I saw this in my Microsoft downloads email yesterday:

Access 2007 Download: Access Developer Extensions

Access 2007 Developer Extensions make it easy to deploy and manage solutions built using Access.

Packing and sharing Access solutions has always been a pain in the rear. My recollection (it's been a while) was that there was no freely available runtime. So every end user had to have a full license to Access, even if they weren't doing any development.

So now the runtime will be free. It's not quite available yet but will be out soon.

Here's more from the Office Developer Center:

As Philip Elmer-Dewitt says on Business 2.0's website: "it may be the most impressive demonstration to date of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' legendary mastery of the art of media manipulation."

The hype has definitely works on me and this has a historical basis. I was stuck in an airport lounge late one night just when the Nano was released. I must have seen the same Nano ad 30 times that night and a few days later, I bought one (my very first iPod ever). But  for the iPhone I have a few things to protect me making the same mindless grab: 1) no iPhone's in Vermont (no AT&T) and 2) in the long run, I think I'm too cheap.

I have a simple phone and if/when I get another, it would be to get access to my email and also share my calendar from outlook. I don't download music or need to carry around my dogs pictures. My iPod (nano) mostly has podcasts (ala Wait Wait Don't Tell me, Fresh Air, DotNetRocks) on it and some old Bonnie Raitt, etc. albums. When I see the iPhone ad, I GOTTA HAVE IT, but then a minute later reality seeps back in and I remember I don't have much need for it.

There are plenty of people that will tell you the more technical reasons why you might not want in iPhone (yet) such as issues with the EDGE network if you are interested in it's web capabilities. Others worry about the fact that you can't replace the battery if you need to, can't expand memory, can't add SIMS, etc.

I bet that all of those people who lined up at the Apple stores around the country yesterday don't care. All that matters to many is that it's COOL and it's SHINY and it's made by Apple. 

Last year, there was lots of buzz about a possible iTablet, for example, ZDNet's Matthew Miller is piecing together some various things he'd been reading. I never really paid much attention to it but now the iPhone has been making me wonder  if the technology that has gone into the iPhone is headed for other things (and if I was paying more attention , that's probably been said in a thousand blogs, too). Certainly if you google "tablet pc" and apple there's gobs of speculation - mostly from last year because a patent had been filed at some point. The patent most likely was for the technology in the iPhone. But heck, I have a touch screen tablet pc (Lenovo Thinkpad X60) and yet I'm still drooling over the iPhone (no AT&T in Vermont and I want Mobile 6 anyway and someone also pointed out on a listserv today... that phone's now cost more than computers!).

I don't know how Apple would ever come close to what Microsoft has done with the Tablet PC platform though, especially with the hand writing recognition. If I recall correctly, there were over a million samples used to get the recognition algorithms. On my touch screen, I can actually write with my finger (just for fun, and it was Stephen Toub who gave me that idea) and the reco works with that even!

Of course there's always Surface which is just as droolyas an iPhone  - just can't put it in your pocket.

I've been using Mike Volodarsky's patch for a while for sites that I am developing in IIS7 (no problems with file based development server) to get past debugger auto-attach problems. Now an official hotfix has been released.

Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

I'm really excited about joining a group of about 50 high school students tomorrow who are participating in the Summer Institute in Information Technology at Champlain College this week. This is part of the Governor’s Institute of Vermont program.

According to Ann DeMarle (Director of the college's Emergent Media Center (among other impressive titles)) who is running the program, the kids range from very creative types doing digital video to hard-core programmers. About 1/3 of the students are girls.

I'm going to go talk to them a bit about having a career as a geek (and doing this in Vermont, of all places ) and then hang out with them while they work on their projects. Susan Wisowaty is going to join me as well. So between Ann, Susan and me, women with technical careers in I.T. will be well represented!

I will definitely follow up with a post on this after the fact.

It was cool on Saturday so Rich & I decided to go for a hike on the Long Trail. We drove to the top of the App Gap (which is near our home) and hiked south on the LT. This crosses over the top of the Mad River Glen trails, so we had lunch at the top of the double chair, looking out over the White Mountains in New Hampsire and then went on to to top of the Single Chair. There was some stuff that was pretty daunting to me in between those two spots, so rather than turn around and do them going back down, we hiked back down the ski trails and cut over to the road. Here are some pictures I took along the way.

