Giant breed dogs don't have a long lifespan but my dogs Tasha (12) and Daisy (11) are not only very old for Newfoundlands but unbelievably healthy at their unusual age. Here's a little 8 second movie (only 364KB) of them on a walk last week. Daisy is on the leash and Tasha is in front. People who own Newfies cannot believe these dogs.

Tasha came to me as a rescue at 2 1/2 yr old with bad knees. She had 3 operations on her 2 back knees when she was about 3 or 4 years old. She has been on Cosequin for many years but we switched to something called Cetyl-M a few years ago. Tasha was always athletic. Tasha definitely has problems with those back legs now. If she is on the tile floor, it is really hard for her to get up (slippery) and she is pretty pokey going up and down stairs. But she is eager (and able) to go for long walks and still even runs a little. She's not a powerful dog anymore, but she still amazes us.

Daisy who is a year younger is one of my parent's dogs (they are breeders). All the other dogs at my parents knew that it was pointless to chase stick or a ball if Daisy was around because she aways got there first. Daisy still runs and jumps and chases - very very strong and powerful still. She has not been on anything until about 6 months ago we put her on Cetyl-M too. The vet says she's like a 5 year old Newf. Even her coat is still dark and rich.

It's everywhere it's everywhere! And now it's even on MSDN, too! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I recorded my basic "Securing a web service with WSE 3" demo using Camtasia. There are two versions of this.

1. In the 30 minute version (25MB), I spend a lot of time looking at config and policy files as well as tracing and debugging while implementing the security.
2. The shorter 15 minute version (12MB) does not take any stops along the way although we do inspect the trace file at the very end  just to prove that the message was secured.
3. WCF Client to WSE3 Service Demo (20MB, 20 minutes) see notes below

I don't get to take this much time to explain things during a conference, so I'm happy to be able to do the demo in my own time frame. I think I will do this for some of my other favorite presentations.

It's different to do a presentation with no audience, in the quiet of my office. I did have to edit out the barking dog at one point. It's not nearly as fun and I can tell that I sound very different than when presenting to a room full of developers. Maybe I should drink a few cups of coffee next time I record demos. Also, without the conference clock ticking away, I am not racing through the demo which is a nice change. Calm cool and collected.

Next I will record the demo of my WCF client calling into a plain ASMX web service built in .NET 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 and then calling into a web service that has been secured with WSE 3.0. When that is online, I come back to this post and link to that as well.

Update 4/18: The WCF demo is online. It is 20 minutes long and about 20 MB. There are two important things to know about this demo. 1) It is part of a bigger presentation about writing web services today that can communicate with WCF tomorrow, but the demo doesn't go over those rules. You can see basic guidance in this article that I wrote, but becuae the guidance was in flux when I published the article, please do keep an ey on he MSDN WSE Dev Center for an upcoming article by William Tay and PAG guidance. 2) This is not focused on how to write the WCF client. Although I show a little about how I did it, the point of the demo is just to prove that it works. Again, watch for William Tay's article!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have Urchin on my website for site analysis but never think to look at the stats. It is an amazing reporting tool with the amount of detail and analysis it does. My site is hosted on Alentus and this is one of the tools they offer.

I was surprised to see that blog folder alone is getting about 400,000 page views a month. I know from my referrals that an enormous amount of that is coming from Google.

Another stat I noticed that surprised me was that in the past month, there have been over 2,000 downloads of powerpoints and zip files(containing my demos) from my presentations page. I sure hope people are finding them useful!

Ken Levy has written a wonderful historical post tying all of these things together. As I have blogged in the past, Ken was something of a Wunderkind in the FoxPro world back in the day. I had no idea how extensive and impressive the rest of his background was. The story he weaves in this post, becomes, in the end, a lovely welcome to Danny Thorpe (if you don't know who this is, it's another great excuse to read this blog post!) who has just joined the Windows Live team.

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.

Green Mountain Power

IT Point Person

Do you have great programming and communication skills?

We’re looking for an energetic professional to join our programming team who has that rare mix of programming and people skills. If you like a fast paced user-driven environment working on a wide-variety of systems, we have a great job for you. You will be the point person for a high-powered software team responsible for triaging requests, writing specs, coding, and project work in order to satisfy a diverse group of users. This position has plenty of opportunities to grow.

The development environment focuses on Microsoft's tools and Oracle databases on Windows, Tru64 UNIX, and VMS systems. Fluency in a cross section of Visual Studio, Oracle, SQL, PL/SQL, C#, Microsoft .NET and Object Oriented programming techniques is highly desirable.

 Green Mountain Power offers a very competitive benefits package for our employees including medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your family, a pension program as well as a 401-k plan with a dollar for dollar match of your first 4 % contribution.
 
You can email a resume in Word doc form to brown_p@gmpvt.com and please cc aghareza@gmpvt.com indicating that you found this on the VTdotNET site or on my blog.

Green Mountain Power Corporation
Green Mountain Power, a Vermont company committed
to the development of its employees, to serving customers and to the
Vermont value of preserving the environment

                                                                          AA/EOE

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]