White River Junction Vermont. It takes one day for mail to get there. We can't figure out why the website says that movies are "received" by them 6 days - 4 business days - after we mailed them back.

I don't think we are uber-renters, destined for the list that we've been reading about lately. But it's pretty annoying and of course not very easy to complain to anyone. The only types of problems they seem to let you report are if you are missing a sleeve or scratched DVD. Otherwise you get in a hopeless loop searching for a way to contact them.

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Here is a project that I am now publishing through clickonce.

I just opened the project up in VS2005 and saw all of these warnings. Sheesh, here we go again...

(Note: I got an email from Patrick Darragh who is a Program Manager on the VB Team and has a lot to do with ClickOnce. Patrick tells me that "those warnings are controlled by the ‘Verify files uploaded to the server’ property on the Publish Options dialog off the Publish tab.  If you uncheck this property, the warning should go away.")

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I couldn't resist buying my honey a big ol' bag of M&Ms for Valentines Day because I knew I had M&M wrapping paper at home. Heh heh.

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Would you like to work out of a newly renovated office with awesome views, great
co-workers and the best coffee machine in Burlington, VT? Do you have solid web
development chops, good customer service and interpersonal skills, the ability to
work under deadlines, and a good sense of humor? This job may be for you…

Union Street Media, a leading Vermont web design and development company, is seeking to add
a new Web Developer to our team. Since 1999, we have developed database-driven web sites
focusing on visual appeal, usability, and search engine prominence. The company serves over
250 clients in three primary business areas: real estate, e-commerce, and content-driven sites.
USM is a young, aggressive company requiring its employees to wear many hats. As a member
of our development staff, the person who fills this role will be responsible for helping in the
development and support of our clients’ web sites. The role requires timeliness in project
delivery, attention to detail, and a high degree of professionalism. We’re looking for a
hard working team player who enjoys working on the web. Those who don’t play well
with others need not apply.

Previous experience at a web development or marketing firm is preferred, but not required.

The position comes with a host of benefits including health insurance contribution, a gym
membership, dog-friendly atmosphere, and access to our stash of ski vouchers.

Functions/Responsibilities:
• Strong people skills and team mentality
• Work with all members of the USM team to develop web sites for clients
• Build sites using USM's CMS; design custom templates for various modules.
• Thorough understanding of HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Web Standards, usability
• Working knowledge of PHP, MySQL
• Keeping skill set up to date with current design and technologies
• Help with support tickets, spam filtering, DNS changes, setting up FTP and email accounts

Compensation:
Commensurate with experience

Schedule:
This full-time position in our Burlington, Vermont office is open immediately.

To Apply:
Email resumé, cover letter, and three references to jobs@unionstreetmedia.com .
No phone calls please.
Union Street Media is an equal opportunity employer.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm looking at a VS2005 ad in CoDe Magazine - part of the "spot the difference" campaign. The before picture has people meeting around a table with an obvious work load ahead. The after picture shows them after they have launched their product. But there is something bugging me about the after picture. The gold master framed dvd on the wall is dated October 7, 2005. So they shipped their product based on VS2005 Beta 2? Eek!

okay back to work...

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I have really been trying to force ClickOnce to let me publish ONLY the changed files, but according to this forum post by David Guyer, I should probably just give up.

Here are my issues.

1) Moving the new deployment folder and manifest to the production server takes way too long.
  1a) part of the reason for this is that I have 3rd party dlls that I have as INCLUDED rather than Pre-Requisites. Even with all of my security, I'm a little nervous about controlling the deployment of 3rd party licensed tools and this feels safer. So with some Infragistics, Janus and XCeed components, this adds 4.5 MB to my deployment files. This is one place I will have to focus on paring it down. However, with the rate at which infragistics updates its components, this provides another excuse for leaving it in the Includes.

2) Even though all of the documentation promises that the client ONLY pulls down the new files from the server, the update dialog says that all 6MB are being downloaded and looking in the GAC I see all of the files in the latest folder, not just the new ones. This is acceptable wrt speed on the intranet, but what about our dialup users out there on the web. I'm not the only one who is questioning this.

UPDATE
I have been keeping at it and learned a little more about #2. Yes, I have to publish the entire app over again, but if I do it right, the files that are not new will not get downloaded. The way to acheive this is to make a copy of the previous deployment folder, which will mean all of the previous files will match up with the hash that the client machine has for them. Then use the MAGE tool to create the manifest. (See this msdn doc and look for the "next steps" section re: updating.) Then the client machine won't bother pulling those down again and instead, grab them from the last folder. Or something like that. Either way, the client will still say "downloading xxxMB" where xxx is the size of the complete app, but it is only downloading new stuff from the web server and kind of "cross-loading" so to speak from a sibling folder already on the client.

