I found a simple way to highlight information on a master/details form. More here...

[A New DevLife Post]

While I have been revelling in the thought of not travelling all summer, today I learned two things that translate to my not having any travel plans until November.

I had hoped to speak at the SDN conference in the Netherlands in September but none of my session topics were selected. After that I had planned to attend PDC in October, but that's not looking so good anymore.

Well, I'm definitely going to be in Las Vegas for DevConnections in the fall. We have a whole track just for Data Access talks in November, starting with 4 talks on Microsoft Day and then 9 more on the next two days. I am following up with a postcon 1/2 day also (more Entity Framework).

Then DevTeach is having a conference in Vancouver at the end of November. Of course, I can't assume I'll get to go there as a speaker, but I am crossing my fingers!

As for INETA user group engagements, I am currently waiting for the folks who do the scheduling to get caught up on their backlog of requests, but at the moment I have absolutely no INETA talks scheduled, which is weird after having done 15 in the current fiscal year. That is probably why I have nothing scheduled! Most speakers do 2 or 3 talks in a year. I just got a little carried away, but boy was it fun!

So my hope is that I am going to have a life this summer; ride my bike etc. Maybe when I reappear in the fall I'll have shed a few of those nasty .NET pounds I have put on since 2002. Or maybe not, but a girl can dream

XML is a pain to work with but because of it's importance, Microsoft is adding tooling into Orcas to make it easier. So, I was poking around in Orcas looking at what's new in tools for XML and XSLT. I even learned some stuff that was in VS2005 that I never paid attention to. Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

At MIX, I was somehow fortunate enough to be included in an intimate luncheon with Scott Guthrie, Ray Ozzie and a handful of bloggers from inside and outside of the .NET community. I've finally written about the luncheon and what I took away from it (no, I didn't steal the silverware!) over here...

[A New DevLife Post]

News stories about flying on planes always catch my eye because I travel a lot. Here's one from www.cnn.com today:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Customs officers at Cairo's airport have detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.

The officers were stunned when a passenger, identified as Yahia Rahim Tulba, told them his carryon bag contained live snakes after he was asked to open it.

Tulba opened his bag to show the snakes to the police and asked the officers, who held a safe distance, not to come close. Among the various snakes, hidden in small cloth sacks, were two poisonous cobras, authorities said.

The Egyptian said he had hoped to sell the snakes in Saudi Arabia. Police confiscated the snakes and turned Tulba over to the prosecutor's office, accusing him of violating export laws and endangering the lives of other passengers.

According to the customs officials, Tulba claimed the snakes are wanted by Saudis who display them in glass jars in shops, keep them as pets or sell them to research centers.

The value of the snakes was not immediately known.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

One of the things I am looking forward to during my summer at home in Vermont is participating in the Dragon Boat Festival/Race/Fundraiser. The even raises money for DragonHeart Vermont (for breast cancer survivors) as well as for the VNAs Hopsice and the Vermont Respite House which provides care for terminally ill patients.

In addition to being able to help these organzations, it is a fun day. I have been paddling something or another all my life, from war canoes, kayaks and canoes at the age of 7 at summer camp, to rafts on Class 5 waters in West Virginia's Gauley River to kayaking all over Lake Champlain with my hubby.

The dragon boats are beautiful and have teams of 20. Check out the site and the pics! Come out and cheer us on this August.

While I had taken some baby steps with using the mediaElement in Silverlight (eg playing one of the wmv videos included in the sample videos in Vista) I had not investigated much further even though I was having fantasies of a sample Ink in Silverlight demo that would involve annotating your favorite YouTube videos.

I have started playing with drawing in Silverlight in this sample app. The cool thing is that while it works best on a TabletPC, it is not a requirement. You can even use it on a Mac.

However, I quickly learned that YouTube videos are formatted using a flash format (FLV). I had no idea that this existed. I really know so little about media encoding. I'm a database developer, not a designer.

Silverlight only displays WMV formats.

So my next idea was to point to Microsoft's YouTube wannabe site , SOAPBOX, but was surprised to see that while they are tweaking the features, the site requires a login to access videos. So much for writing an app to help promote SOAPBOX.

Then I looked at Yahoo... more flash videos.

Then it was time for dinner. So I might have to do my first experiments with some canned videos. But I REALLY like my idea and want to find a way to make it happen.

My Entity Framework presentation at DevTeach was in the last slot of the conference. It was scheduled in the theater which looks like something out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Some of the speakers were referring to it as the muppet theater.

About 5 minutes into my presentation, we were informed that there was a snafu with the hotel and they had scheduled a dress-up cocktail party in the theater. So we had to pick up and move to the ballroom on the other end of the conference center. No worries. Except that when we arrived, there was no projector or screen.

So, while the IT guys from DMIB (thank you thank you!!) set up a projector and screen for me, I just stood up and started talking about the Entity Framework for about 10 minutes until I had the use of my slides and demos again.

