My 15 year old niece is visiting this week and her mission is to get me away from the computer. She's doing a great job. Yesterday we went (this is not something I'm very good at) shopping in downtown Burlington. It's really fun going to Victoria's Secret with a teenage girl. Hee hee. Today we are going to snowshoe up to a lean-to on the Bean Trail near my house. The Bean Trail is a side trail that leads up to the Long Trail. It's about 15 degrees out, so hiking uphill will keep us nice and toasty. Snowshoing? Yes. The snow has finally arrived....well a little bit at least. We have about 8 -10 inches of nice new snow but of course it's basically on top of grass and rocks since we lost all of our base. At least it looks pretty, though.

My mission while she is here is to expose her to different foods. Yesterday we went to a health food store so she could see that there are in fact more vegetables than broccoli and carrots. She has now had (and liked!!!) kale and red cabbage for the first time. We'll do veggie sushi. But she has definitely declined on the seaweed - something to do with seeing it on the beach too often. We'll see how far I get in a week. Heh. Tomorrow I think we will go to Montreal, though we'll have to pass on the city's famous smoked meat since she doesn't eat red meat.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

After a day of fiddling with the new Vista build on my tablet pc, here are a few rambling thoughts... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This is for EWA in Montpelier. They write software for the Department of Defense. I wish it weren't necessary, but it is ... and we might as well have the best and brightest on the job!!

Qualifications

The successful applicant will have a minimum of Bachelor of Science degree in Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Network Engineering, Management Information Systems, or Electrical Engineering with 7+ years experience in software specification, software design, programming (C, C++, .net), testing, and formal documentation. Excellent writing and verbal communication skills are a must. Network system administration experience and/or working knowledge of DoD software development practices are desired.

Applicants selected will be subject to a government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information.

Description of Work

EWA Government Systems Inc. (EWA), Montpelier, Vermont, has multiple, immediate openings for experienced software engineers in a variety of projects with long term growth involving multi-level security network development, Windows-based application development, and systems integration. Typical duties may include software design, computer programming, software integration, reverse engineering, configuration management, database development, network administration, and custom applications development in UNIX, Linux, and Windows-based environments. Projects will involve structured software design, development, testing, and documentation. Duties may involve hands-on work with specialized servers, gateways, VPNs, concentrators, firewalls, and encryption devices.

Contact

Click here to apply online.  Please use reference number GSI-220 when applying.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

William Tay (aka Softwaremaker), a WCF wizard, has an article on TheServerSide.Net which is a great intro to programming with WCF.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

For those of you who are all rss all the time, you may not have noticed the beautiful new Community Server site that dotnet.org.za has switched to. Now I see on Thea's blog that it was Armand who did the job

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Sahil's teaser video for his ado.net 2.0 video training course is great. Clearly a guy who loves data access and has an enormous reverence for data. But watch the video all the way through as you will surely get a great laugh at the end!

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I'm only part way through watching this but you GOTTA see it. Naturally, they brought in Duane LaFlotte as a hacker - I have said before - he's the guy  you want on YOUR side!!

Check it out.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

We'll see. My ISP has really upped the DSL download speeds so I was finally looking forward to faster download times on these DVD sized files. But alas, the connect server is very pokey and I'm looking at a reported 19 or so hour download. I'm happy that the computer can still chug away while I'm sleeping!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Thea Burger went to a Women in IT networking event. She met a woman who made a startling comment when Thea introduced herself as a devloper. There is now a funny ongoing thread of comments about this on her post...

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I think this post is just for my friend Dave who works at home and has more than his fair share of blog posts about donuts.

Rich bought a box of little chocolate covered donuts last night. I begged and pleaded with him to let me have some. He's a good husband though and tries to help me when it comes to succumbing to my dreadful addiction to chocolate. Especially as he's the one who has to hear me whine about the way my jeans fit (or don't, as the case may be).

His first response was "donuts are for people who go to work". That did not go over well since I happen to work about 12 or more hours a day. So then he tried "donuts are for people who leave the house to go to work." Boo hiss.

After he "left the house to go to work" this morning I came downstairs knowing that surely, because he loves me so very very much, he had left me a few of these little tasty treats. But they were nowhere to be found. He told me later that he had departed with the fully sealed box of donuts this morning. I had to make due with oatmeal, since the closest possible source is a 25 minute round trip drive. So here it is, nearly lunchtime, and I'm still thinking about those damned donuts!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Scott Guthrie blogs about the RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 created by Dmitry Robsman on the ASP.NET team. The toolkit exposes an RSSDataSource which you can use with any of the databinding controls in ASP.NET 2.0. Check out Scott's post for all the details and how to's.

