Daily Archives: January 11, 2005

Indonesian Military gives it’s blessing and support to IDEP’s Aceh Aid aid workers

With new stories in the media about concern for western aid workers in Aceh Province, it is extremely heartening to see that the aid coming from IDEP (the folks I’m working with) is being supported by the Indonesian military.

From Susi’s blog:

The Indonesian military and other groups have come together in support of IDEP’s mission on the Sumatran coast, and it is with their blessings and support that the work continues.

http://www.AcehAid.org

DevConnections Spring – Pre-Conference Workshops: WSE2 1/2 day

Not sure if I mentioned that I am doing a 1/2 day pre-con workshop at ASP.NET Connections on March 20th (Orlando).

I am taking my WSE2 Security for Dummies talk and doing it for THREE hours, rather than trying to smoosh what is actually two presentations into one 75 minute session.  This is the way I prefer to do this talk because the point is to try to share what I know about WSE2 (and the security basics you need to grok in advance). I just can’t do it to my heart’s content in 75 minutes.

It’s from 1-4 pm on Sunday March 20th.  There are 3 morning sessions also if you want to make a full day of it. Here are the details of the pre and post con sessions.

http://www.AcehAid.org

COOOOL!! "Go to definition" in debug in Whidbey

I just noticed this!! Previously in Visual Studio.NET, when you right clicked on a .NET class in debug mode and chose "go to definition", it would bring you to that class in the object browser. Now (nov ctp), it opens up the code for the class!! Not that this is always what I’ll want to do. (And of course, it’s probably just some expirementing and not a reflection of what will be in the final bits. I’d be curious to find out.) Sometimes I want to just inspect a class without the goo.. Actually, I *am* having some trouble with the Object Browser in the latest bits, but that doesn’t trouble me, since I have Reflector for .NET v4 which works with .NET 2.0. Yippee.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Mario Cardinal on Enterprise LIbrary and App Blocks last night at VTdotNEt

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 C++ background. (He is also a great presenter – in case anyone is interested in knowing that.)

I have hardly used the current application blocks – struggled with the updater and (sorry folks) but turned my nose up at the Data Access App block.

However, as he went through the various application blocks in the Enterprise Library (something I have really wanted to have happen a the user group for a long time  – I was so happy when he suggested it) I recognized a few things that relate to WSE.

A lot of the blocks encapsulate things that I know I want and need to do in my applications that i have not taken the time to learn yet. So though I may be QUITE cozy with ADO and therefore have that snobby reaction to teh DAAB, I am not very good with event logging, for example. (Want to see my scores on my cert tests? Great on everything except really crappy on tracing/debugging and it is the tracing that brought me down.) So, like WSE, there are a few ways I could leverage these application blocks in their most basic way and get some quick and immediate funcationality into my app without having to (or should I say … before I have been able to) really learn about how that works. Just like with the basics of WSE2, you can just plug some key security into your web services without much education. Then like WSE2, I could start learning more about that particular task and leverage some of the more indepth features of the application block even customizing or extending it.

Another similarity to WSE2 is this. WSE, web services, even xml, are truly designed to handle interop issues. I am not doing interop. I am just writing .net clients with a .net back end. But I am using WSE2 in my solution becuase it was a quick and easy way to get some really good security built in.

The Enterprise Library is for Enterprise developers/applications. I am not writing enterprise application. But I will definitely be considering using those tools in my little apps, again, just to plug in some important functionality.

I fear this is another place where people will be making faces – it’s overkill, more than you need blah balh blah. I’ve heard the same about my use of WSE2. And don’t think that a million other developers like myself won’t be using WSE2 in the same way that I’m doing it. I will definitely pay attention to community response to the Enterprise Library as it moves from specs to usable code. 

http://www.AcehAid.org

Debugger Visualizer changes

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 haven’t found them yourself. I’m still on Nov CTP (similar to Dec CTP though without enterprise stuff).

http://www.AcehAid.org