There was a lot of Trillium  (will look through my wildflower books this weekend to try to see what the heck these are! They looked like a cross between a trillium family and wild orchid family to me..) along the way which was suprising to see in late June.

While at TechEd, David Sceppa wrote about the status of various database vendors as they create proviers for LINQ and Entity Framework. read more

[A new DevLife post]

Miguel de Icaza and team pulled it off in 21 days! Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

Every summer, when strawberry season comes around, I have to look through my collection of old Food & Wine magazines for my favorite recipe. Its a Strawberry Tart and I know enough things about it that I should be able to find the recipe on www.foodandwine.com or just by googling. One of the interesting things is that the article was about Katrin Theodoli, then owner of the super luxury yachts Magnum Marine, and recipes she whips up in the little galley of the yacht when she's cruising the seas with kings and queens. Granted, you could solve a lot of problems in the world for the cost of some of these higher end boats; but still, I'm grateful for the recipe.

[Wendy, I hope you're reading this one!]

So since I decided I would ensure I could find the recipe more easily by just putting it here on my blog along with the reminder that it's in the June 1997 issue: "Outdoor Entertaining".

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 sticks of cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch dice
• 1 large egg
• 1 1/2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted
• 1/4 cup seedless strawberry jam, melted
• 1 1/2 pints strawberries, hulled and halved lengthwise

STEPS

1. In a food processor, pulse together the flour, sugar and salt. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the egg and pulse until incorporated.
2. Preheat the oven to 375F. Butter a 10 inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and pat into a disk. Roll the dough between 2 sheets of wax paper into a 12-inch round. Transfer the dough to a cookie sheet and refrigerate until firm, about 15 minutes. Peel off the top sheet of wax paper, invert the dough into the pan and peel off the other sheet of wax paper. Fit the dough into the pan and chill again for 10 minutes. Prick all over with a fork and bake in the middle of the oven for about 20 minutes or until evenly golden. Let cool on a rack.
3. Transfer the tart shell to a platter and brush the bottom with the melted chocolate. Refrigerate until set, about 10 minutes. Brush half of the jam over the chocolate. Arrange the strawberries in the shell, cut side down, overlapping them slightly. Brush the berries with the remaining jam.
   

As my young co-workers at a former job would say: "chickety-check it out"! www.thedatafarm.com/blog

(I'm still trying to work out the issue of it not showing when you are looking at an individual post.)

The Mobile team is at it again. They have written a converter to take Journal notes and convert them into an interactive Silverlight page. You can read about it on the Mobile dev center and download the converter application. There are two live demos of it here on my own website where I have hosted their sample and one of my own. (Click on the images below to go to the samples.) Note that mine seems to have stretched a bit because I created it on a lower resolution computer.

I recently whipped together a small tool for a client and because it was so small (and for only one person to use), I used some simple drag n' drop wizardry for the form. I created a datasource pointing to a table in the SQL Server 2005 database on my develpment machine then dragged that datasource onto a form to create a navigation toolbar and a screenfull of text boxes and checkboxes.

When I finished it up and pointed it to the live SQL Server 2000 database I was having some strange issues with inserts and updates. Specifically, SQL Server was throwing this error: "Error converting data type varchar to bit."

A little digging showed me that the TSQL being sent to the databse was passing "True" and "False" to the bit fields rather than 0 and 1.

SQL Server 2005 didn't seem to mind this, but SS2000 sure did!

I looked at the dataset that was created by the wizard and the bit fields were properly identified as booleans.

But when I looked at the parameters collections of the Insert and Update statements that the wizard had built, I could see that the properties of my boolean values was set to DbType=AnsiString.

So even though I prefered to know why I was seeing a difference between SS2005 and SS2000, I modified the auto-generated Insert & Update statements to make the DbType "Boolean" which passed 0's and 1's up to the database and everyone was happy. Changint the DbType to Boolean automatically changed the ProviderType to "Bit". 

I have seen a few threads where people pointed out this problem but never saw any suggest my solution or provide a reason for SS2000 rejecting it. If this wizard is meant to be used by newbies, I don't know how they would deal with a problem like this.

Analyst/Programmer Positions Available

Would you like to work for an established local company with a down to earth, employee oriented work environment?

Are you a creative, analytical individual with solid programming and communications skills?