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Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My mom is at Westminster this year again because Bumper was competing in this, the biggest dog show in the U.S. I think Bumper is the third one of my parent's dogs that has gone to Westminster. Oddly, the man judging the Newfoundlands picked one of his own dogs (a dog he had bred) as Best in Breed. It's astonishing that there isn't a rule about something like that, but boy are there a LOT of politics in the dog world.

In 1999, Annie (who is now 9 years old) won an Award of Merit at Westminster, which was a big big deal.

Here's a picture of Bumper and a link to the BlueHeavenNewfoundlands website.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont.NET turned FOUR at our meeting last night and we had a joint meeting with the Vermont SQL Group which is a spin off of VTdotNET. This was the 2nd of our two launch events (the first was related to INETA and the 2nd to PASS) so we had 5 more VS2005/SQL Server2005 licence packs to give away.

So, I counted 46 at the meeting. That is our 3rd largest meeting ever.

1) Ken Getz (INETA): 50
2) Keith Pleas/Thom Robbins/ INETA 100th Speaker event and MSDN film crew: 50
3) Laura Blood/Roman Rehak/SQL2005 Launch: 46
4) Rocky Lhotka (INETA): 40
5) Laura Blood/VS2005 Launch: 40

Laura and Roman did an awesome job. Laura presented the slides that MSDN created for these events. That was some chore because each slide was jam packed with information, so she pointed out highlights. Then Roman did the demos and he used a lot of his own (from his job as SQL Server guru extraordinaire) and also a few from some other sources that he acknowledged.

The most interesting thing to me was my new persective on Service Broker. I have only really looked at it from what it provides for Query Notification and didn't really "get" it's real purpose. Now I realize that the reason for this is because I am a) not a DBA with the problems that it solves and b) not doing big time enterprise work. I understood the queues and the services but was missing the big picture. But I finally got it and it's really easy -  by sending processing chores off to the service broker, you can distribute your processes (much more easily than the previously available methods). Some examples: Scenario A is where you send a process such as executing a particular query off (asynchronously) to a service broker on a different box. Scenario B is where you queue up requests to be processed over night. It was a real "AHA!" moment.

He also did a great xml data type demo where he showed the difference between finding a needle in a haystack of xml formatted data stored in a (???) varchar field and finding that same needled with the data stored in an xml data field. The xquery/xpath was much more efficient, cutting a 40 second search down to a few hundred millseconds. Then by applying some of the indexing you can do with the xml data type, it got down even more.

There were many other great demos - CLR in SQL Server, and a B.I. demo - something I have never looked at or considered before - from Integration Services. Very cool, very impressive.

Thanks to Laura and Roman for a great meeting.

A few other highlights: cake for our 4th anniversary and goodies from local MSDN DCC Susan Wisowaty. Susan lives in Burlington, but is the DCC for New York and New Jersey.

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Pablo Cibraro (who should be an MVP) is, in my opinion, one of the most knowledgable WSE guys around. He is up there with Michele and Softwaremaker (who have both moved on to be WCF gurus, of course). But besides having a wealth of practical knowledge, he spends an inordinate amount of time sharing it in the WSE newsgroups, answering myriad questions and following up on many of them.

He has answered questions for me too.

But today, he really impressed me even more. I was runing up against a problem that I could not figure out or find the answer to anywhere. In fact, I found two other questions on the web with the same problem but no answers.

The more I dug into the problem the more I learned and I finally was able to google the right keywords. And where did I find the solution to my problem? In Pablo's blog (see below). He does not post very often, but boy am I glad he wrote about this. I had even been fiddling in the right section of my web.config file, but just wasn't tweaking quite the correct thing.

So thanks Pablo!

And for google's sake, the problem was some encryption being done in a request for a securityContextToken in WSE3.0. On Windows 2000 machines, it was encrypting the requested key with RSA15, but WIndows XP clients were encrypting with OAEP and the win2003 server was expecting OAEP.

Windows 2000 does not have the ability to wrap with OAEP. So I had to force all clients to wrap security tokens with RSA15 (Win2000 will do it by default, but XP won't) and then force the server to use RSA15 also.

But I couldn't figure out how. Pablo's post on using the web.config in WSE 3.0 to override the default encryption led me to my solution. He also followed up with a reply in the newsgroup as I was typing this very post.

The error

An unsupported signature or encryption algorithm was used --->
System.Exception: WSE3002: The receiver is expecting the key wrapping algorithm to be http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-oaep-mgf1p, but the incoming message used http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-1_5. You can change the key wrapping algorithm through configuring security token manager.

The solution in both web.config of the service and app.config of the client (inside of the security tags of the microsoft.web.services3 tags):

<binarySecurityTokenManager>
    <add
valueType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3">
     <keyAlgorithm name="RSA15" />
    </add>
   </binarySecurityTokenManager>

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