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Thanks for the INETA gang for making me a judge this year for their Component Code Challenge. Even better, I am a judge with some of the industries best individuals – Tim Huckaby and Scott Cate! These are two guys that I have a tremendous amount of respect for. They have don’t a lot for this industry in the many years I have known them. As a contestant – these guys/gals needed to show us judges a sample application that provided an effective use of a component that solved some issue in the dealing...
For those that didn’t know, I have recently left a long run at Thomson Reuters (which is a great company BTW) for a new gig as CIO of Swank Motion Pictures. This company works in the movie distribution business to cruise ships, trains, universities, and more. Some links if you are interested: http://www.onboardmovies.com/ http://www.swank.com/colleg... https://www.swankhealth.com http://www.k12digitalmovies... http://www.swank.com/digita... and more more more …. The thing is that...
My latest book was just released. From Wrox – Professional Silverlight 4. This was a fun book to do as Silverlight is a great technology and will be one of the core technologies that will be used for so many applications now and in the future. Microsoft really put together something quite splendid here and you will find that this book is a good dive into the technology. The Silverlight 4 platform continues to add excitement to building rich Internet applications (RIAs), and it offers new user interface...
My two latest books are out! Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB Professional C# 4 and .NET 4 From the back covers: Take your web development to the next level using ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET is about making you as productive as possible when building fast and secure web applications. Each release of ASP.NET gets better and removes a lot of the tedious code that you previously needed to put in place, making common ASP.NET tasks easier. With this book, an unparalleled team of authors walks you through the...
I think back to the days of the first versions of Visual Studio (when it was called Visual Studio .NET, remember?) and I think about how far Microsoft has come with this IDE. It really is the best IDE on the market. There is so much to this IDE it is amazing. It now can really handle managing your complete software application development lifecycle. For me, it is (besides Windows 7) the best and most successful product Microsoft has developed. You can obviously get this now and it is available on...
Well, another year, and heck …. even another decade and 2010 is going to be such an important year, or kick-off year for technology that I thought I would take a stab at making some technology predictions on what I think might happen this year. Technology always has these “next thing” items coming forward that it is really hard to even really know what is for real. Technologies might be quite good – but it will also take additional things like community ground swell or true behind-the-scenes business...
One of the cooler displays at PDC 2009 was a sample container that is something that is part of the Microsoft super data center strategy. To make Azure real, Microsoft has invested a ton into setting up the most state of the art data centers around the world. The idea is that Microsoft will provide a seamless means for customers to upload their applications, data, and capabilities to the cloud and leave the hardware, IT, and bandwidth management to them. To meet these ends, Microsoft is building...
The second day keynote at PDC 2009 in Lost Angeles was shared by Steven Sinofsky and Scott Guthrie. Steven is the President of Windows and Windows Live Division and it really must have been a great day for him as he came out for the first time in a major conference with the new Windows 7 launched and the old Vista problems just fading away into Microsoft’s past. There is a lot of excitement for Windows 7 and there is excitement for the new Windows 7 APIs that are available for developers to work...
The first keynote of Microsoft’s PDC 2009 conference in Los Angeles has come and gone. Ray Ozzie kicked it off with some of the main messages that gave everyone insight into how Microsoft sees the direction of IT, programming, processes, and more. It was an interesting session that really focused on a few things, but most importantly it focused on Microsoft dedication to the Windows Azure platform and the big thing (to me), the idea that they are dedicated to making a seamless experience between...
I arrived to Los Angeles last night to be ready first thing Monday for my first day at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC). Microsoft has really shortened this conference in regards to size and expense – that’s for sure. Obviously it has something to do with the economy. So, we’ll see how this conference will be done on the cheap. Doesn’t mean it has to be bad, but it should be different. So for this year, this PDC is cut down from four days to three. Other things that are different...
I always look for software that has a footprint smaller than what is offered from the standard software for folks on the market. For instance, I use Foxit rather than the Adobe Reader as the software download for this is 1mb rather than 80mb and hardly has anything running on your machine while Adobe Reader (IMHO) is spyware/junkware. I am a complete audio junkie or audiophile (as some call it) and I have never been 100% happy with the standard Windows Media Player. It is a fine piece of software...
Last year’s St. Louis Day of .NET was so successful that we were turning away people from the registration process (we were limited on the number of bodies we could have). This year’s event is at the Ameristar Casino – so that means more space! This year it was decided to run this conference over two days instead of one. There are currently 53 confirmed sessions for this event. Last year was so much fun – I’m looking forward to this year’s event. REGISTER TODAY...
One of the features that has been available since the Vista days and is also contained in the Windows 7 release is Microsoft’s Desktop Gadgets. Gadgets have become quite the popular set of little tools that lots of people like to completely litter their desktops with. You can think of them as mini-applications that run on your desktop for common tasks that you perform or common pieces of information that you need. Microsoft is in no way the first to the scene with this nor the most popular. Though...
I successfully installed the RTM version of Windows 7 last night. I got a copy of an .iso file for this due to my participation in the Windows 7 beta program. It was very nice of Microsoft to provide everyone that participated in the invited portion of the beta program to a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate! Thanks Microsoft for that. I downloaded the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and burned that to a disc and booted up my machine to this disc. I have to say that it was just a little confusing at first...
Microsoft just recently made some announcements that they will be releasing the new Zune HD. The new Zune HD will also support the now much loved multi-touch capabilities that has made the ITouch and the IPhone as famous as they are. From the image above you can see that the new Zune HD is going for an advanced look with the beveled edges. I owned a Zune first generation and then I bought myself a Zune (120GB version) later. I really did like it mainly because of the very large screen that I could...
Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) is out and the incredible thing is that Microsoft has provided this operating system (OS) for free to the entire world. They will only let you download the OS for a limited time – so if you are thinking of getting it – you should be getting your hands on a copy of it as quick as you can. Microsoft is offering both a 32bit or a 64bit version that you can download. This is NOT the final version of the OS though – that is something to be aware of. If you install this...
Good news for us all is that the RC build of the much-anticipated Windows 7 is going to be made available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on April 30. For the rest of the world, you won’t have long to wait, as the Windows 7 RC will be available on May 5th as I previously reported on my Twitter account. For those that are not aware, RC means Release Candidate, as this is the pre-final version of the operating system and it is supposed to include everything that will be in the final shipping version...
My latest bookwas just released new and improved and with a fresh mint taste! Last month my AJAX bookcame out and this month is it a book that is a continuation of a great series of ASP.NET books. This is an update to the best-selling Professional ASP.NET 3.5 book that the three of us put out about one year ago (time flies). If you are an ASP.NET developer, I (no doubt) advise you to get this book as there has been plenty added to it to bring it up with the latest release of ASP.NET. This service...
I think that Microsoft is missing a large opportunity with the Microsoft Office product. I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. To me, it has been evolving in the wrong manner over these last few releases and it has bothered me greatly. You might be saying, “what is Bill talking about here, they just did a major and well-received upgrade to Microsoft Office with the Office 2007 release!”. I do have to say that you are right in that regard – but what I am talking about is Microsoft Office...
Before I had posted a small blog entry on how it was basically impossible to get the Cisco VPN software working on a Windows Vista machine. It turned out to be one of the most hit blog entries I had – mainly due to the amount of help that was being provided in the comments. In the comments, many folks tried to help others with a solution. Though, one of the last entries I read recently was about a gentleman that pointed out that if you get all the Vista updates, that it seemed to just work. There...
I wanted an eReader of some kind. I knew that. This is a cool technology. First off, no matter if you get an Amazon Kindle or a Sony eReader, then you are in for a definite treat. This is one cool gadget and if you like to read books or magazines or whatever, then you are going to love the portability in carrying an easy-to-read library with you in a nice convenient little package such as these gadgets offer. For those that haven’t seen this in person, the big deal with this all is the piece of the...
I just got back from a business trip and sitting there on the counter was a copy of my latest book from Wrox! This book (my 20th) is titled Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX. This was a fun book and I wrote this with some great co-authors including Matt Gibbs, Dan Wahlin, and Dave Reed. Amazon says that the book will be available on February 3rd (not too far away). Here is some of the introduction I wrote for the book: ----------------------------- ASP.NET revolutionized Web application development....
I’ve been playing around a bit with Google Chrome lately. I switched back to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 as it answered a lot of the frustrations that I was having with Google Chrome (some key pages I like not rendering correctly). Though, when I switched one of my computer’s operating system to Windows 7 Beta 1, I was even more frustrated. The IE that came installed on Windows 7 was a less than superior IE than what I could download off of the Microsoft site. I tried to install the latest IE...
Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 comes on Windows 7 (of course) but I am unable to tell what version of IE this really is. Here is the About dialog from the one that comes on the OS by default: If you look at the version number – it is 8.0.7000.0 – which I really don’t think is too real as it looks like the Microsoft programmers just set all the build numbers to 7000 for the sake of being Windows 7. A little annoying but I understand the fun they are trying to have. The reason for all this conversation...
I have installed Windows 7 on “bare metal” on one of my machines. This was a laptop that I work with and it was a very easy install. First off, it was the quickest OS install that I have ever experienced. You can tell that Microsoft spent some significant time working on the performance and quality of the install and bravo to the team that worked on that feature! I also used the 64-bit version of the operating system. More and more people are turning to 64-bit and it is really starting to be the...
I am now getting Beta 1 of Windows 7! I just noticed it on MSDN. Outstanding. I have a few computers I will be putting this on. UPDATE: Here is it online for others as well: http://technet.microsoft.co... Also some others things: Windows Online Readiness Kit Windows 7 at a Glace (Whitepaper) Engineering Windows 7 Blog Windows 7 Quick Reference Guide...