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Seems pretty inane, but this is the kind of stuff one has to worry about when writing articles. Although sometimes I can leave that to the great tech editors I get to work with like Melanie Spiller. I have gotten very good at properly casing things like SqlNotification and DataSet. But [web services] was always an issue for me. So today I went onto the W3C site and found the following on this page:

"The World Wide Web is more and more used for application to application communication. The programmatic interfaces made available are referred to as Web services."

Okay, so I'm sticking with capital W and all lower case for the rest.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

"Error Creating Window Handle" is not a .NET error, but is coming from Win32, which, in itself, is a big clue when trying to solve this problem, which I had to do today. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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Microsoft's Upcoming Vista to Support Legacy VB6 Apps

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I can barely contain my excitement over this article, "Practical Tips for Boosting the Performance of Windows Forms Apps" by Milena Salman in MSDN Mag (March 06). I read most of it this morning over breakfast and came down to my office with the sole intent of opening up the windows forms app I am getting ready to re-deploy in it's shiny new .NET 2.0 makeover and finding any place that I can apply all of the awesome advice Milena dishes out in this article.

Of course, now it's 2:00 and if I can just turn off Outlook, I.M. and the phone, I might actually get started on this.

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I have mentioned my use of the XCeed streaming compression for returning data from web services a number of times in this blog. Here is a post when I first discovered that it reduced a 2.9 minute download of  4 MB to 12 seconds! I have since mentioned it a few times but never showed exactly how it is coded. Last night Rod Paddock pinged me to find out if I thought that component would work for him and it turned out he had the exact same scenario as I have been using it for. Therefore I showed him my code and thought I would put it here as well.

The key to all of this is that the component compresses bytes, so whatever you are returning, you want to convert it to bytes first. I'm sure this may make some web service purists cringe, but is it any different than returning a binary attachment with MTOM - which is a W3C standard? (I'm open to further education on this, my purist friends!)

Anyway, back to stream compression.

Let's say you have a .NET client to .NET service scenario and are writing both ends. (That is a setup to avoid any rotten tomatoes for using a dataset in this example ).

On the web service end, I have a method that accepts the dataset, converts it to a byte array, compresses that into another byte array using XCeed QuickCompression class and then returns this compressed byte array.

Using ms As New System.IO.MemoryStream
 ds.WriteXml(ms)
 Dim bytearray(ms.Length) As Byte
 bytearray = ms.GetBuffer
 Dim CompressedBytes() As Byte
 CompressedBytes = QuickCompression.Compress(bytearray, CompressionMethod.Deflated, CompressionLevel.Normal)
 Return CompressedBytes
End Using 

On the client end, having called this web service operation, I decompress the received bytes into a new byte array, then read that byte array into a new DataSet. Et Voila!

Dim ds As New DataSet
Dim compressedBytes() As Byte = WSProxy.GetDataSetasCompressedBytes
Dim byteArray() As Byte = QuickCompression.Decompress(compressedBytes)
Using ms As New MemoryStream
  ms.Write(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length)
  ms.Position = 0
  ds.ReadXml(ms)
End Using

I remember when I was first looking for a means of doing this and reading about this component, it wasn't obvious how to do this in a web service, so I had a pointer from someone in tech support as to how to accomplish this.

I have used this combined with WSE 2.0 and now with WSE 3.0 to protect this data in addition to compressing it. If you have really humongous files, you can combine compression with MTOM in WSE 3.0 as well. I'll have to check this out with WCF at some point.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm looking at Rod Paddock's editorial in the current CoDe Mag issue. This is the future tehcnologies issue wiht articles on WPF, LinQ and Ajax. In the editorial he says that there is going to be a 6 article series on WCF starting with the next issue. I'm really looking forward to this. Especially considering who is going to be writing some of these: Michele Leroux Bustamante, Juval Lowy, Christian Weyer.

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Ex-Microsoftie Alec Saunders' teenage boys believe they have found a really good use for a piece of carpentry (as opposed to computer) hardware. I'm married to a carpenter who is in many ways like a teenage boy. But I don't think he'll be trying out this technique in the kitchen any time soon.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here's what one software giant, Peter Norton, did with his millions ... [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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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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