Because the text editor for VS2010 was rewritten in WPF, WPF allows for some pretty cool new features. I poked around the editor for a while today to see what's in there. What I found is in my DevLife blog post: VS2010 Code Editor helps you navigate around your code [A New DevLife post]...

It's here it's here! The Beta1 is on MSDN and will be public on Wednesday. I've written up a list of new feature highlights of .NET and VS2010 on my DevLife blog over here: VS2010 Beta available for MSDN Subscribers today, everyone else on Wednesday! [A New DevLife post]...

Writing your first unit tests can be daunting and can cause you to put off the task for years, like some people I know, but it doesn't have to be that way! One thing that has stopped me for a long time was that I always seem to be interacting with data and lately using Entity Framework to do so. Neither...

At our Vermont.NET meeting this past Monday, Eric De Carufel presented on the Parallel Extensions. I learned a lot and followed up by checking out some of the MSND resources as well. Here's a write up of what really impressed me about the ease of making great leaps in application perf with the new stuff...

Do you know the function of every item in the Visual Studio menu? Probably not. I've decided to start forcing myself to discover and learn about menu commands that I've never used. It didn't take long to find one that was new to me and it led me on an educational path of discovery about searching in...

Note that I am referring specifically to "Crystal Reports 2008", not the version, "Crystal Reports 2008 Basic", which comes packaged with Visual Studio 2008. Today for some reason, I could no longer open up any Crystal Reports in Visual Studio 2008. When I attempted to open them, they did not open or...

I found out the hard way that this is not pretty. In the long run, you'll have to have all users completely uninstall and reinstall their apps. Here are more details... [A New DevLife post]...

Last Monday, nearly 40 people showed up for Mario Cardinal's presentation, Best Practices to Design a Modular Architecture , at Vermont.NET. This is an unusually large crowd for our group, so I was pretty impressed - but not surprised. Developers don't get enough time to think about architecture. Mario...

I'm really looking forward to this Monday's VTdotNET meeting featuring a talk by Mario Cardinal titled " Best Practices to Design a Modular Architecture ". Apparently, so are many other VTdotNETters. I am predicting a larger than usual attendance at our meeting! Thanks to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters...

I had a bit of fun in Quebec this week while trying to code on an English keyboard that was programmed for French Canadian keystrokes. Read more... [A New DevLife post]...

I was translating a threading example that I originally wrote in VB and C# was giving me a hard time about something that made no sense. It turned out that in C#, a delegate for a ParameterizedThreadStart must literally use the object class in its signature. For example in VB, I had this method Public...

Oh happy day, I finally woke up and discovered that StringFormat was added to SP1. Here's a quick rundown on Lester Lobo's WPF blog: WPF 3.5 SP1 feature: StringFormat This solves a huge problem that i was having in my book where I wanted to format a date but didn't want to side track readers with how...

I spent about 1/2 hour this morning trying to figure out why I couldn't get at the .NET source code when others have even blogged about new DLLs being available. I finally found the answer in the MSDN forums - apparently the new files aren't up on the servers yet. Read more here... [A New DevLife post...

Not everyone is having the easiest time installing this service pack. Here is a list of hints, links and things you should be prepared for before applying the service pack. [A New DevLife post]...

VS2008 SP1 RTM is now on MSDN Subscriber downloads. It's an 830MB download, unlike the gigs and gigs of the actual product. But of course, it's still pokey because there's quite a bit of competition on the wire! Two worthy additions: 1) Don't forget that the Silverlight .NET 2.0 Beta Tools for VS will...

It was pointed out to me recently that I've gotten a bit lazy with my coding. I completely blame it on implicitly typed local variables. Read more here... [A New DevLife post]...

Adding to the extensive Training Kit ofr Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft has recently released a set of Hands on Labs that are part of a training kit for the .NET 3.5 Extensions that is still in production. Read more... [A New DevLife post]...

Charlie Calvert has created a new CodeGallery project to centralize blog posts and articles about some of the things that the C# and VB teams are working on for the next version(s) of their languages. You can read about and discuss (and influence) the direction of these features. Read more .... [A New...

This is completely insane. Someone from Romania emailed me about selecting an icon file for a ClickOnce deployment so that the application icon is used for the installation and for the shortcut. He had tried my hack that I have blogged about , written about in CoDe Magazine and shown in conference presentations...

Kathleen Dollard recently wrote about VS2008 letting us easily make our app settings publically accessible to other projects. It inspired me to share my solution for how I did this in VS2005 when it wasn't so easy. Read more... [A New DevLife post]...

I was moving some code around and had a nice WCF Service Interface and Service Class created. So I copied them into a new project where I was re-creating my work. When I tried to debug (self-host) the service, just to test it out with the embedded WCF Test Client. But I kept getting this error: "The...

While there are lots of awesome new features in VB9 and C#3.0, everything has taken a back seat to LINQ. I am, however, growing more and more fond of extension methods. Read more... [A new DevLife post]...

When opening a dbml file created in a pre-RTM version of Visual Studio 2008, you will probably see this error message: Cannot load '[filepath].dbml': Error encountered, check Error List window for details. Looking in the error list window, you might see the following errors: Build failed due to validation...

A few years ago, I wrote a little utility for one of my clients who uses Crystal Reports XI to design reports inhouse. They wanted other people on the corporate intranet to be able to see and refresh the reports and if necessary, enter new parameters. Since they weren't designing reports, it didn't make...

From Jeff Beehler on Microsoft's VSTS team: We recently discovered that the VPCs we distributed as part of the VS2008 Beta2 release will expire on Thursday, November 1, 2007, much earlier than we had originally expected. Since the timeout is at the OS level, we cannot automatically extend the timeout...

Are you sitting? Buckled in? Yes it's true. It was just announced. Microsoft is releasing source for .NET binaries and letting us debug into it as well! Read more here! [A New DevLife post]...

Finally, you can draw a simple line on a windows form, just like in the old VB6 days. The VB2005 Power Pack has lines and other shape controls. It also has a compatilibity tool for leveraging VB6 printer code. Read more here! [A New DevLife post]...

There was something about using the build Error List in VS2005 that has irked me for a long time. The behavior continues in VS2008 so I finally took the time to see what the heck it was all about and got a little surprise! Read more here... [A New DevLife post]...

I caught this in the Microsoft Download notifications: Visual Studio 2008 SDK - August 2007 CTP This CTP includes tools, documentation, and samples for developers to write, build, test, and deploy extensions for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2....

VS2008 Beta2 has been released. Read all about it here on Scott Guthrie's blog . Pay special attention to the special installation instructions. And if you could give me another few hours to get it downloaded before you hop on the bandwagon (or bandwidth as that may be), that would be oh so kind of you...

A few months ago, ClickOnce broke on my Vista machine where I was doing development. I had the same problem on my Vista laptop which I use for travelling and presentations. The short story about the problem is that whenever I tried to install a clickonce app, Vista went into this never-ending loop of...

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

XML is a pain to work with but because of it's importance, Microsoft is adding tooling into Orcas to make it easier. So, I was poking around in Orcas looking at what's new in tools for XML and XSLT. I even learned some stuff that was in VS2005 that I never paid attention to. Read more here... [A New...

[7/13/07: See this post for the solution!] I have run into a bizarre problem with ClickOnce that is occuring with IE7 on both of my Vista computers. Both computers have Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and the special vista version of VS2005 SP1. And on both of these, I can't use clickonce to install apps from...

ScottGu describes SilverLight as three parts. We've seen the media capabilities of silverlight. That's the first chunk of it. The second is the .NET capabilites of the run time ... from ScottGu's lips "a cross platform runtime of the .NEt Framework". (IT IS ON THE WEB RIGHT NOW as Silverlight 1.1 Alpha...

Right now Silverlight (wpf/e) is not for the feint of heart - lots of javascript coding involved. But Ray Ozzie just announced (as I'm sitting here in the keynote) at MIX that Silverlight will support .NET as a first class .NET development environment. So you can develop silverlight apps in .NEt. This...

I have been futzing with WPF/E today trying to get the concepts down and when I looked up, I saw a post from Mike Taulty that said telerik has Silverlight radControls ! The "blimey" comes from MIke, because the relative American exlamation is R-rated! :-) www.telerik.com/silverlight Very cool demos....

Somasegar announced (with great pride) the availability of the first Beta of Visual Studio Orcas a few days ago. There is a huge VPC available for download, but also express versions. Some other varieties (perhaps an MSI installer) are coming on MSDN Subscriber downloads as well. READ MORE [A New DevLife...

I finally noticed that Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 corrected two of the problems that I've mentioned in previous articles and blog posts about ClickOnce. read more... [A new DevLife post]...

I wrote an article for .NET newbies for DevSource called Getting Started with .NET Programming . It goes over the basic "what is .NET" question, then how to get your hands on the dev tools and then lists gobs of resources. It's short and sweet. If you know anyone who is asking these questions, feel free...

I needed to use a monospace font in a report but did not want Courier as it looked too different than the rest of the text on the report. I did end up going with Lucida Console, but on the way to that decision, found a nice resource from someone who made a list of 22 monotype fonts along with some details...

We got nearly 3 hours with Anders Hejlsberg at the ASPInsiders Summit last week. He went over language innovations in C#3 and how they feed into Linq. I can't do a full brain dump in a single post, but here is some of what he talked about (with some added VB examples too for fairness, since the new goo...

