Monthly Archives: August 2005

download madness

Just Rambling

I have no idea how I did this. I was using WS-FTP to downlad a 2+ GB file. It took MANY hours – overnihgt + most of the morning – 12? 15?

When it was done, I got the message “overwrite file?” I thought that maybe this new version had cached the download and was now ready to overwrite the little starter test I had done. Nope. Within 1 split second, by the time I realized and hit pause, I had just replaced the 2GB file with only about 1 MB of the new download.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Okay, maybe I’ll have this thing downloaded by midnight.

www.acehaid.org

Virtual Earth Ink Progress

Virtual Earth

I’ve been fiddling some more with Virtual Earth Ink.

I discovered that there are cases where the tiles don’t get realigned before going over to the inking interface. In order to realign the tiles, I need to use the map object’s SetCenter command and pass in the current lat/long values of the map.That actually calls SetCenterandZoom, before recreating the map anew with fresh tiles (in the order that I need them). This is creating a big problem for me. When I zoom, I need to realign the tiles. But in doing so, this puts me in an infinite loop. So I have to come up with another way around this. In the meantime, if you pan a bit after zooming, the pan will fire off the realignment. Then when you go to INK the tiles, they will be in correct order.

The other thing I have been playing with is setting pins upon a search, which is not a problem. However, I want to persist the pins to the inking surface. I know how to do it, but am having trouble with calculating the position. I just have to keep at it, which of course, I will.

 

www.acehaid.org

Speaking at TechEd South Africa!

Presentations

There, I said it. With permission.

I am SOOOOOOOOOO excited. I have never been to Africa before and plan to definitely get some exploring since we will be right next to Pilanesberg National Park.

There is ONE more person who will be making this announcement and flying together with me from JFK to Johannesburg. I will wait for that person to blog, rather than spoiling the fun for him or her. Then I will link back. That didn’t take long. It’s Kate Gregory (oh big shock, right?). Kate and I are good friends so this will make it an extra special trip. And we are even looking forward to the 10 hour layover in Frankfurt. We will definitely go into Frankfurt and have a look around.

Oh yeah – my talks!

What’s New in Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0
Introducing Indigo
Integrated Innovation: Using ADO.NET 2.0 with SQL Server 2005



www.acehaid.org

Fail Fast : One of Kate Gregory’s Keys to Success

Just Rambling

Kate Gregory  has amazing business sense and is able to share it with great clarity which always has me in awe. Kate wrote a blog post yesterday about what she calls Fail Fast – basically about the value of trying something out and getting it over quickly if it’s going to fail rather than debating the possibilities endlessly or pursuing the project in a way that you won’t find the point of failure until pretty far into the game. I have actually used this theory in my pre-marital days of dating. You know — the totally flaming hot prospect that fizzles fast. “Damned good thing that happened sooner than later, but it was fun while it lasted!” I’d say.

I have a client who also subscribes to this philosophy that has been a key to his company’s success. He would rather invest in something and try it out than wonder forever if it will work or not. The odds work out for him because for every time this causes a loss for him, there are many gains.

I definitely subscribe to this myself. Usually I try to identify the hardest parts of a project and see if I can’t work them out first, before I make any larger scale commitment or planning effort. Of course, you can’t let your ego get in the way of this as I did with my Virtual Earth Ink application. I was determined not to give up until I had exhausted every possible idea I had to get it to work.

Go read Kate’s post if you do any business decision making and I would also recommend Michael Kaplan’s thoughtful response to Kate’s post as a chaser.

www.acehaid.org

SQLDependency Callbacks

ADO.NET 2

If you have ever used a SqlDependency in .NET 2.0, have you ever inspected the object before you execute your command?

In the object is a property called Callback ID. When I am running both the .NET code and SQL Server on the same machine or same network, this is set up to traverse back through TCPIP.

 “<MachineAddress>tcp://192.168.0.5:58343</MachineAddress>
<AuthType>None</AuthType>
<Key>a55f6539-5d30-4e67-b87a-a4e3ebb85131</Key>” 

192.168.0.5 is the address of the client machine and 58343 is one of the ports that SqlDependency is pre-defined to use. This is using Beta2 bits and I expect that this will change when I load the next CTP onto my computer. But for now, it’s interesting to see.

I am now curious to see what the message looks like when it arrives in SQL Server’s clutches, before it strips out the query and sends it off to be processed.



www.acehaid.org