Okay so nobody from Microsoft made the list, but EBay, IBM, HP and Oracle are represented. Though of course these are business women, not I.T.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have thought about getting one of these for a while but didn't do anything about it. When I read Dave Sussman's blog post about his experience with it, I knew I had to have it. I just set it up and I love this. It will really save me when I'm paying bills and logging into lots of different websites. Dave says "Very, very useful, for both the terminally forgetful (me), and the lazy (me again)." Me too!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I still have to get the pic of Hilton and me that Kate took, but here is a photo of me with Thea, Ernst and Armand - not only bloggers but user group leaders as well.

Here are some from Thea's blog

This is Thea, me, Armand and Ernst

Armand and Ernst petting the cubs while they were very busy working on a cow's leg. It was a big leg but they are really on it like glue. That's me, Kate and Oskar's foot. Oskar was great - gave us a tour of the lion park.

I also learned how to pronounce my friend's names properly. To translate for us Americans: Thea is "tee-a", Ernst is "Air-enst" and Armand is Armand, just the way we thought!

One of the places I plan to checkout while at DevConnections next week is Lucille's BBQ.

Lucille's has 6 California locations and one just south of Vegas in Henderson, NV.

It is BBQ & live blues (on Fri & Sat nights) - and is owned by a couple who owns some of my parents' newfies.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 are live and on MSDN Online now. Good luck trying to get them though! The servers are getting quite the workout.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Champlain College offers the first college level e-gaming program and it is headed up by two women...[read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

an overview of my TechEd SA experience.... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

There was a big messy wet snow storm earlier this week in Vermont while I was in hot sunny South Africa. The power went out all over the place and was slowly restored over the next day or so. However the northeastern part of Vermont was slammed really hard. The electric company that provides power there is the same one that we are on so they are having a lot of trouble and we still have no power. Here's the latest article from the local paper on that. Listening on the radio last night I heard them say that the damage to powerlines (and electric poles) was worse even than in the ice storm of 1998.

Luckily I am married to a guy who is a super-camper and we have a small generator to boot. The generator is inverted power so we are running the computers and the refrigerator for a little while. As we have a gas powered stove, Rich made not only eggs for breakfast, but used a campfire toaster to make us toast this morning. Rich also was smart enough to fill both bathtubs before the power went out (we had perfect conditions for an outage so he is one of those great "be prepared" kinda guys) so we can even flush the toilets. We have a gas fireplace in the office and in the living room - so since it's not that cold out, this is keeping the  house perfectly fine. The only place where I notice any real inconvenience is the inability to take a real shower and wash my hair.

However as I just typed the word hair - guess WHAT!?! The power came on. Yahoo! I'm gonna go wash my hair!!!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

As I prepare for my last TechED SA session, What's New in WSE 3.0, every time I hit a slide that focuses on policy or look at a policy file in the code, I think to myself "boy I love wse3 policy." I really look forward to being able to do some conference sessions on just policy or articles in the near future as well as just keep blogging about it.

Posted from BLInk!

(This was written on Sunday) After a long bumpy night we have finally arrived at Sun City. Kate is a good airplane sleeper. I woke up at 4 and couldn't get back to sleep then did then was startled by some big turbulence at 6. Kate slept through it all! Both of our flights on Lufthansa coming to South Africa were on Business Class - which was unexpected and very nice of the organizers. I have never flown business class before. It was very nice, including being able to go in the lounges at the airport.

Unfortunately, Kate's luggage didn't make it to Johannesburg but should be here tomorrow. The drive from "Joburg" to here was beautiful. Some of it reminded me of New Mexico - the red sandy hills, the scrub but other than that it is just unique. Some reality checks were noticing the very very think cattle grazing on whatever they can find. They are free range - like wandering in the highway free range! We also drove by a number of compounds with a variety of small metal and other types of shacks. This is where people live. I have never seen that before. I had a very bad position for taking photographs but the image will remain.

I am now in the speaker lounge and it's fun to meet a whole new crew of people.

Posted from BLInk!

I did the first of my 3.5 (I have two demos during the futures panel in addition to my talks) today. It was the above titled talk. As our talks are limited to 45 minutes (with an additional 15 for questions) this was a real whirlwind presentation. There is so much to share and I had to do so very efficiently using techniques like showing code, but maybe not always running it ("trust me, it works") or when for some reason, deploying a sql server project did not pop my new sproc into SQL Server, umm, just move on ("trust me it works"). I always have fun talking about one of my fave .NET topics - and had my need to show off even more of SQLDependency sated by an additional 1/2 hour with some of the attendees out in the hall afterwards. This was a bit different than my regular ado.net talk as I focused on the SQL Server Integration and added in demos on the new XML type in SQL Server and it's partner, System.Data.SqlXML and also demonstrated creating a database project in .NET and moving some of the intense but hard-to-code-in-TSQL processing to the server side.