I'm at Microsoft in Redmond for the ASPInsiders Summit, three days of training by various members of the ASP.NET Team as well as experts in other relavant fields. Most of what we're looking at is what's coming down the pipes in the near future and in the longer term. Yesterday was the first day and it...

I don't pay much attention to Facebook (could it be that I'm about twice the age of the average user? ;-)), but thought it was intersesting that they expose web services for devs to tap into. Here's an article on DevSource by Tim Stevens called Using the Facebook API: Social Networking in .NET ....

The new post cache subsititution functionality of ASP.NET 2.0 is one of the features of ASP.NET 2 that doesn't get a lot of attention, but I am quite fond of it. So I wrote an article about it for DevSource and it is now online. You can read it here....

One of the points of confusion I've seen wrt these new asp.net features is people trying to use them (and getting no farther than head banging) with random functions. .NET 2.0 makes a lot of asynchronous stuff much easier with the Event Driven Asynchronous Pattern. The BackgroundWorker sets up the entire...

I've long been confused by the fact that static variables in VB are not the same as static variables in C#, but shared variables/methods/classes in VB *are* like static variables/methods/classes in C#. It made for some cumbersome VB code that didn't have to be. I think I finally got it cleared up and...

If you are getting either of these errors when using the Publish Wizard for ClickOnce: Cannot publish because a project failed to build. SignTool reported an error 'XmlResolver can be set only by fully trusted code.' ...there is a HotFix available from the Microsoft download. More info here....

Frustrated with the experience of trying to explain the complicated ASP.NET 2.0 Client Side callbacks at user group sessions, I decided to see how this compared to using AJAX.NET and ATLAS. So I rewrote the demo with each of these tools. Here is what I found... [ read more... ] [A DevLife post]...

EATING CROW! I wrote in May about getting a desktop shortcut with ClickOnce. I have finally discovered a big flaw (well, two actually) in that method. This post explains the flaw and offers up a much better solution! [ read more ... ] [A DevLife post]...

I had forgotten how much fun it is to show off the new Debugger Display attributes in VS2005. A recent talk at an INETA user group in Pennsylvania got me thinking about them again... [ read more ] [A DevLife post] Posted from BLInk!...

I used to think Control Adapters were for asp.net gurus, but then I got brave and started using them. They're not scary at all. Here's a short & sweet, high-level overview of them ....[ read more... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

I have definitely had this screen and fuddled my way through making it go away. I wish I had seen this article !...

I have finally made the v2 of the Vermont.NET site live. It's an ASP.NET 2.0 with SQL Server 2005 on the back end. I challenged myself to use lots of new ASP.NET 2.0 features that I hadn't played with yet. [ Read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

ClickOnce won't do desktop shortcuts. Here's a post about why that is and how I got my app to do it for me anyway. [ Read more... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

MSDN DCC (and our local Burlington, VT based pride and joy) Susan Wisowaty started her 6 part Reporting Services series this month. If you missed the first three, there are 3 more to go in June ! Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

I remember Steven Smith sitting right here in my office over in the LazyBoy chair behind me a few winters ago suddenly saying "wow, look at this cool effect" and showed me a website that had pages fade in and out of each other. By the next day ASPAlliance had the same effect! You see it a lot on sites...

I seem to be getting this question through my blog and elsewhere often enough to justify a post about it even though there are many great (and more detailed) articles on this topic. How do you use your own SQL database for ASP.NET 2.0 Membership instead of the default SQLExpress database. The default...

I did. For shame, eh? I have been playing with a new Vermont.NET user group website and using lots of new asp.net 2.0 UI features. I put it up and quickly got a reminder from ASPInsider , Aaron Seet, (who I'm grateful to for checking) that there were some messy areas when he opened it up in FireFox....

Scott Guthrie's blog has turned into one of the best resources on future ASP.NET related bits. Each of his posts lately, is a complete article on how to get started with a particular technology that ties into ASP.NET, complete with screenshots and code. The latest is Using LINQ with ASP.NET (part 1)...

Now that I finally have some time to write a new version of the VTdotNET site, I wanted to try to get my hands on as many of the new key ASP.NET 2.0 toys as I can. [ read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

I have spent most of the day trying to understand some bizarre behavior in VS2005 with ink on the web apps. The issue is not related to the inkable control per se, but the Windows Forms control hosted on a web page. When I compile the Window Control Library into a dll for the first time, add it into...

Drag, drop and type. Ooh let's do that again. Drag, drop and type. What the heck could this be about? [ Read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

Ever wonder why your application suddenly can't find a file that is definitely in the right place? There's a good chance that you are relying on the default path and that you opened up a FileDialog window. [ read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

"Error Creating Window Handle" is not a .NET error, but is coming from Win32, which, in itself, is a big clue when trying to solve this problem, which I had to do today. [ Read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

I can barely contain my excitement over this article, " Practical Tips for Boosting the Performance of Windows Forms Apps " by Milena Salman in MSDN Mag (March 06). I read most of it this morning over breakfast and came down to my office with the sole intent of opening up the windows forms app I am getting...

I have mentioned my use of the XCeed streaming compression for returning data from web services a number of times in this blog. Here is a post when I first discovered that it reduced a 2.9 minute download of 4 MB to 12 seconds ! I have since mentioned it a few times but never showed exactly how it is...

I'm not sure if I should cry in relief or frustration. I just spent hours and hours trying to get at the cause of a NullReferenceException being thrown by my application. I could not trap it, inspect it or even get rid of it by grabbing a straws. I finally got rid of it, but only by a stroke of luck...

Here is a project that I am now publishing through clickonce. I just opened the project up in VS2005 and saw all of these warnings. Sheesh, here we go again... (Note: I got an email from Patrick Darragh who is a Program Manager on the VB Team and has a lot to do with ClickOnce. Patrick tells me that...

I have really been trying to force ClickOnce to let me publish ONLY the changed files, but according to this forum post by David Guyer , I should probably just give up. Here are my issues. 1) Moving the new deployment folder and manifest to the production server takes way too long. 1a) part of the reason...

I decided this needed it's very own post as it is buried in another one . I was way too eager to finally get .NET 2.0 onto my web server and missed a step and did not recognize the red flags going up trying to tell me that I missed this step. If you are putting .NET 2.0 onto a web server already running...

What do you think is going to be the most likely need for ClickOnce? Deploying apps to anyone in the world? Not for me, I write custom apps for my client. Deploying apps on the intranet? Sure, but we have had a very simple hack for that for a long time. C'mon, think smart client.... Yep - deploying apps...

I put .NET 2.0 on my client's web server the other day. Both 2.0 and 1.1 asp.net apps continued to run just fine. Last night I was mucking with some of the mappings in .NET 2.0 and they weren't taking. So I did an iisreset. Here's where that led me (to the best of my recollection) 1.1 apps: Server Unavailable...

CAS is confusing! Mike Downen's MSDN Mag article about CAS in 2.0 is really an excellent explanation of CAS along with some great info on what's new in 2.0 as well. [ read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

I'm experimenting with a simple .NET 2.0 WinForms application and ClickOnce and still, as is my destiny, banging my head on the wall. My latest frustration (while trying to use all of the built-in automated functionality) is trying to limit who has access to the downloads. For a particular application...

Although my own recent DLL hell with VS2005 is in design time, I have learned quite a good lesson about dynamically loading assemblies and the dll hell you can introduce in that way. I have an application that makes heavy use of Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom where I pass in the path of a DLL to be loaded...

I have a VS2005 app that has assemblies with inherited forms and classes and there is something not quite right in my references that makes these particular assemblies very unstable. This is a project that is being ported from VS2003. When trying to load the form up in the designer, I frequently get...

I finally figured out how to access the overrides in Visual Basic 2005 - a method that is different than in VB in 2003 or in C# in 2005. [ Read more... ] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

Scott Mitchell and Scott Guthrie are both writing about one of my pet VS2005 technologies, Debugger Visualizers. Check out their posts which have lots of web programming visualizers in them. Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

www.SystemNetMail.com . Great resource from Dave Wanta. I just went right there when I was having some trouble with this class (which has been moved from system.web to system.net and given some shiny new buttons) and found the answer lickety split. Thanks Dave! Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

A good clarification for me. One of the great and under-rated features of .NET 2.0 is the System.IO.Compression namespace which allows stream compression. But it's important to understand that this is not file compression. For example, if you want to zip up multiple files, this is not the class for you...

This seems to happen occasionally when I type into the code while debugging. So I say Cancel, i.e. no, and the question keeps coming up over and over. So if I say "ok" I know I'm in trouble when I get the screen about "large sections of the file may be include". This always ends in a hang. (No there...

The application that I am porting to VS2005 has off-line capabilities. In VS2003, after looking at a lot of options, I chose to store the data in the App folder of the All Users area in c:\directory and settings. One reason for this is that it is possible that a laptop will be passed off from one user...

How I plan to solve my specialized ClickOnce needs that are not available in the nice little ClickOnce settings wizard....( read more...) [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

Earlier this month, Matt Cassell interviewed me (with great questions) for his podcast show, www.AcademicdotNET.com that is aimed at highschool programmers. Matt is himself in high school, but at 15, has still been programming a lot longer than many of us! My interview was #4. The first was Ted Neward...