UPDATE – DON’T DO THIS FIX AS IT WORKED FOR ONLY A SHORT WHILE. IT RETURNED BACK TO THE SAME PROBLEM AS BEFORE. YOU CAN DO THIS TO TURN YOUR ZUNE OFF FOR THOSE THAT ARE REPORTING HEATING PROBLEMS, ETC. UPDATE 2 – It seems this update will work if you want to use your Zune for a short while. It has to do with the clock on the Zune it seems. You can do this and it will work, but once you plug it into charge in your computer – it will fail again. UPDATE 3 – Microsoft has posted their fix: http://www.zune.net/en-us/s...
It seems that at 2am last night, most (if not all) 30GB Zune players became a brick! I use my Zune a lot and this is rather disturbing to tell you the truth. My Zune only shows the Zune logo and the progress bar at full and will not respond to any kind of button presses. I can’t even turn the dang thing off --- so I’m probably doing a good job of burning that image into the screen of the player till the batteries run out. Here are some announcements from others on this matter: CruchGear TechRadar...
Well, according to Neowin.net, Windows 7 Beta 1 will be released on January 7th, 2009. I think the "7" for the date might be there for a reason! :) Microsoft released an Alpha version of Windows 7 to the attendees of PDC this year, but it was missing the new skin that we will see in Windows 7. I have been rather down on Vista (as many others were) as I could only use it for my book writing, but was unable to effectively use Vista for my normal work at Thomson Reuters for many reasons not worth going...
This weekend, I had some free time, and what does every developer do with this free time - I went to my TechEd 2008 DVDs to watch some sessions. But in loading the DVDs, I realized that they wouldn't work as I thought. I was only getting a reminder that I needed to install the Beta 2 version of Silverlight (the RTM of Silverlight 2 is out now). Tim Heuer put up a nice blog post stating a solution to the problem and he also has a little Silverlight application on his page that allows you to search...
Presentation by Anders Hejlsberg. It is 10 years later since they started C# C# 1.0 was about introducing the general concept of managed code. C# 2.0 was about finishing C# 1.0 but didn't have time to do. C# 3.0 is really about radical new thinking in the language - LINQ. They learned a lot about functional programming through this exercise. Today is about C# 4.0. Some of the trends that have shaped their thinking on C# 4.0. Declarative Dynamic - resurgence of dynamic programming languages Concurrent...
I blogged years ago and voiced my disappointment of Google taking books, scanning them, databasing the contents of the books, and then making these books available to end users in "chucks". I am a computer book author and have written 18 books (two more on the way) and I wrote in my old blog post about why I didn't care for this move and how it really hurt me as an author. Back then, I wrote about the issue: "The problem is (at least for publishers and authors) is that let's say there is someone...
I would like to first thank the academy ..... Thanks to Oracle and the award as the Oracle Enterprise Developer of the Year for 2008. This was announced today in Oracle magazine. http://www.oracle.com/techn... This was about using ODP.NET and Oracle to develop and deliver top-of-the-line .NET financial applications. At Thomson Reuters, I work for Lipper, and we are using an Oracle backend system that gets its data delivered via a set of WCF services to a series...
This keynote is all about Windows 7 (the Vista that shoulda been) and new things from ScottGu's team. While yesterday was about the back-end infrastructure of the new cloud platform Azure from Microsoft, today's keynote focused on the front end of Microsoft. One funny question from Ray Ozzie was wondering what we would do at work all day if we didn't have a computer on our desk. Here are some random notes from the keynote. "The PC will be more relevant in the next era." - Ray Ozzie Today we barely...
This session is by Scott Hunter, Program Manager at MSFT In July 2007 - ASP.NET Futures was released That was followined by an Extensions Preview of ASP.NET 3.5 in Dec 07 Then in March 08 - we started doing some new stuff - ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - MVC and more The ASP.NET will continue to release out-of-bound items. CodePlex is the main driver for that. www.codeplex.com/aspnet - This is where you will find the interim drops. Currently there are ~1,000 downloads today If you want to see all the latest and...
Well, probably the most exciting picture (for me at least) that I got was a picture of me and Anders Hejlsberg (inventor of C#). He is quite the nice guy. We had dinner last night at a restaurant near the convention center. It was a great evening. Here is another shot as I was leaving the keynote. There are sooo many people here, it's great...
Ray Ozzie, chief architect at Microsoft, opened the keynote. Here are my random notes: Ray thanked everyone for coming to the event and stressed how important we all are in Microsoft's success. He then stressed his work as an ISV in the past and how he also sat in the audience like we are today. PDC is about Microsoft's take on the revolutions happening in the world. It is about combining the best aspects of combining software along with the best aspects of services. Tomorrow Ray will talk on stage...
Well, this is the first day at PDC 2008. This is, by far, my favorite conference. This year's PDC has a lot of energy and excitement. I think, partially, the reason is due to the fact that the last PDC was canceled (I had signed up for that one). The last PDC was in 2005 - so this one was due. I was invited by Microsoft to the conference as part of the Microsoft Regional Director program. You can find more information on the RD program by reading some of the blog posts from other fellow RDs at www.theregion.com....
No, it's not the PDC 2008 World Champion Darts competition, but actually it is one of the coolest conferences on the planet. Microsoft's PDC 2008 (which stands for Professional Developer Conference) is a conference that is focused on the future Microsoft technologies. While TechEd is focused on the here and now - PDC focuses on things that are coming in the next 18 months or so. This is by far my favorite conference as there is quite a bit of energy and the crowd is excited and hungry for knowledge....
First, I would like to say that I am quite the Microsoft guy and I am at my first non-Microsoft conference - Oracle OpenWorld 2008. Within my organization, Thomson-Reuters, I lead a team that built a new product platform. Our platform has an Oracle 10g back end and a complete .NET 3.5 middle tier and presentation layer. I have been to a lot of PDCs and TechEd sessions and it is interesting some of the differences between the two conferences. The first big difference is in how they do these keynotes....
The last half of this year is being completely focused on cloud computing. Microsoft is focusing a lot of attention in this space and are focusing on setting up development centers around the world to assist customers in hosting logic and data centrally in the cloud to make use of for your global applications. It really is the next step in expansion of the Internet and is something that will be greatly adopted by organizations all over the world. There are some tricky areas that still have to be...
I'm for the first time at a non-Microsoft conference in my life. I am at Oracle's OpenWorld 2008 in the lovely city of San Francisco. So far so good. The biggest surprise is really how big this conference is. There are more than 43,000 people at this conference. Wow - amazingly big. The other thing that is different than the TechEd and PDC conferences that I attended in the past is that there are a number of keynotes here and it seems that the first ones aren't that important and they build up in...
While working with Visual Studio 2008, I would constantly get exceptions thrown at me while working with any ASP.NET AJAX page. I also had no Intellisense when working with JavaScript which was a pain. I found an issue to the problem from Josh Berke on his blog here. It seems that there is a conflict with using a fingerprint reader while you are working with AJAX (they are somewhat related, aren't they?). You have to open up your processes (ALT + CTRL + DEL) and kill DPAgent.exe. Doing this immediately...
Well, like most, I downloaded Google Chrome and gave it a whirl. So far, I like it. There are things that bother me - but overall - I like it. Here are some of my likes: It is faster. It does seem to deal with JavaScript quite a bit faster than other browsers. Pages load faster than before for me. This is probably the biggest plus of the whole thing really. The look and feel of the application is more modern looking (again, from my perspective) and it provides more real estate for browsing by default...
All of a sudden I couldn't sync my Zune anymore on my Windows XP computer. I would always get an error that there was an error on the installation of the hardware when I plugged the Zune into the USB port. The actual error I would get was: There was a problem installing this hardware "zune" I tried all sorts of "fixes" including installing the Zune software update and uninstalling the Zune drivers, but nothing seemed to be working. There were folks on the Internet saying that I should format the...
You see a ton of charting components out there for .NET. Whenever you look into any magazine for developers in the developer space, you will see all sorts of advertisements for charting components of every kind. One of the main things these companies show is the new fancy and shiny charts as proof that they are the obvious choice in your applications that you want to build. As a developer, you might look at this chart and say, "Wow, this is new and this would look wonderful in my application". I...
I attended a session (title above) by the famous Doug Seven. Doug is always one of the better speakers out there and he covered how to construct your projects to work with various systems that improve the overall application and approach. Focus was put on unit tests and code coverage and the importance of incorporating these items into your development process. It is surprising to me that this is not yet the norm of application development. Again, I said this in a previous post, but development teams...
I'm in TechEd at the moment and I am sitting in a presentation on Unit Testing. Unit testing is something we have been doing on my teams for some time now and it is an intricate part of our development process. I am a big believer in continuous integration for development and part of the automatic build process includes a unit test run through the application/component that we are working with. The results of the unit tests are then deployed (automatically as well) to a server and made accessible...
TechEd is going good. This years TechEd is a bit different than the many that I have been to before. The keynote was ok - not great, but not bad. I was hoping for some customers to come out on stage and present the really cool things they are doing with Microsoft's technologies. I love seeing front line implementations and the hills they had to climb to get to what they have. But there was none of that this year. They brought out a robot as part of some new Robotics group in Microsoft and they brought...
I am heading out to TechEd this year. I have been going to TechEd since 2002 and find this and PDC to be exciting events and usually well done by Microsoft. You really do leave with a strong sense of excitement of what you are able to do for the next year. I will be posting a lot of posts (hopefully) while I am in TechEd about my trip there and I have brought a camera - so hopefully I will be posting photos as well. For those that are going - I once posted (back in 2004) a blog entry on what you...
Ever want to get information for a reliable source then find what you need in a book but really not that interested in buying the entire book? Well, that is the type of customer Wrox is going after with the introduction of their new "Chapters on Demand" service. You are now able to purchase individual chapters as a PDF file. Looking at the site, you will also find a lot of free chapters made available as well. Rather interesting to see how it goes - some people will love it and others will not. Funny...
Two of my latest books just hit the market - Professional C# 2008 and Professional Visual Basic 2008, both from Wrox. The back cover of the C# book is as follows: Updated for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio® 2008, this book is the ultimate guide to C# 2008 and its environment. Beginning with a look into the architecture and methodology of .NET, the team of superlative authors explains why the C# language cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather, must be considered in parallel with the .NET Framework....
