Jason Row

Thanks to Wally McClure for sending me one of his ASP.NET podcast t-shirts!  As far as I know I'm the first in Atlantic Canada to have one. Go give his show a listen !

 

Tonight I traveled for 3 hours (roughly 300 kms) to attend the DevEast meeting in Moncton, NB. And in my mind it was worth it.

In the most unusual place I've ever sat and listened to a presentation, I joined 8 others at AJs Pizza Place to listen to Derek Hatchard run through two presentations that's he's planning to give at DevTeach Toronto next week.

Leveraging the Amazon Platform

Covered the various types of services that Amazon has made available. Derek talked about S3 (Simple Storage Service) their file hosting service, mentioned their Simple Queue Service but most of his demos covered EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). If you need virtual environments launched when you want them this is an option for you. Plans start around 10 cents an hour per image (virtual machine) and you can create an instance from the preconfigured images that Google has made available (all flavors of Linux along with apache and mysql from what I saw) but you can also upload your own image to S3 and then create instances based on it.  Derek showed some of the command line utilities that are available as well as how you can create a .NET application to setup your images. One thing that was note, if you're planning to run an image with mysql, if the image is shut down or crashes there's no method of retrieving your data since you cannot simply restart the image from where it left off. So don't use this if you plan to keep your data !

Extending IIS7 with Managed Code

We didn't have much time for this presentation but it was interesting to see how you can extend IIS fairly easily by writing modules. He discussed how to modify the web.config as the application.config (not sure on this one) and how the majority of the IIS settings are now set through these files. At the end he also briefly talked about how to add what I would call property pages for settings that your modules can have but that you need to make these available not only on the server but also to clients since IIS 7 can be administered remotely.

That's the quick overview of things. it's midnight and I've been on the go since 6am. Time for some sleep !!!

I saw Lou Vega's review about this book today and went ahead and ordered it from Amazon.ca (Chapters.Indigo.ca isn't carrying it). Sucks to have to wait 8-12 days but I'm not in that much of a hurry for it at the moment. I've been involved with my local .NET user group and I want to contribute more to the community so I figure there would be some good ideas to draw from.

The Rational Guide to Building Technical User Communities

By Dr. Greg Low

Published by Rational Press 2007

ISBN: 978-1-932577-32-7

It's time to vote for who you think is the top Individual Developer and the top Development Team in this year's MSDN Canada Code Awards.

Honestly, I've been hearing about the contest for months and initially took a look at the site when they were looking for nominations. Not knowing anyone to nominate I only gave it a passing look.

Now that the nominees are named I'm impressed by products that have been created here in Canada.  Will it be the Cancer Specimen Analysis app that takes home the prize for the top individual developer or will it be one of the other 4 nominees including the database automation tool.  From the development team side the top 5 nominees include an Anti-Phishing system, and my personal fav the MeshMinder.com web site that matches hockey teams with Goalies.  What could be more Canadian than that !!

Head on over to  the Code Awards web site to look at all 10 nominees and then cast your votes.

Just wondering if anyone could clarify a SharePoint question for me that relates to the TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development exam. One of the objectives being measured is to Configure a target computer for Windows SharePoint Services development and beneath this is a mention of SecurityAdministrator. I'm not sure if they are referring to SharePoint Forefront Server Security Administrator or something different.  

Anyone have some insight?

Well I've gone and purchased a collection of online SharePoint courses from Microsoft. I'm curious to see how good they are. Collection 5385: Developing Solutions with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Visual Studio 2005

My first issue that I do have has been the price. It was listed for $191.99 USD on the site but when I switched it to the Canadian version the price jumped to $224.99 CDN. I thought it was just taxes that they had to collect but that didn't come until the next page where the total price ended up being $256.06 CDN.

So why is there a price difference for an online course. It used to be due to the difference in the Canadian dollar versus the US greenback but at today's prices that shouldn't be the case, actually it should have been cheaper than $191.99 in Canadian dollars.

So how do you design a shopping cart system that provides fair pricing to your customers? I would think that you simply charge a credit card and the card company takes care of the conversion rates.

I would have less issues if I knew the reason why I'm being charged more for an online course other than the fact that I live in America Jr.

 

I came across this yesterday. I was looking for a phone number using the local Yellowpages.ca web site when I noticed an "Add to Facebook" link next to the search results entries.

Clicking the link prompts you to enter in a note and you end up with the following on your mini-feed in Facebook.

 

I'm still trying to determine how useful this would be to people. It's a "neat" feature but how often will I use it?

I know there's alot of FaceBook applications being developed (trust me I get enough spam for them) but so far this is the first site I've seen that integrates with FaceBook, does anyone know of any others?

I'm just discovering twitter and like blogging it helps if you follow / read interesting people.  So who do you follow on Twitter that would be worth my while to follow?   Or is twitter just a lot of noise that interrupts your day, feel free to let me know.

So far I've found the following notable people who's blogs I enjoy:

Dave Winer
Ray Lewallen
Mike Gunderloy
Jeff Atwood
Scott Hanselman



My twitter is http://twitter.com/Rowser should you car to listen to my ramblings.

