no not mine (that went back to my client, remember?), someone else's. Brand new acer c111 (or c112).

Posted from BLInk!

it's just a time thing. I say it's evolution, not revolution.

Softwaremaker has gone the dasBlog route and his new [must read if you are doing anything with WSE] weblog is here: www.softwaremaker.net/blog.

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This is not the first case of worn-out TabletPC enthusiasm I have seen. I really do envision a future where tablets are the norm...where they *are* the laptops. Where a laptop is a tablet and a tablet is a laptop and it's all mobile computing and there is no distinction any more. But the problem for many who have been excited about it for years now is that it is still "a future".

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Steven Lees writes about some upcoming changes for VB in Whidbey. I had to laugh at this understatement: Refactoring is another feature that we've heard a lot about from VB developers.

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One of the local votes on Tuesday is to go ahead with the plans for the Regional Technical Center here in Vermont, bringing together and expanding upon the success of the exsiting Tech Centers in Burlington and Essex Junction. This has been a big controversy in Vermont and one that seems to be fueled by misinformation (or so say those on both sides of the argument). A lot of educators are against it even some that work at the existing Tech Centers. The problem is not in the desire to have the RTC, but in the actual current plan that is being voted on. My understanding is that voting against this plan does not mean that you are voting against the RTC but you are insisting that they go back to the drawing board and make a better plan. I really have had a hard time keeping on top of the arguments pro & con. Of course, everyone wants to see more opportunties created for people in Vermont and it will also benefit Vermont businesses - though this should not be the primary goal, otherwise, we are creating a worker mill.. I wish that teens did not have to worry about their careers at such a young age and can focus on developing life skills. I lived most of my life in NY State where BOCES has been a great success.

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Have you see Jeff Prosise's planes? Here's another one.  I thought they were real, thanks to the way the photos look... until they started accumulating! I knew that he couldn't have so many. Then I looked a little closer and then finally saw this video. Very very cool, Jeff!

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KVM stands for Keyboard Video Mouse. Since I bought a new desktop this summer, my former daily driver was sitting in a corner doing nothing. I just bought a KVM 2 Port Switch made by LinkSys that is one sweet little cable with all of the connections built in. I can now switch between that computer and my regular one without moving any more muscles than my little index finger to tap on the Scroll Key twice. Love it! Now all I need is Ghost so that I can use that machine either to test additional beta software or to emulate a clean client machine to test installations, etc.

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Jim Blizzard is an organized guy. I would never have thought of enabling

• Bulleted
• Lists

or

1. Numbered
2. Lists

in BLInk! without him.

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Bliz has kindly agreed to play around with BLInk for a bit. Hmm - spell checking hadn't thought of it!

I appreciated all of  his nice comments but just wanted to clarify something.

One thing he misunderstood was about the API limitation on categories and titles. That is only for the Blogger API. I saw the common workaround but could not get it to work from my application and finally ditched it. However, the Metablog API absolutely supports titles and categories. I also use dasBlog, as does Bliz and am posting with the Metablog API from BLInk! with titles and categories. No problems at all with that. I don't have to go back to my blog and add those things in after the fact.

.Text and dasBlog support both APIs.

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I'm sorry - is it just me? This is on the windows forms home page. "Just in case you didn't know that there are chicks that write code, we wanted to bring your attention to this gorgeous woman's chest."

Then there's that other picture we've seen a lot of that really cool looking chick in the green shirt. Something about that picture is all about her chest also. I double checked with a number of people when we first saw that photo over and over again during the MVP Summit and they all conferred that it was hard to see the rest of the photo. Something about her boobs - like she wasn't wearing a bra or something - just totally drew your eyes (and mine - totally heterosexual woman, here) right to her chest.

I dunno - I just figure there's got to be a happy medium here somewhere.

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Cool!! This might finally enable me to rip that Access database out of one last of my old VB6 projects.

It also made me wonder why I haven't even played with this stuff yet and then I realized I've kept myself busy with WSE2, ADO.NET2 and a host of other new things. Oh, to be able to just spend all of my time playing with the new toys and call it a job. Yeah I know some people actually have that as their job definition.