It is quite easy to say that the IT world is a diverse world. For instance, it is quite rare that you would find an enterprise that is built upon a single vendor’s technology stack. Instead, you most likely find that a company is made up of a patchwork of systems. Some of the systems are based upon UNIX, some Microsoft, and some others (sometimes items that are considered legacy). A company’s software and data repositories are something that grows quite organically over time. Usually you will find...
The new edition of the Wrox ASP.NET book is officially on the shelves today! Amazon received their shipment and it is now in stock for a CHEAP $34.64. My co-authors, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader, revamped this book and added quite a number of new pages to deal with the new features from AJAX to IIS 7 to LINQ to this book. We really focused on helping the ASP.NET developer understand the tools, APIs, controls, and environments at their disposal for this release. ASP.NET is, in my humble opinion,...
Though just rumors at the moment, there has been some talk in some computer journals that they are hearing that Vista's Service Pack 1 is going to be released in the next few weeks. One reported that Microsoft is aiming for February 15th for the *much anticipated* release. I, myself, have seen these rumblings in both Wired and Computer World magazines. Though the RC1 build has been out for some time, I have always been rather wary of installing a beta or an RC build of a service pack. I really worry...
UPDATE: THIS DEAL HAS EXPIRED IT SEEMS. SORRY. Almost - but really I consider this a giveaway. Amazon is selling the Wrox Box for $30 USD! That is incredible really. There are four books in this box and there are some really good ones that I have on my shelf! These books and content include: Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Professional C# 2005 Professional .NET Framework 2.0 Professional .NET 2.0 Generics CD-ROM with more than 700 pages of bonus chapters from 10 other .NET 2.0 and SQL Server(TM) 2005 Wrox...
Scott Hanselman beat me to the punch, but come Feb 14th, our latest and greatest edition of the Professional ASP.NET book is coming out. The book has a ton of new content and was exciting to put together - but man, did it take some serious time to do (especially when all three of us have real jobs, kids, newborns, animals, etc to deal with). The book is big ... really BIG - 1728 pages, so it can serve many other useful purposes after you are done reading it! :) The book description from the WROX.com...
Oracle just released its latest version of ODP.NET. This version, for Oracle 11g, provides enhancements and the much anticipated Instant Client and User Defined Types (UTDs). One big issue in the past when you were working with ODP.NET for your ASP.NET applications was that you had to install a tremendously large Oracle client application that took some time. Now with the instant client, you simply XCopy your client to the server you want it at. Very easy. UDTs was also another feature that allows...
I got one of the first Zune players when it came out. There were things that I liked/disliked about it. The worse thing about it was the software that it came with. It was clunky and not to practical so I really didn't end up using it that often. Though, with that said, Microsoft recently released the new 2.0 version of the Zune software which was basically a complete new software package. With the new software and the changes to the firmware that was made to the Zune player along with the client...
Spent the weekend so far using the new release of Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET AJAX. More specifically, I have been using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Adding the new controls to your VS2008 toolbox is a straight-forward process, but when I added them - at first everything was fine - but after a few hours they seemed to magically disappear. Trying to add them again didn't seem to do anything at all as nothing changed. Right-clicking on the VS2008 toolbox and selecting Show All actually did...
Along with Visual Studio 2008 becoming available for download off of MSDN - there are a whole slew of new products (some free) that are now available with this new release. A release of VS2008 also means that the RTM (or final) release of the .NET Framework 3.5 is out and available for download. It is important to note that if you install VS2008, that it will install the .NET Framework 3.5 for you, so you won't have to make this additional install. In addition to the .NET Framework 3.5 and VS2008,...
You will now find that Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 on MSDN for certain subscribers. It will be there soon for everyone, but if you are a Volume User on MSDN, then you might not find it there yet (as of yesterday). I was pretty excited for this release. Once installed, I had to also install JetBrain's ReSharper and it requires you to do a command line install. Once the .msi for ReSharper is on your machine, you will have to use the following command to install it for VS2008. msiexec...
Yes, we have Windows Server 2008 coming. Yes, also SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Framework 3.5, and more - but probably one of the more exciting new items to come at this same time is IIS 7. As Scott Guthrie states in his recent blog post on IIS, this is a major update to the technology. IIS 7 will allow for a plug-in architecture and allows you to take out all the pieces of the IIS stack that your applications don't need. It also allows you to build your own extensions and plug...
Want to join a .NET development team that works on with the latest and greatest? A team that is making a difference in the collective investment space? I have a couple of spots for some new team members in our St. Louis office. I am looking for strong .NET developers with the following focus: · .NET 2.0/3.0 · ASP.NET · AJAX · JavaScript · HTML (of course) · CSS · VS2005 · And more…. The company is Lipper and we have some outstanding benefits. Send me your information via the Contact part of this...
As noted to me from Scott Hanselman, Microsoft just released the CTP1 of the XML Schema Explorer. Seems that there are a lot of changes coming in the XML space for the .NET 3.5 release and the XML tools that are currently present in VS2005 will be no more as they are replaced by some new XML tools - the XML Schema Designer being one of them. Here is a screenshot of the new XML Schema Explorer. You can see from this screenshot that the schema is open on the left-hand side of the shot, while the schema...
While I am thinking about Silverlight, I am looking forward to Devin Rader and company's new Silverlight 1.0 book from Wrox that is coming out this Fall! Devin is one of the main characters from Infragistics and due to the nature of his job of building controls for this company - he is usually neck deep in all the latest and greatest stuff coming out of Redmond. Stay tuned. Buy today: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCD... http://www.amazon.com/Silve...
Microsoft just launched a beta version of an application called Tafiti. A nice test application from Microsoft that demonstrates - probably most importantly - the use of Silverlight. For those new to Silverlight - Microsoft's official one paragraph description of this technology is: "Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming...
I've known Kevin for a number of years as a friend and more recently as a co-worker. "G" has just started his blog at http://geekswithblogs.net/k... and is one of the .NET voices of St. Louis. Kevin's focus is on the Smart Client and especially in the area of Smart Client frameworks. In fact, he is giving a presentation on a framework that he has been working on for some time. It is quite worth the look. Glad to see you blogging finally Kevin...
Oracle has released a new version of ODP.NET as a Beta today. You can find it here. This release offers some outstanding features ODP.NET developers have been waiting for. The new feature list is as follows: Oracle Data Provider for .NET Features Instant Client Support: Smaller ODP.NET client installation User-Defined Types: Map Oracle objects and collections to .NET custom types and support REFs to object types Process Database Down Events: ODP.NET automatically frees connections of a downed Data...
At least this is the first review of the Professional XML book that I have seen - there may be others. But Tech-Unity did a review and got some of the purposes of the book right on the button - "This isn't a book about learning XML. This is a book about integrating XML into advanced programming and development. As the blurb on the back goes, "Wrox Professional Guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals". If that...
Another book! I and some friends just finished a new release of our Visual Basic book. This is another book I wrote with the wonderful Kent Sharkey! :) We really cleaned up this version of the book. This book came together quite well and shows not only the core of .NET 2.0 in depth - but it also covers the new ground of .NET 3.0. The .NET Framework 3.0 includes the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The table...
I was recently in an article detailing the power of putting an Oracle 10g database together with a .NET application. Oracle Magazine recently did an article of what I have been working on for the last year as the Technical Architect for Lipper. Take a read. The article intro goes: "Developers want - and need - more choice than ever. From shopping cart applications to Web 2.0, from SOA to the database, from .NET to Java, programmers face increasing challenges in an increasingly diverse workplace."...
I have been looking at the best ways in which Lipper can work with Excel in our next-generation application and took a look at ExcelPackage - an Office Open XML file creation library. I was quite impressed with how easy it is to create Excel documents on the fly with our latest financial information and then to delivery that file to the end user via a web service or something. The nice thing is that you can create exciting looking Excel documents (using Office 2007) on the server with very little...
This week marked the release of my latest book - Professional XML. I wrote this with friend Kent Sharkey and some other authors including Michael Kay (editor of the XSLT specification and other things). This book came out really nice and after quickly covering XML - goes straight into covering all the major technologies that are based upon XML. The Amazon site doesn't seem to provide the table of contents at the moment, so here it is: 1. XML Syntax 2. XML Editors 3. XHTML and CSS 4. XFL-FO 5. Document...
It was nice to see "Mr. ASP.NET" himself (Scott Guthrie) give a nice review of the latest version of my ASP.NET 2.0 book on Amazon just recently
Talking with Microsoft, I learned of some of the additions they are making for .NET Orcas (due at the end of this year). I am investing quite heavily into Windows Forms projects here at my company; therefore this environment is quite important to what I am doing here. Some of the highly touted items that are being added to Windows Forms are a lot of WPF interoperability items. This was announced at last year's TechEd, but the idea is that you will be able to host WPF controls directly inside of a...
Ok, I was tagged by Jim Minatel and I have to list five things about myself that you might not be aware of. #1 – I work for Lipper, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reuters. I just moved to Lipper as their Technical Architect after about 5 years at Reuters. I am leading the effort to design and build their next-generation platform and premium product offering (all .NET of course)! #2 – I am married to an outstanding lady I met in Europe. She's from Finland and we have three kids aged 8, 6, and 1 together....
Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie are the keynote speakers to this Microsoft-centric Web Developers conference held in the beautiful desert of Las Vegas. The conference is from Monday, April 30th till May 2nd and has sessions on everything from Windows Live, to AJAX, to LINQ, to the topic I am most interesting in right now - WPF/E. I wonder if my friend Laurence is going to be there...
Lipper/Reuters is looking for some top .NET talent to work on some C#/.NET 2.0 projects on my team. Interested in doing some fun and exciting work? Send me an email through the Contact section of this blog
Installed Windows Vista back on my machine. Took it off for a while due to the fact that the new Zune software didn't work on Vista. It does now - so I'm back! :) In installing Windows Vista, for the second time - one thing that took me a while was finding all the software for my Microsoft Keyboard with Fingerprint Reader. You can find the software for both the keyboard and the fingerprint reader here: http://www.microsoft.com/ha... It is two separate pieces of software...
