Well, the big problem with a conference filled with bloggers is that EVERYONE is blogging about it and I have NO clue where to start finding out how the day went and what came out of it without pouring through hundreds of blogs. Can you say information overload?

When I find a good thread to begin on, I will post it here, in the mean time: you can start here

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One of my favorite local arists in Vermont is dug nap. Dug is very clever, very witty, very talented and sometimes very naughty. Luckily for me, he makes greeting cards of lots of his artwork so I can buy and share his art very easily. The best I can do for the rest of you is at least to point you to his website so you can cruise around. A new card that I saw yesterday for the first time has one of of his always right-on observations : "Women are from Paris, Men are from Jersey City". That makes me laugh. Isn't it true? We women like to think of ourselves as connoisseurs, bastions of good taste and sophistication. I feel like that sometimes. I want to watch foreign art films and Rich likes shoot'em up bang 'em up movies. I want to make some fancy schmancy recipe that takes weeks to find the ingredients and days to prepare the meal and Rich is happy with this.

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Hilton Locke, a member of the Tablet team at Microsoft, is listing issues (and solutions) with installing and running the beta on a Tablet.

• Cautions
• Device Driver problems
• Application Compatibility

There will probably be more, so check back for new posts on his blog.

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Scott & Omar and their merry little elves have been working hard and just released v1.8 of dasBlog that is filled with lots more spam protection and many other improvements.

Scott lists the details and how to get the update here...

Thanks guys!

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When I first saw the Turnkey Security Scenarios in WSE3, I was a bit skeptical as I thought it was more wizards. I hate wizards. I have now seen the light, thanks to Sidd Shenoy's awesome WSE 3.0 Policy presentation that is online. Policy is just so completely different in WSE3 than [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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This must be the longest post Dave Noderer has ever written in his blog. He obviously got very fired up about the Atlanta Geek dinner last weekend. See why!

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Brian is a .Net user group leader from the land of the #2 cheddar cheese in the world and has been very involved with INETA since the beginning of INETA time.

Congratulations Brian!

(#1)

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I received a box filled with books from Addison-Wesley today. The next meeting of Vermont.NET will be an ADO.NET blowout with Mike Soulia from Kiss the Cook & Apple Mountain doing the .NET Newbie session on ADO.NET and then I will be doing one of my favorite new talks: What's new in ADO.NET 2.0. One of the books I have multiple copies of for the meeting is the beta2 version of the ADO.NET 2.0 & System.XML 2.0 book by my pals Alex Homer, Dave Sussman and Mark Fussell (who is now the program manager on the WSE team).

Because they are in Boston, A-W was also able to pull through on a fast box of books for the first meeting of CNY .Net Developers which is on Wednesday.

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Thanks to DevExpress for coming up with some great swag for the first meeting of Central New York Developers.NET.

Andy Beaulieu will be raffling off two of DevExpress's extremely popular VS.NET add-ins, CodeRush and the language neutral Refactor!Pro for VS2005. Don't forget, you can get Refactor! for VB2005 for free.

Did you know that CodeRush works with VS2002, VS2003 and VS2005 Beta2? Those guys are way too slick!

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The Imagine Cup is a worldwide, tiered competition that Microsft hosts for the academic community. Over the course of the nine month competition, teams compete regionally, then by country and then the winners for each country go the the worldwide Finals. There are a number of  [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

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I'm really excited about this new group that Andy Beaulieu is starting in Syracuse, New York (www.cnydevelopers.net). That's where I grew up (Cazenovia) and my dad grew up in Syracuse too, so I have a lot of ties there.

Andy has been working hard to build up interest and I'm sure this first meeting on August 3rd will be great. There will be a talk by Andy (who has been programming for over 10 years) and by the MSDN Developer Community Champion for NY State, Rob Jackson.

I'm looking forward to visiting the group sometime this fall and presenting (and visiting my parents!).

If you know any .NET developers in the Syracuse, NY area, point them to this new group!

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Champlain College (Burlington, Vermont) has several adjunct teaching positions open for fall semester. Two online and two in person.