Though I planned to work on tomorrow's demos talk (Indigo intro) and futures panel demos (Indigo and ATLAS) and call it an early night, I have been struggling with the fact that no USB pointing devices are being recognized on my laptop. Fortunately (like, thank the demo gods...) my USB drive for VPC is working and thumbdrive also - so I willl just have to continue struggling with the touchpad. That makes moving the pointer slow going. For my tablet friends, yeah yeah, just use the pen, but picking up the pen, pointing, then putting it down and typing etc is not something I do smoothly either.

Tomorrow's schedule: Tech Check at 7:30 am, futures panel from 10:30 - 1:00, Indigo (err WCF) talk at 2:30. The talk is a "get your head wrapped around Indigo" and I look forward to helping to bring more future Indigo/WCF users to their "oooooooh, I get it!" momentl.

Posted from BLInk!

I had a really bad problem with USB today that I want to blog about (with my resolution) before it spins out of my head.

I am using a USB wireless mouse. It started acting flakey today -- doing things like not reacting to mouse clicks and then lagging a lot when I was moving it around the screen. I rebooted a few times but it didn't help. I then went to a hardwired mouse that worked properly for a few minutes than was flaky in a different way. For example, I move the mouse down on the screen then suddenly it would be at the top of the screen.

For the short term it meant that I had to do my first TechEd presentation with a touch pad which was bad news for me.

So I have spent the last few hours fiddling around with this. I thought perhaps it was my USB port, but was happy to see that my thumb drive and external drive (which I am 100% dependent on for my Indigo talk) was working. My powerpoint clicker, another USB pointing device was also failing. The failure was a) a windows message saying that the USB device failed and b) they stopped working all together!

Nothing made sense so no point in going through all of the things I tried...but what I ended up doing that worked was after noticing that in Device Manager, I had the extended USB hub manager and 4 other usb hub managers with usb devices, I disabled all but one of the 4 hub managers.

The LaCie drive was still working, but when I put the thumbdrive in the 2nd usb port, it didn't work. Well, flaky - windows explorer said there is a D: but I couldn't read it.

Then I reenabled the 2nd of those 4 usb managers with no effect. But when I reenabled the third, my thumbdrive worked and after I stopped and removed it and plugged in the mouse, that too worked.

Hours of needless aggravation and I still want to prep for tomorrows talks! But I know from experience that staying up all hours is a very bad thing for conference prep. I will be much better off going to bed, getting a decent night's sleep and then hammering in the morning.

(written 12:30 am Tuesday morning but posted later)

Posted from BLInk!

One of the best parts of being here is that I have finally gotten to meet Thea Burger who I met via blogging and had a lot to do with my being here as well as the others who took up her "bring Julie to South Africa" meme - Ernst Kuschke, Hilton Giesenow and Armand du Plessis. Kate took a pic of Hilton and I today and I will definitely be getting one of Thea, Ernst and Armand before the end of TechEd.

I can't believe I only arrived yesterday. I feel like I have been here a long time! (that's good, though now I think I'll go phone home...)

(written Tuesday 11:50pm - posted later)\

Posted from BLInk!

Kate and I went on an incredible 3 hour game drive today with our guide Humbu. We saw so many animals and took gobs of pictures. Kate has blogged some here. Here are a few of mine but I must get focused on my afternoon session - ADO.NET 2.0 & SQL Server 2005 Integration.

These are wildebeest. They are a strange looking animal and are said to have been created with leftover parts of other animals.

These are impalas. We saw them frequently on the drive ...

...but not nearly as many as the zillions of zebras we saw. These are a variety that also has a faint brown stripe. The type with only black and white are not in Pilanesberg.

This was our 2nd elephant siting of the morning. The first was in the distance behind the "vacation club" where we were staying. Our eagle eye tour guide spotted them as we were headed to the park. This one, he saw from a distance and drew up a road to show us. Unfortunately, it was a road to a private lodge ("for princes and presidents" as Kate says) and he got yelled at by an employee of the lodge who was also headed up the road. She was very unreasonable and we wondered if her treatment of Humbu was reminiscent of previous relations in South Africa.