I just really started playing around with WPF and XAML and how to build an application in this new format. I really like it, but at the same time, I have a lot to still learn! For my first example, I wanted a form that would have some sort of event that caused UI to change in some manner. For this, I put together a form with a simple Button control on it and a place to put some results on the form after the button is clicked. This form really needs two pieces to work - Window1.xaml and Window1.xaml.cs....
As everyone is probably blogging ... Vista is out! Yeah! Very nice. I am quite looking forward to have Vista on my machine full time now as a finished product and I am very much looking forward to MSFT Office 2007 and the abilities it gives developers to more easily build within its environment. Have you seen the new VSTO Special Edition for Visual Studio 2005? If not, then this is something to check out. It seems quite easy to program to from the demos that I have seen. I am also looking at the...
There are so many new items out for download today. The first set are all the new .NET Framework 3.0 downloads: .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components Windows SDK for Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0 Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP There was also a release of VSTO 2005 SE: http://www.microsoft.com/do...
Java has always been good at getting its code down to the smallest of devices. .NET made attempts at entering this space a little while back when SPOT came out that allowed .NET developers to write code for some small devices such as some Microsoft watches. SPOT has gone away it seems but the work applied there has brought forth the new and upcoming .NET Micro Framework. This is a development environment that will allow for .NET development on a small device. The size of the framework will only be...
According to Steve Lasker, the Microsoft marketing machine has renamed SQL Everywhere to SQL Server Compact Edition. If you haven't looked at SQL CE (the new name) yet, I suggest you do. I posted earlier on some good links to some info on this product
http://www.microsoft.com/do... The new CTP is available for the Orcas version of Visual Studio. This is the version which will allow for Windows Presentation Foundation development. I understand that the Windows Workflow Foundation and the Windows Communication Foundation pieces are not yet included and will come in a later version. This CTP includes what some of the items which will be in the post-.NET Framework 3.0...
Microsoft's Sandcastle was released as a CTP just recently. This is a tool for .NET 2.0 that allows you to create documentation from the XML comments that are found in a DLL. This is a tool that is meant to compete with NDOC which hasn't really had the greatest support for generics found in .NET 2.0. I haven't tried Sandcastle myself yet, but here is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/do...
A very nice list of WCF / .NET Framework 2.0 downloads from the IDesign team. http://www.idesign.net/ides
Made the Oracle press release on their new .NET integration tools: http://www.oracle.com/corpo
I have been working in the area of Web services for some time and I am on a project where I needed to distribute some extremely large datasets to some clients (Windows Forms). So, imagine an interface where you need to request information about an entity and you have a service where you can send in an array of entities to then get back an array of result sets about each one of the identifiers passed in. We had one such application and it worked quite nicely in that we built some ASP.NET 2.0 Web services...
Scott Guthrie posts about the upcoming Atlas 1.0 release at http://weblogs.asp.net/scot... The highlights include: The only date mentioned is the end of the year for the beta - then will come an RC and then they will decide later when to release the product. Atlas will be fully compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS2005. Atlas will have a outstanding support model and MSFT is committed to supporting it for the next 10 years. The names...
Oh yeah .... Scott Hanselman beat me to the punch, but Mission “Build Biggest Book Possible” has been completed! Our Professional ASP.NET 2.0 book from Wrox just had to get bigger with all the cool stuff we wanted to add. 300 new pages! So big, that we could only offer the book in hardback because they don't make bindings big enough to handle all the pages (~1,700). Its called, Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition (because it is just so special). :) And as was stated by others: Here's...
So many releases ... so little time. The July CTP release of .NET 3.0 has been put out. Some links: The Annoucement .NET Framework 3.0 July CTP Runtime Components Windows SDK for .NET Framework 3.0 July CTP Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation Release Candidate 4 .NET 3.0 July CTP Read Me File Determining Which Build of Windows Vista and .NET 3.0 Development Tools is Right for You Windows Communication Foundation Virtual Labs ...
http://www.oracle.com/techn... Oracle has released ODP.NET for those that need to work with Oracle from their ASP.NET applications, Windows Forms applications, and more. This is what you would use for your .NET 2.0 applications as well. This release includes the following: Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003 10.2.0.2.20 Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2005 10.2.0.2.20 Oracle Data Provider for .NET 1.x 10.2.0.2.20 Oracle Data Provider...
From Scott Mitchell ... outstanding! http://www.asp.net/learn/da...
The new documentation has arrived. That will make it easier. I have two of the leading WCF books that were written right before the June CTP and they seem to already be out of date, so it is good to have some current docs. http://wcf.netfx3.com/files
http://www.microsoft.com/do... The June CTP of WinFx, .NET 3.0, Avalon, Indigo, Windows Workflow was released today. Nice
The .NET Framework 3.0, formally known as WinFx, formally known as Indigo and Avalon, has released a new website: http://www.netfx3.com/
At TechEd 2006, I was quite impressed with the new SQL Server Everywhere. I am not sure why ‘Everywhere’, but I guess just because this program is so dang easy to install, that you will just start using it in all of your applications – therefore it will get installed ‘everywhere’. SQL Everywhere was formally called SQL Server Mobile and has been expanded to now run on the desktop. Rather excited about it myself as we are going to use it as a local store in our new smart...
Dang, I really really wanted to run Windows Vista on my new Lenovo (formally IBM) Thinkpad T60. I installed it just fine and got all the drivers working, but I need three things in order for this to be my work laptop. One, I need Microsoft Outlook and that worked just fine. I need our work-based messaging program to work. It didn't at first, but you can run this program using the Program Compatibility Wizard and assign it to run in a Windows XP SP2 context. Then the last program I need is Nortel's...
On Somasegar's WebLog, there was a post about the name change from WinFx to the .NET Framework 3.0. There is also a clarifying post from Jason Zander's WebLog on the matter. This is an interesting move and something I am still trying to understand because as I start digging into what this really means, I don't think it is a great idea. So, what is the deal? WinFx has simply been renamed to the .NET Framework 3.0 ... nothing more and that is the problem. When I install the .NET Framework 3.0, I was...
I attended this talk about how to build Windows Forms 2005 apps that can later deal with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) components. Interesting, but the entire talk could have been covered in about 15 minutes. Recommended links from the talk include: Windows Forms Websitehttp://www.windowsfo... Windows Forms FAQhttp://www.windowsforms.... Windows Forms Interoperability Bloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/m...
This is cheap for right under $100. Wrox is releasing their “WROX BOX” on Amazon starting May 9th and it includes the following books and chapters: Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Professional C# 2005 Professional .NET Framework 2.0 Professional .NET 2.0 Generics CD-ROM with more than 700 pages of bonus chapters from 10 other .NET 2.0 and SQL Server™ 2005 Wrox books DVD with 180-day trial version of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Professional Edition This is a top of the line...
Do you classify yourself as a Windows Forms developer? Do you have a stack of .NET books by your bedside? If so, I am looking for a senior Windows Forms tech lead (team of 8) for an important and exciting project with an outstanding company. Here are some points about the job: Must be a US citizen or already have legal status to work in the US Must be able to relocate to St. Louis. Must be self-starting and enthusiastic Must be capable of being a team leader over a multi-cultural group of developers...
I just noticed when looking at the ASP.NET Developer Portal on MSDN that my new article on uploading files in ASP.NET 2.0 has come out. You can read the article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/a... Enjoy
Well, not exactly you, but NASA is allowing for us common folk to send our name into outer space aboard the spacecraft Dawn which is heading to the asteroid belt. Your name will be placed on a microchip and sent on the spacecraft! I'm signed up ... are you? The link:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.g... HEY .. BTW ... the site is built on ASP.NET...
https://www.microsoftelearn... I just noticed that Microsoft is offering a bunch of free online e-learning courses. These courses usually cost $99. Have fun. The courses include the following: Course 2924: Building Data Components in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 (2) Summary: This course provides students with a focused, hands-on environment to experience the new features and functionality related to building Data Components in Microsoft® Visual Studio®...
I'm heading to DevConnections tomorrow in Las Vegas to give a couple of talks on ASP.NET 2.0 and XML Web Services. I really like this conference - not because of Vegas, but because it is a good sized event where as an attendee you can really talk to other attendees and easily talk with the speakers. So, I am looking forward to attending the other sessions myself as there are some excellent speakers lined up for this event. Look for me
Today, the book Scott Hanselman & Devin Rader & I put together (Professional ASP.NET 2.0), is for sale on Amazon. You can really tell that people are excited about ASP.NET 2.0 since the book is ranked 404 on the Amazon book list (as of 8am this morning) and is ranked #8 on the technology book list! ScottGu and team did an excellent job giving us one of the more outstanding technologies out there to put into production today! Cheers to the ASP.NET team...
http://blogs.msdn.com/somas... .NET 2.0 and VS2005 have shipped today and will first be available to MSDN subscribers later in the day. Outstanding! I've been waiting two years for this! :)
My second article on the Media Share Library Starter Kit is out: ASP.NET Jumpstart: Building the Data Tier of the Media Share Library Starter Kit
Whew! In addition to the Professional ASP.NET 2.0 book I have coming out this month, I also co-authored two other books coming out this month: Professional C# 2005 & Professional VB 2005 Both these books were reworked for the lastest release of both of these languages. The table of contents for the Professional C# 2005 is as follows: PART I: THE C# LANGUAGE.1. .NET Architecture. 2. C# Basics. 3. Objects and Types. 4. Inheritance. 5. Operators and Casts. 6. Delegates and Events. 7. Memory Management...
I just noticed that Bookpool is offering all Wrox/Wiley books for 50% off! You can get the new Professional ASP.NET 2.0 book for only $25 bucks. Not bad
The first article in a series I am doing for MSDN just came online. The ASP.NET Jumpstart series will run an ASP.NET hobbyist through the creation of their own application/starter kit. This first article, Introduction to the Media Share Library Starter Kit, is an introduction to the starter kit and runs you through installing and configuring the starter kit. ALSO, at the top of the page, you will notice that you can download the starter kit yourself to install on your machine. To steal from myself,...