Online

• Advanced Java
• Data Structures and Algorithms

In Person

• Introduction to Computer Theory (2 night sections available)

Contact:
Gary Savard
IEEE-CSDP, MCSE/MCSD, OCP
Program Director, Software Engineering
Champlain College
163 So Willard St, Burlington, VT 05401
savard@champlain.edu
(802) 865-6467

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Announcing - Code Camp 4: Developers Gone Wild

 

September 24/25, 2005

 

Register Today

 

September 24 – 8:30 AM – 9PM

September 25 – 8:30 AM – 4PM

 

Microsoft Waltham
201 Jones Rd.

Waltham, Ma.

 

Call for Speakers

 

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I just read this article which has a very unofficial estimate of 250,000 Indonesians lost in the tsunami in December.

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I miss "whidbey" but I still use that fond old nickname for Visual Studio 2005.

I really like "avalon" [Windows Presentation Foundation]

And where will we be without "indigo"? [Windows Communication Foundation]

After those light, airy, winsome names, these new ones are like sitting in a dark cigar smoke filled room with big leather chairs and a lot of fat old men chuckling about the stock market.

Boo hiss.

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Casey Chesnut: citizens arrest

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I first heard about blogging listening to Chris Lydon a bunch of years ago. In fact, here is a link to the very show, from May of 2000! I was definitely fascinated by that show and actually signed up for a blog on blogger.com that day (which I only ever put two posts in as I recall). It was a few years later that Scott Watermasysk asked me if I wanted to blog about INETA on his newish blog site (now weblogs.asp.net) to which I replied "ummm, nah, but thanks for asking". A few months after that it was I who emailed Scott asking if it was too late to take him up on his offer but that I'd like to blog about other things in addition to INETA. No problem, says he...

So, anyway, Chris Lydon....yes. I heard a promo on VPR today (which I only really listen to in the car - that is when Rich isn't in the car - which is not frequent these days. I can't listen to people talking when I'm trying to work, so I don't hear it at home) for a newish show that Chris Lydon is doing called Open Source and the promo said "blogs, podcasts, etc"! That definitely caught my ear.

Of course, I realize that I've just missed the show as it is 8:15! But it looks interesting:

Open Source is a lively, hour-long on-air conversation designed to capture "the sound of the Web," with the popular Christopher Lydon engaging callers, e-mailers and bloggers from around the world in a range of fascinating topics. It is the first radio program to embrace bloggers, Web enthusiasts and the Internet transformation of media.

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Brand new!

MSDN ASP.NET Ugrade Center

Lessons Learned White Paper

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I recently discovered something by accident after three years of programming in .NET. I am testing an ASP.NET site (yep - that custom SharePoint site that is finally about to go live) and needed to check the affects on users with different priveleges [read more]

[A DevLife Post]

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oh duh! (thanks Bliz)

I think sharepoint has just worn my poor old brain out today!

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I ran into the worst of all Sharepoint problems - impersonation and permissions.

Example:

When using the regular WSS UI, login as John Doe Contributor. John Doe can check in and check out files, etc. Looking at SQL Profiler, you can see all of this is being done as the apppool account (NT Authority/Network Services) which has all of the necessary permissions.

Cut to a custom application which uses Windows Authentication and impersonation. Even in the same site, John Doe Contributor no longer has the right access permissions. Logging in with an admin account, all works fine.

I have been at this since yesterday. Now I am dangerously close to my deployment date (and of course a few new wrenches - including a biggie - have been thrown into my week). I have been reading blogs and articles galore and have gone down many paths.

Pros & Cons:

Web Services: This will most likely get me my Network Services account access. They are easy to write, but a little bit of a PIA to implement for Sharepoint.

Stored Procedures: most were okay to work with but checking in a file is a bear!

Mucking with Impersonation: dll hell, anyone?

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c'mon Ari! Vermont is beautiful in September!!!

whaaaaaa

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Congrats to Dr. Neil for launching ViaVirtualEarth, which will tap into the power of MSN's Virtual Earth.

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There was a sneak peak of virtualearth.msn.com this weekend, but it's not quite ready yet. Hopefully tomorrow. Chandu Thota, on the Virtual Earth team, explains.

