We Vermonters and flatlanders who live in Vermont are a bunch of tightwads when it comes to spending our hard earned money, so paying $200 for one night in Waltham for code camp was more than we could bare.
I finally gave in and booked ar oom at the Homestead Suites. What the heck. It’s clean it’s new it’s safe and it is 1/2 the price of the Westin. No gym. Internet is $10 (so what?).
Plus the rooms are Suites, so who needs the Westin lounge anyway.
PARTY IN DAVE’S ROOM!
I was so I spent some time trying to get everything sorted back out again. Here’s my take on it…
[A DevLife post]
Sometimes I feel like I learn .NET one little method at a time. Today I had to do something I’d never done before and the solution was not obvious at first. [Read more ….]
[A DevLife post]
I’ll be doing a talk on ASP.NET 2.0’s Asynchronous features (async pages, async tasks and more) tonight at my home town user group (VTdotNET).
Huge thanks to SyncFusion for sponsoring this entire meeting. Not only are they covering the pizza & soda, but they have given us a license to Essential Studio to raffle off. It’s a $1300 product (okay, that’s the retail price). And there will be even another raffle for an individual license of any one of their components.
I had to translate some VB code to C# and it took me a while to see the light! Here’s the shortcut.
[A DevLife post]
This is nothing new, but it was new to me and it was messing up my dynamically rendered ASP.NET pages. My lesson in VarybyCustom.
[A DevLife post]
Thom announced 10/21 & 10/22 as the dates for Code Camp 6!
I just tried to book a room at our favorite Code Camp hotel (Waltham Westin) for just Saturday night and there are no rooms for one night stand-ers.
You can book a room for the weekend for a pricey $318 if you go through their special fall 20% off package offer on the web.
What happened to the $119/night of earlier code camps? Baah!
Maybe it’s time to find another hotel (with an adequate bar/lounge) for us all to camp out at!
Leave suggestions in the comments.
Hilton Garden Inn (newly renovated, has a lobby and restaurant) is $125/night. Or $137/night for 2 beds and full breakfast for two. Total with tax is about $150 per night which is closing in on the Westin rate except for the breakfast.
It was an exciting week at Microsoft as they pushed out the RC1 versions of Vista and .NET 3.0! [read more….]
[A DevLife post]
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 package for you and is a great solution for Windows Forms.
But with the ASP.NET 2.0 methods, you must call out to methods that already have BeginInvoke/EndInvoke and that return IAsyncResult. It’s easy to do with classes that already do this – like the new SQLCommand Async functions (eg. BeginExecuteReader/EndExecuteReader) or calls using HTTPRequest to pull down data from another website (eg an RSS Feed). But what about doing long running processes that don’t have .NET (or 3rd party) calls that implement the async pattern? What if you have a website that does the ever popular Fibonacci calculation? (Not really “ever-popular”, though it is the common example of long running method used in MSDN docs ;-)).
The grown-up way is to create a delegate for your synchronous method and then call BeginInvoke and EndInvoke. Here’s some help with that.
An easy way that doesn’t require mucking with delegates is to stuff the function into a web service then use the web services async functionality (which come for free when you build a web service proxy through Visual Studio). Prior to VS2005, we had only the Begin/End methods availalbe. VS2005 has those plus a new pair that ift into the Event Driven Async Pattern: myMethodAsync & myMethodCompleted. You can see both of these in the above link.
We’ve been off the tour for a while. If you live in the area, be sure to attend this!
Remember that if the attendance is poor, these will go away again.
Tuesday Sept 26th 1pm – 5pm Wyndham Hotel, Downtown Burlington
Featuring our own MSDN DCC: Susan Wisowaty!
Get Connected with the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio® 2005 (and Beyond)
These days, it seems like everything’s talking. Smart Client applications are sending emails and uploading and downloading files from the Internet. Browsers are talking to Web servers asynchronously. And enterprise systems are using a myriad of Web Services, .NET Remoting, and other technologies to get the job done.
Fortunately, it’s easy to keep the conversations flowing with the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 and the forthcoming WinFX® platform. In this free half-day event, you’ll see the future of writing connected systems by exploring the upcoming Windows Communication Foundation. Check out how easy it is to send mail, work with FTP and HTTP, and detect network availability and status by using the System.Net namespace. And learn how quickly you can create AJAX-style applications by using the powerful new “Atlas” framework.
Session 1: Exploring the System.Net Namespace in the .NET Framework 2.0
Session 2: Windows Communication Foundation Exposed
Session 3: Building the Next Generation of Web Applications with ASP.NET “Atlas”