I wasn't too phased by this since I could easily sit in a bar with geeks and talk about this stuff for hours with out the aid of a computer. Also I had a VERY great audience of attendees who were totally understanding! Thanks to you, also.

I have posted the demos and a revised Powerpoint for the ADO.NET Entity Framework presentation to the DevTeach site for attendees and to my own website at www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx for others. I have run these demos in the March CTP of Orcas.

I have found myself with no travel plans for the entire summer and I am thrilled. Last summer I was hardly in Vermont with a hectic travel schedule that began, well, in March with DevConnections, then two trips in April, a user group and DevTeach in May, TechEd and then my Moncton/Nova Scotia/Newfoundland trip in June, 3 user groups in July, 1 in August, 3 in September, Bulgaria and more user groups in October, DevConnections in November and then Redmond to visit Microsoft  in December. That's not just the summer, it was the whole year, wasn't it? So now that I have finished up my crazy spring 2007 travelling (DevConnex in late March, then Seattle area in mid April and Las Vegas (MIX) in late April and Montreal for DevTeach last week) I am done.

No TechEd.

No user group trips.

No conferences.

It will all start up again in the fall, but for now I am looking forward to a long and beautiful summer in the place I love with the man I love and the doggies I love.

We'll see how long this plan stays in tact....

The Universal Thread "offical coverage" of DevTeach provides writeups of a variety of sessions from the conference. Those are now available. Read more ....

[A New DevLife Post]

Yesterday, I presented a session at DevTeach called Hacking ClickOnce. I have lived the web based deployment pain for many years and finally found success with ClickOnce after I worked out some unsupported scenarios with ClickOnce. I wrote about this in an article in CoDe Magazine's Nov/Dec 2006 issue called Real World ClickOnce. I then decided to turn my lessons into a talk for DevTeach.

At the end of March, I got a new laptop that has Vista on it and have been using it for presenting ever since. Unfortunately, I discovered an unsurmountable problem with one of my hacks when trying to emulate deploying apps via IIS7 (it is locked down much more tightly than IIS6, even when using the "classic .net" app pool) on the Vista machine. But since my hacks work perfectly well in IIS6 and that is still the current web server technology for Windows, I went forward with my presentation; working around the IIS7 issues because the lessons are still totally valid.

It was definitely a little frustrating but hopefully worth the effort.

I have posted an updated version of the Powerpoint along with the demos onto the DevTeach site for attendees as well as on my TALKS page for others to check out.

[7/13/07: See this post for the solution!]

I have run into a bizarre problem with ClickOnce that is occuring with IE7 on both of my Vista computers.

Both computers have Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and the special vista version of VS2005 SP1. And on both of these, I can't use clickonce to install apps from  Internet Explorer. The ClickOnce mechanism wants me to install .NET.

Firefox doesn't have this problem. (Check out this earlier post.)

Here is a SIMPLE little nothing Hello World app. The only thing in it is this form which has ZERO .NET 3.0 stuff in it. It is pure .NET 2.0.

When I set the publish properties with NO prerequisites at all:

it still wants me to install .NET (on a Vista machine with .NET 2 and .Net 3 already there by default!)

I get the same effect if I run the publisher saying "yes, build a setup exe" with NO prerequisites installed.

If I give in and Install anyway, it gets stranger. It is installing WinFX Beta 2! I have actually let it go all the way through prior to this, which is why in this case it is saying "repair,etc...".

Even if I follow through the installation, ClickOnce continues to insist that I install it (again and again) so I can never launch /install my application.

This partciular computer has a new hard drive that I bought a few months ago on which I installed Vista Ultimate RTM, VS2005 and the service packs. No beta software has ever touched this metal.

I have done the same tests on my 2 month old laptop which also has Vista. I get the exact same results.

I have been at DevTeach for most of this week. A number of very (very) smart people who were at the conference looked at this and were equally mystified.

Brian Noyes created a hello world app in front of me and ran it with no problems.

John Bristowe pointed out the fact that it says "The following preqrequisites are required:" with nothing listed below. WIth no pre-reqs, that statement shouldn't exist. He checked the manifest and researched the schema of the manifest and still remained mystified.

Derek Hatchard spent some time looking at the page headers to see why IE and FF behaved differently.

Prior to DevTeach, I spent many hours trying to figure this out because it was having a pretty bad effect on the demos for one of my talks at DevTeach. At DevTeach, I spent every free minute trying to solve this problem (oh and another annoyance that has to do with IIS7 being super-secure...).

I left a post in the ClickOnce forum on Monday and it has qquickly gotten buried under two pages of questions that have been asked since then, and gone unanswered. It's a little scary how many questions people are asking on that forum.

So, I am putting it here in case anyone recognizes this problem and knows what to do about it. It sure made doing my ClickOnce session at DevTeach challenging, to say the least!

