While I have merely enabled ink in my own controls on my own web pages , Loren Heiny is working n something really cool!! A way to place inkable edit controls over existing text boxes on web pages. For example, in his Camtasia video demonstrating his tests, he opens up Google and can write directly in he google text box, then it will get recognized and converted to text. This is instead of using the TIP.

This is big U.I. problem that many tablet pc developers struggle with. We like the idea of users opening up forms and writing directly in them and having that get recognized. What we lose, though is the editing flexibility of the tip. So the conundrum is how to get these two things to merge!

Loren is using some magic to get his inkable edit boxes placed over the fields, which means that this needs to be predefined somehow for each page. But that doesn't seem worriesome to me. It sounds like his tool might eventually enable anyone to create the definitions for any page and share them. Or the developers of those page could create the placement definitions for their own pages and let end users download them. Something like the how the context tagging works for tablet pcs. Or better yet, anyone could just hire Loren to create the mappings for their pages.

Anyway, check out Loren's post and accompanying video demonstration. Neat stuff!

Last week our neighbor's house was robbed in the middle of the day. I sent an email out to a list of about 30 local people to let them know and suddenly many of those people were reporting back about a number of other recent local robberies. Many of these had the same signature which was the door being kicked in. My carpenter husband had even repaired one of these doors.

A positive effect of this is that we are now planning to have a community meeting about setting up a neighborhood watch and hopefully having a state trooper come and advise us as well. I already feel like the Mrs. Kravitz of Moody Road since I can see who is driving up and down the road all day long while I'm at my computer. There are not very many houses on my road and it'sa dead end road, so an unfamiliar car definitely stands out!

Happily, it seems that the perps of some (maybe all??) of these robberies have been caught, according to this news report in the Burlington Free Press.

This has definitely had an effect on us and some of our habits in the past week. I prefer living in my little fantasy bubble where nothing bad can happen to us.

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The demos from my talk on Monday night at Vermont.NET are on the TALKS page of my website. They are listed alphabetically, so look under "F" for "Five..." The link to the PPT and ZIP files is below the session description.

I'll get them onto the Vermont.NET website shortly.

Code Samples from my two latest CoDe Magazine artcles:

• Ink on the Web
• SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications Tell .NET 2.0 Apps When Critical Data Changes 

 are on the "articles" page of my website.

I have been doing a bit of organizing and gotten the following two sessions from DevConnections on-line.

• Advanced Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0
• Five (Supposedly) Scary Things about .NET

These can be found on the "talks" page of my website.
The talks are listed alphabetically with links to the PPT and ZIP files just after the descriptions.

I still have to package up the code from the third talk: "Preparing WSE3 Web Services for WCF Clients".

The power went out for a short while today. Though I have no idea what stroke of luck caused this to happen on a 70 degree sunny day, I took great advantage of it and planted peas in the veggie garden bed. Most things can't be planted until after memorial day. But to sate my need to get gardening, I have seeds for a bunch of things that can get started early.

ok I retitled the post - didn't want to trick anyone into reading about my garden ....<g>

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Though I have the necessary permissions for using SqlDependency almost memorized (as well as documented in my presentations and my new CoDe Mag article on Query Notification), I tend to forget that when using the lower level SqlNotificationRequest, that you need permissions to send and receive on your custom services and queues.

Here's how to do that and here is the MSDN Documentation on the same.

In this example, the ASPNET account is the one for IIS5 that I have set up in my SQL Server. Use whichever account is going to be accessing the services and queues.

GRANT RECEIVE ON MyNotifQueue TO ASPNET

GRANT SEND ON SERVICE::[MyNotifService] TO [ASPNET]

Having spoken a few times over the years at the one of the Poughkeepsie NY ACM groups, I am on their mailing list. I got a good laugh from the recent mailing announcing a talk about Image Storage ex-IBM engineer (that describes most of the members of the chapter) who has an I.T. support business. In his business description, he says:

To keep from being swamped with more and more business, Jerry has adopted a new slogan:  Highest Priced Computer Service in Town.

The TabletPC Hands on Labs were very popular at DevConnections. I think I heard that over 600 people did the labs. Upon completion of the HOLs, the attendees were given a bright orange Mobile PC baseball cap. Throughout the conference, 3 attendees wearing those hats won a new Toshiba M400 Mobile PC (you know, a tablet). Lora Heiny has a lot of great pictures of the thrilled recipients here.

You can imagine that every time attendees were in one big room, for example at breakfast or lunch, it was a sea of orange, as they were all wearing the hats in hopes of winning the M400.

But even after all of the M400's had been given away, people were still wearing the hats. They were kind of cool. At the closing session, where perhaps 1,000 of the attendees were all seated, I took this short video to show the sea of orange hats.

It is only 12 seconds long. The AVI version from my camera is 25 MB and the choppier WMV file is only 2.9 megs.

As I was doing the last section of my "5 Supposedly Scary Things in .NET" talk last night at the Vermont.NET user group, I came to the slide with the Permission attributes examples to either Request, Demand or Assert permissions. I had decided to try to explain these (very high level) as they had always completely mystified me. Although I have given this talk before, I had a sudden epiphany for a new analogy for the demanding and asserting permissions - purchasing beer. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.