The next meeting for the Fredericton .NET User Group will be at the end of October. Here's the poster that I did up and note that you MUST register for this event.

Canadian students can now take advantage of a new promotion from MS for the Ultimate edition of Office 2007.  For just 64 dollars Canadian (that's 64 dollars American btw as of earlier today) you can order Office 2007 Ultimate. All you need is a valid email address from one of the participating schools (both Universities and colleges are listed from across Canada) and you will need a valid student ID card if MS comes knocking at your door.

And if you prefer to spend some of that money on books or other school supplies you can get a one year subscription for just 22 dollars.

Head on over to www.theultimatesteal.ca for more details !

I miss having admin rights to my laptop. All my development work is done with Virtual Machines now and I'm locked down on my laptop so I can't install anything that is beta or not directly work related.   That included Windows Live Writer which I enjoyed using to post to my blog.

But no longer !  Scott Kingery has released Windows Liver Writer Portable version 2.0   (apparently I missed version 1.0) so now I can get back to blogging semi-regularly.

[via Download Squad]

It's been a while since Justice tagged me in his How I am becoming a better developer, part 1 of infinity post. I've  gone through some personal issues lately but now I feel ready to publicly post what I'm doing to make myself a better developer.  Now I'm not as ambitious as Justice or D'Arcy but I feel that I can achieve these goals in the next 6 months.

Certifications
    - pass the 3 exams to get my MCPD: Windows Developer certification. I know I could just pass the
      upgrade exam but I really want to feel like I know the material inside and out.

Education
    - Start working towards completing the Certificate in Software Development @ UNB. Only have 3 courses
      remaining and I should be able to transfer these over to a degree program at Athabasca University.

Books
    - Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET by  Jimmy Nilsson.

User Groups
    - make two presentations to the Fredericton .NET user group before Xmas.

Projects
    - Develop a portfolio of applications. Nothing fancy, just start building stuff!


So that's the plan. time to make some schedules and focus on getting things done.

And I'm not going to tag anyone. I'm simply going to ask those who do read my blog what are you doing to make yourself a better developer?

Pitter-patter, let's get at 'er!

The latest MSDN Canada Flash newsletter announced a new Microsoft program where they are attempting to get Charities/Non-Profit groups who have technical work to be done, and match them with local IT workers who want to give back to their community.    I'm not sure when it launched but there's a almost a couple hundred people signed up and at the moment 25 organizations with 10 job postings.

I'd say that even if you're not interested at least let some of your local NPOs know about this site and I know they wouldn't mind the extra help.

The concept reminds me of http://www.nonprofitways.com/ that David Silverlight (yeah that Silverlight) helped put together.  Seems like the same kind of idea.

Oh and it's not just development work being posted. Networking support is also part of the items you can select to offer your help with.

<reposted from my old blog>

Ok so it's not the Stanley cup but I know lots of guys who grew up playing their own Stanley cup series outside on a frozen pond, lake, river, tennis court, or other piece of frozen water.

I spent the first weekend of February playing in the Miramichi Pond Hockey Tournament in my hometown of Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada.

I played on a team with one of my brothers, a cousin, and another guy I play beer league hockey with and we ended up winning the Competitive division!

In the top picture from left to right is: Darren Row(my brother), Mike Row (my cousin), Matt Breen, and me.

This was the third year for the tournament and I've played in all of them so it was a blast to win it.  This year there was 30 inches of ice on the pond and 90+ teams in the various divisions. I was the Wayne Gretzky of the team and my brother was Jari Kurri as I kept feeding him passes while he scored 95 percent of our goals. It helped that I was in the best shape of the past 3 years so the 4 games on Sunday didn't wear me out as badly as I thought it would.

I also had the chance this past weekend to return to the tournament that started it all, the World Pond Hockey tournament in Plaster Rock, NB which has been going since 2002. Who wouldn't want to play pond hockey with the setup they have as seen in the ariel photo below. With 120 teams registered from all the Canadian provinces, 23 US states, as well as countries such as England, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Egypt, Cayman Islands, and Bermuda we had 40 teams playing at once on 20 ice surfaces.

And talk about volunteers, the people of Plaster Rock work all year long to prepare for this and do they ever put on a good event. The Friday night Kitchen Party that happened in the main tent went on until 4am. Then there's the big dance on Saturday night which is the biggest social event for the year in this village of 1200. It's hard to tell you how great the experience is to be at this tournament, you have to just go and play (mind you it's hard to get in as they have a lottery for new teams)

The team I played for was raising awareness for the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada and from the team photo below we have Shawn McIllwraith, me, Rick Jenkins, and Dave D'entremont.

Now it you'll excuse me, it's back to some NHL '07 on my XBox 360 as I pretend I'm playing on a frozen pond in -25 degrees Celsius weather and loving every minute of it!

<reposted from my old blog>

Chalain over on LiveJornal wrote about his first experiences with Vista on a new PC. Rather then just stating this feature is good, this feature is bad, he compared it to waking up and finding a beautiful woman in his bed. The part about the paperboy needing permission to deliver the paper is a hoot.