This is an exciting month for me as my book, Professional ASP.NET 2.0, will finally make it out. I started working on this book at the beginning of 2004 ... yes, that is right ... 2004! This lead to a release of the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta Preview book which was based upon Beta 1 code. Since then, I re-worked the table of contents so that it would fit nicely in the 1000+ page Professional model that makes a Wrox book so good and asked some good ASP.NET authors out there to help me finish the project. The...
From Kent's plethora of new content list, I noticed that my Time Tracker Starter Kit articles have made it online at MSDN: Introduction to the Time Tracker Starter KitExtending the Time Tracker Starter Kit Enjoy...
Paul Vick introduces Linq in VB .... oh yeah
In a panel discussion on the BCL (.NET's Base Class Library) Future here at PDC. Pretty interesting. Some interesting tidbits: The manager stated that he has been on the BCL team which started in 1997! BCL 3.0 will have a better side-by-side story. MSCORLIB will load in 3.0 and you will then be able to choose which stack from other BCL versions to use. Therefore your application can use the core MSCORLIB from BCL 3.0 while using other parts of the .NET Framework from versions 1.0/1.1/2.0 etc. Interesting....
I just had a conversation with the head of the Microsoft Windows Forms team in the developer lounge and told him that one of the biggest questions I get about Windows Forms is whether or not it is dead. Avalon is coming and the rumor was that this 2005 release of .NET 2.0 was the last release of Windows Forms. Asked about this, his reply was that IT IS TOTALLY NOT TRUE! His comments included: This is not the last version of Windows Forms (Windows Forms is not dead) The Windows Forms team is still...
Session PRS 312Title: ASP.NET: Future Directions Developing Rich Applications with "Atlas" (Part 1)Speakers: Shanku Niyogi, Group Program Manager, Microsoft This is one of the sessions I was really excited to see. The demo by ScottGu earlier in the keynote here at PDC 2005 in LA was outstanding. So, I really wanted to dig in more and see what “Atlas” was all about. This session was held in Hall C/D and MAN is it packed with people. There is definitely more than a thousand people here....
http://beta.asp.net/default... Atlas has now been released! ScottGu talks about it in his blog as well. Outstanding product from Microsoft
It was interesting that they only allowed photography of Bill Gates for the first minute of his presentation. Also, you weren’t allowed to use your laptops in the crowd as well – so I ended up taking my notes on paper instead of doing it with Microsoft Word like I normally do. Oh well. So, there was a lot said at the Bill Gates keynote, so I will only go through what I think were the highlights of the presentation. Video – Bill started off with a bit of humor and presented a video...
I had a tough time to get here to LA, but I made it! For some strange reason, I was thinking I was flying out of St. Louis at 11.30am, but my flight was at 9.40am ... so I missed my flight. Then I did some stand-by flights through Dallas to LA. In Dallas, I ran into Rob Howard who was lugging around a large box containing a monitor or something. Arriving into LA, there was no power to much of the city. And the hotel I am staying at is NOT in the greatest part of town -- oh well. Can't wait for the...
Looking over the PDC sessions that are available, the ones that I find the most exciting right now include: TLN307 C#: Future Directions in Language Innovation from Anders Hejlsberg Day/Time: Wednesday, September 14 3:15 PM- 4:30 PM Room: Halls C & D (Petree Hall) Day/Time: Thursday, September 15 2:15 PM- 3:30 PM Room: 402 AB Speaker(s): Anders Hejlsberg Session Type(s): Breakout Session Level(s): 300 Track(s): Tools & Languages Join Anders Hejlsberg, Distinguished Engineer and chief architect...
I still have been working on adding resources to my Learn ASP.NET page. If you see any good 2.0 resources online that I have missed, let me know. Thanks. Here's the link: Click Here
Looks like my Club Web Site Starter Kit articles made it out and are now available on MSDN: Introduction to the Club Web Site Starter KitExtending the Club Web Site Starter Kit Enjoy
For those that haven't seen it yet, the Personal Web Site Starter Kit based upon ASP.NET 2.0 is out and I have a couple of MSDN articles for you on how to work with it: Introduction to the Personal Web Site Starter Kit Extending the Personal Web Site Starter Kit Enjoy...
Neowin is reporting that the BBC is going to make their shows available to Internet users. Outstanding. Now I can see the new Doctor Who 2005 show that they have started this year! :)
First time I have seen the term .NET Framework 2004. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/... Hopefully that's a mistake. ;)
Mr. Kent Sharkey informs everyone who may be interested in working with the latest ASP.NET 2.0 bits that the November 2004 CTP is better than the December 2004 CTP package. Where do you get these Community Technology Previews btw? From logging onto your MSDN subscription, that's how! Bill Gates is trying to arrange a meeting with the President of Brazil in order to convince him about the evils of open source and why they should stick it out with Microsoft. Interesting read here on this topic. I would...
I started putting together a resource list - kind of a 'best of' - of all the resources out there on the Internet to help you learn ASP.NET. There is so much material out there, that I wanted to put together a list for those that don't really have the time to go through it all and just give them links to what I deem is some of the most valuable material people should be aware of. Here's the link: http://www.geekswithblogs.n... I plan on expanding this list...
INETA LATAM put out a great newsletter this month. Here is the English version:http://www.willydev
Neowin is reporting that Microsoft is to release a new (for them) anti-spyware program which they recently purchased from GIANT. This link includes numerous screenshots as well. Pretty interesting. I use Ad-Aware at present as well as SpyBot. Another interesting program is HijackThis. I *LOVE* anti-spyware programs. :) http://www.neowin.net/comme... ...
I just got my VS2005 CTP Nov 2005 disc in the mail and installed it yesterday. Today I tried pulling up an old project and creating a new project, but I found that there was nothing but the HTML controls showing up in my toolbox. I even tried a reset (right-click for this option) and that didn't work as well. Googling ... I found this solution and it worked: http://weblogs.asp.net/epor... You have to delete the toolbox.tbd file from %userprofile%\local settings\application...
From Robert Hurlbut's blog ... they are starting up a Boston CodeBrew! Outstanding! Our CodeBrew here in St. Louis was outstanding.
http://www.ineta.org/Deskto... [FROM THE INETA SITE] We are very happy to announce that INETA will be adding 8 new speakers to the North American Speaker Bureau for the 2005 calendar year. They are: Don Kiely Kathleen Dollard Joel Semeniuk Russ Nemhauser Stephen Forte Jim Duffy Phil Weber Craig Utley We will have their bios up on ineta.org shortly. INETA member group leaders can submit requests for these speakers immediately.Congrats to the new speakers,...
Nice to see Chris Pels out there pitching the “truth” to the local government on technology issues before us. http://geekswithblogs.net/c
LEARN ASP.NET:Items of Importance in the ASP.NET World This is an ever-changing list of ASP.NET resources out there for folks that are interested in learning about ASP.NET and what it offers. Also, with the huge amount of ASP.NET material out there, this list attempts to cut through the clutter and provide you with a list of some of the top material out there. Feel free to add additional items by either emailing me or adding via the comments below. Thanks. If I am *JUST* starting, where do I start?...
Sometimes it can be the little things. Good job Microsoft on sending over an XBOX and 30 games+ to everyone's ASP.NET friend Steve Smith! http://armyadvice.org/armys
The International .NET Association (INETA) has appointed two new board members for a three year term. This brings the board membership to seven people. The two new board members are: Julie Lerman Chris Pels ----------------------------- Julie Lerman leads the Vermont .NET User Group. Chris Pels leads the Boston .NET User Group. Both of these folks have gone out of their way to help make INETA what it is today. They are both outstanding volunteers and are eager to help INETA grow in this next year....
Many things are happening on the search front if you haven't been watching the tech news as of late. Just recently, Microsoft launched the beta to their online search engine at: http://beta.search.msn.com I was shocked and chuckled a bit when I saw the simplicity of the page here .... kinda looks like some other site I know. :) One nice feature was the local search. Not sure if they have to work on the local search. For an example of this working, I typed in “Garage Door”, pretending...
Here in St. Louis, we had the first Code Brew (as we call it)! We have been meeting at user group meetings for the last four years. It is nice to always go to a user group and meet others, network, and see some great presentations. But a few of us wanted a bit more interaction - so born was the idea of a Code Brew. We held the first one in my dining room. Here is the idea of what a Code Brew is and how it can work for you too: A Code Brew consists of a small group of peers (4-10 to be effective)...
There was some interesting Q&A from the VB Team chat today: PaulV [MS] (Expert): Q: Paul, you blogged about refactoring today. Is there any chance there will be additional refactoring support post RTM but pre-Orcas?A: At this point, we haven't thought far enough beyond Whidbey to really comment one way or another. All I could say is that we are very aware of the demand among VB users for refactoring features... AmandaS_MS (Expert): Q: Are there plans for have more snippets than are packaged today...
Not that election mind you ... but the Duncan Mackenzie VB usage survey. Take the survey here
Tired of reading about tech tech tech all day long? How about words of wisdom from someone famous? Here are some famous people who blog (any others?): Wil Wheaton (Star Trek NG, Stand By Me) - http://www.wilwheaton.net/Dave Barry (Columnist) - http://weblog.herald.com/co... Bridges (Actor) - http://www.jeffbridges.com/ (Click on Latest Link) ** Artistic BlogAnna Kournikova - http://www.kournikova.com/j... Roker (TV Weatherman) - http://www.alroker.com/jour... (Musician)...
Over the weekend, ScottGu announced how they are doing on getting Beta 2 out the door. Pretty interesting to hear how many tests they run on ASP.NET. Wow
As posted here. This is nice to see
No fix at the moment, but Microsoft reported an ASP.NET vulnerability yesterday: http://www.microsoft.com/se... It deals with the canonicalization of files and a hacker's ability to play with the URL to get at files they shouldn't. There are safeguards to protect yourself in the meantime. Check out KB article 887459: http://support.microsoft.co...