Update: at this point, I can tell the problem is not about IIS7, but it must be my computers. Once the problem began on these boxes, it now happens when, from either of these computers, I try to hit a ClickONce deployment site that is on an IIS6 server.

On Wednesday, I presented a session on Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET 2.0 Developers. The purpose of this talk is to introduce programmers to the new async features for ASP.NET 2.0 (Async Pages, Asyn Tasks, Event Based Async Web Services, Async DataBinding and when there is time a little pet feature of mine: PostCache Substituion). These are some simple functions that programmers can use to go after the "low hanging fruit"

Since I have modified the powerpoint for this talk, I put a newer version on the DevTeach site for attendees and also uploaded the newer version to my TALKS page on my own website.

The demos are also zipped up and on my website and the DevTeach website.

Once again, INETA is coordinating and leading a full day meeting of .NET User Group Leaders at TechEd. While budget no longer allows INETA to fund bringing many leaders from across the US and Canada to the event (as they have done in the past), TechEd is an event attended by many u.g. leaders, so it remains the best opportunity for congregating.

Over the years. my best source of information and inspiration for leading Vermont.NET has come from talking to other user group leaders and learning from their experiences.

If you are planning to go to TechEd and you are a user group leader or interested in learning more about helping your local user group (or just interested), the summit will be on Saturday, June 2nd in Orlando.

You can register and find more information at summit.ineta.org.

There is an Israeli contingent of speakers at DevTeach this year, bringing Udi Dahan, Oren Eini and Roy Osherove.  I was especially happy to meet Roy because after so many years of blogging, he is someone I feel like I've known for a long time! Here's proof that we were not only on the same continent, but in the same room!

I guess we can't call it ADO.NET Orcas any more.... I guess the right name will just be ADO.NET 3.5.

The DevTeach pre-con workshops are today. I am heading up tonight as the main conference is Tuesday through Thursday. Montreal in the spring - aaaah!

There's so much going on at DevTeach.

Tomorrow morning, Pablo Castro will be doing his keynote, which I'm looking forward to. He will follow up wiht a focus group on Entity Framework in the afternoon.

There is going to be a lively panel on OpenSource on Wednesday night as well as two Birds of a Feather sessions.. one on pair programming with Oksana Udovitsdka and Wendy Friedlander of Oxygen Media in NYC. I'm looking forward to meeting these two hip young women programmers even though I know I will stand next to them feeling like a frumpy old middle aged lady programmer.

I'll be doing three talks. One is on Hacking Click Once, based on my experiences I wrote about in this CoDe Magazine article. It's been hell getting this to gel with IIS7. I will also be doing a presentation on using the asynchronous features of ASP.NET 2.0 and then I will be talking about Entity Framework on Thursday afternoon.

I'm also looking forward to seeing Kate Gregory, who I haven't seen in way too long. Kate and I first met at the first DevTeach. We had each been told "you should meet..." and without having seen pictures of each other, we recognized each other immediately when we passed in a hallway. In fact there are many people that I met at DevTeach who have since become friends. It is a conference I truly look forward to every year.

In my short span betwee MIX and DevTeach (leaving tonight), I've been heads down playing with Silverlight's Inking capabilities and preparing for my DevTeach sessions and avoiding dealing with the delay of EF.

In the meantime, Roger Jennings continues to organize all of the info about ADO.NET Entity Framework into comprehensive posts such as this one.

Mike Taulty's library of LINQ to SQL videos has grown by orders of magnitude. Now he's posting LINQ to XML. When I see how many 15-20 minute videos it is taking Mike to demo and explain LINQ to SQL in a way that is satisfactory, it keeps making me laugh at the absurdity of covering whatever I can manage to squeeze into conference sessions that range from 60 - 90 minutes. Mike definitely has the right way to acheive this!!

An amazing panel of local experts will congregate  at Wednesday's Vermont Software Developer Alliance meeting.

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

12pm - 2pm, Courtyard Marriott Williston, Vermont

A discussion on climate change and what software companies can do to help slow it

This month's meeting brings together a panel of speakers who are experts in helping businesses to:

• Reduce energy consumption
• Recycle computers
• Properly dispose of electronic waste
• Leverage greener transportation options
• Buying greener products
• and more

More info at www.vtsda.org

Tonight we have two presentations at Vermont.NET.

Laura Blood from Blue Note Computing will present on Windows Services.

Mike Soulia, a guy of many hats: Vermont Tech teacher, owner of two great stores in Burlington (Apple Mountain and Kiss the Cook) and a consultant, will dig further into WPF and Expression.

Free pizza and soda sponsored by MyWebGrocer (who is actively looking for .NET developers).

It should be a fun meeting.

It will be the first meeting ever (5+ years) that I will miss since I am driving up to Montreal for DevTeach.