Is there something wrong with my code? With the component? Or with the docs? Or were the docs just written for normal scenarios? Had I done something so very unusual that it wasn't covered in the documentation? (I don't think I did anything unsual, by the way.) [ read more ... ] [A DevLife post] Don...

Using blocks are new to us VB developers. I get the basic concept - it's cleaner than try/catch/finally blocks when all you are doing is disposing an object and it's super great when dealing with unmanaged resources and good ol' SqlConnections. But the intricacies of using it are a little less obvious...

When I moved to .NET from VB6, I loved the ability to name variables beginning with an underscore. Now that I am porting some .NET 1.1 code to .NET 2.0, I am seeing that this in non-CLS compliant . However, because the handful of variables that use the underscore are in a class that has many subclasses...

Working with some sub-standard Tablet PC code (umm, that would be my own code) in VS2005 made me realize that this version is much more sensitive to bad practices when it comes to threading [ read more...] [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

Etienne Tremblay is a real VSTS wonk. (Etienne is French Canadian, so I should be sure to remind him that "wonk" is a good word..). He works at EDS, which is one b-i-g company, and is excited about the fact that Microsoft has just changed it's Team Foundation Server recommendations from "Teams of up...

whaa, me too. I was changing the fore color of a label on a winform with very few controls on it. The label's color changed. Then cross hairs cursor appeared and started flashing. Then I got the hourglass. Then it all stopped and the ol "(Not Responding)" appeared on the windows title. This is on a machine...

I admit that when I tested out the migration tool, I had limited time, so chose a whimpy app to migrate. Dave Burke is working with a much more complex app and is frustrated . Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

My client wants me to port an entire (and complicated) VS2003 application to VS2005, just so we can leverage ClickOnce. Here's the story.... [A DevLife post] Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

In VB6 with Crystal Reports 8, embedding an image dynamically into a Crystal Reports file was fairly simple. You could merely add a new object to the report on the fly, passing in the path of the image file then drop it into the appropriate section and x/y position on the report. Dim oleobj As OLEObject...

I think my head has been under the rock as far as vs2005 WinForms UI design stuff is concerened. I was fiddling wtih Winforms the other day and wanted to put a line on the form and realized I still can't do it the old VB6 way. I just dropped a panel on instead and put the "below the line" stuff inside...

How cool. I am now reliving one of my favorite sessions at PDC - Shy Cohen's Reliable Messaging session (COM307: Windows Communications Foundation (“Indigo”): Writing Reliable and Transacted Distributed Applications) I am really looking forward to virtually attending the many sessions I was unable to...

Dan Appelman and I had a fun time talking about casing with some C# developers over lunch at DevConnections yesterday... [ read more.. .] [A DevLife post] Posted from BLInk!...

MSDN Nuggets has a bunch of short videos (similar to hte great 10 minute groktalks ) on how to do a variety of things in .net. I caught this one by Mike Taulty that is on hosting windows forms controls in asp.net. What I really liked is the way he demonstrated the code access security issues that you...

Fun weekend ahead! I have an app that is a smart client with a host of about 20 additional assemblies that contain subclassed forms, classes and Crystal Reports that are dynamically loaded. The entire app uses web services for authentication and data access. The app uses 3rd party controls by Xceed,...

I default all of my VS2005 web development to the file based web server (also referred to as the Development web server). This gave me a big headache today when I couldn't solve a problem. I was trying to host a Windows Forms control built in VS2005 in a web page. Update: this problem seems to be specific...

There was something I was not grokking about creating a proxy file from a WCF service that could then be used in the client app. I didn't know what to tell the svcutil.exe tool to build the proxy from. Finally it dawned on me. I needed to have the service running and then point to it's endpoint. Then...

First, proof that I really got it working! Although you can see that one of the messages got lost. (Note Ari doesn't receive first "hello?" from Julie.) Guess I need to build some Reliable Messaging into this! This dropped first message was consistent every time I ran this. But looking back at the TechEd...

Introduction to Building Windows Communication Foundation Services Clemens Vasters newtelligence AG September 2005 Summary: Clemens Vasters explains the fundamental concepts of the new connected systems platform for Windows, Windows Communication Foundation (previously code-named "Indigo"), and shows...

Crazy for Atlas? The latest VSI to create an Atlas project using VS2005 is online here . You can still get bits for Beta2 as well. (thanks jhawk ) Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org...

John Mueller demonstrates a nifty debugger visualizer in his article on DevSource: Write Your Own Visualizer for VS Debugging . I have played with visualizers a lot, but have focused on data - like database data. John expands my world with his DateTime visualizer. Definitely check out his article....

I was having a bit of trouble last night with Atlas. Here is why. You will notice on the Atlas site a note saying that the currently available VSI's for Atlas run only on VS2005 Beta2 right now. I read that but inferred my own interpretion. My bad. Here's what you need to know: Beta2=Beta2 Beta2!=June...

I have been trying to do some of the Atlas Hands on Labs . First, I tried them on my newly set up Vista machine. I had problems getting the file system (aka ASP.NET Development Web Server - so is that called WADWSF now?). Finally I decided that there is just something WRONG with Vista and the file WADWSF...

Since nullable has been baked into .NET, I had to see if that carried over to ADO.NET. Now I know that datasets' behavior with Nullable types was so broken that it was removed from the scope of .NET 2.0 , but I wanted to go back and look at my previous tests with dbnull and Nullable types . Nullable...

With the recent changes to Nullables in v2.0, I wanted to go back to some old tests that had not been very satisfying when I ran them over a year ago . One was comparing the speed of using a Nullable<T> and testing to see if has a value or not with HasValue to the speed of a just checking for either...

A reminder to myself since I kind of missed the note in the VS2005 Documentation that says: The DebuggerBrowsableAttribute is not supported by Visual Basic in the .NET Framework 2.0 Scott Nonnenberg was kind enough not to point out my mental block. I somehow looked over it a number of times when looking...

I will never remember this - so I'm blogging it. If you use your middle mouse button to click on the tab of an edit window in VS2005 it will close the window. Caught that as an aside while watching Scott Nonnenberg's debugging presentation on the TechEd DVD's. In fact, right click has also been enhanced...

I noticed in the past few days that these two have been expanded upon in the past months and have been replaced with three pairs of methods, Read/WriteAllText, Read/WriteAllLines and Read/WriteAllBinary. These are really great - relatively small in the scope of all that is new in VS2005 but SO very useful...

August VS2005 CTP is now online with MSDN Downloads. I definitely can't get SQL Server June CTP to install alongside of VS2005 August CTP. You'll probably have to stick with the SQL Server Express bits that come with the VS2005 CTP. www.acehaid.org...

Now this is exciting. Somasegar announces that RC1 will be coming out in September . That means we're almost there! It gets the heart patternig a little faster than “CTP”, doesn't it? www.acehaid.org...

Have you tried out the new ASP.NET 2 Migration tool that the ASP.NET team was hoping to get feedback on? Time is running short. I tried a small app. It's small, but criticial to a client and does file transfers, file reads and writes, database access, forms authentication and a huge amount of inspection...

Microsoft is pushing a lot of great info out on ASP.NET 2.0 for the imminent November 7th release of VS2005. Here are some documents that went public recently: [ read more ] [A DevLife post] www.acehaid.org...

Brian Goldfarb points to this just released document: Major Changes for Visual Web Developer 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 from Whidbey Beta 2 to RTM . Thanks for keeping us up to speed!! Here's one that I've been waiting for. SqlCacheDependency.Start method required for cache dependencies based on SQL Server...

Every time I have considered leveraging Active Directory in my VB6 or .NET applications, I have laughed the thought away - too hard. But not any more! Andrew Duthie walks us through how to use the Active Directory membership provider for ASP.NET 2.0 . www.acehaid.org...

Chances are, anything you can ask is likely to be answered in this just-released extensive PAG guide to ASP.NET 2.0 Security ! What a fantastic compilation. Thanks PAG. www.acehaid.org...

I had to do some work in a VS2003 web service today. I have a remote web server and when I went to debug the service, I got the error message "the RPC server is unavailable." I suspected a firewall issue, though I did not know if I needed to attack the firewall on the client side or the server side....

I have been using the file server method with ASP.NET 2.0 since the beginning. I thought it was time to run in IIS. Note that all of my .NET 1.0 and 1.1 development has been against a remote server. I have never had to use ASP.NET 1.x on a machine iwth a local IIS, so there are some bad lessons I never...

I'm definitely curious what people think of the comic strip ads for Visual Studio that have been "playing" on sites like DevSource and elsewhere. In it, some poor developer is swamped with work and, in once strip, frustrated because he has a date with Katie that he is going to be late for. Suddenly,...

I recently discovered something by accident after three years of programming in .NET. I am testing an ASP.NET site (yep - that custom SharePoint site that is finally about to go live) and needed to check the affects on users with different priveleges [ read more ] [A DevLife Post] www.acehaid.org...

Here are a few things that keep biting me when I return to working on a web services app using wse3.0. I have blogged about some of these before , but need to keep them in the front of my mind! ASP.NET Project NTLM Authentication : If NTLM Authentication is on and you are not set up to use it, you will...

[this is for v 1.1] On a web page I have an ImageButton with some server side action to take place when it is clicked. But there are scenarios where I would like it to be disabled. The Enabled property disables any command action, but you still get the "index finger" cursor when you hover over the icon...