Hey ... if you are in St. Louis, we have Jeff Julian and John Alexander tonight! September Meeting - Test-Driven Development and Unit Testing in Microsoft .NETMonday, September 26, 20045:30 - 6:30 pm Welcome6:30 - 8:30 pm ProgramJeff Julian, John Alexander One City Place DriveCreve Coeur, MO 63141[MAP] Unit Testing is a crucial piece of the development process. The problem is, most of us don't put the time in to properly construct this portion of the process. By skipping this portion, we cause issues...
Good friend, Devin Rader, is getting married this weekend and the bachelor party is tonight! Hmmmmm
Many people might have already seen this, but here is a post about the upcoming changes to Beta 2 of ASP.NET. Shucks is what I say. I really liked the DynamicImage control. It was a fun control
HAPPY Friday the 13th! Well .... I know we are in our eighth month here of the year, but I decided to post my half-year favs of 2004 (please take the topics and post your own as well ... if you wish). Drum-roll please ..... Fav Movie WatchedThe House of Sand and Fog - This movie totally shocked me with that ending. For some reason, I found this movie very intense and the acting is SUPERB! Fav CDI know it is old, but I spent the first six months listening to Sugar: Copper Blue. Oh, what a great album...
Devin Rader just pointed me out to the Web Messenger beta! Cool. Great for those moments when you can't install Messenger on the machine you are on
I promised that I would tell how it went at the Neste Rally in Jyvaskyla, Finland this year. I really got into rally after playing way too much RallySport on the XBOX and so did my 3 year old boy Henri. We decided that we wanted to also see the real-deal and this was our second time down to one of the biggest events Finland has to offer (along with the wife-carrying contest, the sitting-in-the-sauna contest and the boot-throwing contest). First off, Henri really enjoyed himself as he is a big car-enthusiast....
Wow, I came home from vacation and found a box with copies of my latest book in the mail - WROX's ASP.NET 2.0 Beta Preview. It is great to see it finally out and available for everyone. Hope you all enjoy it! ... can you believe I am ALREADY working on the next version of the same book? It never stops! ;)...
Had drinks and dinner with Scott Watermasysk, DonXML, Chris Pels and Keith Pleas. We spent the evening answering the problems of the tech industry as a whole - it was a fun evening! Scott reports ... Dang ... he didn't like my pizza restaurant choice ... you should have eaten more of my selection and not Keith's “white“ pizza! :)...
blogs.ineta.org was launched today by Jeff Julian and Devin Rader! It is like the blogs.msdn.com site that is really a finer aggregation of weblogs.asp.net. Blogs.ineta.org is a finer aggregation of www.geekswithblogs.net. Enjoy...
I know I'm late to post this ... but congrats to friend and community peer G. Andrew Duthie on getting a position with Microsoft. He is an outstanding individual and has continuously worked in the greater community to help others. Andrew has always been a big supporter of INETA and has helped INETA greatly. Thanks for everything Andrew
Earlier I posted about the new Reuters RSS feeds that were made available on Reuters.com recently. These are news feeds which provide news headlines by category as well as the first sentence of the story and a link to the story as it appears on the Reuters.com website. I decided to play with them myself using ASP.NET 2.0 and I thought that I would share with you the details on how to use these RSS feeds with the DataList and XmlDataSource controls. The XmlDataSource control is an outstanding new...
If you haven't seen the INETA movie yet - then check it out! We got a 5 minute movie made which details out what we are all about. View the 300K version View the 56K version...
Geez, as if we needed another reason to go to MSDN's ASP.NET Developer Center, but I have found myself hitting it at least once a day to see what interesting pose Kent will be in. One day he is covering his face, the next he's not, the next he is but with one eye showing. Is there logic to this madness???? ;)...
I was just on Amazon buying the first ever Barbie XBOX game (I have a 6 year old daughter!) and when I was done purchasing it - Amazon gave me a list of recommendations from all the stuff I look at. I thought my recommendations where funny: Your Recommendations: SpongeBob SquarePants: The Battle for Bikini Bottomby THQPrice: $36.95 Used & new from $34.97 Finding Nemoby THQPrice: $19.99 Used & new from $13.00 Programming C#, Third Editionby Jesse LibertyPrice: $30.57 Used & new from $22.95...
My Books Articles Wrote Introduction to the My Web Pages Starter Kit, 2007 My Web Pages Starter Kit Internals, 2007 Introduction to the Media Share Library Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Extending the Time Tracker Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Introduction to the Time Tracker Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Extending the Club Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Introduction to the Club Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Extending the Personal Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Introduction to the Personal Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN...
In looking at Beta 1 of ASP.NET 2.0, I noticed some big property changes to the SiteMapDataSource control from the community previews. First off, the properties SiteMapViewType and StartingNodeType have been removed. This is good, I thought that changing the SiteMapViewType property to Flat was odd to say the least and didn't see much use for it. In place of these removals, the new properties ShowStartingNode, StartFromCurrentNode, StartingNodeOffset and StartingNodeUrl have been added. These properties...
Sorry for all these non-technical posts today ... but it's Friday. I heard a rumor that Walt Disney was thinking of remaking the movie Tron with modern special effects. I don't know if it would be a remake or if they would be doing some similar-type of story. I am wondering if the rumors are true though, only because the Internet Movie Database usually posts these things and there is nothing on a new Tron movie on their site. I myself think it would be pretty dang cool to redo the movie as I did...
In the monthly release of user group presentations from Microsoft, this month's presentation is titled: Microsoft Web Development Roadmap. This covers the Microsoft Web development roadmap, leading in to ASP.NET 2.0 and the Express products for Visual Web Developer and SQL Express. These presentations are free to the public and include some talking points...
Hopefully it is a joke, but according to TheServerSide.net, Clippy (from Office) is going to be apart of VS2005. HOPEFULLY if it is true, that it won't be enabled by default
An article came out on the front page of the Money section of USA Today on the loses being taken with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I mentioned this also earlier as an issue and it seems that it isn't just me. Hopefully SP2 of XP will address everyone's issues as one of the comments from my blog stated. They also report on which other browsers you should give a try...
Roy Osherove talks about his first user group experience and how cool it was. If you want to also have a fun and geeky time, be sure to visit the INETA site to find a user group near you. There are more than 500 user groups listed there
I hate to say this, but I think that the browser wars are back - and back in a big way. The reason - well, I think partly for these little thoughts and concerns that are going around my head today and yesterday. I am having more and more problems browsing around the Internet as time goes on it seems and I am getting slightly annoyed about it - so I am thinking - “I wonder what it will be like to use THIS browser here?”. I was a big Netscape user till Netscape 4. Once IE4 came out - I...
I just finished doing all the writing, author review, second author review and the rest of the steps to get my latest book out the door! WHEW! (did you hear the big sigh!?!) This was an interesting book to do and rather difficult to write - only because the builds kept changing so much from one build to the next, that I would always have to go back and redo/hack portions of the book that I already completed. The final result was just finished this last weekend and I am VERY HAPPY with the results...
This is one of funniest photos I've seen in a few months
Another presentation for .NET User Groups to use from Microsoft has been made available from the INETA website! Microsoft is giving INETA user groups a new presentation each month. You can find this month's presentation here. The name of this month's presentation is: Microsoft Services Oriented Architecture and includes discussions on the following topics: Overview of Service Orientation (SO) Web Services and Service Orientation Microsoft’s Service Orientation offerings How to do Service Orientation...
As I posted earlier, I was at the Technology Management Conference in New York City last week. This is the largest conference for IT in the financial services industry. Reuters was one of the main sponsors of the event. It was a jam-packed event: another sign that the financial services industry is rebounding quite well in the United States, something that is mildly happening in Asia and hasn't yet seen the light of day in Europe at the moment. Reuters, while doing little last year (in my opinion),...
I just got a copy of my latest book, WROX's Professional VB.NET 2003, in the mail last week, so I am guessing the book is out and ready for sale even though Amazon at this moment says it hasn't been released yet. This was a fun book to work on and I got to write it with the likes of Billy Hollis and Rocky Lhotka - two icons in the VB world! Enjoy...
Friend and Microsoft ASP.NET Guru Rob Howard announces he has left Microsoft to start his own business. Good luck Rob! The grass is ok on this side of the fence, eh
Jan Gray – Architect //blogs.msdn.com/jangr Abhi Khune – Development Lead //blogs.msdn.com/akhune Slow Software Stinks – Don’t Ship It! Symptoms – Locked-up UI, bad citizenship, poor scaling Causes Mistakes in architecture, reuse, interfaces, data representations, algorithms Not paying attention; low prioritization Where are we? Where should we be? Is premature optimization the root of all evil? How to optimize the right stuff, the right amount, at the right time? Put...
Eric King posts a photo of the INETA UG leader conference gang. Here is the small version (all sizes include S, M, XL):...
This is a great review of INETA from a Java Guru that came to our user group leader conference. It is an ABSOLUTE MUST READ my friends!!! It is from: N. Alex Rupp
Started with a skit of two actors – one being IT and another representing development. They complained about each other and made some funny jokes about each other. Then Andy Lees was introduced. The crowd liked the skit. Andy Lees Corporate VP, Server and Tools Business States that 70% of the time IT is standing still Cause of this is complexity MSFT will reduce IT complexity Windows Server System components (SQL, Exchange, OS, etc.) all work together seamlessly … this reduces complexity...
The pre-keynote videos and presentation was in a lot lower key than previous TechEds that I have attended. Steve Ballmer was introduced and got a light amount of applause. There weren’t the funny videos that we have seen in the past, which was a strange exclusion I thought. Some notes I took of Steve Ballmer’s speech: MSFT will spend 6.8 billion (USD) on R&D this year. Thoughts: Geez, that is a heck of a lot of money. In fact, he said that only Pfizer spends more on R&D than Microsoft....
