Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'll be doing a talk entitled "Five Supposedly Scary things about .NET" at Vermont.NET this evening.

The talk covers the following daunting topics on a high level

1. Declarative Attributes
2. Reflection
3. Delegate
4. Threading
5. Code Access Security

I'll be raffling off the last of the launch copies of Visual Studio 2005 PRO and SQL SErver 2005 Standard.

Free pizza courtesy of www.dottnetjobs.com.

After I did this talk at DevConnections last week, an attendee told me that he had been trying to solve some problems with an app and hadn't looked at any of these technologies becuase they seemed over his head. He was very excited because he realized that he could solve these problems using some of the stuff covered in the talk and was looking forward to learning more and leveraging them. That is exactly why I did the talk. I hope to inspire others as well.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My parents' dog Celeste just had her first litter. She had 10 gorgeous little things. Here are the first pictures: http://www.blueheavennewfoundlands.com/blueheavennewfoundlands/April2006LitterCeleste.htm

Celeste is Daisy's great grand-daughter, so these are Daisy's great great grand puppies.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

CoDe Magazine sends a pile of issues for the VTdotNET user group every month. I got the box before I left for DevConnections and set it aside, only opening it this morning in prep for tonight's user group meeting. I didn't realize that the Query Notification article and the opinion piece I wrote for them had already been printed, but there they were. It's the May/June issue but is not online yet. In addition to my articles, there is the first of the WCF series articles in there (yay!!!) by Juval Lowy and one on Transactions in ADO.NET by Sahil Malik (yay!). And of course (as always) bunches of other great articles and columns.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Lori McKinney sent me an email in response to my Winforms hosted in i.e. post, pointing out the I.E. update that  caters to the EOLAS lawsuit.This hadn't caught my eye before. The update forces users to "activate" ActiveX controls (such as Flash) hosted on a web page. Here is the official article on how that affects our websites. I also found a blog post by Steve Smith and another by Matt Watson with discusson on workarounds.

I installed the update this morning from Windows Update to see  how it affected my ink-enabled winforms controls that are hosted in a web page (eg the Doodling website). Without any of the scripting workarounds, the effect is not really bad at first. Just by placing the cursor over the control area, I get the popup that says "click to activate and use this control." Click and I'm instantly inking. But it doesn't remember! I have to do it every time I ope the page in a new i.e. session. This is with Disable Script Debugging checked. If I refresh the page, I get a different message, "press spacebar or enter to activate the control." But just clicking still works. Odd.

Okay so that was testing on my non-tablet with a mouse. With the tablet and stylus, luckily I don't really need to tap and THEN draw. Doing that gives me an inky dot where I tapped. But I can actually just ignore the message and start drawing and it works. But this means, I will have to explain this on my website. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to check into the scripting after all.

So the known issue is with this thing unchecked - as all good web developers have it set. I didn't experience anything different. I'll keep playing with it.

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Don't miss out on this opportunity to reserve a guest room for only $109.

• Valid for weekend stays between April 13th- June 9th
• Sink into The Westin Heavenly Bed(R)
• Relax in our heated indoor swimming pool or oversized whirlpool
• Must book by Friday, April 14th
• Limited rooms available

Here's the link

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have spent most of the day trying to understand some bizarre behavior in VS2005 with ink on the web apps. The issue is not related to the inkable control per se, but the Windows Forms control hosted on a web page.

When I compile the Window Control Library into a dll for the first time, add it into the web project, then embed into the html as an <OBJECT> it works fine. But if I recompile the dll and re-add it tothe project, the control does not display. I get the standard "image not found" graphic that you would get on any web page displaying a jpg where the jpg is not available.

After many hours, I discovered the solution, which I am leaning towards thinking is only related to working on the development machine - if I change the name of the output assembly, then add that new assembly to the web project and modify the object tags accordingly, it works just fine.