Oh, more lost hours in admin hell. Here's some pointers if you are upgrading your web server to SP1. - Remember the firewall problems when moving XP to SP2. You will have them here!! <g> Pay attention to what ports are opened up. This article is a good reminder of that wiht a section on what applications...

This .NET error message is misleading (although in the long run, it is still correct) and brings up nothing at all in Google, so I am going to put it here again: "The row doesn't belong to the same DataSet as this relation". Miseleading because I was focused on the row. This is the System.ArgumentException...

When Beta2 was released, I wanted to get my hands on it right away. This meant downloading it from MSDN Subscriptions since it would take a while before any CD's would arrive. I have DSL with [ read more...] [A DevLife post] TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item...

Earlier today I wrote about celebrating the VS2005/SQL Server 2005 launch while I am at DevConnections in November. Now I have found this great banner on their home page (though I admit seeing it first on fellow speaker (wow, I get to be a "fellow speaker" with Dino??!) Dino Esposito. TechEd Speakers...

I just got an email from Paul Litwin who is the track chair for ASPConnections. Since DevConnections is being held right when the official launch date of VS & SQL 2005 occur (Nov 7), they are going to be a part of the celebration. If I were home in Vermont, I would not have this opportunity. Microsoft...

I do it, so my site should be safe, right? Well it turns out that the answer is "wrong"!! One of the websites that shares a webserver with my site left CustomErrors="Off" in their web.config when they deployed their site. How does this affect me? Well, there was a problem in the machine.config on the...

I would just like to point out that the word Indigo is now appearing on Michele Leroux Bustamante's blog. Watch this space for lots of Indigo insights!!! TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881...

Some of the syntax for writing debugger visualizers has changed again with the recent Beta 2 of VS2005. They are minor, but as always, notable. 1) The VisualizerUIType is gone because all Visualizers are Modal. Before [assembly: DebuggerVisualizer(typeof(DebuggerVisualizers.DataTableDebugger), VisualizerUIType...

I have to write what I hope will be my last vs2003 app - just a quickie for a client. Now that I have done so much work with Whidbey, there was something that is painfully missing from .NET 1.1, the backgroundworker class component. This is for easily making asynchronous calls without having to write...

Scott Nonnenberg keeps track of cool debugger visualizers people are writing. I have only gone so far as messageboxes or windows forms. Here is an entire MDI application debugger visualizer that really let's you explore a dataset in amazing ways!! It is way more than a simple tool and not a freebie....

When I was at Microsoft's Reston office earlier this month, there was a 'Softie (oh, I just can't remember his name) who was telling me that the next big thing was going to be Software Factories . He showed me the dev center for them. Said to get to know them, keep my eyes out, etc. Well, I have definitely...

Egad - Microsoft is now talking about Hawaii which is THREE product cycles out from what we are working on today. VS2003 VS2005 (Whidbey) VSxxx (Orcas) VSIhopetoberetiredby then (Hawaii) http://www.AcehAid.org...

[I wrote this while at Devscovery] When I FIRST learned about exceptions 3 years ago, I was told that exception handling was for handling exceptional situations. Jeffrey tells us that this is a myth and is just wrong. Exceptions are when a method cannot perform its expected behavior. There may be many...

Michele is thinking about ".. how can ASP.NET developers lessen the pain of returning to 1.1, and better prepare to migrate their code to 2.0? " and will be posting blogs on a variety of ASP.NET 2.0 topics. Keep an eye out... http://www.AcehAid.org...

I had two problems calling web services with a VS2005 app that I moved from Beta1 (Feb CTP) to Beta2. I have a client asp.net and a web service app. Both are running on a file based web server, not IIS. The web service was functioning properly when I ran it directly, but not when I tried to call it from...

Although you can now output DataTables from web services in .NET 2.0, there is still a problem when trying to consume them using a web reference in a client project in VS2005. (I know there are plenty of people who think this is evil anyway...) The problem is apparently in the proxy generation. Here...

Anyone catch this in Chris Sells' post about the 2.0 version of his Windows Forms book? we're not updating the VB.NET version due to poor sales for VB.NET-related titles in general That is a shocker to me - that VB.NET books are selling less than C#. I wouldn't have expected it. http://www.AcehAid.org...

it used to be the butt of a great joke by Leon Bambrick - with his now famous VB Refactoring menu , but now thanks to the genius of Developer Express , VB Refactoring is real and being offered by Microsoft as a free plug-in for VS2005 . http://www.AcehAid.org...

Sahil lists a bunch of interesting (good and not so good) things that he is finding with beta2 . I have downloaded and not yest installed cause I realized I don't want no dang STANDARD bits! http://www.AcehAid.org...

I blindly downloaded the standard version of VS2005 Beta2 because the only other option was Team System (not for me and also a an extra GB which would have added at least 6 hours). Mike Gunderloy pointed out that this is standard and we don't have access to Professional as yet, so I went and checked...

SQL Server Reporting Services and Crystal Reports: A Competitive Analysis Thanks for pointing this out, Mike . I have still not touched Reporting Services and continue my "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" relationship with Crystal, so I definitely need to read it.. It is written by Brian...

Beth Massi points to a xml data visualizer on GotDotNet that you can use today in VS2003. Since she is speaking at DevTeach , I hope she'll get to come to my session on Customized Debugging in VS2005 so I can show her the debugger visualizers. Of course she may not be able to wait so in that case, I...

I don't remember seeing this in the past, but the Feb CTP bits have a hissy fit if you change the name of a control on a web form or windows form. Web Forms want to refactor your code behind for you. Sometiems it hangs. WinForms throws a whole lot of compile time errors to the Error reporting system...

I'm fiddling around with nullable types in Whidbey and just discovered a DataRow property that is not even new, but I had never known was there (or maybe it flew by me once but it didn't stick in my brain): DataRow.IsNull("mycolumnname" ) Obviously invaluable when dealing with value types. I guess in...

So I popped over to blog feed reader and I see "Got Indigo Day" in Boston . I can't see the whole post and I can't help thinking "who the heck is gonna do that?". Who in Boston knows Indigo well enough already to present on it on behalf of Microsoft? Will they just be reading a script or something? Then...

If you have been and continue to be using pre-release versions of .NET 2.0, Kit George has pointed to this download which will list the APIs that are in existing bits that will not make it to the final RTM version. Definitely pay attention to this! Clarification for those who may need it: These are NOT...

This is impressive! I need to dig through them to see if there is anything to update for my BCL Talk at DevConnections next week. [note: they kept going the next day with another 13 or so posts! See Kit's complete summary here ...] Take note of Kit's post on the .NET Vision and the Best Features post...

"SQL Server Setup could not connect to the database service for server configuration. The error was: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified" I had this problem and found the solution the other night over on Niko P's blog... His blog is a great resource...

Brad McCabe sure gets to start his new job as content manager of the Visual Basic Developer Center with a bang! Brad explains what will change as of April 1st and what the effect will be. Similar to what I said here , but with much better detail. http://www.AcehAid.org...

this took me a while time to find via MSDN Library or Google. That's because I didn't notice it at the bottom of the "switch" explanation on C# (duh!). (And because the fantabulous C# & VB.NET Conversion Pocket Ref doesn't have an index and I couldn't find the listing for this in the TOC.) It's hard...

Dino Esposito has an article in the current Code Magazine called " Implications and Repercussions of Partial Classes in the .NET Framework 2.0 ". It is a good, thoughtful look at partial classes, what you might want to do with them, where they are obviously beneficial, and where they are possibly beneficial...

Geeze - nearly 3 years of working in .NET and I just noticed this today - 'cause I went looking for it. For the super curious (and this hardly satisifes anything beyond that), how do you know when you are using a system type vs. a “keyword“? It's easy with VB's Integer (keyword), or C#s int...

As I'm digging further into my C# for VB6 programmers talk that I am preparing for Code Camp and also DevConnections, I noticed something funny - that case-sensitive C# doesn't seem to care if you use String or string - while it cares plenty if you try to use "Int" or "Bool", etc. I realized though that...

Kathleen says: Let’s take a trip down memory lane to look at how you’re using tracing today. That’s easy – you aren’t using it. You aren’t using it because even though you can’t articulate what’s wrong (and maybe can’t articulate what tracing is) you’re primordial self still recoils in revulsion at the...

I learned about Comment Tasks during Deborah Kuratas eye-opening "Best Kept Secrets" talk at VSLive last month. She also has a whole book filled with these goodies. It was really funny to hear people keep going "what? I didn't know you could do that!". I also did this a number of times. One of the things...

Michele posted something funny on her blog. An image of VS2005's "New Project" dialog suggesting that C# is THE language of choice and VB.NET is just one of those "other" languages. This is just really based on some settings in VS because mine looks quite different! http://www.AcehAid.org...

I love the concept of Nullable<T> being able to deal with null data coming out of the database - especially ints and datetimes. The only problem is that I cannot figure out how to leverage Nullable<T> with data coming from a database. I still have to test for null. I have also talked with...

Mario Cardinal's presentation last night at Vermont.NET was fantastic and well attended! Mario is one of those guys that big companies call in when they have enterprise problems that nobody can solve. He has been programming forever (it seems from all of the references he makes) and comes from a serious...

acccch . Just wrapping up last edits on a debugger visualizer article only to disccover the implementation has (as promised) changed. As soon as I can get my code to actually compile based on the new documentation (which seems to be a bit of a challenge), I'll let you know what the changes are, if you...