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details here from NASA website

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Here's a picture of Richard Campbell atop of Kilmanjaro. Hooray! Richard went with a bunch of RD's and some other folks, too.

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I need to see something that is in the latest ctp of the beta. However, I don't have a good setup on any of my machines for VPC, and therefore I can't download and install the VB.NET Express AND C# Express and wipe out my current full beta bits. I need to see both language implementations of this function which I know has changed.

My other option is to download the full app CTP from MSDN which then also requires the latest SQL 2005 Beta. Sam Gentile said it took him two days to install this. I don't have that kind of time to mess around.

I have about 5 minutes of research I need to do in the ctp right now so I'm kind of bummed. I was excited to see my MSDN universal disks arrive today but alas - the bits weren't in there.

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I was sad to hear today someone say that they did not switch their applications to .NET because of the poor U.I. They were actually talking about an ASP.NET application, but just kept saying  “.NET application“. And seemed to be unaware of the smart client with a web back end option.

In the long run they ended up keeping with their current app (a fantastically architected VB6 application) and distributing it via Citrix ($$$) but are happy not to have to tax their thousands of non-technical end users with the requirements of a machine to run a desktop app. I never really knew very much about Citrix. The capablities that he was describing blew me away.

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when I spoke in Montreal, I got to use a remote control (had used on at DevDays also). I love the freedom it gave me to wander around. So I ordered one after some recommendations and am looking forward to using it. This one is by Atek.

I know it looks like it might double as some kind of sex toy...but I'll never tell.

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Dare Obasanjo asks for prescriptive guidance for developers on when web services and ws-* should be used. This goes past the "web services or remoting?" question that we have all seen that chart for. (sorry , can't link to an example - but surely you've seen it). I am using web services in a non-interop solution where I own both ends of the pipe (over the internet) and have even implemented wse2 ...because I saw this as an "easy" way to solve my problems. In some situations, this could be a very bad choice. I would absolutely like to see what Dare is asking for. Including myself, we sometimes get so caught up in how to do something, that we don't stop to think whether or not it's what we need. I just spent weeks shoving wse2 down the throat of a production app that worked perfectly fine. Admittedly, I did this mostly due to a bit of an ego problem (and that I wanted to get past my “in theory“ only understanding of WSE2).

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This was great to hear! I'm really looking forward to being and speaking at DevConnections in Las Vegas in a few weeks.

>

Posted from BLInk!

I have been waiting for Kate to pop her head up. She was on a vacation in Europe and then home for just a few days and then a long flight to Johannesburg to hit TechEd in Sun City.

So there she is and here are her first thoughts about being in that phenomenal place.

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One of the cool things about working at Microsoft is that there are so many interesting ways to pursue your interests. Recently we have seen people who are very strongly associated with particular technologies move to something totally different - Dan Fernandez Eric Gunnerson (sorry, I was stuck in C#, too) and Keith Ballinger come to mind the most quickly. Dare Obasanjo wrote that he is moving from the xml team to go work on the back end of things related to social software - which has been an interest of his. Opportunity abounds. Don't think this means that you can just post whatever nonsense comes to mind about XML! I'm sure he'll continue to keep us all in line . Have fun, Dare!!

Don't forget to change the endpoints in your policycache files!

(she says, having learned the hard way, once again...)

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I realize I made a bad design decision for using this method. (previous post)

I did not want the application constantly polling for a new version so I just check once before I start up the app. Unfortunately, the process of checking (not even downloading) takes about 8 seconds (on my fast client machine). So everytime they start the app they have to wait. Which is why you want it to happen in the background. Maybe the polling isn't so bad after all.

I don't like the options. I would like to find a happy medium. But for now because I have spent so much time trying to get this worked out (was it even worth it) and my client needs me to move on to other projects, I'm going to have to leave it. So all in all I'm very unhappy that I went this route. I wish I had known enough about the process to realize this problem in advance.

I never really discussed this part of my design with Chris Kinsman when he offered to work out the other issue I was having. I probably should have. He knows this stuff better than almost anyone.

