Monthly Archives: May 2005

Julie Lerman’s DevLife – a new sub-blog on DevSource

Just Rambling

I am really excited to announce that I am going to be writing some of my blog posts for the DevSource website, which is a Ziff-Davis online publication! Editor, Esther Schindler has done a wonderful job in creating this technical resource targeted to .NET Developers. There are lots of great articles (including the fun .NET Rock Star series :-)), contests where they give away cool stuff like Acer Ferrari laptops or Dell flat panel monitors and forums. When I post a blog over there, I will make note of it over here. The blog should be up any day now.

The purpose of this blog is to give a developer’s perspective to things – some of the pain of being a developer, my thoughts on what’s going on in the community, my take on some buzz, etc.

I even had a new picture taken for it. Big huge thanks to Wintellect‘s Mark Kovalcson, a serious photographer on the side, who brought his big camera and a light to the MS Reston office during Devscovery to snap a few photos. My buddy Sara Faatz even let me borrow some makeup, but it’s laughably light and you probably can’t tell I actually did that. Yes, I put make-up on folks, just for you!!!

As soon as it’s live, I will let you know. I’m looking forward to posting some TechEd blogs there as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Arghh DHL/Airborne

Purely Personal

Rather than drive up my nice, short, paved driveway to drop off some small envelope-sized packages, the DHL guy sticks one of their honker envelopes to the side of my painted mailbox. My green mailbox. The green is paint. Now I have a foot long 1/2 inch high stripe from trying to peel the darned thing off.

Hello? Duh!!!! Yes I called them. I think I need to bill them for all of my wasted time…

http://www.AcehAid.org

Paddling on Dead Creek

Vermont

Dead Creek is a very special place in Vermont and not far from where I live. It’s hardly dead! It is a wildlife refuge and one of the locations of the Bald Eagle restoration project. Rich and I took the canoe there yesterday and had a lazy beautiful paddle up the creek. It is wide open, with views of the Adirondacks along the west. Lots of birds and yes, we even did see a bald eagle. I have wanted to go there for a long time and know that we will definitely go back. The temperature of the water in Lake CHamplain is still under 50 degrees. We don’t have wet or drysuits so we can’t go out on the lake yet. That water temp will literally kill you in a very short time if you don’t have the proper protection.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Male Bonding blogging

Blogging

Sometimes when I read blogs (and I’m talking about those from the .NET community) I think that the male bloggers (you know, that 99% of the .NET bloggers) are definitely writing for guys, when in the context of a technical post, they make some joke about their sexual prowress or the hottie quality of a particular woman. I don’t really think a post like that was written for me. I dunno – maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’m ultra sensitive. Even if I am highly unlikely to ever be the subject of “who’s the hottest…” 🙂

But it is a bit of a turnoff for me to be lured into a post like that and then suddenly be in the middle of some male bonding ritual. Not a big problem, mind you, because I *am* in the company of men, and I know they are really just being silly more than anything…



http://www.AcehAid.org

Debugger Visualizer Changes in Beta2

dotNET

Some of the syntax for writing debugger visualizers has changed again with the recent Beta 2 of VS2005. They are minor, but as always, notable.

1) The VisualizerUIType is gone because all Visualizers are Modal.

Before
[assembly: DebuggerVisualizer(typeof(DebuggerVisualizers.DataTableDebugger),VisualizerUIType.Modal, Target = typeof(System.Data.DataTable), Description = “JL DataTable”)]

Beta2
[assembly: DebuggerVisualizer(typeof(DebuggerVisualizers.DataTableDebugger),Target = typeof(System.Data.DataTable), Description = “JL DataTable”)]

2) Rather than implementing the System.Diagnostics.IDebugVisualizer interface, you now will implement the Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers.DialogDebuggerVisualizer class 

Before
public class DataTableDebugger : IDebugVisualizer

Beta2
public class DataTableDebugger : DialogDebuggerVisualizer

The signature of the show method has changed as well. It now uses interfaces from the Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers namespace and no longer requires a uiType, since that is a given.

Before
public void Show(IServiceProvider windowService, IVisualizerObjectProvider objectProvider, VisualizerUIType uiType)

Beta2
public void Show(IDialogVisualizerService windowService, IVisualizerObjectProvider objectProvider)

Note that in addition to using the System.Diagnostics namespace (which gives us the DebuggerVisualizer class referenced in the assembly attribute, I am also using the Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers namespace as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

DevTeach Keynote: Steve Swartz & Ted Neward

Community Cheerleading

I don’t know why I didn’t realize this before. Steve is a system architect for Indigo. A knowledgable, interesting and entertaining presenter, I have seen Steve do team tag in an Indigo presentation at VSLive with Don Box and he definitely kept Don on his toes!!. Christian Weyer, who won’t be able to make it to DevTeach this year, boohoo, refers to Steve as “Mr. Indigo… *the* man behind Indigo”.  Ted is Ted …. and I can easily also say knowledgable, interesting and entertaining. Ted is all about WS Interop so Indigo is a natural for him.

I am *really* looking forward to this keynote!! DevTeach is from Sun June 19th – June 22nd in Montreal. Today is the last day to get the last of the early bird discounts. VTdotNet-ters can also get an additional $50 user group discount.

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEd Women in Technology Luncheon

Community Cheerleading

This year – a whole page dedicated to this great luncheon!! There will be nine panelists this time! And still including our fave developers, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Kate Gregory and Kimberly Tripp. Angela Mills, who blew me away last year, will be back this year. And they have added some more women with fascinating jobs. Once again, I am really looking forward to this lucheon, which will be on Wednesday June 8th at The Convention Center- North Hall A1 from 11:30 – 1:30.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Thank you, Juval!!!

dotNET

I have to write what I hope will be my last vs2003 app – just a quickie for a client. Now that I have done so much work with Whidbey, there was something that is painfully missing from .NET 1.1, the backgroundworker class component. This is for easily making asynchronous calls without having to write all the goo yourself. Thanks loads to Juval Lowy for creating a totally compatible v1.1 BackGroundWorker component (CoDe Magazine Mar/Apr 2004 issue and download the code from the www.IDesign.net website). He has written it with the same properties, methods etc so that when 2.0 RTMs, I can easily just update this little app and in the meantime, I get to use the syntax I am now quite familiar with from .NET 2.0,

http://www.AcehAid.org