From Kent Sharkey's mention in his blog I saw a link to Fiddler. This is a nice 1.1 program that every developer should own
It is pretty exciting to be heading to the MVP Summit in Seattle, WA and to get to look a little more at what is to come. The event I understand is pretty much under NDA, so I won't be able to blog about the sessions ... but the items that are not under NDA I will post when I can! Sorry. Just spoke to Jeff Julian about heading out and he was stuck in Minneapolis/St. Paul for a few hours. I am off to meet Devin Rader in the airport in a couple of hours. See you all there and feel free to get in touch...
Steve Ballmer and Scott McNeely are doing a joint press conference this morning announcing a whole slew of new agreements between the companies. Dang interesting and it looks like we will see the JVM come back as well. There is mention in the press release about a closer bond between Java and .NET ... wonder what that could mean
As a VB'er, I am SO happy that the name of Visual Basic (of which I am an MVP for) has changed from Visual Basic .NET to Visual Basic 8.0. This info comes according to Robert Green's Visual Basic Blog and Panopticon Central. I have posted about this in the past here and here. For me, as a writer, it was ALWAYS very annoying to write “Visual Basic .NET” over and over again. Then ... was it “VB .NET” or “VB.NET” ... geez. I am going to love writing “Visual...
EWeek comes out with an article on the the Whidbey and Yukon dates being moved back to first half of 2005. Most of the article though concentrates on SQL. Another interesting point besides the dates being moved is that the official product names are now Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Now that they said the official names of the products, I am wondering when they are going to announce the official names of some of the other languages and technologies - such as Visual Basic .NET and ASP.NET....
INETA is going to be running the Birds of a Feather (BOFs) again this year. We did this at PDC 2003 as well and it was rather successful. It is an amazing addition to the overall event. YES, TechEd and PDC are great events, but it is one PPT presentation after another with a handful of questions at the end. The BOFs are meant to be community driven discussions/debates around a particular issue. There is no speaker - just a moderator for the topic and everyone is encouraged to participate and discuss...
My latest article on MSDN just came out. It covers the File Field control. Enjoy
Went to lunch with Devin Rader today and he told me about where to get the Lorem Ipsum text ... from the Lorem Ipsum site of course! (I need it for a screenshot in a book I am doing at the moment)
I just noticed that ASP.NET Pro magazine just reviewed my latest book - ASP.NET Professional Secrets. Nice
Besides looking at the candidate's issues and how they hold a pen or something of that matter, I usually head out to their websites and take a look at the code they are putting out there as well. It do find it interesting in how and what technologies people use when using technology as a tool. My review here of Presidential code is by no means saying who you should vote for - I stay away from those conversations - but use it as you wish - that's all! My first stop was in Texas country! 1) Republican...
4th, you say? What about the third? Well, I just finished author review on the 3rd Edition and then had to get the Table of Contents for the 4th edition in by tomorrow morning - so I spent some of the day on it. I think it is a great book and it will be exciting doing the 4th edition on Whidbey. If you would like to see something different in the 4th edition of the WROX Professional VB.NET book, then let me know here by commenting...
After my first post on this 'Interesting Interview: Software Patents Will Destroy Development', I started reading a little more about this issue and came across this editorial called 'Another Fine Patent Mess'. It seems that Microsoft now has a patent for sticking multiple scripts into an XML file and the author was wondering how such a thing could be patentable. I tend to agree and think we have a definite situation here. It also isn't Microsoft's fault as they are forced to play the patent game...
Scott Guthrie talks about the release dates for ASP.NET via Chris Garty
Today, INETA is officially two years old! It is hard to believe that INETA is two years old this month. When we launched INETA in February of 2002, .NET was fairly new and we came to the scene with about 40 user groups in our association. Today, we have close to 500 user groups and more than 170,000 members from all over the world that are part of INETA! Our growth is more than anyone ever imagined and outstanding as it is, it is also one of the most difficult things in managing INETA. More growth...
I have two articles on the front page of the ASP.NET Developer Center on MSDN. The first: Using JavaScript Along with ASP.NET - I used to be a big JavaScript user during my ASP 3.0 days and I was one day thinking why I didn't use JavaScript as much with ASP.NET 1.0/1.1. I think for me, was that it wasn't as easy to use as it was with ASP 3.0 and I looked at how I would accomplish the same sorts of tasks I did in the past, but now with the use of server controls. The Forgotten Controls - HTML Server...
Nice to see some great INETA activities happening in Europe! If you haven't gone to a user group meeting yet, then you are missing out! Already, there are hundreds of great user groups around the world. A .NET User Group is an outstanding way to learn .NET - learn with your peers, see it in action, see how it is making it in the field, best practices, etc...
Awhile ago, I wrote a book called the Visual Basic .NET Bible with Jason Beres. It was a fun book and it has been translated into something like more than eight languages already, which is cool. I like to look at the translations and see what they did - since they don't involve the original authors at all. The latest translated version of the Visual Basic .NET Bible that I found out there is the Spanish release. The interesting thing here is that the title of the book is just Microsoft Visual Basic...
INETA, under the program leadership of Dave Noderer, is going to be organizing BOFs again - just as we did at PDC 2003 (only bigger, badder and better!). Dave and team are looking for additional volunteers to make this a success. Volunteer and join in with the community - it's fun and you will meet some great and outstanding people! (Like Dave and the rest of our Florida friends)...
I have been typing like crazy for about a month now, working on WROX's ASP.NET 2 Beta Preview. I am excited about this book. I simply LOVE ASP.NET and so for me - it is an honor to do this book on the beta preview which is coming out sometime this year. I decided early on that this book should have examples in both C# and VB as I think developers (on average) appreciate that. It worked well for ASP.NET Professional Secrets which I put out at the end of last year. I have about 16 chapters planned,...
I just noticed that fellow INETA volunteer Julie Lerman is speaking at the Edge 2004 East conference. Cool
Very nice to see the Reuters stock jump high today! This article says we have announced the revenue slide is over (whew ... that's nice to hear), but I also heard that some of the jump is due to Thomson's inability to create a platform for Merrill Lynch. Hmmmmm. Might be cause they use JSP and not ASP.NET! ;)...
Look ... it's my friend Keith Franklin working the people for his user group! :) Sounds like the Chicago ASP.NET Exposed tour went well (not as good as St. Louis .... but oh well) ;)
According to John Alexander and from what others have been telling me, St. Louis had the largest gathering so far for the ASP.NET Roadshow that is roaming the country. That is outstanding, but we also know that the IT training/knowledge interest is extremely high in the Midwest. I am quite thankful that Microsoft came to St. Louis with this show. It wasn't too long ago where the only Midwest city that would be targeted for these sorts of things would be Chicago. When it comes to IT in St. Louis,...
My latest article just arrived on MSDN. This one is titled 'Validating ASP.NET Server Controls' and is meant to be a complete introduction to validation server controls as well as putting them to some practical uses. I also spend some time on custom validations and making them more secure by performing them client-side and server-side
I think that Devin is still looking for volunteers for INETA development. I have seen the next version of the site to come soon and it is rather cool. The guys working on it are doing an outstanding job
Though just a page with links at the moment - the St. Louis .NET User Groups has a single page for all the user groups to share (in addition to our regular sites). We think this cross-promotion will help all the user groups grow and show the strength of the user group community here in St. Louis. We actually got both http://www.stlusergroups.com and http://www.stlusergroups.org...
Devin Rader, who heads the Infrastructure committee for INETA, points out that INETA is searching for web developers for some projects
Rob Howard, PM on the ASP.NET team, came to St. Louis last night for the ASP.NET Roadshow. It was an outstanding event and the St. Louis .NET User Group along with Microsoft got around 450 people there for the event. The event covered ASP.NET Basics, ASP.NET Tips and Tricks, ASP.NET Security and ASP.NET Whidbey. Our meeting was about 3 1/2 hours long. Poor Rob - he got in a car wreck before the event here in St. Louis. He was squished between two cars (the perpetrator being a cab) - and complained...
There seems to be one topic in the .NET community that usually gets a lot of responses and can sometimes turn into an ugly debate. It’s the question – which language should I program in? Some folks choose one language and stick with it. Some are forced to choose two, because their job demands it. Though, no matter how many programming languages one uses though, they usually turn to a tried and try favorite and primarily use this one for their development purposes. When it comes to .NET languages,...
You know you are in love with technology when you have a huge painting of Gates on your wall! I thought it was pretty dang cool
I have done six .NET books all with the same editor. Today was her last day as she has decided to move onto less-stressful pastures than book acquisitions. I used to always joke in my house and say that I had two ladies that would boss me around in my life - my wife and my editor. All the best Sharon .... what am I going to do now
Rob Howard is bringing ASP.NET 2.0 to St. Louis via the ASP.NET Roadshow. We are excited and we are ready! We have around 300 people already signed up for the event and there is a bus of folks coming from Kansas City as well (4 hour drive). This will be our first meeting at St. Louis University and we have a ton of giveaways for the event. As I know it so far, we are giving away: 5 Pocket PCs MSPress books for everyone who fills out an evaluation T-Shirts Books from Sams Publishing Books from John...
FINALLY! I got a machine together - not all the parts I wanted - but good enough to get Longhorn on it. Final piece was the DVD drive. I did a clean install of Longhorn. I was quite interested in how the install process would proceed. So I will detail it out as much as I can for those people that are strange and love these details (like me). First off, there was no blue install screen where you would see the default drivers and such being installed. The first things requested was a page where I had...
I just got notice that I will be speaking at ASP.NET Connections! That's cool. My sessions will include: AWF201: Secrets of Working with HTML Server ControlsBy using the languages that are offered with the .NET Framework and ASP.NET, you can gain programmatic access to specific HTML elements. Using a little bit of ASP.NET code you can change these HTML elements into something that you can easily control and manipulate on the server before the complete set of HTML is constructed and sent to the browser,...