This really made me nuts and I think I spent 6 hours trying to figure out "what I was doing wrong". Of course, I'm not done with this yet... as this is not good behavior! I'll have to find out if there is a logical reason for this, but it will be one more hindrance to people using ink on the web if they are developingin VS2005.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have an application with lots of projects in it.The main project, which compiles to the EXE has references to two Janus assemblies and to one of my own assemblies (the dll, not the project). Additionally, I have about 15 assemblies that use these components and point to their dll's in the same location as the main exe does. Somehow, something got out of whack and in design mode the main exe couldn't "find" these 3 assemblies. I got that fixed and at the same time had to make some different changes to two of the other assemblies. After doing my update via clickonce, I couldn't load these two assemblies in the application on client machines. I did a lot of recompiling and redeploying of specific assemblies so that I could continue with my minimal impact ClickOnce update.This means that I don't republish and redploy the ENTIRE application, but can just move only the assembies I need to the webserver and recreate the manifests there. (I need to write an article on this).

When I tried to access the functions that loaded these assemblies, there was an error complaining about matching assemblies listed in the manifest.

"The located assesmbly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference"

When I opened up these projects in VS2005 and looked at the references, those three assemblies had this "<system could not find the reference specified>" in the value where the path should have been.

So, I had to load up every one of these projects and in each one, remove the existing refs to those 3 assembiles and re-add them in.

Then I rebuilt the entire solution and had to run the full publish utility on my development machine and redeploy the entire application to the web server - a two part process. Two-part, because the dynamic assemblies do not get picked up by the publish tool. I have to deploy the results of the publish, then copy that folder into a new folder (next version number), add all of the dynamic dll's, then rebuild the manifests. (That's part of the trick I will write about in the aforementioned article.) The whole app is about 11MB. Copying this over VPN with 350K upload speed takes longer than I have patience for, but that's life.

Nevertheless, after a lot of copying, pastng, manifest buildng adn testing, I was able to get the whole re-jiggered app deployed without requiring the dreaded un-install. The end-users won't even notice a thing tomorrow morning when they get back to work.

 

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

In reference to my "Vista 5308 -First Impressions" post, I was asked how I got the Vista Build 5308 specific video drivers that enable glass installed onto my Toshiba Tecra M4 Mobile (aka Tablet) PC. This machine has an nVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 TE 128M graphics card.

I documented this in a post on my DevLife blog. [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

From Damir Tomicic's weblog: Great offering for INETA User Groups in Europe - DevConnections, 24-27 April 2006, Nice, France, with ScottGu, Dino Esposito, Michele Bustamante, Juwal Lowy, Prashant Sridharan, Hans Verbeeck and many more: "...Hi Damir,  I would like your help getting the message out to INETA members in Europe that we are offering them a discount to the event in Nice and I will give you a discount code to offer..." You are INETA UG leader or INETA UG member? You would like to attend the conference and get INETA discout? Contact me at: Damir Tomicic@ineta.org

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Now in its sixth successful year in the US, Developer Connections now makes it s European debut on the French Riviera. Meet Microsoft developers and DBAs from around the world and build a network of peers to stay in touch with.  Unwind and relax with you colleagues in Europe on the French Riviera while obtaining the most relevant technical advice from Microsoft's ASP.NET, Visual Studio and SQL Server teams and training with Microsoft architects and world-renowned developers and DBAs delivering over 80 in depth, no hype sessions!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

At Scott Guthrie's DevConnections keynote, Petyo Ivanov (from telerik) noticed that Scott was using CSS for the page design in his Atlas demos. Petyo asked him about it later at the Microsoft Unplugged event. [read more ...]

[A DevLive post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Ahh, I'm a day late and a dollar short. Yesterday the PAG Team announced Service BAT - Service Baseline Architecture Toolkit - that will guide and help you implement WCF and ASMX services. They have had a bunch of plumbers helping them out including Christian Weyer and Pablo Cibraro. I can't wait to get my hands on it. This type of tooling will help take another layer of fear (and unintentional bad design) allowing WCF to be accessible to a lot more people.

Here's Jason Blogg's announcement.