If you are doing an UpdateBatch with ADO.NET 2.0 and do not explicitly set an UpdateBatchSize parameter, this will default at one - meaning that one row will be sent at a time to the server for updating. Whatever other number you set it at is the number of rows that will be sent in a batch and of course you need to consider a variety of factors when choosing this number (such as network latency, how many columns are in the table, etc - bigger is not always better!) This is hardly new info at this point, but there is one other setting - zero. I am listening to Pablo Castro's ADO.NET 2.0/SQL Server integration talk from TechEd (DAT320) and laughing because he says (this is not a direct quote - I am paraphrasing) "If you set it to zero, there will be no limit to the number of rows....[pause]...which isn't really very good for performance .. [pause].. I don't really know why we put it there, but...[you can practially hear him shrug his shoulders] .. we did". Pablo can totally get away with this... the audience laughs with him and he moves on. Funny how if some other teams said something like this this, they would probably have many detractors. ADO.NET is just a happy API!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rather than wind myself into my usual pre-travel panic (leaving today!), I am ironing my clothes. Yes, in advance. My mother would be shocked. It's very calming. Perhaps I will even go get the rest of my lilies into the ground before I leave.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Are you a video jockey? Create a screencast starring Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 or Biztalk Server 2006… and you!

 

I am happy to announce that the East Region Evangelism Team and TechSmith have come together to promote the Launch Tour 2005 with a screencasting contest. To join the funs – and competition – download a free 30 day evaluation of Camtasia Studio. Then record you on onscreen action, your audio, and even your webcam feed.. To show off your rock star personality.

 

Winners will be selected for the following tour cities only: New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Orlando. All winning entries will receive a backstage pass to these events and rock star treatment at the event, as well as various prizes includes a copy of Camtasia Studio.

 

The grand prize winner will be flown to New York City (from within the continental US) to give a demo live, onstage during the during the Steve Guggenheimer keynote!

 

The winning screencasts will be featured on Channel9

 

Ready to go to Rock School?

 

1. Register for the event that you’ll be attending
2. Send your AVI screencast submission to Thom Robbins. Entries must be received at least two days prior to each event.

 Official rules, Camtasia download information and additional details can be found here.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Kate Gregory and I leave tomorrow for South Africa to present at TechEd. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Tim Ewald's recent talk at Vermont.NET got me fired up about contract first again. Read more here...

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

We have not seen the sun in two weeks. It is here to day. Glory glory! I'll have to take a picture.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have CA EZ Antivirus on my computer. It decided to install the firewall. I don't want it and am happy with WinXP's firewall. It's on my demo machine so I don't have to deal with it often but it's stupid. It says "do you want IIS to run" and I select "remember this setting" and click "Allow" which is dim, but still active (doh) and next time I turn on my computer it asks me all of those questions again for a series of apps. SQL Server, svchost and more. The big problem with this is I get sick of it and say "yes yes yes" without looking. I turn it off and turn on Windows Firewall, but when I restart the computer it's there again. Next step is to just uninstall it. My recommendation is to avoid this program. (Sorry CA) 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Laura Blood is a .NET consultant in vermont who has been programming for a looong time! She has also been an invaluable help to me with the Vermont.NET user group as well as being one of the founders of VTSQL.org. Laura has jumped into the blogging fray which makes 3 Vermont.NET bloggers now.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

All I can say is "lucky us"!!

Tim is driving up (or is that over) from New Hampshire to give a fantastic talk I saw/heard him do at TechEd to the Vermont.NET user group tonight.

We are also lucky to have a new convenient venue for our meetings at Vermont Technical College and a sponsor for pizza & soda tonight: Technical Connections.

And just for icing on the cake, I recieved a big box filled with phenomenal O'Reilly press books today!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I just got my annual letter from MVP which made me look back to see how much it has gone up since we started.

For the two of us

2001 $425/mo
2002 $527/mo
2003 $568/mo
2004 $617/mo
2005 $697/mo
2006 $721/mo  ($8,652)

70% increase in 6 years.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

From the PAG Service Orientation workspace:

Just Released: October CTP featuring WSE 3.0! (10/15/2005 •  News)
We invite you to check out the latest release of the Web service security patterns. This release is a substantial improvement over the past releases. We’ve added even more patterns and updated the implementation patterns to take advantage of the latest advancements in WSE 3.0. Please note that the WSE 2.0 implementation patterns have been removed from this release. We will add them back for the final release, but if you would like to review the WSE 2.0 implementation patterns in the meantime, check out the August CTP.

