I pilfered this from my parent's website, www.BlueHeavenNewfoundlands.com. They are newfie breeders (mostly Landseers, like Rollo). Rollo is one of their puppies, now 8 years old, who is owned by a really neat lady who dances with her dogs competitively. Yes dances. She and Rollo were even on Nick at Nite and they compete in various "Freestyle" events. YOu can read more about that here. She dresses up her dogs for the dancing and also for pics like these - for Halloween, New Years and more. There's a page filled with them on my parent's site.

A slew of Silverlight books, a better way to handle Silverlight installs from your website and moving to Silverlight 1.1.

[A New DevLife Post] 

I spent a lot of time coding in javascript for silverlight 1.0 and am having fun now getting back to managed code with 1.1. I'm even doing it all in C#, but the main reason is because I  have a lot of nearly reusable javascript code and it's just easier to port that to C#.

However, as usual, I am just diving head first and not doing too much advance research. Two things I learned the hard way:

Silverlight does not yet support LINQ
A few months ago, I spent bunch of time buliding a beatiful LINQ to XML method to build up some XAML by hand only to discovere when I tried to run it, that it failed. I looked around and discovered that LINQ support was not there yet. Oops! But it was my first time using LINQ to XML to build an XML document, so what I learned in the process was not a waste by any means.

Silverlight does not yet support WCF
I built a very nice WCF service, with composite types and everything only to learn (when I went to add service reference to my SL client) that it's not supported yet. There are a few workarounds, [here on the sliverlight forums] and [here in Luis Abreu's blog], but since this particular code will be for a conference demo and I don't want to add any extra layers of complexity, I will just go back to ASMX for this one.

I spent a lot of time coding in javascript for silverlight 1.0 and am having fun now getting back to managed code with 1.1. I'm even doing it all in C#, but the main reason is because I  have a lot of nearly reusable javascript code and it's just easier to port that to C#.

However, as usual, I am just diving head first and not doing too much advance research. Two things I learned the hard way:

Silverlight does not yet support LINQ
I spent bunch of time buliding a beatiful LINQ to XML method to build up some XAML by hand. But it was my first time using LINQ to XML to build and XML document, so what I learned in doing that was not a waste by any means.

Silverlight does not yet support WCF
I built a very nice WCF service, with composite types and everything only to learn (when I went to add service reference to my SL client) that it's not supported yet. There are a few workarounds, [here on the sliverlight forums] and [here in Luis Abreu's blog], but since this particular code will be for a conference demo and I don't want to add any extra layers of complexity, I will just go back to ASMX for this one.

Yes, you can have it all! Live in a cool place (Stowe, Vermont) and do the work you love surrounded by smart people!

(While you are at it, check out Springer-Miller, also in Stowe who, like Inntopia, has a sizable and brainy team of programmers.)

Inntopia in Stowe

APPLICATION DEVELOPERS
REQUIRED TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE
4+ years experience in a majority of the following technologies

• ASP.NET/C#
• SQL/T-SQL
• XML
• XSL/XPath
• AJAX / JavaScript
• XHTML/DHTML
• COM/DCOM
• SOAP/Web Services

SOFTWARE TOOLS
Familiarity with the at least 2 of the following development applications:

• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/2005
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005
• XMLSpy
• Visio

REQUIRED SKILLS

• Ability to design, develop and maintain software on Microsoft .NET platform.
• Ability to design and develop software in a group or independently.
• Comfort with direct communication with all levels of technical and business resources.
• Self-managing, self-motivated learner with good written and oral communication skills.

ADDITIONAL BENEFICIAL SKILLS

• Travel/hospitality industry experience
• Experience with high-volume transactional accounting systems (accounts receivable and accounts payable)
• Experience with complex pricing and commission structures
• Experience with security protocols (i.e. PCI Compliance and data encryption standards)
• Experience with software development process management.
• Experience developing multi-lingual web applications.

Email resume to lisa@inntopia.com

I'm not a big baseball fan, so I didn't even realize that the world series was already in play. This morning, I learned that the Red Sox had won yet another series (many Vermonters are big SOX fans) but the really big news this morning was that Lucy, a Holstein from Derby, Vermont, was crowned the "top female Holstein on the planet at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WIsconsin. "On the planet"!

Here's the big news with a cute picture of Lucy.

Yet another Flash driven advertisement (here are some others i've blogged about in the past) that uses annotation. Below is a screencast of me playing with this Notes ad (with a mouse, not a stylus). You can do this in Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 with the InkPresenter. I'll be giving a session on Annotating in Silverlight as part of the Mobile Connections show during the big DevConnections conference next week (Nov 5 - 8) in Las Vegas.

This is probably a temporary problem as I'm working with an alpha and a beta, and therefore my fix is a  probably a temporary hack. I always have to remember how to get XAML intellisense to work whenever I start a new Silverlight project. Here's how to do it.

[A New DevLife Post]

Kathleen Dollard gave up the fight against spam on her self-hosted blog and has moved over to MSMVP Blogs.