Union Mutual may have a place for you…

We are on the search for two enthusiastic developers with that rare mix of programming and people skills to join our .NET/web development team. As a part of the team, your responsibilities would include maintaining and supporting our existing environment, as well as working with end-users to develop solutions to business problems.

Our ideal candidates will thrive in an environment where they balance several tasks of varying priority while working with a number of different languages and systems. Professionalism, a positive work ethic and a keen attention to detail are paramount.

Desirable skills and experience include (but are not limited to):

·       Strong analysis and communication skills       

·       Thrives on projects both independently; and in a collaborative team-based environment

·       Profession or educational experience developing solutions using:

o       Object-oriented analysis and design methodologies

o       Microsoft .NET Framework (C# - ASP.NET/Web Services)

o       SQL/XPATH query

o       Source control (CSV or VSS)

·       A passion for learning new skills and languages

Additional exposure to the following would also be of benefit: 

·       Project management experience

·       Aptitude for web and graphical user interface design

·       Knowledge of application development security best practices

·       Best-practice testing methodologies (Test-Driven-Design; NUnit; JUnit; etc.)

·       Prior experience in the property/casualty insurance industry

We offer a competitive salary and excellent benefits including pension and 401K plans.

Qualified candidates are encouraged to submit, in strict confidence, a resume and cover letter to:

Union Mutual of Vermont Companies
Director of Human Resources
PO Box 158
Montpelier, Vermont 05601-0158

or submit to Resume2007@umfic.com

VTSQL is having their June meeting tomorrow, June 20th.

Our pal, Jean-Rene Roy is coming down from Montreal to do a presentation on SQL Server Service Broker. This is one of those topics I found myself having to learn so that I could understand how Query Notification works in ADO.NET 2.0. But there's a whole lot more to leverage from it besides what I'm getting from ADO.NET.

More meeting info here.

INETA sent Keith Pleas to speak to the grateful Vermont.NET User Group last night. Keith presented the Designing for Operations project that PAG is working on. It was eye opening to many of us who have not spent a lot of time thinking about having our applications provide useful information to those who have to keep users happy and a joy for some who have had to write this stuff themselves in the past. Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

I keep seeing all of these flash ads that have a pen that you can move around with your mouse and draw - similar to all of the inky stuff I've been doing except I wanted that pen, too! I finally figured out how to pull it off. Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

I think eating lettuce that came from my garden last night really drove it home. Summer is really truly here.

More evidence is that the lupine in field in front of my house is about at it's peak. It's pretty hard to share the real view but here is a composite picture and a few others...

click on the composite to see a larger size...

Recently, the VTdotNET website has been getting hit by some robot entering hyperlinks into the password text box of the login form.

ASP.NET catches this on the server side and pushes out this error:

System.Web.HttpRequestValidationException: A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client (ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$LoginView1$Login1$Password="<A href=http://...").

Since I have errors emailed to me, I'm getting a LOT of these emails every day which was annoying.

So, I wanted to trap this on the client side using a validator.

While they may appear to be, login controls are not totally locked up. One of the smart tag options is to "Convert to Template". Once you do this, you can edit the control all you want.

So I added a RegularExpressionValidator control and entered the following regex for the ValidationExpression:

^((?!href|http).)+$

which won't allow strings that href or http. Then tied it to the password control and to the ValidationGroup for the whole login control. That way I get the validation during data entry AND when the user hits the login button.

I did the same for the User Name control.

This solved part of the problem. If you went to the actual login page, it was no longer possible to enter hyperlinks and postback. But the spam kept coming. I changed the name of the controls and put some more details in the error handler and saw that the name of the control reported in the error didn't change and that it wasn't even coming from the login page. But it was the ONLY login control in the entire website.

Then I got a little education from some who are less naive than I about the evil ways of spammers. Ryan Trudelle-Shwarz, Adam Sills and Dave Wanta filled out the picture for me. It's a nasty type of comment spam where a robot collects the postback info from your site and no longer needs to return there to do the actual entry and postback. There is still some mystery here for me since there never was a login control on the home page, but as Ryan suggested, the simplest thing to do is just filter out those errors so that I don't have to get them in my email box and forget about them.

ASP.NET Forum user keanxsoul has done some detective work along these lines and offers an interesting explanation about how the spammers are actually doing this.

