Rich and I went to a halloween costume party this past weekend. I did something I've always wanted to do - put wire in my braids to make them stick out so I can be Pippi Longstocking. My hair is a little long for doing this which made it hard to get through doorways and a little dangerous to walk around the party. Rich was a villanous Vampire.

The U.S. elections are Nov 7th. There are two big conferences next week in our community: TechEd Europe in Barcelona, Spain and DevConnections in Las Vegas, Nevada.

If you are leaving home for these events, don't forget to vote before you go!

In Vermont, absentee voting is allowed for 30 days prior to the elections. I'm not sure how this differs in other states. Here, you can get an absentee ballot in the mail from your town clerk (which needs to be back to the town clerk by Nov 6th, or to the polling place by 7pm on Nov 7th) or just go there and vote. I went to the town office and just sat down and voted there.

It didn't occur to me to do this until about a week ago even though I've known for a long time that I'd be gone. I just hadn't put two & two together!

In "blogtime" this is old news, but I just caught that John Lam is joining Microsoft to work on the CLR team, "to help bring the love of dynamic languages out to the statically typed heathens ". Great news!

I've been helping a client deal with a website that we think was designed by DOS programmers. [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Noah Coad was a  student ambassador and an MVP when I first met him a few years ago. You could easily describe him as a young, eager, bright and clean-cut kid.

So was Ian Ceicys!

I see both of them occasionally at Microsoft events such as the MVP Summit or TechEds, 

Both of these young men got sucked up by Microsoft when they graduated from college.

(I am feeling older with every sentence - egad!)

I don't think I have ever seen them together which is the likely reason that somehow they had blended into the same person in my mind.

When I saw Ian at the New England Code Camp last weekend and asked him why he was in Boston and how his Microsoft job was going, he gave all the right responses - it could have just as easily been Noah - which is the mistake I made. I even blogged about it. Oops.

So here I am putting their pics side by side and now the difference is a little more obvious! Sorry guys!

Now that the "Click to Active and Use this Control" is a fixed part of IE7, web developers have to pay more attention to the problem. I got bit by it because I'm embedding winform controls into web pages to do Ink on the Web. Here are some pointers to what we can do to not share this grief with people visiting our websites.  [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

This was one of the early highlights of our trip to Bulgaria. Chalga-Man!

Click on the image to see and hear Chalga-Man in action!

Though we selfishly were sad to see Thom Robbins leave the D.E. position for New England, the local community was thrilled to see him move to an awesome new job at Microsoft. But the big question was who on earth could fill his shoes?

Happily, Thom has made a wonderful choice in a successor. Chris Bowen, a local developer who has been very involved in the community and someone for whom I have always had a ton of respect, will be our new D.E.

Thanks Thom! Thanks Chris!

Code Camp 6 was this past Saturday. It started out with a somewhat nervewracking 200 mile drive to Waltham due to torrential rainstorms and high winds. But I had a fun companion in the car who kept me well entertained throughout - Dave Burke, who was ridiculously kind when I was adamant that we needed to go south on Route 91 (totally wrong) and let me get away with it for 10 miles before I let him convince me to turn around. I suppose it's one thing to deal with female logic when it's your wife, but a totally different conundrum when it's another chick.

When we arrived at the event on Saturday morning, I learned some wonderful news. Athough we are all sad to see Thom Robbins go (and thrilled at his new job at Microsoft) he made a fantastic choice for our new Developer Evangelist in Chris Bowen. Chris is a local guy who has been involved with the .NET community in Boston for a long time and is someone I have a huge amount of respect for. So I was very happy to hear this great news.

Since people quickly disappear into the conference rooms, it's always hard to tell how many are really there, but at lunch time, it certainly seemed like major swarms of people heading for the pizza. I did only two of my three talks. As I expected, the Persisting Ink on the Web talk, which I was hoping to practice prior to Mobile Connections in a few weeks was waaaaaay to narrow so nobody showed up. But the Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Websites and Moving Big Data with ADO.NET 2.0 talks were both well attended.

I spent most of my free time futzing with the impact of the "click here to activate and use this control" issue that is now a permanent part of IE7 and has a big impact on the embedded winforms controls that I use to do ink on the web, rather than sitting in on other talks, so I missed out on Richard Hale Shaw's C# talks where I'm sure he couldn't resist a dig or two against VB .

There were a bunch of VTdotNETters there which is always great to see.

