Scott Spradlin

So when I started blogging, I assured myself that I wouldn't waste anyone's time by posting socially irrelevant noise that just added to the spam we all have grown to hate.  Without the "Hanselman connection" this post might be considered questionable.

I was in my hotel room, tired and thirsty.  It's a fancy hotel you know, so there are no vending machines on the floors where the rooms filled with people are located.  You must dress yourself and venture down to the lobby and make a legitimate purchase at the store in the lobby.  I'm pulling my warm Diet Coke from the "cooler" and Scott Hanselman is buying some candy.

The candy he is buying for his wife is Cadbury's Flake. He was saying that he always buys them for her when he can find them because they are not sold in the United States.  Apparently they are produced in the UK, Australia, and South Africa.  I'm not sure how they made it into Canada.  I don't think that form I signed at the border prevented me from eating these imported contraband.

As you might expect of a Cadbury product, the chocolate was tasty -- not overly sweet and not waxy. It was incrediby flaky -- no doubt hence the name -- and made a mess in the bed that I felt obligated to clean up.

Interestingly enough, it turns out a Cadbury Flake advertisement was removed from the air in the 1970s in the UK due to complaints about the suggestive manner in which the woman in the ad bit into the bar.

Another good party with Jeffrey Palermo.  Always good to meet up with old friends and make new ones.

Jeffrey and I showed up a bit early for the party at Menage.  What a great view on the outside patio overlooking the city street.  Geeks would be arriving in droves momentarily.  Given the typical percentages of male/female attendees at these events and user groups in general, I was surprised when a young woman showed up by herself and sat at a table by herself near the back.

Turns out that her name was Kate and she was there by invitation from a friend that was late.  She was feeling like the "odd man out" since she was only one of two or three females in the room so far.  Kate mentioned she had a friend that is studying gender in the IT field. (Maybe not that generic...I'll have to get the details later.)

But interestingly enough, Kate was getting her PhD by researching young adult's use of facebook.  I thought that was fascinating.  Scott Hanselman was in the area and I introduced the two of them -- I thought he might find her field of study interesting.

Maybe we'll get Kate or her friend in front of some Canada user groups to discuss gender issues. Any volunteers?

I am headed to Toronto Canada for DevTeach tomorrow. Scott Hanselman has the keynote first thing Tuesday morning.  Lots of great sessions planned and networking with fellow user group leaders and members from Canada.  What a great country.  Everyone I've met from up there has been incredibly nice.

Monday night is the traditional Party With Palermo. That's always a great place to catch up with a lot of familiar faces at these events.

I'm also looking forward to the .NET Rocks hosted panel discussion on the 14th.  Carl and Richard will be talking with folks who have strong visions of the future of software development and the role that .NET can play in that future.

Plus, there are an incredible number of great sessions at these DevTeach events.  If you are in Canada, you need to try to make it to one of these events.  They happen twice a year.  Check out their web site ... Montreal in December 08

As you know from previous posts, I'm currently using Sprint's version of the HTC Mogul called the PPC6800 running Windows Mobile 6.0.

Up to now, the broadband speed has been pretty decent. About 1/2 DSL speeds or better.

The other day HTC announced the upgrade to EVDO Rev A -- the true DSL speed network.  I reflashed my firmware pretty smoothly and the upgrade went well.  Did I get double speed downloads?  Well, it seems snappier, quicker connects, overall a little faster but not 2X.

I just now did a speed test using http://www.dslreports.com and it reported 713 kbit/sec with a 400K file and 664 kbit/sec with a 1MB file.  Not too bad.

Faster than that 1200 baud Hayes modem I bought for $695 in 1983.

You've been there.  "It works on my box!"  Our new SharePoint web parts don't work in production!

This project called for a suite of data entry grids inside custom SharePoint web parts.  The customer already owned Infragistics' NetAdvantage for ASP.NET so I used their UltraWebGrid.  Very slick and easy to deploy with your custom web parts.

The primary feature they wanted was the cool Excel-like cut-n-paste functionality but that wasn't working in our production environment.  At the beginning of the project, the client said "Oh, we already have AJAX things running in that environment...it's installed and ready to go."  Silly me, I didn't follow through and verify it.  My solution installed without the infamous "The Web Part you attempted to add no longer exists in the Closed Web Parts Gallery" helpful error message...which means that all the dlls that I'm referencing apparently are there.

After the page loads -- apparently successfully -- and we mouse over the grid, we see the tiny little error message down in the corner of the browser.  Digging deeper I see that JavaScript has encountered a problem and is helping me out by saying "Object Expected".  Even gives me the line where this object is expected.  It's the line that is 65 million characters long that contains all the html for the grid.  So, IE knows the object it's expecting, why can't it share that tidbit?

Well, we know it's event oriented because the error happens when the mouseover should be firing.  Maybe the JavaScript code that's supposed to fire isn't being loaded properly I say to myself. (Infragistics cleverly bundles all the JavaScript support files as embedded resources so there's no additional headache of distributing them, setting permissions, etc.)  So it looks like it's loading them but apparently it's not.

Specifically, one of the changes you're instructed to make to the web.config for AJAX installation supports the callbacks for embedded scripts through ScriptResource.axd.

<add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false"/>

Someone had not updated the web.config on the production web front end to include all the changes needed for complete AJAX support.  Thanks buddy.  :)

I made the seven little changes and bingo -- success.

So there I was, thinking about a new blog post, pondering someone else's blog post I'd just read, installing Windows Live Writer so I can post better blog posts, and it just hit me.  Wham!  Of all the people I know, if the universe could have back the total number of hours spent on blogging alone, just imagine the possibilities.  Plus, add in the time for all the people that I DON'T know who blog.  Wow.

Then, I started to enumerate (list) the alternative actions that would be more beneficial to the cosmos.  Before I got three items (the minimum in a list) my Live Writer installation completed.

So I'm off to spend more time playing with yet another tool that I need when I spend time blogging instead of playing outside.

...I can mow the grass another day.

So after the User Group Management Summit was over, a bunch of us also attended ALT.NET.  It's a free conference by developers held in the Open Spaces format.  I never would have believed how successful that format actually is unless I experienced it myself.  I was pretty impressed and enjoyed several of the sessions I was able to attend.  Touched bases with tons of friends, and even met some new ones.

I especially enjoyed Scott Hanselman's session "Are we innovating or just porting?" Check out my buddy D'Arcy's blog post.

So, one of my nerdy buddies suggested I join Twitter. So I did. It's a way to send short status messages about your self into the cloud and interested beings can watch your messages. Jeff Atwood calls it the combination of blogging and IM.

There are various way to interact with twitter:

• you can do it with your mobile phone, sending and receiving updates as SMS
• browse to the mobile version of the web page
• you can sent and receive updates using your favorite IM client
• you can use the web UI and the RSS feeds
• or you can a desktop client like Twhirl

So, if you want to know what I'm doing right now, just go to my personal twitter page twitter.com/scotts, and you might even want to add me as friend in order to get my thoughts and "status updates" delivered as soon as I post them.

So, I never joined myspace.  Just never felt the need.  However, this new Facebook phenomenon looks interesting. Yet another social networking vehicle.  It's more lightweight and structured than myspace.

Check out my profile over there.  Sign up!  Be my friend!