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"‘ctrl-alt-del’ will now be known as : ‘hasta la vista’"

From Inside Microsoft (by way of Alex Barnett)

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It looks like Sam is getting to do something that we rarely get to do when we travel on business - playing tourist. He's gone from one extreme to another.

http://feeds.indonesianews.net/?rid=8bd09717ce894532&cat=f9295dc05093c851

This is a result of a reported 7.3 earthquake in the Nicobar Islands that was causing worry of potential Tsunamis in Indonesia. (http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=972471)

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(I wrote this on Saturday and held off on posting this. Finally someone blogged about Egypt! Why are we so damned used to killings in the Middle East/Africa region?)

London 7/7: 4 bombs, 50+ killed, 700+ injured  The western world goes crazy

Egypt 7/22: 3 bombs, 80+ killed, 200+ injured: all quiet on the western front (so far). It's already fallen off of the CNN headline news in favor of more info about the London bombers - well actually about the completely unconnected person that the police killed.

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Microsoft Press, gimme a search, please????

I am trying to find a link to a book, and have to drill into subject area and make guesses as to where it would be. I have already drilled in to about 5 levels and still don't konw if I"m on the right path to find the book.

Why not do a search at least by author and book title in addition to the "categorical drill down"?

I give up. I'm going to just link to it on Amazon.

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Global Garage Sale.NET in Winooski, Vermont is growing fast! They are very hot EBay reseller and are looking for:

 “...someone to write a piece of web-based database driven software for in-house, and another version to franchise our business. Thanks again! “

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Windows Vista?!?!? What the hell were they thinking in Redmond? Apple gives us sexy, cool sounding names like Tiger and Panther and then Microsoft chimes in with something that sounds like GM’s latest failure. [Confessions of a G33k]

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This has confused me for a while and I just realized the solution. A few weeks ago I tried to download the Sharepoint help documentation which si a CHM file. I could never read it. The contents were there (on the left) but the actual documentation would not appear.

The problem, I just realized when I downloaded another CHM a few minutes ago, is that the content is blocked because it was downloaded from the internet. If you look at the properties of the file, you will see that you can unblock the file very easily! I just never thought to look at that before now. Duh.

Just unblock it and you will be good to go!

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I am still on the ancient Beta2 with WSE 3.0 June CTP, but there are new bits out. The July CTP of VS2005 came out on MSDN (for suscribers only at this point) and soon after a new release of WSE3.0 came out to go with that (i.e. this requires the July CTP of VS2005). Note that there was a small problem with the WSE3 CTP that Matt Powell explains how to work around.

I got a good chuckle reading Mike Gunderloy's pointer to the latest CTP: "Just in case your edge isn't bleeding enough yet."

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1) MSDN Web Services Developer Center is repositioned as "Web Services and Other Distributed Techonlogies"

2) Guidance on when to use which technologies to use when in building distributed apps with todays tools from Rich Turner. Steve Swartz gave an excellent session on this advice at TechEd.

3) related: WS-Security gets it's own PAG group. ("Web Services Security Patterns") This is excellent news. Not just how to use the stuff but WHEN, WHY and what approaches work best under which scenarios. I am really happy to see this happening.

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oy vey - here comes another good storm and lighting. To me that means shutting down ALL of my computers and unplugging everything - computers, phone lines etc.

I learned the hardway about 8 years ago when I lost $7,000 worth of equipment in a lightning storm. Everyitn was powered down and plugged in to UPS's but that didn't help!

One zap came through the phone line, ripped through the computer, out the parellel port and into my printer. Yikes!

Follow up: Holy Canoli. Lightning struck the house! I was on the phone with Don Smith and he could hear how close the lightning was getting - said it sounded like I was talking from a war zone. I was in the loft underneath the skylight when a HUGE bang and a HUGE spark INSIDE the house (coming from the metal on the skylight) about 4 feet from my head. Needless to say the phone line died immediately. But that seems to be the only damage. It reminded me of reading about Fritz Onion's recent lightning strike in Maine. Luckily Rich is home so he knew to check the water pump and a few other things. Well, back to work, I guess!