The people who are in-house hitting the web server locally are going to be the big losers with this solution. The people who are using this application over the web (the back end is a web service) will definitely benefit since we couldn't figure out how to push out updates to them. So I may end up modifying this again to handle local connections differently.

Posted from BLInk!

You know hep - like totally hip!

I discovered Iggy Kin's groovy TabletPC weblog through my referrers. And with a tag line "a tablet pc in every hand".

Posted from BLInk!

I have a very complicated application to deploy and update. I mentioned a while ago that Chris Kinsman helped me overcome a limitation of the application updater block. After that I had to work pretty hard to get it to work with an insane set of rules and layers of applications. A few things I had to deal with:

1) I did not want to download complete applications (including all dll's) for every update. THerefore I needed to have a special folder to dump updates into and launch my application from.
2) I have three different related applications to launch and wanted them all to be responsible for downloading the same bits. Therefore, they each had to have knowledge of the latest version downloaded even if that was from a different application
3) My webserver location is dynamic
4) complicated configuration issues abounded
5) I had to do a lot of customization of the updater block to get it to work my way.

When all of that was said and done I still had a huge task ahead of me: creating an MSI that would install this whole crazy mess. I have been working on this all day and am near the end. I just learned how to use the launch conditions to force WSE2 to be installed as well.

It is amazing how entire days get soaked up with things like this. However, now I have a very intimate understanding of the Application Updater Block. I have not looked at ClickOnce, but I sure hope I'll have as much access to make changes I want as I do with the raw code supplied with the AUB.

I miss weekends.

Posted from BLInk!

If you are subscribed to SQL Server "GuruGoddessHera" Kimberly Tripp, then you have been following her incredible around the world travel schedule. Kimberly has been doing immense training and impacting SQL Server management worldwide. She is an amazing inspiration in her teachings to many people around the world and to those of us who also like to try to help people learn. What this woman could use is a nice long underwater vacation! I hope she gets one soon. I look forward to catching up with her at DevConnections next month, but I think I'll just invite her to go relax in a hot spring somewhere.

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Carl Franklin videotaped pieces of code camp and interviewed people about attending. It's fun to watch and you can see that this event that Thom Robbins' invented is going to be a model to be adopted around the contry. Yeah Thom. Yeah everyone who helped out with it.

Shawn van Ness has written a very important and informative article for anyone interested in writing tablet applications. He talks about some of the things that we have struggled with the most with our tablet apps - not how to recognize ink or things like that, but dealing with threads, security, resources (remember the sdk is a COM API wrapped in managed code).

Understanding these things in advance, or in the least - being aware of them - will reap a huge payoff when you are digging into tablet app development.

Read this article. It will save you a lot of grief. Or you can just read about the grief instead by clicking on my tablet category.

Posted from BLInk!

So Rich (hubby) called me to say that the local classic rock/Howard Stern station, played some Rolling Stones song today dedicated to Julie Lerman at the Data Farm. He can't remember what the song was but thought maybe it was "Let it Bleed".

Fess up.

Posted from BLInk!

Here is a very good reason - note the writers of the comments, too. Plumbers!

(by way of Casey)

Posted from BLInk!

I really like posting from my little off-line blogging application so I have installed it on my desktop. Even without using the ink features, it is way better than posting online.

That is a big win for me, since I kept working on the program until there was nothing in it that bugged me anymore and now I really like it! Now if only I could draw a little smiley face right here.

Posted from BLInk!

(re my I give up on wse2 without x509 post) I followed another thought this morning and was able to get one form of encryption working although it's not totally satisfactory.

By signing my requests with a username token (and policy automatically uses a derivedkey token of that) I can just use that token to encrypt the response. I was having a problem with this because my policy was missing one little piece of info - I hadn't told the policy that the token used for signing was also supposed to be an identity token. So it just was failing and failing and I had decided that I was trying to to something that you weren't supposed to do. And because I'm coding against a remote server, I had to create the policy manually (with the help of some copy and paste though.) Check this post for the reason why and a followup in the wse newsgroup for the thread I started titled “config tool and policy for remote server“ where Hervey Wilson explains that this is by design and is being reconsidered for wse3.