I am a big fan of desktop wallpapers. I usually head to National Geographic's site for these kind of things ... but I saw this post and had to use the Rally Sport one myself. AWESOME
I love Fall. It is probably my favorite time of year. I have three huge sycamore trees in my yard that drop leaves that can be 12 inches across. I also like the foods and drinks that come out at this time (except Starbucks does a poor job). My favorite is Bluemoon's pumpkin beer. If you haven't tried this beer, look for it and try to pick up a six-pack ... it is quite tasty
Looks like from this post that XML documentation will be done with 3 clicks when the beta hits the shelves (when is that btw?): ''' <summary>''' A method.''' </summary> That is nice and convenient
I liked the videos that Microsoft shows at conferences. You can tell they put a lot into them. I was lucky enough to see the 'Behind the Technology' video at PDC. That was pretty dang cool. Though it seems that I missed another cool one showing Microsoft and the Matrix. Ballmer is Neo and Gates is offering him the BIG BLUE pill or the Red pill so that he can continue to stay in Wonderland. hehe. If you find where the video can be downloaded on the Internet, post a link here please. UPDATE: Jason...
All the SYS-CON radio interviews that were done at PDC are now available. You can find a long list of .NET folk talking about what they are doing with .NET - many it seems pitching their services. ;) The one that I want to point out is the INETA interview done by our own Brian Loesgen and Dave Noderer. Check it out! PS - Why is the site done in Cold Fusion...
I was working with some others on a book that came out about a month ago, 'ASP.NET Professional Secrets', and I am finally seeing it in the book stores. That is nice as book store sales are the largest that a book can make (Borders and Barnes & Noble). Now that the book is out and I went to PDC, I am already planning the ASP.NET 2.0 version of the book and have already started outlining it. Dang ... technology moves so fast! My biggest concern is how the heck I am going to possibly fit all ASP.NET...
There seems to have been a lot of questions in the community about WROX - if they existed and what was going on. Let me report that Wrox is alive and well and is upgrading a lot of their most popular books at this moment. I worked on Professional C# 3rd Edition and the Wrox Professional VB.NET 3rd Edition. Both these books will be coming out in a couple of months time. Rob Howard and gang are working on the 3rd Edition of the Professional ASP.NET book. There are also some new books on the way. I...
I am quite upset today. Tomorrow Jeff Prosise is coming to town (St. Louis) to speak at our C# SIG and I am out of town - in NYC actually. Jeff is one of my favorite people, EXTREMELY nice and one of the best .NET people out there by far! Devin and gang will be there though, so it will go quite well. Jeff coming to St. Louis has actually caused quite a bit of buzz in St. Louis...
Rafael Munoz and family, the lead for the VB.NET MVP program, just had a new baby! Congrats to him and his wife on that as it is the best thing in life
Whew! Another article done for MSDN. I am way late, but I should be able to pump them out now that I am done with the C# book. I just wrote a pretty cool article (at least I think it is cool) on effective uses of JavaScript in your ASP.NET pages and the best ways of employing JavaScript in ASP.NET. I used to use a lot of JavaScript when I was an ASP 3.0 programmer and I noticed that I pretty much abandoned it when I moved to ASP.NET thinking that - why bother - I can keep doing these postbacks. But,...
I turned in my last chapter for WROX's Professional C# 3rd Edition. Whew! Now that the last chapter is in, it will get technically reviewed next and then I will receive what is called AR (author review) where I have to go through the chapters and address all the comments and concerns of all the reviewers. After that, the chapters go back to the editors and they review them again and then off to the printing. I understand that we won't see the book in print for another five months or so. The biggest...
The ASP.NET Roadshow is touring the USA right now. This is a roadshow conducted by the greats Scott Guthrie and Rob Howard. You can see a advert (as the Europeans would say) on the side of my blog. Steal the jpg and use it on your own blogs/websites as well and make it click through to http://www.asp.net/roadshow. Help promote a great and FREE event to show America ASP.NET 2.0! I am excited about this tour. There are a ton of people already signing up for the event. I heard from a Microsoft friend...
I am always so particular about names and the use of proper names. I have also thought about naming issues in past posts. Some people just say ... oh who cares about what the name is ... just use it - oh, I don't know why this is an obsession of mine, but it just is. Now the problem I have is that I have seen the mention of the next version of the .NET Framework being .NET Framework 1.2 in people's posts (including MSFT people) as well as reference to it being the .NET Framework 2.0. So what is it...
There are some interesting conversations going on about refactoring in VB that shouldn't be missed from the VB team. http://www.panopticoncentra... (first post) http://www.panopticoncentra... (follow-up post)...
Nice to see that Code Magazine (.NET focused) has now started putting their articles online
I have tickets tomorrow to see the final episode of the Matrix (Matrix Revolutions) at 3.45 CST! I promise no spoilers on my blog! Though I will give it a rating. I heard that they all finally find that they should have been using .NET since it has a built-in garbage collector and once they switched over - all the bad guys were removed from the program. It sounds kinda anti-climatic myself...
OK ... I haven't installed Longhorn yet .... I can't decide on how to do it. I have an important WORK laptop that could handle it, but my entire work existence is on it and I can't meddle with it. Then I have a nice desktop at home that the entire family uses and I have been warned repeatedly about installing all sorts of alpha/beta stuff on that computer as I seem to always mess up my wife's computer existence. So I want to build a new machine ... but I have to do it piecemeal - meaning case and...
The St. Louis .NET User Group is one of the lucky cities that was chosen for the upcoming ASP.NET 2.0 Roadshow! We are pretty dang excited and we are aiming for 250-300 people for this event. This is going to be a rather lengthy presentation and will give Rob Howard time to go into the details. DETAILS: Date: 12/4/2003 Welcome: 5:30 PM Start: 6:00 PM End: 9:00 PM Where: St. Louis University - Busch Student Center Rooms 170 & 171 Top of Form 20 N Grand Blvd St. Louis, MO 63103...
Rob Howard – Membership, Role Management and Security in ASP.NET Whidbey Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward and http://www.rob-howard.net Forms Authentication 1.0 Solves a common problem developers had with their web apps Most popular Internet auth. Technique No ugly/confusing dialog boxes Custom authentication uses HTML UI Use credentials collected on page Posted back to the server Page obtains credentials issues auth. Ticket ASP.NET Forms Authentication APIs APIs for creating authentication...
I am not a fan of the official name “Visual Basic .NET” for the VB language. It was too bad that the .NET moniker name was thrown on everything. Microsoft obviously has as well since they changed the beta product “Windows Server .NET 2003” to “Windows Server 2003”. So I have been asking around if they are going to do the same thing with Visual Basic .NET. In most of the presentations here at PDC though - you see “Visual Basic .NET” - BUT if you go to...
Rob Howard – WSV330 – ASP.NET Programming Using Advanced Caching Techniques in ASP.NET Whidbey Program Manager, Web Platform & Tools http://www.asp.net/whidbey to download the slides http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward ASP.NET 1.X Output Cache Page Output Caching Cache contents of page to memory Reused cached page on subsequent requests Supported HTTP 1.1 Cache semantics Partial Page Caching Cached User Control in a page Allowed for portions of page to be cached Time based dependencies Programmatic...
Second day keynote …. In the beginning, there was a video of attendees. The most exciting part was Donny Mack and Asli talking about Indigo being the stuff in your watches to make them glow. They were shown in their shades and holding their little dog! Quite groovy guys! Notes on Eric Rudder Keynote: What Microsoft hears from you: Don’t make me rewrite everything! Moving code from development to production is too hard Give me more code samples … in my favorite language Help me make...
Last night I attended the MSDN/AW PDC party. It was on top of some hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Don Box and band (Band on the Runtime) played quite the set for a good length of time. The party was on an open terrace and it was quite a fun time. Thanks Stacey for setting this all up. There were a number of INETA folks at the party as we all had a good time. THOUGH - Amy came over and had heard my name mentioned with the word “pool” and asked me to give her all my pocket electronics....
Thanks to Kent for the bio on MSDN! That's pretty dang cool I think .... BTW - new photo coming soon
Jim Alchin - ** how developers can do this? Fundamentals - WinFS - Indigo - Avalon Announcing WinFX - next step behind Win 32 - builds on the .NET Framework Well-structured programming framework for Windows Continued commitment to back wards compatibility MS-DOS – Win16 – Win32 - WinFX Add ref and release you will not have to think about. WinFx Developer Preview - namespace chart Software fundamentals - challenges System, application, driver reliability Deployment complexity and expense...
ASP.NET Whidbey Themes Developer productivity Reduce ASP.NET V1-V2 lines of code by 2/3rds Enable rich scenarios not easily possible today Administration and Management Easiest platform to manage and administer Totally Extensible Platform Replace/extend all built-in features + services Customize for any enterprise environment Performance and scalability The world’s fastest web application server Runs on a 64-bit server ASP.NET 2.0 Developer Stack New ASP.NET Building block APIs Membership....
In the keynote for PDC ... FIRST DAY rockin! FROM ME: I feel like Dorothy and have landed in the land of OZ! Tons of people for the Bill Gates keynote with giant monitors all over the place. They started with showing us all the HALO PDC video which is a total riot. After that we got a little emotional clip about the history of Windows starting from the beginning. Bill Gates talked about this being a record PDC - more signups than any other PDC. Man, he is starting to age when you see him 20 feet...
I am having the time of my life at PDC! There are so many friends that I have meet here that I seem to always meet again and again. Funny that there are like 8,000 people here, but I keep running into everyone! I plan on posting a lot of the notes that I am taking during the lectures ... I am typing the notes as fast as I can - so there are mistakes and omissions. Enjoy for all those reading outside of LA! Oh ... just bought Alex Homer, Dave Sussman, and Rob Howard's new ASP.NET book! Rockin...
This is my first post in my blog. I am also keeping a Longhorn blog about Longhorn issues over at http://longhornblogs.com/be... for those interested in that. This blog here will cover basically everything else! .... so a little .NET, a little family, a little INETA..... so have fun