Got Speech? Developing Applications using Microsoft Speech Server and .NET Wednesday, February 23, 2005 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM Microsoft New England District Office Waltham , MA Registration is open! Posted from BLInk!...

Oh good. Now I can take all of those caveats out of my Whidbey BCL presentation! This is a big deal. Peter Drayton explains why and the impact of this on language developers in this blog post. Good work, folks! (of course, if you used Smalltalk..... as per James Robertson ) Posted from BLInk!...

Sahil asks a good question (something I meant to share...thanks for the reminder) about installing the November CTP bits on a machine that already has SQL Server 2005 (Beta 2) on it. The latest install put SQL 2005 Express on my machine without asking me. I already had SQL 2005 Beta 2 (Oct. CTP) on there...

Here are some more changes upcoming for the November CTP that I found loading up a project from the October CTP bits: retyping for Google, etc System.Transactions. TransactionScope.Consistent is being replaced by Transaction.Scope.Complete LoadOption.UpdateCurrentValues (used with DataSet/DataTable.Load...

I have to look further into this but look at the pattern of where DataTips are available (green) and where they are not (red) If you haven't seen DataTips yet, it's like an inline quick watch window during debug Posted from BLInk!...

You've got to love this level of detail! Here is an exception raised from SQL Server 2005 into VS2005 (latest CTP) when I was doing some testing to play with transactions in MARS and passing in some tsql to do a table update. Posted from BLInk!...

The Mobility Road Show is well under way and Microsoft is now ready to trade your mobile application samples for a Smart Phone, Pocket PC or other mobile device. Read more about this awesome contest on Thom Robbins weblog....

(talking smart client - windows forms app here, not asp.net) I was using System.IO.Directory.GetCurrentDirectory to find DLL's that are to be loaded by reflection in a particular app. But when a user goes out and does something like look up something in windows explorer, that changes the definition of...

James Avery recently emailed me to see if I had experienced any problems with the refresh and some of the visualizers that I have written in the past . As I had not yet bothered with the install I couldn't confirm for him but we got a pointer from Scott Nonnenberg to check that the Microsoft.VisualStudio...

I'm working on my deck for doing ink on the web for ASP.NET Connections . I wanted to be able to explain why the SDK 1.7 controls now enable this to work - which is all about the fact that the Tablet Team has modified the API to make the the InkPicture and InkEdit controls as well as the InkOverlay object...

One of the three talks I am doing at ASP.NET Connections is What's new in the BCL 2.0 for ASP.NET Developers (that's an abbreviation of the title). I am taking my “ What's New in the Whidbey Base Class Libraries ” presentation that I have been doing since February and turning it on its' ear...

Champlain College has some .NET classes . I believe it's in the continuing ed school. I couldn't find the classes in the regular curriculum. They are one of the colleges in Burlington. I was happy to hear this. What it means to me is that .NET is finally really taking wing here....

I'm not sure how long they've been there, but Brian Keller just posted that the streaming video from DevDays presentations is online . There is one each, looks like they taped them at the Redmond event which had the largest attendance. Boston was the 2nd largest. It was definitely the largest audience...

I have heard the prediction of the demise of VB from the mouths of some *very* believable sources (not at Microsoft). These are people who are so immured in the internals of .NET that from their perspective it just may not make sense to have multiple languages. However from a practical perspective (i...

Over the winter, I had a great excuse to dive into the Whidbey BCL as I had a presentation to do for the Edge East Conference in Boston in February. I spent a huge amount of time going back and forth between the .NET 1.1 reference library comparing it to the reference library in the PDC bits. I did lots...

I was trying to understand why I was being told that the implementation of iXMLSerializable in DataTable and DataSet in 2.0 is responsible for all of the xml goodies (readxml/write/etc and of course all the webservices stuff) when DataSet in 1.0 and 1.1 does not even implement iXMLSerializable, yet still...

Since Ian Griffiths doesn't have comments, I just wanted to make sure I got his attention with that title. Do you know that VB.NET doesn't have Data Breakpoints either? And that it won't in Whidbey, either? (Hmmm that C# book I received today in the mail looks tempting...) I'm sure many many programmers...

Ian Griffiths couldn't understand why I was having a party because I could drill all the way into a dataset in VS2005 without having to retype each item in the quick watch window. eg. if I want to see the metadata for each table in a dataset, I currently have to explicilty enter dataset.tables(mytablename...

In Scott Nonnenberg's blog post on how to write debugger visualizers that he wrote after the March preview of VS2005 was released, he mentioned that the location where you need to place the resulting dll would change in the future releases. That time has come (I noticed today when I tried to use one...

Update - see THIS POST to find out why I added the words “(in VB)” to the title! In case you missed this in the previous bits (not PDC, but March & May), I am having a repeat episode of the thrill of debugging datasets in Whidbey. HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hooray Hooray Hip Hip Hooray...

Call me crazy. I'm so swamped but just got bit by the curiousity bug and did some very silly perf tests on Beta1. A few months back, Krzysztof Cwalina posted some Design Guidelines for Generics. In it, the BCL team recommends using <nullable> for value types. At that time I was curious about the...

I hadn't noticed this elsewhere, so just wanted to “log” it. Opening up a VB.NET project built in the May bits in the new Beta1 gives you this warning 3 times: The "MSBuildVersion" attribute is deprecated. If the project is authored in the MSBuild 2003 format, please remove the attribute...

Don Kiely's talk was fantastic at Vermont.NET on Monday night. I think he had everyone on the edge of their seats with all of the great tips & tricks for truly working in Least Privilege mode. Not only why you should do it but how to do it. And not only how, but what to expect because it ain't easy...

That's because you have intelligent debaters on BOTH sides of the fence. I can't believe I have missed this thread from being kind of heads down and no time for blog reading for a few days. Surely, the comments are growing by the minute....

Jon Box points out an important thing to be aware of with the upcoming XP service pack. He also points to some additional resources on the topic. And since I seem to do it in every single post where i mention Windows XP SP2, here is a link to what you need to know as a developer about this service pack...

I've been seeing on many blogs that there are beta versions of the upcoming Visual Studio.NET 1.0 and 1.1 Service Packs . I'm so filled up with betas that I think I will...well...maybe I can put it on my tablet that already has XP SP1 RC2 on it. Oh gawd - here we go again! My guess is that these are...

I just came across a problem debugging a windows .net app that I have never seen before. I would hit my break point and then I did not have control of the app to step to the next line. After about 10 seconds control came back. If I tried to view a value in the Quick Watch window most of the values just...

There is a super duper young guy at one of my client's who is a very talented graphic artist with plenty of java website experience - you now... one of those Mac users :-). He was tasked with adding a little more flare to some of the internal websites I have done for his company. I was a little nervous...

Ahh - looks like Sam gets to do this as part of his .NET Supreme Wonk Architect job. Darn it's not fair :-). I still had my clients calling me today with all of the usual stuff and code to write that they are waiting for. Then since dinner I have managed to knock off a few of my Vermont.NET and INETA...

Every week or so I go back to the Pearson Vue site to see if Microsoft has released the results of the Security beta test that I took in early May. It was a bit of a traumatic event as you can see from the blog post I wrote when I got home. Being a beta test you never know when you will get the results...

I am a die-hard NO WAY JOSE kinda girl when it comes using the visual data wizards for my apps. No for connections, data sets or anything. I like to write my own data access thank you very much and then hook everything up at run time. However, I got really stuck because not only do I not use them , I...

Though the cat got out of the bag a little early, the betas just launched! And a beautiful new MSDN developer center to go with them. VS2005 Beta 1 (released June 29th) How to get it MSDN Subscribers will be the first to receive Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, which will be available for subscriber download...

A few things to note with the ACL functions in Whidbey,err .NET 2.0. - If you are using ACL for creating files, you can't combine it's use with the file.writeall shortcut. YOu need to use filestreaming. That's a bummer. (Maybe a temporary one?) - Pay attention to the complexity and combination of possibilities...

So my little birdie also told me not to miss ACL's in the whidbey BCL. Brad Abrams wrote about this in January . System.Security.AccessControl is namespace with many classes is in it for dealing with ACL and not having to be a security expert to figure out how. The really pleasing classes are the FileSecurity...

SYSTEM.IO.COMPRESSION A little birdy pointed it out to me today. I googled it to see what had been written about it so far and found that I had actually missed some previous other blogger's similar happy response upon their own discovery of this groovy little namespace. I must have flown past it in Craig...

It seems like that sometimes, doesn't it! Well, here finally is the Smart Client Developer Center on MSDN . It took Microsoft a long time to come to this definition of Smart Client and it looks like they're stickin' with it! See if you can define Smart Client before going to look at their definition...

Scott Watermasysk writes about the using statement in VB.NET Whidbey pointing out that “using ... end using” will also immediately dispose of the resource you created with “using”. Brand spanking new concept to me - since I have not even used enough C# to know that it already...

Rich Turner from the Indigo team is here with his arms waving and feet stomping to attempt to stop the spread of the malformed idea that the push of SO means the death of OO. OO is * absolutely * relevant, useful, valuable, important, vital and positively NOT deprecated and obsolete. I don’t know...

Clemens Vasters on secure deployment... and from the recent past Kathleen Dollard on the .NET Security Beta Cert TEst Keith Brown does his part to try to help...” a .net developers guide to Windows Security”...