It's a bad solution, but better than nothing. And it's not great because the real roadblock is that implementing secureconversation is the thing that is truly difficult without the x509 web server certificate (or kerberos).

So I am replacing a non-WSE solution that did create an authorization ticket which I could use for a number of transactions, with a solution that will require the usernametoken to be authorized on every single request at the server. In the case of my client, this is an app that I own both ends of and the webserver and sqlserver are on the same box, so I am not going to make myself any more nuts over this - since the processing time is nominal and this is not like some banking application with millions of users.

But - let's be clear here- this is a “better than nothing” solution however it is NOT a highly recommended one if you have any care about the quality of the security you are providing.

(that = my previous post...) After DevConnections, I am going to change the title of my wse talk from “WS-Security for Dummies with WSE2” to “WS-Security for Humans with WSE2“. Of course that is the kind of brilliant idea that pops into my head at 1am when I normally get to bed by 10 or 11.

Since I have no idea when the admins responsible for my client's servers will put an x509 cert on the webserver, I have decided to set aside all of the work I have been doing to apply wse2 to one of their existing applications and get on with my life.  I have learned a lot. I will continue to dig into WSE2 because it fascinates me and has opened up a huge door for me. But I don't foresee any real-life implementations any time soon. Which I hate. This application demands that I be able to encrypt my responses. With WSE1, I could create my own “shared secret” key in the client app and the same one in the web services and then on the client end insert <decryptionkeyprovider> into the app.config to point to my decryption key. That was the recommended way but now it's been deemed “too insecure“ and taken away. Although with WSE2, we have ws-trust and the ability to create and issue custom security context tokens from the web server, this method still requires a server certificate to make it possible for humans to implement it. I need to get on to other projects for this client as well as the myriad other commitments I am worried about falling behind on. In fantasyland I would love to just keep playing and playing with this. Oh well.

oh - I should mention the Kerberos token option. It's not an option - since I can't count on all of the clients being on windows xp.

The next meeting (our first speaker event!) of VTSDA is Tuesday 10/26. We have as our speaker Stan Eames, President and CEO of Synergy Software. See details about the speaker and presentation on the VTSDA website. The meeting is from 11:45 - 2:00. Lunch will be catered and is looking very yummy. The meeting fee is $8 for members and $15 for non-members. We will be raffling off the book Professoinal Software Development by Steve McConnell (author of Code Complete) which was donated by the publisher, Addison-Wesley, as well as a Symbol BarCode Reader for Compaq IPAQ Pocket PC's donated by EQ2.

This meeting is sponsored by ProClarity.

some people subscribe to this on instinct-but it is great business advice that Sara Williams shared with a room full of women at Tech Ed 2003:

Posted from BLInk!

Posted from BLInk!

Sounds like a song doesn't it? But it's a new blog by Valerie Winberg of Minnesotta. Val is a C# programmer with a VB background. Thanks Avonelle for pointing her out!!

So I wonder if this could inspire a new tune from Band on the Runtime.

Posted from BLInk!

Last year Rory was just another [wierd] guy at the xml dev con. Then he wrote about seeing Chris Sells and Don Box in the men's room. And he wrote and he wrote and he wrote. Now Rory is a Microsoft employee (in a dream job for him) and is back at XML DevCon only 1 year later (well not really one year since last years' was in July) and whadya know, in case you haven't heard yet, he's writing hilarious stuff about the conference.

It's interesting reading Rebecca Dias' analysis of Tim Bray's talk and the reading Rory's. And so far Becky's got the best shoes.

There are so many great postings from each session. Becky Dias, Shawn Morrissey, Chris Pels, Robert Hurlbut and John Gossman oh and Scott Hanselman, too! have been keeping us well informed and others probably too I haven't read. So I am definitely feeling in the spirit, sitting here with some Chili Lime Tortilla chips, tomatilla salsa and a Corona, reading about Tim Bray's, Chris Anderson's, Don Box's and even a talk that thrilled all of the gamers from the Dept of Defense.

Of course I wish I was there. Well, no I wish the whole conference was here!

Posted from BLInk!

Scott's Top 10 dirty little xml secrets. Very very funny.

