Monthly Archives: September 2005

PDC Day Two:Sessions and Swag

Just Rambling

Yesterday (Day Two) I managed to curtail my socializing enough to attend four sessions! It is so incredibly difficult to choose, but mostly I focused on Indigo which I really need to get sooner than later. I had been told by Angela Mills who is the Group Program Manager for XML Enterprise Services in Indigo (phew long title) that Shy Cohen’s Reliable Messaging in Indigo talk had some to-die-for demos, so it was one of the ones that I was sure to see. Shy is …[read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

What Raymond Chen wants to be sure we know (PDC)

Just Rambling

I’m sitting in Raymond Chen’s “5 Things Every Win32 Developer Should Know” talk. Ray is one of those “oh my god” Microsoft big brains, however, his blog has definitely made him feel like an old friend.

Ray is talking to the packed room about being conscientious about your environmnet when you are writing applications – how is your app working with memory paging? [read more …]

[A DevLife blog]

Posted from BLInk!

Have you tried the VB6 upgrade assessment tool?

Just Rambling

This tool is part of the PAG VB6 to VB.NET Migration Guide that is being developed and is on GotDotNet. It is still a work in progress and they will be happy to have people test it out!

Though there is an enormous amount of detail in the report, the most interesting was it’s assessment of man hours and cost to migrate your application. There are caveats on the assessment of course.

The one I tried, which is a big app that has been evolving for 7 years, would take 9 months and cost $86,000.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Bill Zack – INETA Membership Manager for Northeast

Ineta

I know – it sounds awfully formal, but INETA is getting all organized and grown up.

When I began as a volunteer in the User Group Management committee almost 3 1/2 years ago, I was the liaison for all of Canada and all of the northeast and a handful of other states as well. Slowly that has shrunk. Bill Zack came on board and I gave him NY and CT. Chris Pels came on board and I gave up RI and MA. Ohio and Pennsylvania eventually found more local liaisons and now there are 5 liaisons covering Canada. For the past year or two I had responsibility for communicating with the 5 groups (including my own) in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.  Now with INETA’s overhaul including a major restructuring that board member, Chris Wallace, has orchestrated in the Membership Division, I was happy to pass on these groups, and my buddies Pat Tormey, Joe Sarna, Tim Durgan and Phil Denencourt, to such good hands.

But those NH and Maine groups aren’t rid of me yet. Now I get to go visit them as an INETA speaker. That will be great fun and I look forward to it.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

KatrinaSafe BOF at PDC

Community Cheerleading

Excellent news from JSawyer

If you are going to the PDC, there will be a Birds of a Feather session that will talk about how technology can be used to respond to a disaster like Katrina.  It’s called “Katrina Relief through technology” and will be on Monday, September 12 at 7:00 PM. 

I and some other members of the KatrinaSafe.com team will be attending.  Join us to hear how we used technology to build the KatrinaSafe.com system. 

Hope to see you there!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Variety the spice of life

Just Rambling

I  just sent in my powerpoints for DevConnections and am laughing at how all four topics are completely different:

  • Leveraging SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications in ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0
  • What’s new in WSE 3.0
  • Customized Debugging in VS2005
  • Demystifying C# for VB Developers

Now I have to prepare a presentation on yet another completely different topic: Virtual Earth, which is one of my 4 (4? what was I thinking! 🙂 ) for Code Camp Developers Gone Wild.

But what I am most excited about is preparing for my Indigo talk at TechEd South Africa.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Nullable type and dbNull

dotNET

Since nullable has been baked into .NET, I had to see if that carried over to ADO.NET. Now I know that datasets’ behavior with Nullable types was so broken that it was removed from the scope of  .NET 2.0, but I wanted to go back and look at my previous tests with dbnull and Nullable types.

Nullable may be “fixed”, but there is still no correlation between them. I know that the fix was for totally different reasons, but I just still had to see.

It is still necessary to test for a dbnull before trying to populate a Nullable<DateTime>, for example.

Any attempts to return date data that is nullable with a datareader.GetDateTime() will give a runtime error. DataReader knows this value is a dbnull, but you will just have to check for yourself and do the little bit of extra work.

nulld Nullable<DateTime>;

‘get some data into a reader and read it

if (myReader.IsDBNull(mycolumn))
{
 nulld=null;
else
 nulld=myReader.GetDateTime(mycolumn);
}

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org