This error message was thrown when trying to set ListControl.ValueMember=“mydatafield“ I know I had this problem once before and wasted a lot of time trying to solve it. I found nothing helpful via google (though a hint about Oracle that referred to case sensitivity which I stupidly ignored...

It is definitely a conundrum. Do you use the registry? (easy as pie to code to, with lots of potential security and other issues) Do you leverage Isolated Storage? (a very secure way to write and read local files in managed code, but designed for files - which means a lot of coding to get info in and...

I read with great interest Paul Vick's post on “The truth about Nullable types in VB“ vs. C# as I am talking about nullable types in my revised Whidbey BCL talk that I am doing at VTdotNET in a week and then at DevTeach in a few weeks. I have played with nullable in the March preview bits...

Sean Campbell from 3Leaf , who with his partner Scott Swigart are known as “Early & Adopter” explains why paying attention to Whidbey today is a good strategy . This does not necessarily mean ALL of your attention, but it is one of the reason that I keep telling my user group members...

Security guru Keith Brown's A .NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security is on line and I'm reading parts of it in my last minute cramming for the 70-330 beta exam. Ach - I have to leave in 1 1/2 hours! Anyway, I love stuff like this: From the chapter on Configuring Security for a COM(+) Client ( item...

I took the absolutely last possible time slot to take the Security Beta Exam (vb 70-330, c# 70-430) I just wanted to point out (and say thanks!) Jason Row's compilation of info for this test . Most of the official materials won't be out for quite some time....

It seems that a bunch of developers have finally cracked under the pressure of too much information on the future stuff and just not enough focus on the current technology that most developers are working in (referring to .NET 1.1, there). I definitely understand. Take a look at Greg Robinson 's post...

Late last year, I finally began tackling WSE and then followed that up with some (now postponed boo hoo) very excited digging into WSE2. During that time I had read a very useful article on WSE by Jeannine Hall Gailey and heard from her that she had a WSE2 book coming out . The insatiable programming...

Loren Heiny , who is a developer first and a tablet pc (MVP and) expert second (that ranking is my own personal opinion), (and even an author ) -- spent some time using his new Toshiba M200 as a development machine to answer the question many developers have asked - “but can I use a tablet as my...

”Visual Basic at the Movies” A ton (101 I think) of videos by 3Leaf (that's these guys btw - oh but they have a new blog now , thanks Robert!) and the whole kitten caboodle is presented like an advertising campaign for a series 50's (40's?) B-movies. If it weren't 10 pm and I didn't still...

I love reading posts like this from Sam Gentile. (Though I am timid about writing about them, as I'm always worried I'm gonna get something wrong! :-) ) But these posts are where you can really see his expertise through the experience he has had in drilling into very complex and detailed areas. I think...

This is a great idea that Thom Robbins , the New Englend DE for Microsoft, put together. It is a weekend (9a - 9pm!!) full of many training classes on a variety of .NET topics to help developers get up to speed over the weekend. There will be three separate tracks during each session, so coders can pick...

This * is a humongous honor, especially since I am third in line after Chris Sells and Paul Vick . I'm a little embarrassed by that title, but it's just what the article is called. I'll be hanging around DevSource's forums for a few days if you really want to harrass me or anything. It might be a good...

For my data friends out there ,I would just like to point out that my previous post is about the VERY first thing I wanted to look at when I had the new bits installed!! :-)...

I have been bitching for a while about the loss of the debugger's ability to drill into a dataset/datatable in the same way that we could in VB6. There is even a project (I have yet to look at...sorry) on GotDotNEt to make up for this. I have been told - just wait, visualizers will help!! But the Whidbey...

This evening I received a reply to an email that I wrote 16 months ago! In January 2003, I sent the following email to my user group: Folks, go check out: http://www.crystalreportsbook.com Basically the story goes that this book was written for APress and then the contract was cancelled due to a lack...

I swear, I really am coding these days, but it's nothing new. Just getting ready to crank out the puzzle pieces of a pluggable framework I devised for my client. It will handle possibly hundreds of different data entry forms for the various testing services they perform for their clients. The app leverages...

Thom Robbins is the Microsoft D.E. for New England. He blogs this morning about a recent presentation at a corporation that is heavily invested in VB6 and ready (?) to move to .NET. He makes a point that I have tried to deliver over and over again to developers. Many times what people miss is that even...

If you have spent any time on Jonathan Goodyear's www.angrycoder.com site, you will know that he has never been shy about how he feels about VB.NET (well, sometimes I think he targets the VB developers, not just the language). So in his ASP.NETPro Mag commentary on the lack of Edit & Continue in...

I have not used drag and drop data features since I first started learning VB4, but I don't mind doing it just to explore the features of the IDE, so even though the README says this “Drag and drop from data source window onto a form is not very stable. “ I wanted to see how “not stable”...

Well I ended up just dedicating my laptop to installing VS2005. It already had Whidbey PDC bits on it so I wasn't planning on depending on it for anything else. I had to do a LOT of uninstalling first - VS.NET Whidbey, .NET Framework Whidbey, then the new install also forced me to uninstall .net 1.1...

Well, I finally decided to just trash my current Whidbey PDC bits and install the Tech Preview right on my laptop. No VPC - just let this be the box for it. Having made that decision, I went to MSDN and saw that the download is 4GB. I do have DSL but still that will be more time than I feel like dealing...

This has bitten me in the rear twice in the last few days while working on some webmethods. I was erroring out on a sql ExecuteNonQuery with the only message being that there was an error on line 1 of my command. Looking in my SQLProfiler I see my query as exec sp_executesql N'MySprocName', N'@myparam...

To me, the best education is gained when two great and knowledgable minds debate. Here are Chris Sells and Ted Neward on the pros & cons of the GAC. Chris is talking about not using the GAC and Ted heartily disagrees with a lot of Chris' points (though he heartily agrees with some as well.) Listen...

I went today to Mad River for the last hurrah . It was just like one of those great spring days in college where you just have to cut class and go play frisbee and drink beer (back in the old days when the drinking age was 18) on the college green. A day of sheer sun, joy and new found freedom after...

I would love love love to look at the newer bits but after reading Rick Strahl's very trustworthy blog on his experience with them, I'll just leave the PDC bits on my box for now, thank you very much. Update : in my comments, Bliz suggests using VPC. I'm a VPC “never-ever“ and don't want...

I banged my head over a problem for a while a few months ago. I was using a lookup datatable for a dropdown and also trying to use it for a search (to get some more key info when the user selected an item for the drop down). But this was screwing up the display in the dropdown. The problem makes so much...

Transaction processing for databases is one of those things I have always been ashamed that I never used - though in most of my small applications, I only do one insert/update at a time. Now with .NET they are really easy to implement so no more excuses. I'm busy right now sticking them in my webservice...

Well, I did explictly choose to live far from a major metropolitan area, so I can't whine that I will probably be missing this: http://radio.weblogs.com/0131777/2004/03/24.html#a97 Actually, the VB Team is going to visit a bunch of user groups around the country. I don't have a list, but keep an eye...

Our next user group meeting for Vermont .NET is “XML Night”. We have Joe Stagner , a Microsoft Developer Community Champion who is located in the Northeast (and has been a big help to our user group along with our D.E. Thom Robbins) coming to talk about Secure XML and also Altova 's Trace...

I had an email from a Boston attendee who was trying to figure out where the demos could be found on the dvd. I looked myself and realized that although the OpenHack and IssueVision source code were on the cd, the actual little demos during the earlier sessions were not. I told him I would keep looking...

I had a hell of a time tracking down a problem that was occurring on a remote web service/web server today and finally came to this. Hopefully, if this helps someone else in the future, then my hours won't have been totally wasted. I have a webservice that is required to return a recordset (this is an...

One thing to consider when rendering output to the browser is to htmlencode any text that you are sending out to the browser. eg. label.text=htmlencode(mystring). It's pretty obvious to do this with direct user input - for example a search form where you spit back “Your search for 'dogs' resulted...

Peter Blum , who has a bunch of fantastic asp.net controls on the market - said he is getting read to add some new validation controls to his already fantastic validator control package. These will be for dealing with possible cross-site scripting and SQL Injection attacks. Keep an eye on his site for...

I'll admit I was nervous going into my first DevDays talk in Hartford a few weeks ago. I just didn't feel like I “owned” my material yet. Boston DevDays is 2 days away and I am REALLY looking forward to doing my talk. Since Hartford, there has been a plethora of output analysis and further...

I recently learned about the v1.1 ValidateRequest (on by default) feature and wrote about it (though the comments to that post are the most interesting part...). Don Kiely has more to say on ValidateRequest in this quick ASPNetPro article . If you are writing aspnet1.1 sites, you should really be aware...

From a conversation with Brian Keller , the PM on the VJ# team and some additional input from C# dudes, Dan Fernandez and Eric Gunnerson . For further enlightenment, read Jason Clark's introductory article on “what is generics...“ from Sept 2003 MSDN Magazine. Q) I know I can't code VJ# for...

For some reason, I have not been that interested in code generation up until recently. I have looked only briefly at some of the tools out htere and not at all at others. I guess I saw them as an all or nothing situation - rather than leveraging code generation for bits and pieces of my development and...