Edward Bakker has some good details.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

(note: for those of you who need this clarification - eg the anonymous commentor who gave me the big lecture - the title and the last sentences of this post are intended to be sarcastic. Sheesh.)

In my talk on Preparing WSE3 Web Services for WCF at DevConnections, I was asked the dreaded question: do these work on the compact framework?

Nobody likes to get this question, because the answer is just way too embarrassing.

The answer is "No".

This has been the cause a lot of ruffled feathers in the CF and Web Services community. Casey Chesnut , our resident genius, even wrote his own implementations: cfWSE and cfWSE2.

The last version of the WCF story that I heard was that R1 will not have it, but R2 will. The WCF footprint is small which will help enormously. But R2.

To top it off, though I don't have a PPC and didn't see this myself, I am astonished to learn through Softwaremaker, yet another place where security has been set aside: Passport logins. On the web, we get a login and a masked password, along with options to remember the login, password or both. Not only are those options gone with the PPC interface, but the password is not masked! Hello?

I suppose that it is another indication that people who use PPCs or write applications for them, are just not doing anything important enough to require security. I suppose.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rich Tarrant started a little software company in the late 70's and recently sold it to GE for  $1.2 billion. He will be speaking to the Vermont Software Developer Alliance at our monthy meeting on Wednesday April 19th. More information at www.vtsda.org.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Pablo Cibraro answers gazillions of questions in the WSE newsgroup. He also follows up with a lot of them too. I am extremely happy to see that his generosity with his time and his knowledge has been recognized by Microsoft. His award is in Connected Systems Developer. He is also doing a lot of work with WCF.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I just returned from another fantastically successful DevConnections conference. There were so many attendees, the weather was great and just so many fantastic speakers and sessions. In addition to what you can learn in sessions, just being there provides a lot of opportunities to learn even while wandering the halls. Here are seven things I learned in between sessions..... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I seem to have found myself answering "check Red Gate" to a number of questions lately, so I thought I would share this recent email from them:

I wanted to let you know that we have just released version 5 of the SQL Bundle. This is a major new version and includes:

 §         SQL Compare Standard (with completely re-designed UI, ability to see object dependencies and numerous other enhancements)

§         SQL Data Compare Standard (with improved side-by-side comparison of column values, added support, etc)

§         DTS Package Compare

More information on specific changes to each of the products can be found at: http://www.red-gate.com/support/versions/index.htm

In parallel, we have also released SQL Bundle Pro 5, which comprises of:

§         SQL Compare Pro

§         SQL Data Compare Pro

§         SQL Packager Pro

§         SQL Toolkit (removed command-line interface)

§         DTS Package Compare

The Pro editions of the Bundle tools come with a command-line interface for easier scheduling and tasks automation.

For more information on our Bundles, please visit http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql_bundles/index.htm

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Posted from BLInk!

Two years ago, I blogged about the "Mobile PC" division at Microsoft which encompasses all of the mobility technology - Tablet PCs, handhelds etc. Today, for the first time, I noticed that this is finally catching on. There are lots of people walking around with bright orange hats. When I commented on one in the elevator to an attendee, he said "yeah, the Mobile PC team is giving them out and they are giving out a Mobile PC every day during the conference." So it sounds like people are getting it now. A mobile pc has a lot of features that enable mobility and ink is only one of those features.

Posted from BLInk!

My i.m. pal Michal Chaniewski has just (finally) become an MVP. Michal is one of the most connected guys in the .NET community in Poland. I'm so happy to see him get recognized. I met Michal when I noticed in his blog that he was from Poland and learned that he had lived in the small city that part of my family (generations past) came from. The town was called Langhfur but the name was changed to something wtih lots of w's, r's, s's and z's and maybe a vowel thrown in for fun that I couldn't pronounce for the life of me! Something like a great chocolate torte that is all eggs, sugar and chocolate with a teaspoon of flour added.

He also told me that Maja Ciemienga has become the first female MVP in Poland! Yay. Maja is the INETA lead for Poland. Here is Maja's blog - if you can read Polish!

Posted from BLInk!