Developers can build secure Web services easier with WSE 3.0 by using its simplified and enhanced policy framework and by taking advantage of features in the .NET Framework 2.0. When you combine that with solid architectural, design, and implementation guidance, you have a much better chance of choosing an appropriate solution and saving some time in the process. While the WSE team just released the WSE 3.0 October CTP, these implementation patterns were tested against the WSE 3.0 Beta build.

The following patterns have been added since the August CTP release. These patterns have all been through the workshop process, but haven’t all been through an initial editorial pass ... that’s why it’s a CTP ;)

• Message Replay Detection
  
• Perimeter Service Router
  
• Message Validation
  
• Exception Shielding
  
• Trusted Subsystem
  
• Protocol Adapter
  
• Delegation

As we are ramping up to release the final version of this content, we’re really depending on you, the community, to provide the feedback needed to make this the definitive resource for Web service security guidance. We would also love to hear from you if you’ve used this content as the basis for decisions you’ve made regarding your production Web services.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have a self-hosted service which I am calling through it's proxy in a client app.

When the service has multiple endpoints, svcutil adds "ConfigurationName" properties to the endpoints in the config file. With a single endpoint, that parameter is not necessary.

When instantiating the service via the proxy, I was following a single endpoint example and forgot to indicate *which* endpoint or configuration I wanted. Thus my code:

ServiceProxy myproxy=new ServiceProxy();

gave me an error when it hit the proxy's constructor and I was given the following exception:

could not find endpoint element that references contractType [whatever my contract name is]

Oddly, if I found that if I removed ConfigurationNames from the config, the app will actually run and somehow randomly selected from the multiple endpoints.

The exception message led me on a very wild goosechase. But luckily, Softwaremaker, who is quite the Indigo guru already, asked me a key question: "how are you instatiating the proxy?"

Since all of this stuff is so new, I am placing this mistake out on Google for the next person who makes this mistake.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

It has been raining for about a week with intermittent major downpours (like right now). We are in northwestern Vermont and not experiencing the dreadful flooding that surrounds us in New Hampshire, Southern Vermont and other parts of the NorthEast. Rich and I have discussed what would happen if there was indeed flooding around here. Though living on a mountainside and far from the mountain streams prevents us from worrying about our house being flooded, we have to cross bridges in two directions to get off of our road so we could be screwed if the bridges were ever washed out. All of the disasters of late have made us think about the what-ifs and what we need to do to be prepared. Not only do we have to think about food and water for ourselves but also our pets. And of course we would stay here with them. Funny the things you take for granted. Hopefully it will turn us all into little boy  & girlscouts.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I bet you didn't know that the Emily Post Institute was based in right here in Burlington Vermont! They are now reporting that good manners are on the decline in the U.S. Dear oh dear!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I figure if Don Box can do Indigo demos in VB, then I should do them in C#. That of course, will make my demo take a tad bit longer as I will likely have to compile a few times to find all of the VB syntax I typed into the C# code.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This is a Wissif Wippif

(it's a Toyota Avalon in Indigo Bunting Blue - so an Indigo Avalon - WCF WPF... get it? I'm sure this is already an ancient joke but it sure had me and Kate giggling today)

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have a 512MB memory chip for a Toshiba Portege M200.

They are on sale right now at Crucial for $50 so if anyone wants to buy mine, I'll sell it for a little less than Crucial. I bought this a little less than a year ago and the M200 is not my daily use machine. You know, only driven by a little old lady on Sundays.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here is an excellent article on using ADO.NET and SQL CLR inside of SQL Server: Managed Data Access Inside SQL Server with ADO.NET and SQLCLR. Besides the obvious code, there are things you should be aware of such as context connections, how transactions work and most importantly, when not to use ADO.NET in the SQL CLR. The article is by the ADO.NET master himself, Pablo Castro, who is the Technical Lead on the ADO.NET team.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

One of the talks I will be doing at Visual Studio Connections is "Deciphering C# for VB Developers". One of the BEST resources for converting your code back and forth is O'Reilly's C# & VB.NET Conversion Pocket Reference. I have a slide in the presentation devoted just to the book. Now I have dozen copies of the book to give away at the presentation. Thanks to Marsee Henon of O'Reilly!

Here is the description of the presentation

As a Visual Basic developer, have you ever searched for a code sample and then found one that is exactly what you need but written in the C# language instead? The differences between the two language syntax are substantially more than just semi-colons and curly braces. This session is intended to help you understand such idiosyncracies as backwards variable declaration, stringent rules for scoping variables and methods, compound assignment operators and more. This session will be given by a Visual Basic programmer who has felt the pain both deciphering and writing C# code and wants to help you avoid some of the same pitfalls.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

From the INETA website

INETA Announces New Board Members, Sheri Nawrocki, Matt Ranlett & Brendon Schwarz.