After an afternoon of tangling with a locked up computer, when it was running again, a Windows Defender oddity led me to the WMI repository. Not sure if the two problems were related, but I sure learned more than I thought I needed to know about system management... read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

No, this isn't "I used a Mac and survived", but a great story about my neighbor'sMac powerbook that went through hell and survived.  I should qualify "neighbor". He lives nearby, though I don't think we've ever met. But he is a blacksmith who's beautiful work you can see here on his site) 

He left it on top of his truck when he left his house last week and didn't realize it until he arrived at his destination about 50 miles away. It had fallen off the car while he was driving down the road and yes, got run over. He posted a message on the local FrontPorchForum in case anyone saw it. I even called my husband to ask him to keep an eye on it on the way home.

Amazingly, some very nice person found it and brought it to Small Dog Electronics in Burlington who was able to track Jim down. More amazingly, it still works!

Jim blogged about this on Small Dog's website. You can read a Jim's story here and check out the bent up but still functioning powerbook.

It took me a while but I finally am having fun using Expression Blend after some initial trepidation. But suffering through a bunch of XAML hand coding actually helped! Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

.NET  Job Description: 

CONTACT:

Paul Mewis BSc (Hons)
Senior Recruiter, S.Com
Suite 2525, One Post Street
San Francisco
CA 94104
Tel: 415 627 1892
Fax: 415 989 0450
globalpeoplesolutions
Email: Paul.Mewis@scomusa.com
www: www.scom.com

Okay, I lied. I thought I was staying home all summer, but it turns out that the Greater Lansing User Group had a request in to INETA and it just so happens that their July meeting date falls the same week as the famous Ann Arbor Art Fair that I have always wanted to go to. So, I will be doing an INETA event on Thursday, July 19th in Lansing and as long as I'm going there, I will speak on the previous night at the GANG (Detroit) User Group.

Thanks especially to Bill Wagner and Darrell Hawley for their help in coordinating. Darrell runs the user group in Ann Arbor but their meeting date is weeks before.

I'll be doing a session on the ADO.NET Entity Framework at both groups.

(note - If you do not see the drawing surface it's because this doesn't seem to work when the blog post is viewed individually. View my entire Silverlight category and it will be rendered properly. I guess I need to keep working on this one...)

This is the Silverlight setup that I used for my tests on this particular page.

I put the javascript and xaml files in the relative folders in my dasblog application:

thedatafarm.com/blog/xaml

thedatafarm.com/blog/js

Then I added the javascript references that are in the header tags of my html page into the header tags of the homeTemplate.blogtemplate file in my blog/themes/myfavetheme folder.

And it just works!

So far this is just letting you draw on the blog page. My persistence code in the later pages of the above mentioned tests use asp.net ajax and I'd have to do some major customization to my dasblog app to incorporate that right now. I pretty much use dasBlog out of the box, so I'm not ready to go down that road. I have lots of other stuff to learn, but this was a fun little exercise!

Inspired by the Scribbler app (part of the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery), written by Daniel Cook  & Pete Blois (with some inspiration from Laurence Moroney)  I decided to spiff up my own drawing application.

Why is it that a black background seems to be the way to make apps look cool?

I even finally opened up Microsoft Expression Blend to help me since I was getting sick of working in raw XAML and having to test each visual change by debugging the app. Last time I looked at this product, it frightened me and I closed it quickly. But now that I have done enough of the hand-coded XAML, it was not a huge leap to comprehend how to use Expression Blend and what I could do with it.

One thing that I discovered is that the Background property of the InkPresenter element, while necessary, is not recognized by the designer. So to do the design in Expression, I had to remove that property, then replace it when I wanted to test out the app.

Since my app is still using the v1.0 of Silverlight (and javascript, not .NET), I can't pull off the slick color picker that is in the Scribbler app. But when it's time to move to v1.1, I'll know where to find the code!

Although I'm pretty jaded about any achievement of Amanda Murphy (hey, I just expect great things of her!) I was happy to see her on the list of paneliests for this year's Women in Technology Lunchon at TechEd. It's a big honor.

Here's more on the luncheon (pasted from the TechEd site):

Women in Technology Luncheon

Every year, the Women in Technology luncheon provides a fantastic opportunity to network with other professional women in the computer industry. This year's luncheon takes place Wednesday, June 6, from noon – 1:30 P.M. and will feature Eileen Brown who will explore the challenges of being a woman and a technical professional in today's ever-changing world.