[Warning - I am NO Indigo or ws-messaging, etc. wonk , but] this post , by Rich of the indigo team, which references a post by Omri , caught my eye. I learned a while ago why DIME can suck - if you have a large attachment, you can't truly leverage the fluidity of streaming since the entire thing needs...

From Don Kiely The Code Generation Network 's Jack Herrington recently interviewed Kathleen Dollard about code generation, her new book ( Code Generation in Microsoft .NET ), and the state of programming in general and .NET specifically. It's an interesting read; Kathleen has some interesting thoughts...

Here's the home page for Christoph who did the OpenHack demo at DevDays in Houston. Here are some recent entries - he is following up from his talk (and questions he was asked) at DevDays and with more info and how-to's DevDays:Restricting access to IIS websites. DevDays: A simple way to configure a...

Well that quote comes from this post ( On the Road to Indigo - is .NET REmoting Dead? ) by Microsoft's Rich Turner and it caught my eye. In it, Rich explains the future of .NET Remoting. I personally don't have a lot of (well...any) experience with .NET Remoting. Once I got through the learning curve...

My jam-packed session at DevDays - Defenses and Countermeasures - shows a huge amount of solutions of things you can do to try to keep the hackers out. It was frustrating not to be able to get into the details of all of the great information that was in there due to the time limitation. I think it would...

I am getting some great feedback in my last two security related posts from people who have been thinking about, working with and dealing with asp.net security a lot longer than I have. DEFINITELY read the comments by Steve Smith and Sam Gentile in my last post. And don't miss the comments by Anil John...

Don't we all? Isn't it what we were told to do. ASP.NET protects the web.config file so nobody can browse to it and see your connection strings, logins and passwords and whatever else you have hidden in there. Right? But guess what, that's just not good enough anymore! Hackers who know how to get into...

Did you know that ASP.NET v1.1 automatically checks for possible scripting attacks when users enter info into you forms? I didn't! I learned it in my prep for my DevDays session. So this: (with Errors =”Off” in web.config) results in this: (click to enlarge) This protection is on by default...

This is probably old news to many who have been playing with VB.NET Whidbey for a while... I noticed that when debugging, if I didn't have have NEW in a custom class, the debugger stops on code that instantiates that class, givint a little popup message “There is no source code for the current...

a few days ago I posted a some code that (if you trust me, if you really really trust me...) you can drop into your asp.net application folders to get a quick look at the various paths returned by server.mappath or directory class and stop the nonsense with the guesswork! Rick Strahl just posted a nice...

Do you, Mr/Ms Developer, think Security is boring? Well after seeing most of the content for the DevDays web track - my answer to that is : TOUGH SHIT ! DevDays is doing a big job of trying to make this stuff accessible and palatable because it is THAT important that the secure development practices...

(Is this the only way to talk to you outside of the con-calls) I wanted to point out that the DPAPI that we are talking about for protecting strings is now has a managed wrapper in Whidbey! They are still wrappers to the API, but a heck of a lot easier to code than the current solution that we will be...

I am the typical programmer who needs to hear this! Look at this post where I thought I had to do this exact thing! Thank goodness Mark Pearce corrected me immediately in the comments of that post. This is a typical example of the points that are being made in my DevDays “ASP.NET Defenses and Countermeasures”...

saw this on Andrew Duthie's blog Kent officially announces the ASP.NET resource kit. (with some good humor, to boot!) It made a brief appearance last week or so, long enough for a bunch of people (including me) to blog about it then - poof - it was gone! :-)...

I have not had a need for Console applications since I started writing Windows applications. Obviously there are a lot of people writing console apps (I can tell from the cheers of all the folks who were excited about the color in the PDC presentation). I know Stephen Forte has one he showed me once...

yes COLOR in the Console!! and beeping and more... However, if you are playing with the Console Demo App from the BCL teams' website , be sure that your console windows settings in WinXP (other versions?) is set to open to a Window rather than full-screen. I have no idea how this works in .NET 1.0 or...

Way to go Colt! Read his post here . There seems to be a link missing so here it is: http://www.mshk.com/hk/msdn/docs/MSDNVideo Colt is very instrumental in the .NET community in Hong Kong, a busy INETA Volunteer, MVP and ASPInsider. (and weblogs.asp.net blogger...)...

John Bristowe explains (from personal experience) what it takes to really learn and understand all that goes on through the pipe in .NET - WSE, Web Services, etc etc. I have always been impressed with John's scope of knowledge on this topic and having only scratched the surface of some of that stuff...

Sounds like TechEd, but it's not! It's DevTeach , Montreal, Quebec in June. I am a huge fan of this conference for a number of reasons. 1) It's less than 2 hours from my house 2) it's very inexpensive 3) the canadian exchange makes it even LESS expensive 4) awesome speakers 5) gobs of great .NET content...

Thanks to Brad Abrams and John Hawkins at Microsoft for shipping me gobs of the WinFX posters to give to attendees of my Whidbey Base Classes presentation (next week!) and share with some other user groups. They had a few left over from PDC....

Jack Herrington, who, if you google his name comes up over and over as “the force behind code generation” (and author of this well received book on Code Generation) gave Kathleen's new book Code Generation in Microsoft .NET (MSPress) a 5 star review! Way to go Kathleen. Another review by...

Found this little C# app on iDesign's download page to demonstrate perf gains with generics. (scroll down on page and look for Generics Performance.) These are demos from iDesign's classes. I believe it's the same demo that is in Juval Lowy's C# Generics MSDN article . From the iDesign downloads page...

(thanks Leon, I fixed the spelling in my title - glad someone's actually reading it!) Just this morning I was visiting the MSDN Architecture Dev Center with the idea that if Duncan Mackenzie's info is on the VB area , etc. then I could find out who the person in charge of the Architecture area was. But...

okay from Kent Sharkey, via Chris Garty from the proverbial horse's mouth (sorry Scott! you're not a horse...) Chris asked Scott some straightforward questions and got some straightforward answers. The details The summary: The first public beta will be released in June There will be releases before the...

I'm working on the generics part of my little BCL Whidbey talk . I'm going to have about 5 minutes to do generics - whadya think? LOL. I just wanted to point out that in addition to some of the more (now) classic resources, like Jason Clark's MSDN Mag articles ( 1 , 2 ) and Anders Hejlsberg's PDC demo...

Ahhh peace and quiet, now I have some time to write another overdue post. I was able to lure Steve Smith to speak to Vermont .NET with the invitation of a free weekend getaway in Vermont which was extended to his wife Michelle and daughter Ilyana. Unfortunately, Michelle and Ilyana weren't able to come...

Extracted from here : My problem with many n-tier examples is that while they are getting better at separating the logical tiers, there is nothing about how to separate the tiers physically. It can't be done easily, because everything is coupled with the web.config file....

In this essay which questions why it seems people are not leveraging .NET to do real scalable enterprise apps, Sam reinforces a point that he has made often and states again in his comments on this post . Too many developers pick up Visual Studio.NET and kind of start where they left off, without looking...

I have been using reflection for a while to open up forms dynamically and have been past the form properties and form methods hurdle for quite some time. I just had to raise an event from my form that is being loaded dynamically. A quick article by Dino Esposito on VB2theMax made it relatively easy to...

Sam Gentile did a presentation at VTdotNET in September that really took the time and care to explain the many terms that define the .NET programming that we do. Although one of the very minor points of his talk, in there he happens to clarify the BCL vs. FCL, which I talked about in this post and discussed...

The ASP.NET Resource Kit (similar to the VB.NET Resource Kit ) in fact, it's not even listed on the www.asp.net home page yet! But just got released yesterday (2/9/2004). Thanks to Scott Watermasysk for pointing it out . There don't seem to be any details anywhere yet (though Scott does quote a few....

Steve Smith and I had to miss the DevDays (web track) speaker training last night because of the Vermont .NET User group meeting . But I know we will have plenty of opportunity to make that up. Today is the last day for the DevDays discount. If you wait until tomorrow, you will have to spend $24 dollars...

Interesting post from 2003 PASS track chair, Roman Rehak, on the evals from the conference. Besides been a .NET developer, Roman is an absolute whiz with SQL Server and has been doing a lot of talks for developers on what they should really know about working with SQL Server. Keep an eye on his weblog...

Steve Smith , Mr. ASPAlliance etc is coming to speak to the Vermont.NET User Group on Monday night, Feb 9th and then he is on to Montreal for the GUVSM.NET User Group on Tuesday night. His Tuesday night talk in Montreal is an INETA sponsored event. Monday is a Julie & Rich's Bed & Breakfast sponsored...

When I started working on my Edge East presentation (that I have written about a lot lately) I was really focusing on the fundamentals of the BCL. The conference organizers had picked the same title as Kit George's talk at PDC which was absolutely about the fundamentals. But the more bounced some questions...

How often do you have to set up IIS on a remote server and configure it to be accessible from a client box using Visual Studio.NET? Daily? No. Monthly? No. Maybe once every year or two? More like it. I just want to kick myself when I have to go through all of the same problem solving! Oh yeah, forgot...

Though I wrote about DevDays 2004 eons ago (and that attendees will be getting Whidbey!!), since I am speaking at two events (Hartford 3/2 and Boston 3/16) I just signed up for the devdaysbloggers.net site. Here is my little “I'll be there” graphic. It doesn't really give me the same jitters...