INETA ANNOUNCES APPOINTMENT OF SHERI NAWROCKI AS VICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING Redmond, WA – October 4, 2005 – The International .NET Association (INETA), an organization that provides resources, services, and support for .NET user groups around the globe, today announced the appointment of Sheri Nawrocki as Vice President of Marketing for INETA North America. “Sheri has been a valuable member of our team over the past few years and will do an excellent job leading our marketing efforts.” says Chris Pels, President of the North American Board of Directors. “Sheri brings a unique perspective to our team with her background in software development, marketing, and graphic design that will be invaluable.” “INETA has done a great job strengthening the .NET development community with its efforts over the past several years and I am excited to have the opportunity to help the organization.” says Nawrocki. “This is a great group of volunteers and I look forward to working with them.” INETA ANNOUNCES APPOINTMENT OF MATT RANLETT AND BRENDON SCHWARTZ TO INETA BOARD OF DIRECTORS Redmond, WA – October 6, 2005 – The International .NET Association (INETA), an organization that provides resources, services, and support for .NET user groups around the globe, today announced the appointment of Matt Ranlett and Brendon Schwartz as Co-Vice Presidents of Technology for INETA North America. “Matt and Brendon, or The Atlanta Regular Guys as many know them, have done exciting work in the Atlanta area with local INETA User Groups and have contributed to the success of the Community Activities Division of INETA” says Chris Pels, President of the North American Board of Directors. “We are excited about the energy and ideas the guys will bring to the Technology Division.” “Matt and I are very excited about our new positions on the Board.” says Schwartz. “We are really looking forward to having a big impact on how INETA works with technology now and in the future” added Ranlett.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I swear, not one word about Pakistan (or Guatemala for that matter) on the home page of CNN.com. MSNBC stil has a little something on the lower half.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have postponed, cancelled and delayed this appointment [to remove an ancient filling and replace it with a new one] three times now. Oooooh the torture (and to top it off, the expense). But I can avoid it no longer. Off I go... whimper whimper whimper...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Burlington Vermont's Champlain College is definitely on the cutting edge of  I.T. Education, so it does not surprise me to see this new degree program that they are offering.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

The agenda for TechEd South Africa is now online.

I see that two of my session will be in Session Room 1 - the big room. This room as a capacity of 800 people (okay not so bad as TEchEd US where it's more like 8,000). But still.... gulp.

The fun begins on Sunday evening at 7pm (Oct 23) with the welcome party!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I had the good fortune of having Melanie Spiller edit a recent article for the upcoming CoDe Focus issue on Tablet PC and Mobile PC Development. (Free issue by the way, subscribe here).

One of the habits she noticed was my use of the word "actually". We talked about it a bit and she happened to mention that another problem word is "basically" which, she told me, people use when they are guessing. That actually (see, I use that a lot) makes a lot of sense. Of course, being THE editorial blogger for technical authors, I was able to find a blog post where she talks about "actually", "basically" and some other oft misused adverbs.

I wonder what she thinks of the infamous "So..." that begins every sentence of Microsoft employees when they answer a question...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Damir Tomicic, who heads up INETA Europe, created such a wonderful video of his trip to PDC that I wish it was much longer than 3 minutes. Microsoft EMEA chartered a flight to L.A. from Austria or somewhere (which was dubbed "EMEA @ PDC"), so the video starts with a plane filled with geeks. [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I had to laugh when I read this post. It all sounds so familiar!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Everyone has them - the performance anxiety dream. You know, the one where you are back in college or high school and walk into a class to find there is a test or pop quiz. Then suddenly you realize that you have somehow managed to not have attended any of the classes all semester and are totally unprepared. This dream has shifted for me recently because of my nasty habit of presenting at conferences. I have had the new version of the dream more than once and had one yet again last night. This time it was my Indigo talk at TechEd South Africa. I was up on the stage with one minute before I had to start. My computer wasn't even started up. Then suddenly I realize, though I have my deck prepared and written all of my demos,  I have never once practiced them. I will be doing it totally cold. (Worse yet for this conference - the talks are only 45 minutes to allow 15 minutes for Q&A.) And Don Box is in the audience. Egad! I'm sure I'll be using that many many many hours of travel to go over it about a thousand more times. And that's only one of three, no really 5 (including an Atlas and an Indigo demo at the Futures panel), that I'll be doing. I'll be the crazy person talking gibberish up in the front of the plane.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm not kidding.