Posted from BLInk!

I got sick of trying to figure out what to do about icons in my ink blogging application and just wasted the morning creating my OWN. Some are just from scratch, some take the images that are part of the Microsoft dev tools SDKs and modified them a bit.

I finally gave up on finding a little infinity sign for doing a hyperlink and the butterfly is for inserting images.

Now, to either get back to my original plan this morning - adding categories to Blink, or actually doing some work for my clients, working on some articles or my presentations for Connections.

Posted from BLInk!

The Mobility Road Show is well under way and Microsoft is now ready to trade your mobile application samples for a Smart Phone, Pocket PC or other mobile device.

Read more about this awesome contest on Thom Robbins weblog.

Now that I have just refreshed the WSE2 samples with their original versions (thanks Bristowe), I am very happily debugging through them to see Don Smith's lovely code for creating and issuing custom security tokens. My frustration had a lot to do with the fact that I know there is a goldmine of info in the samples and stepping through them with the debugger brings me so much farther than just reading explanations that don't cover every single step.

And now I grok this stuff well enough to dare to dig in again and start mucking with it.

Here are some tricks about debugging into web services and into httphandlers that you never really understand until you have to use them.

Debugging web services from a windows client is sometimes a real mystery. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I never really understood.

I had this experience when debugging into the custom username token manager - sometimes I just couldn't get at the code. (John Robbins ....I need to read your book cover to cover and that is all there is to it!!!) Hervey Wilson reminded me of Debug/Processes which helped enormously. I learned finally how to attach to a process that I couldn't get into normally to debug. With the custom security token it was a bit different since I needed to attach to an httphandler that was not loaded before I needed it. Here you just need to attach to the aspnet worker process (aspnet_wp.exe) when you are at a point in your code that you know it is being used - and tada - you  can debug into the http hander. In the case of the CustomXML Security Token Sample, the httphandler is where all the goodies were.

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One of the downsides to being part of our incredible international community is that everytime some awful news hits the press, no matter what part of the world it is in, I start worrying about people I know who live there. Oh - I am a big worrier - as I try to explain to my husband ...it's my job to constantly worry about “what if”. We all do, as programmers, right?

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I am having great difficulty getting back to Dare's blog this morning and I wanted to comment on a post he wrote on 10/18 so I'll just do it here.

Dare, dude, I did not say Google Desktop replaces WinFS. In this post, I pointed out the fact that many people were saying that and that WinFS is a whole heck of a lot more than just finding files faster. I've been trying for days to get to your old post that addresses just that point, but having trouble with your site (as you know). Dare did post more on that yesterday. Go check it out.

Burlington Free Press wrote a nice story about the Vermont Software Developer Alliance. Here is it. (of course that link will be gone in a week... aargh)

yeah - I'm pouting. Whine whine whine...and whimper, too.

I'm coming up against one brick wall after another after another trying to run some of the wse2 samples so I can try to understand how some of these things work. I don't know if I'm setting things up improperly or what. I wish I could get Don Smith to just come here to Vermont and sit with me for one whole day. I know I could figure everything out with someone to just point me in the right direction every time I go astray. But unfortunately these “astray-nesses” take me off track for hours and sometimes entire days.

So I'm pouting. Maybe just tired and time to call it quits. nah - that's like giving up.

update for the kind souls who tried to comfort me after my very satfisying rant: I had two places to test this. The second is my tablet where I could use localhost, but I had mucked with the code a while ago and broke it and was not adept enough to figure out how to fix it. So John Bristowe was kind enough to email me a new sample directory (save those samples - you have to reinstall wse2 to get them again) and at least on that machine it's all working again. But I learned a LOT as usual trying to track down the problem.

When Bill Evjen first dreamt up INETA, the problem he was trying to solve was how to enable small user groups to have world-class speakers present to them. This is what we now know as the INETA Speaker Bureau.

Rocky Lhotka spoke at at the October Vermont.NET meeting as an INETA speaker. Rocky lives in Minnessota. There is no way we could have had him at our group otherwise. I recieved this email from a user group member today and with her permission am sharing it here:

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how to pass info from one managed application to another that is in a separate process. I'm thinking of all of the tools that I know how to work with and none of them make me happy. The information is user information as I have the user login to one app and then that app starts up another app in a separate process - but I don't want the user to have to log in again.