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Big thanks to Scott Forsyth and the webteam at ORCSWeb who set me up with a custom solution because I was in a major time crunch. I needed online Sharepoint hosting and I needed it fast, but I needed to be able to deploy a custom Sharepoint solution, which requires a dedicated server (read: my own box on their network). When I started this process over a week ago with my other host, there was a communication disconnect and I ended up signing up for a standard Sharepoint site - which is not customizable. By the time I finally realized this, it was too late to start the process of setting up and moving to a dedicated server. 

Scott came up with the great idea of setting me up on a Virtual Machine hosting plan and he personally installed Sharepoint WSS on it for me. So I am now able to get in via Remote Desktop and set up my entire custom solution. We started talking about this yesterday and I am already working on it now. Big save and my client is really happy!

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Thanks to Scott Hanselman for hunting down and fixing what he referred to as a "latent and **HORRIBLE** bug" that surfaced in the latest version of dasBlog. It was mucking up the RSS feeds when you were filtering on a category. For example, my VTdotNETFeed">VTdotNETFeed RSS was randomly selecting a handful of posts from the past, with nothing newer than April showing.

So that code ahs been fixed. It will be in the versoin 1.8 which has not yet been released. If you want the fix now, you can go to the SourceForge dasBlog workspace, into the CVS Repository (bottom of the page), and then drill into the source folder, then newtelligence.dasBlog.Web.Services folder. The fix is to the SyndicationServiceBase.cs file.

To fix this now, it requires downloading the entire current dasBlog source, updating the contents of that one file, and rebuilding and redeploying the newtelligence.dasBlog.Web.Services project.

Thanks again, Scott!

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Bear Code develops internet based applications that rely on robust backend relational databases. Typical applications include scientific imaging and  news analysis tracking. Bear Code has successfully executed projects for multi-national companies with 150,000 people as well as individual entrepreneurs-but our real passion is developing unique custom applications.

We're looking for a Project Manager with a strong foundation in Internet applications and protocols.  Canididate must know Java and SQL. Would be wonderful if candidate was familiar with Content Management systems,  writing specification documents, Linux and MS Project.

Bear Code has offices in Barre, Vermont and Moscow (Russia, not the little town of Moscow, Vermont). The project management is done from Vermont.

Contact info

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beta1 available August 3. Website

 

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Dave deploys a beta of a .NET 2.0 Smart Client app and then goes on vacation. Lucky guy!

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Duane LaFlotte, the guy you want on YOUR side when it comes to hacking servers, has a great article on DevSource. In it he walks you through the devious mind of a hacker. The article required the following legal disclaimer "LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Please do not go hacking sites because "Duane told me to do it." I said, just look at the site, don't hack the site."

If you ever get a chance to see Duane and Patrick Hynds (both of Critical Sites which specializes in defending your networks) do their hacking presentation together, you really ought to try to see it. I'll have to find out where the next performance is.

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this guy is just scary smart! And Jason's latest Captcha attempt is still pretty darned impressive!

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Congrats to Scott Lock and his wife on the birth of their new boy, Christopher. July 15th.

Scott is the user group leader for Capital Area .NET User Group in the D.C. area (Vienna Virginia) and an INETA User Group liaison as well. Scott also has an interesting job working on the donation site for the American Red Cross. Here, you can test it out if you want!

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One of the most memorable things about this year's Women in I.T. luncheon at TechEd, was Scott Bellware, who attended, telling me afterward that he was surprised to learn how much women talk with each other about work life balance. He thinks that men of course think and worry about this all of the time, but it is not something men generally discuss among themselves. ("How 'bout those Mets, huh?")

So seeing this article "Eight Great Lessons from Working Dads" on MSN's CareerBuilder.com about men and work/life balance definitely caught my eye.

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If this was near me (NYC or Boston) I would definitely make the effort to attend the one day BlogHer Conference. Even though I am not very political, I am very interested in the voices of women in the blogging world - especially technical women. How we represent ourselves? Do we just be a techie or can we women techies? Do we blend in or show our ti**ies (tee hee). (shut up, Sahil - I'm just making a point). And how does what we do today affect young women coming into the world of tech (and blogging). But it's in California - all the way across the country. No can do. Bummer.

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I have started watching the taped WSE 3.0 SDR presentations. Here are some of my thoughts on what I am seeing and learning [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

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This is cool news:

from Sam

from Paschal

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Sheesh - how did I miss that blog post?!