By changing a WCF binding from basicHttpBinding to wsHttpBinding, bingo bammo magic right before my very eyes! My messages were encrypted. I did nothing else.

Here's where I got my inspiration...thanks Ami.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here's a new Channel 9 video with all my buds on the Tablet Team.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

As I am tightening up my Indigo demos for TechEd South Africa, I am going over a bunch of posts by Michele Leroux Bustamante which is helping me sort out "just getting it to run" vs. "writing services properly". [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I really enjoyed presenting at the CNY .NET Developer Group last week. It was a nice surprise to discover that the meeting was held about 2 miles from where I lived until I was 10 years old. This was the third meeting of this new group and the room was filled to capacity (about 20 or so) which is rea lly impressive for a new group. Andy Beaulieu, the leader of the group, has been getting great attendance since the group started and he should be congratulated. It's a great thing to have a resource like this and it is clear that Syracuse has been needing it for a while - there is a lot of technology going on there. I spoke about ADO.NET 2.0 and Andy has posted my session powerpoint and code demos on the user group site. They are on my own website as well, on the Presentations page.

Syracuse is easy to get to and I highly recommend this group to speakers who are willing to make the trip. The group is only 1.5 hours from where my parents live and I still have family and friends right in Syracuse, so it's a fun trip for me. Another hot item that may make it worth the trip is the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

Posted from BLInk!

Michael Swanson blogs that the PDC DVDs will be going out in early November which is pretty fast turnaround considering that they have ended up with 4 dvds worth of content. But even more exciting is that they will host all of the session videos online and free for all (for 6 months)!

(by way of Owen Allen)

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm happy to see Steele Price's name in the latest round of MVPs.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

There was a problem with SqlDependency pre-Beta2 which created headaches for anyone trying to use it as a non-admin. It also created headaches for programmers at Microsoft who were in charge of it. They finally reworked some of the plumbing in order to get past the permission issues. In this DataAccess blog post, Sushil Chordia not only explains why the problem existed, but what they did to fix it, how to use SqlDependency now (most changes were in the plumbing, but you do have to do some minor changes in your code) and also what permissions are necessary in SQL Server to get it working.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I need to stamp this onto my brain so that it flows from my tongue as readily and thoughtlessly* as the word "Indigo":

"Secure, Reliable, Transacted Web Services"

*thoughtlessly as in: I don't have to stop and think "what is that phrase again?", it's just there...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

A few weeks ago as I prepared for the weekend Code Camp IV in Waltham, I was going back and forth finalizing my four presentations, three of which were on topics that couldn't be farther from each other. Two talks were related to Web Services: WS Security Fundamentals and Overview of WSE 3.0. A third talk was on data access and the last was on adding TabletPC inking capabilites to the online Virtual Earth mapping application. My brain was everywhere.

I am feeling the same today as I am working on my three talks for TechEd South Africa. Two are somewhat related but still very different: Overview of WSE 3 and Introducing Indigo/WCF. The third is a data access talk on ADO.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Integration. But of course this as much fun as watching t.v. while constantly clicking on the remote to change channels. Very natural.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I murdered my TabletPC functionality on my Vista laptop when I hacked the glass onto it. So I can't play with all of the awesome new TabletPC features. Very disappointing and I am looking forward to a remedy. In the meantime, I can oggle the 123 screenshots that Peter Rysavy did showing off the Tablet tools on Vista over here. Thanks to Lora for the link..

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

There are many developers in Pakistan and we have 15 user groups from Pakistan registered in INETA.

Though I haven't seen anything yet on some of the blogs I know such as on INETA Pakistan, or DotNETPakistan, Stephen Forte has some links to some of his friends there. Stephen speaks at conferences all over the world and leaves a wake of new friends everywhere he goes.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Programming Virtual Earth

• This was a chalk talk, so there is not a formal powerpoint or demos. Check the Virtual Earth category on my weblog for any code samples or insights I post.
• Microsoft's implementation of Virtual Earth on MSN
• www.viavirtualearth.com   Developer Center run by Dr. Neil Roodyn. Contains articles, references and a gallery of sample applications.
• Virtual Earth on Channel 9
• javascript files for programming Virtual Earth  MapControl.js   ve.js

What's new in ADO.NET 2.0

There are 3 pages of resources (articles, books and