I started thinking about this over the weekend and mentioned the problem in this post, thinking that it was just because I have limited knowledge, but the solution was probably just out of my reach, yet common knowledge to many others.

Some of the paths my brain has gone down...

 - persist the info - using some type of encryption, temporarily write the info into a file and then read that file from the second process. I dno't like this because I come up with way too many what-ifs.

- pass the info as args within the startprocessinfoclass. No way. Too easy for someone to then start up the 2nd app on their own without credentials.

- pass the login and password as args and then force the new app to quickly re-authenticate the user. No - I have no clue how secure or inaccessible the command line args are.

- get a securitycontexttoken within the first app (that is already doing wse2) and pass it to the 2nd app. Hmmmm... that could work - although since my client won't have x509 certs on the server (don't ask, please!) this won't be as easy as I would like.

However, I think that this last thing is going to be my best chance. Hooray WSE2.

Now to figure out how to accomplish this. Oh - it is never ending...

Michael Gerfen and Andy Gray have started the www.TabletDev.com website which contains a [community] blog, forum and resources. It is targetted to TabletPC development. There are not a whole lot of people writing about TabletPC development yet. Loren Heiny and Casey Chesnut are probably the most prolific tablet development bloggers (that I know of). Shawn van Ness writes a lot of articles for the Tablet Developer Center on MSDN online and then we have occasional posts from a few other well-knowns like John Robbins, Jon Box and Jeff Richter.

I know they have wanted to do this for a while so I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

Rich & I visited a good friend in the hospital yesterday who is a .NET programmer. She was waiting for her next pain meds and was feeling pretty crappy when we got there, but she's a total trooper. I brought a handful of my favorite novels and a newly minted tech book. Even in her pain, her face completely lit up when I showed her “Best Kept Secrets in .NET” by Deborah Kurata. I mean, she had been very happy with the chocolate croissant I brought, but the book definitely took the cake for her!

by way of The Daily Grind

Do you read tech blogs? We're looking for you to tell us which are the best of the best. Right now, it's your chance to nominate your favorite independent tech blogs.

What kinds of tech blogs are eligible?
All blogs that cover technology and are published independently of a major publishing company are eligible.

Here are some examples of the types of weblogs you can nominate.
1. Personal weblogs, discussing technology from one individual's perspective
2. Personal weblogs, digesting and disseminating technology news
3. Group weblogs, digesting and disseminating technology news

Ten finalists, one winner, $500 worth of coffee, a whole bunch of promotion.
Ten finalists will be announced on November 1 and will receive a "2004 Best Tech Blog Finalist" logo and six months of promotion across TechWeb Network sites. Voting begins on November 1 and on November 15 the winner will be announced. The winner receives a special "2004 Best Tech Blog" logo and (to keep those blogging juices flowing late into the night) a $500 coffee card from Starbucks.

www.sevendaysvt.com (they only leave stories there for one week) just featured local political blogger, Jerome Armstrong (www.myDD.com) of Howard Dean blogging fame, on in the popular, independent, Village Voice for Vermont-esque weekly paper.

Paul Wilson mentioned that his blog was featured in the local paper where he lives.

If you are experiencing installing Visual Studio Beta 1 Refresh from the DVD that was distributed at the current round of MSDN events, read Bernard Wong's blog here.

From today's Burlington Free Press

About 600 Vermont Army National Guard soldiers were mobilized Friday morning to provide security in support of the U.S. war in Iraq, but Vermont's soldiers are not scheduled to go into the turbulent country. They report for training Nov. 15.

Also two soldiers with Vermont ties died in the past few days in Iraq.

Norwich University graduate U.S. Army Maj. Charles Robert Soltes was killed in Iraq this week when the Humvee he was riding in was ambushed. He becomes the 14th with Vermont ties to die in Iraq.

Michael Voss, 35, moved to North Carolina nearly 20 years ago; many of his family members remain in Enosburg Falls.