The other very nice surprise was seeing Noah Coad who I have known for a number of years, originally through the MVP academic community. He has been at Microsoft for a while now (they scooped him up the day he graduated from college), but I didn't realize he had recently moved to the east coast. So I'm sure we'll be seeing more of him.

When all was said and done, Dave and I hopped in the car for the drive back to Vermont in what was thankfully great weather on a beautiful fall night.

DevConnections (combination of 6 conferences: ASP, Visual Studio, Mobile, Sharepoint, SQL Server and Office) is only a few weeks away. I'm going out to present 2 sessions for ASP Connections (Managing & Deploying ASP.NET 2 Sites and Asynchronous ASP.NET), one for Mobile Connections (an advanced Ink on the Web talk) and a 1/2 day post-conference workshop on Advanced ADO.NET 2.0.

I'm sorely disappointed that my flight schedule is having me miss the Monday night keynotes, especially this one that Scott Guthrie and Brian Goldfarb are giving: Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and ASP.NET AJAX.

There is going to be so much going on at DevConnections, including some Microsoft "hear it for the first time in the U.S.") announcements from Microsoft. I hope I don't end up holing myself up in my room trying to perfect my talks again (so that means they need to be perfect before I go to the airport! ). Of course, there's always the lure of the gambling tables and the girlie shows (just kidding - not really interested in either), but still Vegas is certainly a fun place to be when you do want to take a little break from the geek fest!

From Russ Helfand, creator of the CSS Friendly Control Adapter Toolkit, announcing a new version! (Of course, this comes just weeks after my article about them in aspnetPRO is published , but I knew that was coming...)

I'm pleased to announce that we have upgraded the CSS Friendly ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter kit.  The new release is Beta 3. 

The whole kit now serves as a sample of designing markup and CSS that scales gracefully. This includes scaling of the menus, trees and forms.

All forms rendered by the adapters (think: membership controls) now implement a solution for the accesskey issue. It’s simple but incredibly effective… and totally addictive.

There are other things in beta 3 besides accessibility improvements. The TreeView adapter now restores the tree’s expansion state. That’s a huge usability improvement but more importantly it’s our first demonstration of an adapter that leverages the ASP.NET view state framework.

To get familiar with all the new features, please read the "what's new" section of the kit's home page at http://www.asp.net/cssadapters.  Also, try out the "quick cool demos" listed in that section.  They are:

I don't pay much attention to Facebook (could it be that I'm about twice the age of the average user? ), but thought it was intersesting that they expose web services for devs to tap into. Here's an article on DevSource by Tim Stevens called Using the Facebook API: Social Networking in .NET
.

I finally discovered a better way to debug javascript, after 5 years of clobbering my way through this process. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

I know very few people who can write sentences like this:

"I've been messing a lot with time zones lately, planning my trips to South Africa, Spain, and Denmark...." [http://www.gregcons.com/KateBlog/TimeZones.aspx]

This represents TechEd South Africa, TechEd Europe and then some more .NET love in Denmark. It also represents quite a lot of frequent flier miles!

I am 99% with Kate on this one. I've always wanted to go to New Orleans and was excited about the added aspect of TechEd 2007 having a major impact on the city's economy. The only thing Kate & I disagree on is that I'd like to see it in Burlington, VT. Of course, Burlington has no means of hosting an event even 1/4 this size. Oh well. Hawaii?

I spent 2 1/2 hours yesterday trying to arrange a warranty replacement for a Dell monitor. The first hour was used merely trying to find the right means of contacting Dell for this problem. In the end, I succeeded, but there is something seriously wrong with how their info is managed... read more...

[A DevLife post]

I have WS-FTP Pro 7.0 on both multiple computers as well as the newly released IE7.

One computer has no troubles. The other gives me this interesting error when I try to start it up:

The only solution is to click ok and then kill the app from task manager.

Luckily, I found this thread in the Ipswitch forums (which also decries a lack of support from WS-FTP) where a user (who is clearly a pit-bull and chose not to give up on finding a solution - thank you Suzy!!!) has managed to find how to fix the problem, which calls for "hiding" an outdated file.

navigate to where your WSFTP is installed e.g.
c:/program files/ipswitch/ws_ftp professional
and rename PSAPI.dll to PSAPI.dll.old and then reboot

It worked. Yay.

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A pointer to a great blog source of Vista Tips & Tricks and my husband's (a non-techie) upgrade to IE7... read more...

[A DevLife post]