Eileen Brown, manager for the IT Pro Evangelist team in the Developer & Platform Group, will join us from Microsoft UK to share insights from a study done by Microsoft about women in technology. She will then introduce the panel of 4-5 phenomenal women, and moderate a discussion about attracting women into the technology field and retaining those who are already a part of the field.

Panelists include:

• Amanda Murphy, Senior Technology Specialist and Director of Operations for Infotech Canada and president-elect of INETA
• Lisa Coleman, Marketing Manger for Microsoft partner Intermedia.NET
• Mary Jo Foley, Currently the "unblinking eye on Microsoft" behind the "All About Microsoft" blog, and frequent radio, TV and newspaper commentator on Microsoft products, people and strategies.
• Ani Babaian, Senior Product Manager with Microsoft and author of a book to be released in October on women in technology.
• Mythreyee Ganapathy, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Education Strategies, and the mother of "a challenging 2.5 year old, who almost behaves like a Microsoft employee already."

The battery on my 3 month old Lenovo X60 is dead and I am getting the dreaded notice in the power manager "Irreparable damage to the battery has been detected. Replace the battery with the new one."

In addition to the message in the Power manager, I have the following symptoms:

• Battery Indicator light is blinking orange
• Power status says "Plugged in, not charging"
• Computer shuts down immediately when unplugged (since the battery is dead).

This is not atypical of old batteries that need replacement, but this battery is fairly new and has not been abused in any way.

I attempted a recommended BIOS update but this requires a fully charged battery.

I checked the March 27th battery recall, but my battery was not on the list.

Luckily, I found a comment thread in the LenovoBlogs under a post that is a few months old called "Power Manager." There is a new string of comments that began a few days ago with other people having this problem. An IBM technician from Vancouver has joined the thread, identifed the problem and is currently seeking a solution.

So if you have found my blog post via searching for a solution to this problem... keep an eye on the comments on the tail end of this post's comments: http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=52.

I like having found the www.LenovoBlogs.com site. It's a mini "blogs.msdn.com" and a good stab at corporate transparency and accessibility. The product manager's direct phone number is even published there!

There are a few silverlight demos that use the InkPresenter, though two of them don't refer to Ink at all...:

The page turning demo has it. You can annotate the pages and that gets remembered during your session. As you flip the pages back and forth, the annotations are incorporated into the effects.

The scribbler demo has it. This is straight drawing. What I love here is the cool pallette.

The Ink Tattoo Studio demo has it. This a fun demo.  On a tabletpc, the pressure of the stylus can be registered by the digitizer.I saw a version of this app that said "Ouch!" if the pressure got too high. Otherwise, the tattoo tool buzzes.

Dan Wahlin and Matt Gibbs have a book just coming out about ASP.NET AJAX (Prof. Asp.NET 2.0 AJAX) from WROX. So Dan has now spent a LOT of time with AJAX and is very knowledgable. Then Silverlight comes out and boom - he's got a Silverlight ASP.NET AJAX app that is VERY cool. I'm supposed to be writing an article on Entity Framework right now, but boy do I want to continue playing with Silverlight.

Since I won't be at TechEd, I want to make sure Eric Sink is well-entertained! Of course, he's a pretty entertaining guy, so do yourself a favor and go visit him, get a cool t-shirt, get a chance to win a Wii and see some awesome developer tools like my favorite source control program.

[The fine print: I was not asked, paid, cajoled, bribed or otherwise to make this post, but I admit that I was definitely flattered!]

It's always entertaining to laugh at the unrealistic things people do with computers in television shows - most often shows like CSI. I remember seeing one of the early demo apps for WPF that Carter Maslan created in early 2004 and thinking that it looked like the fantasy computing scenarios from t.v. coming to life.

Now another of the Microsoft Research projects that looks like life emulating art is coming unveiled... Microsoft Surface. Considering that I recently publically declared my love of using a touch screen computer, this looks like the best of that combined with the best of WPF and then blown up to a huge surface. It's very cool and promising and apparently coming at the end of this year. There will be a unit in a NYC Sheraton starting next week and then another will be at a tech show in San Diego later this summer. Check the FIND IT page for more details. I highly recommend watching some of the demonstration videos on the site and exploring the history as well. COOOOOOOOOL....

After my first series of exploring the InkPresenter in Silverlight, I have done some playing with having video interact with ink in Silverlight. You can read more about that here...

[A New DevLife Post]