Hearty congrats, pal!

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"United States v. Microsoft (2001): Represented 18 states and the District of Columbia in the Microsoft antitrust case"

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Well, my summer hasn't really gone as planned (or should I say: fantasized) and I keep thinking maybe it's just not here yet- summer. A few things that remind me that it really is summer - fighting with the Japanese Beetles who are after my hollyhocks, roses and beans, watching the tiger lilies disappear (deer grazing) and yes I have been in my kayak some 4 times. What' been missing in its entirety and normally defines summer for me is cycling. But I don't want to talk about that - too disheartening. However last night I actually had a little summer fun - going to the Vermont Mozart Festival event at the famous and beautiful Round Church in Richmond (12 miles away).

And to continue my summer journey, I actually picked berries around my property this morning. Mmmmm. Now back to the grind...

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Holy blank Batman! I don't know when these went up but I just found them thanks to Carter Maslan (you know the guy who does all the cool Longhorn demos!!)

I think I'll just download them all in case they are there by mistake.

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Sarah Blow is trying to get a women geek dinner together in London.

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Here are a few things that keep biting me when I return to working on a web services app using wse3.0. I have blogged about some of these before, but need to keep them in the front of my mind!

1. ASP.NET Project NTLM Authentication: If NTLM Authentication is on and you are not set up to use it, you will get a 401 Unauthorized error ("The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.") when trying to start up a web page or access a web service.  This was a new project property setting as of Beta2.
2. Using File System and not IIS? Check your port #.  When trying to hit a web service and the port # of the Development Server has changed, you will get an error message saying "Stream was not writable". This happened to me when I moved a solution from one computer to another and I needed to change the port # in the web reference.  In an ASP.NET application you will get this message "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it" when your port # has changed.
3. Permissions to read certificates Depending on your environment, a particular windows account will need READ access to the web server certificate. Normally, it would be the ASP.NET account. I found that when developing with a non-admin account, I needed to give that non-admin account access to the certificate (in a development environment). If you have not set this up properly, you will see a message indicating "Bad Key" in the soap fault when looking at the trace info. This will come back in the TraceInput of the client application. The Security Hands on Lab for WSE3 (found on this page) has instructions for setting permissions on certificates.

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If you have seen Wally McClure's many posts on AJAX lately, then this great news will come as no surprise. Congrats!

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When INETA began, Christian Nagel was our man in Europe. When INETA was divided up into the five regions (North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East Africa and Europe) he took the lead of Europe. Now that region is very organized. Christian did a fantastic job and also brought a lot of great people on board to help him out all across Europe. As with the recent evolution with INETA NORAM, Christian decided it was time to let someone else step up to the plate and the obvious choice was Damir Tomicic who was already on the INETA Europe board. Damir lives in Bavaria where he runs a .net user group and is an MSDN Regional Director. He blogs at www.tomicic.de and you can read his bio here.

I know he's already doing a great job!

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If you have done any work with the TabletPC SDK, you are probably aware that there is a COM API and a managed API, but that the managed API is really just a wrapper to the COM API. You are also probably aware that the Tablet API is VERY tightly bound to the windows API. Everything that you do is through windows handles. If you have tried to add ink to your web pages, you probably learned this lesson well also.

Shawn van Ness was fortunate enough not only to have been born with a pretty good brain, but he was also lucky to be working at the Leszynski Group when they got very involved with doing TabletPC development hand in hand with Microsoft. Do you know that it was the Leszynski Group that wrote the super cool Physics Illustrator app? And that Shawn was one of the authors of that program? Shawn has also authored a great many Tablet PC development articles for MSDN Online.

So I was definitely not surprised to learn in February that he had finally gotten scooped up by Microsoft to ink-enable Avalon. And I was not surprised when his recent blog article came out talking about ink being baked directly into Avalon.

What is interesting is how differently it is all going to work. Because Avalon tosses our dependence on Windows handles, working with ink had to be rethought from the ground up. Shawn is a very good teacher and he offers a great explanation of how and why this will work and how it is compares to our current Tablet PC SDK development experience.

And no, I have NOT played with Avalon yet. Aaargh!

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