Daily Archives: June 6, 2004

The rain that never came

Vermont

This is very typical for Vermont. Rich and I had planned to NOT WORK today and go play outdoors : hike, bike, or even paddle. However the forecast this morning said rain throughout the day. It is now 3:30, 60 degrees (brrr) and overcast so that would have been okay for a hike or a bike ride, though with the Lake Champlain water temp at about 53 and no wetsuits, paddling would have been out anyway. Regardless, it never rained. I’ve been in front of the computer all damned day. Aaach.

ListControl: “could not bind to the new display member”

dotNET

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 since it was Oracle).

Finally it occured to me (as it has in the past) that the damned thing is case sensitive.

Just check what the datatable has as the column name and follow the casing exactly.

I thought I’d stick this here for the next poor sucker searching in Google for this problem.

Knowing what you want and GETTING it too!

Community Cheerleading

Kate Gregory has two fantastic posts about knowing what you want and getting it. Kate has a lot of incredibly valuable experience not only as a programmer, but as a consultant and a business person. I have been fortunate enough to have Kate be somewhat of a mentor to me and have learned some of these gems from her in the past. At the Women In I.T. luncheon at TechEd, many more people were able to benefit from Kate’s insights as well as those of the other incredible panelists.

Kate is now sharing some of these thoughts in her weblog.

What you want to get could be what I need to give

Know what you want from the Meeting

A better way to store user preferences in .NET apps?

dotNET

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 out.)

I started out with the easy way I was already familiar with – the registry. Then when I got bit with my first registry permission problem, I learned how to use Isolated Storage and had to code up all of the file stream, read line, write line business which is a PIA (though I suppose I could create an xml file, store it in isolated storage, open it up in a datarow and grab what I need). So I was happy to see what looks like an awesome article in this month’s MSDN Mag (as of this writing  – most of the articles are not online yet) called “User Preferences: Manage User Settings in Your .NET App with a Custom Preferences API” by Ray Djajadinata. I have read enough of the article so far to recognize all of the same walls I have encountered with this, so I look forward to digging further in to read about how Ray has solved this problem.

Tablet PC Developer Tour to arrive in Boston on Wednesday

dotNET

This is a half day free seminar from the Microsoft Tablet Team and the Leszynski Group that is targetted to developers. It hits Boston this Wednesday, June 9th.

The sessions focus on core features of the Tablet SDK and will be code and API intensive. 

Date: Wednesday, June 9 2004, Start Time: 1:45 PM, End Time: 5:00 PM

Tremont Hotel   275 Tremont Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02116, Room: Empire Room

Here is the description of the event

The Microsoft Tablet PC Developer Tour
The Tablet PC is a next-generation PC—the evolution of the notebook PC. Tablet PCs run the Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition operating system, which incorporates the convenient and intuitive aspects of pen and paper into the PC experience. The Tablet PC provides all the performance and features of today’s notebook PCs in an ultra-light form factor, and has the ability to run full versions of standard Windows applications. Providing advanced handwriting recognition and a natural interface for entering data using a digital pen in addition to your keyboard, the Tablet PC opens exciting new opportunities for mobile computing.

This free course provides an overview of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition features for developers, architects, systems integrators, and solution providers. Plan to spend a few hours with us and we’ll teach you what you need to know to get started. The sessions will cover:

  • Tablet PC Platform Overview
  • The Tablet APIs, Object Model, and available components and controls
  • Complete coverage of the new features available with Windows XP Tablet PC 2004 Edition
  • Code samples and demonstrations across all the main features
  • Discussions around designing and deploying Tablet PC Applications
  • Q & A time for more in-depth questions
  • Each session will be delivered by Microsoft Tablet Employees or a Recognized Tablet PC Expert from the Leszynski Group. This is an opportunity you don’t want to miss. Register soon, as space is limited.

Who Should Attend?   
   All developers interested in a detailed overview of the Tablet PC Platform should plan on attending. These sessions focus on core features of the Tablet SDK and will be code and API intensive. 
 
You can still register for this event from the www.tabletpctraining.com/microsoft site.

I had planned to go but since it is a 4 hour drive each way, and I just attended similar sessions at TechEd, I think I am going to skip it and work on my demos for my own tablet PC SDK talk at DevTeach in a few weeks.