Always the last to know! I got an email from a good friend of mine who is a Java programmer at BEA telling me about www.theserverside.net (“Your Enterprise .NET Community“) which was just launched this morning.

The Middleware Company today announced the launch of TheSeverSide.NET, Your Enterprise .NET Community. In his opening letter, TSS.NET Editor-In-Chief Ted Neward talks about his vision for TheServerSide.NET, his commitments to the community for the future, and why TheServerSide.NET is important to the .NET community as a whole.

Wow! Take a look at that. Ted Neward is the top dog editor. They’ve got video interviews with Don Box and Scott Guthrie. Looks like it is chock full of content – original content.

My java/BEA pal tells me that theserverside.com is “the” place for J2EE. So they’ve got lots of great experience already that will be leveraged for the .net version.

It looks awesome. Oh god, MORE GREAT STUFF TO READ! EEEEEEEEEEEEEK! (When’s a girl to find time to sleep?)

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 of Web Services and the HOW of the . NET Framework. We’ll go low level and sniff packets on the wire and we’ll go high level and design business documents with XML schema. We’ll auto-generate Business Domain Objects and Messages. We’ll discuss the meaning of the WS*.* specifications, interoperability and get our heads around the “Zen” of Web Services and see where . NET succeeds and where it falls down. This talk will be as technical as you want it to be, but it will also be valuable for the Business Person or Project Manager who really wants to answer the question “Web Services: So What?” Doesn’t sound like the typical Users Group meeting, does it? You’ll just have to come by and find out!

Scott is an INETA Speaker and this event is being sponsored by INETA.
more here…

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 world’s record for Microsoft certifications!

Pat is coming to Vermont to speak to Vermont .NET tonight on his own, rather than through INETA.  The original plan was that he would come up and enjoy a weekend in Vermont and then do the presentation. Unfortunately, his schedule changed and he is driving up and back on the same day. Maybe it’s just me. I hate travelling, so the thought of driving 7+ hours for a 2 hour talk seems god-awful. But Pat, in his absolute kindness, has said that he doesn’t feel abused, rather he feels that he is abusing my hospitality by not taking advantage of it.

Awww shucks. Well, this will be a great talk “Best Practices and Techniques for Building Secure ASP.Net Applications” which he is revving up for the EdgeEast conference and also is the title of one of the presentations of the next round of MSDN events (that won’t be in Burlington anyway).

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 me while I’m doing this. Sean & Scott  – now I get it!! 🙂

Working on my vs.net 2003 project, I had a dream that perhaps Whidbey would let me drill into ado.net objects in the more seamless manner I had grown accustomed to in Visual Basic.

But alas. I’m sure there is a reason — a good one. But the problem persists.

You can’t get into a collection.

So if you have a dataset you can basically see the tables.count, but you can’t drill into  a table.

In a datatable, you can see the count of columns, but you can’t see the columns.

It’s a huge PIA when you are debugging and you want to see something about your datastructure or your data. I’m almost starting to wonder if there has been some other functionality in there all along that I have missed and I am just looking for the wrong thing.

I had a conversation with a friend who is new to web development and is doing an ASP.NET application. She came upon a roadblock that I recall made me nuts two years ago. She wanted to grab an onclick event on a server control in the client side script. If you are coding in the html, this is not presented as an option and  if you choose to bypass that and enter onclick anyway, you get the little squiggly line and a tooltip saying that this attribute doesn’t exist. If you are bold enough to ignore that, you will find that it works anyway. But she got stopped by what the intellisense told her was not possible.

There is a whole world of client side scripting that many people will never realize exists because they depend on the guidance of intellisense. She also spent some time googling and researching and got very frustrated because she felt that she was being led to the conclusion that you can’t interact with server controls in client script. I know there are lots of resources, but this is the experience of someone who is very capable and not lazy about researching information. So if this was what she came up with, I am sure that many others do the same.

I was a windows developer fairly new to web stuff when I started ASP.NET, so I understood completely where she is coming from. I told her that she can ignore that intellisense when working in the client side html of her webforms and  pointed her to one of my favorite resources for when I have to deal with anything on the clientside: DevEdge.Netscape.com. I have pointed this out before. In there you can find this great javascript reference and this morning the key chapter was Chapter 3 on event handlers.

Well, now we know what Roy kept himself busy in between his full time employment job and his first big contracting gig up in Norway.

He has had three articles published in the last month! This is so impressive.

1) Creating a Plug-In Framework (Dec ’03)

2) Search Dynamically for Plug-Ins (Dec ’03)

and the just published

3) Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes

To me what is the best part of all of this is that this is all a result of Roy’s weblog.

Great work Roy and Kent!

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 a local guy in my mind. But now he lives all the way on the other side of the world in Seattle.

Hey Paul (wave wave) How’s it goin’ out there? It was 15 below this morning when I walked the dog! Do they know how to make chowdah out there? If your homesick you can just check out a Sunny Day video (he’s a Mainer you see) on www.franklins.net!

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 in order to better control how hash table info was displayed in the debugger and then decided to let us developers leverage the attributes as well. In the bits he used he had [DebuggerDisplay] with params of name and value. I wanted to check out how to use this, but in our bits (PDC) and in any documentation (Longhorn SDK online or Whidbey) what I find is DebuggerNameDisplay, DebuggerValueDisplay and DebuggerTypeDisplay. I can handle this difference no problem except I couldn’t for the life of me get my version of the code to run (C# or VB). I put a question about this in the newsgroups a month ago (microsoft.private.whidbey.clr) and still there has been no response. There are 2 posts in that newsgroup. I asked a few people at MS and was told probably I should skip it for now. I wonder if anyone in the world has used these attributes and knows how they work in Whidbey? I really am curious about them. I don’t think they are going away even if they do change drastically.

I ask because I wanted to talk about them in my talk at EdgeEast. I think I will talk about them, but just not demo using them. Instead I will demo the how they have been used internally and maybe compare a .net 1.1 hashtable in debug vs. a Whidbey hashtable in debug. Or maybe an object that a VB developer would be more familiar with that is leveraging this. :-).