Here new blog, Leaning Into Windows, can be found at http://msmvps.com/blogs/kathleen

A few years ago, I wrote a little utility for one of my clients who uses Crystal Reports XI to design reports inhouse. They wanted other people on the corporate intranet to be able to see and refresh the reports and if necessary, enter new parameters. Since they weren't designing reports, it didn't make sense to buy licenses for everyone and I was able to (very easily) come up with a viewer utility that did the trick. I finally wrote this article about it for ASPAlliance, as they have a great collection of articles (mostly written by Eric Landes).

Writing a Viewer Utility for Crystal Reports

Leave it to CoDe Magazine to let me write about the problem some of us programmers have when we really have to pee, but we just want to get that last line of code working. I also talk about my own impatience and obsessions around programming and suggest that I might not be the only developer with these traits.

MVP Corner - Coder's Anonymous

It's in the current issue (Nov/Dec 2007) and is also now online.

This article, Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework, which I wrote for CoDe Magazine is now online.

You can find it in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue which is currently on newsstands (and highly likely to be at available at your local .NET User Group.)

I have been subscribed to this blog for Zlatkov which has was phased out in July and I didn't know he was going to resurface in a new blog. I just happened to come across that today! It is a focused Entity SQL blog

blogs.msdn.com/esql

If you can't make it to DevConnections in Las Vegas where there will be a Data Access track with a whole bunch of Entity Framework session (check it out) and the reason is because you live over on the other side of the pond, there are a bunch of EF talks at TechEd Europe.

Mike Taulty lists them here.

From Jeff Beehler on Microsoft's VSTS team:

We recently discovered that the VPCs we distributed as part of the VS2008 Beta2 release will expire on Thursday, November 1, 2007, much earlier than we had originally expected.  Since the timeout is at the OS level, we cannot automatically extend the timeout period.  As such we are currently in the process of reissuing the VPCs and expect to make them available early next week.

In the meantime, for anyone that has stored information in TFS that they need to access moving forward, we recommend that you immediately backup the TFS databases in preparation to move them to the updated VPCs.  For information to complete these steps, please refer to the documentation on Moving Team Foundation Server.

We're still working on additional guidance to respond to this situation.  As more information becomes available, I'll post it here. 

Note this is NOT talking about regular installations but the actual VPCs

I came across an article about drawings being used rather than passwords for security on computers, etc. Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

Scott Gutrhie introduces his next fun project, an MVC (Model-View-Controller) Framework for ASP.NEt. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

The fall DevConnections is coming up in another 10 days (Nov 5-9) in Las vegas.

It looks like they will have about 5,000 attendees again, like last year which is amazing.

I will be doing a variety of talks.

One that i'm especially looking forward to will be teaming up with John Sudds from the Internet Explorer team to present on embedding Ink-Enabled Win Forms controls into ASP.NET 2.0 pages. This will be part of the Microsoft Day session for Mobile Connections. John brings a new level of expertise to the work I have done in this area and solved some problems I was never able to get around. John will be the demo god in this session and i get to do my favorite thing: Talk!

I will also be doing a talk about Annotating with Silverlight as part of the Mobile COnnections show. Don't let this fool you. Annotating in Silverlight, while best on a tabletpc, also works  nicely on regular pcs and on Macs - anywhere that you can run Silverlight. If you haven't seen the various test apps that I have deployed on the web, you can check them out here: the Step-by-Step series and the database persistence application.

In the ASPConnections show, I will be doing a session on ASP.NET DataBinding with LINQ which will explore many flavors of LINQ, not just LINQ to SQL.

And then there is the Data Access track in which I will be presenting and advanced talk on Entity Framework - Real World Entity Framework with a focus on multi-tier apps. John Papa will precede this talk with two intro type talks.

Lastly, I will be a presenting a post-conference 1/2 day (9am-12pm) workshop on guidance for accessing data in .NET 3.5. We now have ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and three ways to query data in Entity Framework. There will be a number of entity framework and LINQ to SQL talks during the main conference, so this session is aimed at comparing and contrasting them and providing guidance on when it makes sense to use each one.

There's still room to sign up! http://www.devconnections.com   

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing when I would choose querying an data through an Entity Data Model using LINQ to Entities vs. Object services + Entity SQL vs. EntityClient + Entity SQL.

One of the advantages I pointed out about using EntityClient is that it returns datareaders and does not attempt to turn the returned data into objects. In re-reading Zlatko Michailov's EntityClient post from earlier this year, I realize that I didn't highlight one of the most important reasons about being able to return datareaders, in case it isn't obvious: Performance. But note that this is for reading only.

If you do not need the Entity objects materialized by object services and do not need the other benefits of object services (e.g. change tracking and DML) and just want to get your hands on the data, using Entity Client will get it to you the most quickly. While this can also be done with ADO.NET, EntityCLient gives you the benefit of querying the conceptual model rather than directly against the database schema.

I check the MSDN forums for Entity Framework and Astoria frequently and just noticed something today that made me smile.... read more...

[A New DevLife Post]