Well, I bet it's common though I only found ONE post on the whole internet about it so I better add a little noise here, too. This is for WSE1.0. I will ahve to look into this in WSE2.0! I installed my client app onto another machine. It's not on my domain so was synching against the internet time (a...

I have written in the past about my favorite little method in the BCL - GetDateTimeFormats . There is only one thing that bugs me about it. You have to return an array and then get the element out of the array. For example dim strArray() as string=now.getDateTimeFormats dim myFavoriteFormat as string...

Matt Powell's MSDN article on Programming with WSE2. I know - it's been around since July...six plus months, but hey, I'm an “early-ish” adopter, not an instant adopter. Also of course the reference docs. Here's a list of MSDN articles . Having delved into WSE1 makes this all seem so sensible...

(Links to former posts that I refer to in this post: 1 , 2 , 3 ) Hey, I ain't no plumber. I think by now anyone who reads my blog is well aware of this. Yet, I needed to act like one last month when I had to use WSE1.0 to encrypt some super secret data that was being sent out from a web service. I followed...

Are you or do you know a VB6 programmer who is still worried about the leap, learning curve, etc. to .NET? To me the most daunting thing was not wanting to just do things the VB6 way when I moved to .NET. I didn't want to be just another mort. Well this looks like a REALLY promising series of webcasts...

I have used typed datasets in a few cases where I have to build a dataset from xml data or something along those lines. Most of the things I didn't like about them expressed nicely by Shawn Wildermuth , (THE ADO Guy) and Rick Strahl here and here , I just dealt with because I wasn't using them extensively...

You saw it here first, but Darryl Taft has done a little more research and has more details in this e-week article . [syndicated from Julia Lerman's Don't Be Iffy Blog . Please refer and comment here ]...

bummer - this is what I get for working instead of playing on BLInk! Well, being first wasn't my intention. I was just experimenting, really. Seem's like Loren's got a winner . Here's what Peter (aka Tabula PC) has to say about it....

Robert is asking this question of Mark Cliggett , the new community guy for VS.NET. This will only cover a slice of those asking, but if you live in the u.s. (or are visiting) and have access to one of the 30 major cities on the DevDays tours, GO GO GO !...

I love the description of this talk! Zen and the Art of Web Services (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WSDL) Will Web Services save the world? More importantly, will they save you time? Are Web Services just a bunch of hooey? We’ll separate the good from the bad and dig into the WHY...

Pat Hynds is our Regional Director (though he's about 3 or 4 hours away). He is also an INETA speaker, a big-time conference speaker and a security expert . Pat is also one of the nicest guys (ask anyone in the development community). The trivia I love the most, however, about Pat is that he holds the...

I'm sitting here with my laptop open to the help topic on String Members in Whidbey and my desktop on String Members in .Net 1.1 going back and forth to i.d. new members. (Sorry but I don't have every single property method and event in the framework memorized!) It would be a lot easier to have two of...

Every so often, Microsoft raids the coffers of INETA. Or so we like to think, when they hire user group leaders, INETA speakers, etc. Paul Stubbs is one of those that Microsoft recently sucked up. Paul was the leader of MaineBytes for a very long time. So you know, New ENgland, Vermont, Maine. He's like...

One of the many cool things that Kit George demo'd at PDC in his What's new in the Whidbey BCL demo was a deeper control over the debug process. With the DebuggerDisplay attributes, it is possible to control how information is displayed about your objects in the debugger. Apparently they wrote this stuff...

I found this article on Forms Authentication for the woman I have been mentoring. I really like the way the concept and process is explained before he gets into the code. There is a part 2 which is about how to use Forms Authentication with Active Directory but I don't do any programming against Active...

http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/devdays2004/default.mspx It will be in 32 cities during the month of March. Not only do you get a full day of awesome training. Not only is it cheap ($75 before Feb 10th, $99 after). But you will walk away with the “technology preview“ of Whidbey. Ummm- I...

How many times have you watched CSI or some other t.v. show and laughed when their computer does ridiculous things and say “computer programs don't DO that!” ? Well, I just watched the video of the Longhorn based real estate application by Carter Maslan - and guess what, computers *do* do...

I've been playing with Xceed's .NET Stream Compression component and also fiddling with a compression soap extension written by Paul Glavich . I have this kinda big dataset I need to bring down via a webservice to persist for off line use. It's almost 4 megs. On my DSL it was taking 2.9 minutes to download...

Addy Santo - A fellow blogger from NYC who keeps trying to tempt me to travel south for u.g. meetings and other Manhattan based events. Poor Addy. He just doesn't realize that after 8 years of living large in NYC, I live in Vermont for a reason now! :-) Robert Levy - one of the youngest MVPs (mobile...

Jeannine Gailey has a book on WSE2 to be released in January. Now that I have “touched” WSE (ummm - no, not mastered or conquered) I probably won't waste any more effort on WSE1.0 and move straight to the soon to be released WSE2 . The book: Understanding Web Services Specifications and WSE...

I had to revisit this functionality today. I am pretty certain that I tested decrypting back to a dataset with the previous method I was using, but today it just wouldn't work at all. After a lot of reading, googling and research, I learned a lot about various methods of cryptography, yet I was still...

Holy moly! That was hard work. I have never spent any time with the blogging APIs (blogger and metaweblog) and needed to at least push a post out from BLInk! . I wanted to make sure I could do this against dasBlog and dotText (from which so many blog sites are now derived ). With help from : The Blogger...

Just got word that I will be speaking at DevTeach again in 2004 (Montreal, June 19-22). This is a great conference and Rob Howard and Scott Guthrie will be doing the keynote. It is only a 2 hour drive from home, so I like that a lot too. Montreal is beautiful. The conference is very inexpensive even...

I must pass along this post by Don Kiely on a new book that Kathleen Dollard has just completed for APress! - Code Generation in Microsoft .NET . Don says, “I guarantee that this will be the hardest book you read in 2004, but also that it will be the single most important book for making you as...

I just had a thought about what I was working on yesterday with encrypting data that is passed back to a client in a SOAP response. I was using examples from two sources . In those samples, there was a key created in the webservice for encrypting. That same key was added into the client app in order...

ahh - another lost post - why oh why? ok here's the short version... I just spent all day working with SOAP and encryption and xmldocuments. Don Box just wrote a post that addresses a misconception that I had when working on my solution today. “ What caught my attention was the implication that...

( add : as per this and this , I modified my webservice to return a plain old dataset in the encrypted soap header - as I would for any other dataset returned by a web service - rather than turning it into an xmldocument first. Actually, also check out this from Sean Wildermuth , which is what convinced...

Inspired by Rory Blyth's post on what .NET techonology we fear the most (hands down for me, it's WSE) and a need to return login data from a web service in a secure manner, I am about to finally ( finally! ) use WSE. I have just installed WSE1 SP1 SDK on my dev machine and the runtime on my webserver...

Have you been waiting and waiting and waiting for a response to your application to participate in the reporting services beta? (Like I was?) I just happened to go to Beta Place today and there was Reporting Services in my area of “active programs”. I know I get a gazillion emails, but I...

I had some difficulty figuring this out. ALthough the ink can interact with the clipboard, I wanted to have an explicit place to tuck away my strokes and retrieve them again. A few hints in the Tablet Newsgroup pointed me in to some interesting methods and I was able to come up with the following solution...

note: I gave up on the webclient class and used Vick Soulios' VB FTP class on GotDotNet. It hangs for a few seconds when it's making the connection, but the upload works like a charm. Thanks Vick! But if someone can explain WHY the webclient.UploadFile was failing - translation ...what was I doing wrong...

Gulp. Guess it's official. I'm only doing the talk once, but maybe they just wanted it to look like they've got lots of women speakers by putting me on that home page twice! Just kidding. There are at least two others that I can see. My task is to pack a laundry list of what's new in the Whidbey CLR...

Stephen Forte asks if Reporting Services will be an Access Killer. Of course we have all giggled about how it looks like Access for SQL Server. But it won't kill Access. Many people will not need or be able to justify the cost of a SQL Server license as well as [what I have been led to understand is...

From Mike Gunderloy Longhorn Readiness Program for ISVs - The people who were unhappy to see the PDC Longhorn DVD shipping for $499 are going to be really unhappy to find out that it's now available for free....

I received this email today (well this is a slice of it...). I hope this means good things to come! The TabletPCDeveloper Web site is moving, and you can move with it! On December 17, TabletPCDeveloper.com content will be moved to its well-established peer site GotDotNet.com. You have received this notice...

I have noticed a pattern that when I have worked on a WinForms project for a while (weeks...months) and then start on a new ASP.NET project, I have two problems: 1) I forget about the darned postback. It takes a couple of “hey where'd my value go?” to do one of those “could've had a...

Boy “catastrophic”... Sounds pretty horrible, huh? It's really just a little problem created by Win2000 SP4 if that SP is implemented before installing ASP.NET on a remote server. This was my case because I only recently (finally) put .NET 1.1 on my in-house webserver. So anyway, I didn't...

I just pulled a login page from an ASP.NET app I wrote last year into a new ASP.NET application. These are applications that live on my domain that are web based utilities for some of my clients or just myself and I haven't had to write one in quite some time. When I opened up the login page I saw something...

(edited this because there seemed to have been a little drag and drop action that messed up my original post, oops...) I'm always interested to see what Sam Gentile and Robert Hurlbut are working on together. Always BIG projects that seem to have the scope of large architectural blueprints which demand...