Category Archives: dotNET

Beta Service Packs for VS1.0 and VS1.1

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 the service packs to make Visual Studio work with XP Service Pack 2 since it will be locking a lot of things down and create some possible breaking changes. That’s the thing we need to be focused on. You can read about what to expect and how to plan ahead for that here.

Just in case this is all confusing, these are not service packs for the whidbey beta, but beta service packs for the current version(s) of Visual Studio! 🙂

Don Kiely coming to Vermont.NET next week!! From Alaska!!

Lucky me, lucky Vermont .Netters!

Don Kiely is flying from Anchorage Fairbanks, Alaska on Friday to come for a visit. He’ll be here for about five days. The excuse for the trip is built around the fact that he is speaking at Vermont.NET on Monday night (July 12th) on Building Applications with Least Privilege. A topic I am psyched about and have a little experience in since I am now running as a non-admin on my computer!!

Don gets to go to a dog show while he’s here (he loves dogs so that will be fun) and I plan to take him kayaking in a few special places. Though he mostly white water kayaks, he will see no rapids here (it’s way past that season) but maybe we’ll get some of those great 3 foot waves out on the lake. We will definitely take him paddling out on the incredible Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain is 120 miles long and 10 miles wide with about 500+ miles of shore line – so it’s like a small ocean. The other is a very special place, now a state park, called Green River Reservoir. It is a place where no motored boats of any kind can be. So it is canoes, kayaks and some small campgrounds scattered around the shore that you can only get to by boat. It is also a wildlife retreat.

I was able to get meeting sponsorship (i.e. paying for pizza & soda) from Red-Gate who makes SQLTools and Ants for load testing and profiling. Since this will be a joint meeting with VTSQL, we’ll get a good demo from that user group leader (Ed Hall) who uses SQLTools a lot where he works (Vermont Dept. of Health).

We have so much swag for this meeting too, thanks in part to the INETA Spring Thaw and piles of ASPNetPro and CODE magazine as well! Hopefully we’ll get a great turnout, which is sometimes difficult in the summer months.

So mostly I’m looking forward to Don’s visit and an excuse to play hookey for a bit and go paddling! Then after he leaves I’m on my way to Redmond for about a week and bringing Rich with me, too, this time.

Beware: Watch Window creates threading problem when debugging

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 had “error: cannot obtain value” in them. When I pushed the debugger and just kept trying to step through I eventually received a Threading Exception with the message “thread was being stopped”. Naturally I googled to see if I could figure this out – but google did not return anything for this phrase.  Eventually I came across this sample chapter from John Robbin’s Debugging Microsoft .NET book, searched on the word “obtain” and before I actually read anything, the phrase “watch window” popped out at me. So I went back to my app, deleted the contents of the watch window which were hanging around from many previous debugging sessions, and voila, the problem was gone. I’ll have to go back and read that chapter at some point!!

First time letting a designer muck with my asp.net pages

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 about how this would affect my websites. I sent him the html for the pages he was to work on and he sent me html pages back. All I had to do was copy and paste the key segments from the html he returned back into my original pages and upload the revised aspx along with some stylesheets and a separate images folder and voila – new look, same old functionality. That was my first experience partnering with someone on the UI portion of asp.net sites. So I’m glad it worked out well. Oh, I had warned him not to touch the <asp: > controls or I would chop off his head, so that seemed to pay off. (And I believe his ego has recovered from the threat…)

Nice quick overview of the new tools by Sam Gentile

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 tasks that have been piling up. So I am relying at the moment on what I’m seeing in blogs and on some lists and these three posts of Sam’s stuck out in the crowd for me.

Holy Crap! I passed the Security cert test

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 haven’t received any emails. But I just checked the site and…

Though I am no expert, I am glad to see that what I confidently know about .net security combined with the intuition that I have acquired over 20 years of software development saw me through. Phew.

I believe that I am able to use this test towards my certification. It is an elective toward MCAD or MCSD. So I guess that makes me an MCAD. Now I will have to take the web services to be an MCAD and the architecture tests for an MCSD. Someday…. 🙂

Remedial VS: Learning to drag & drop in Visual Studio

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 don’t  even know *how* to use them. I have let all of those demos slip out of my head to make room for things I need. But I got bit when I wanted to design an Infragistics UltraWinGrid at design time due to the fact that my datasource was somewhat complex and it is nice to see what I’m doing. I had a nice little typed dataset class that I created and wanted to assign it to the datasource at design time. Something I have never done! But the class was not available in the drop-down for the DataSource property of the grid. Finally I figured out to drag a “dataset” from the toolbar onto my form and that’s where I was able to select my dataset class.

I have to say, it was pretty handy! I wonder if it’s time for some remedial VS training… 🙂

I’m laughing because I’m thinking of Sam Gentile and his disdain for all things drag & drop – but Sam, I just had no way around it this time!

ECHO ECho echo: VS2005 Beta and Express Betas and SQL 2005 Beta 2

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 within just a few days. MSDN Subscribers will also receive Beta 1 in their next MSDN shipments. Within a few weeks, non-subscribers will also be able to order a copy of Beta 1 for a nominal fulfillment fee.

Express Products (Beta)
VB Express, C# Express, Visual C++ Express, Visual J# Express, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL 2005 Express!

SQL 2005 Beta 2
hmmm – maybe they didn’t announce it yet – still looking…

Congrats to all at MS, including MSDN,  for so many launches!