Monthly Archives: November 2005

Service Broker *is* hard

ADO.NET 2

I have had to grok and also explain Service Broker as part of my work and presentations on Query Notification. I kind of get it on the surface but do not get it deeper down and will probably never write t-sql to work with it anyway. I was very happy in talking with a SQL Server guru recently who also thought Service Broker was really hard to understand. If it’s hard for a SQL Server whiz, then I’m not going to beat myself up about it anymore – until of course, I need it more directly than just through Query Notification (via ASP.Net or ADO.Net).

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

INETA Eval forms for last night’s VTdotNET meeting

dotNET

Yeah – so I printed the eval forms just before I left my house and left them sitting in the printer! Attendees of last night’s meeting can get the form from the Vermont.NET home page (top of page). Please email them back to me after you fill them out. Filling out the forms is what assures that I get reimbursed for last night’s pizza and soda!!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rob Howard’s VTdotNET presentation

dotNET

In February (’05) we had Rob Howard scheduled to speak at VTdotNET as an INETA speaker, and we were very excited. Even with a snowstorm, there were a lot of people planning to come. Unfortunately, the snowstorm prevented Rob from getting to Vermont …. he got stuck in Chicago at the airport waiting for his flight to take him to Vermont. The plane was delayed so many hours that we finally decided to cancel the meeting and Rob got on a plane back home to Texas. The Vermont bound plane did not arrive in Burlington until after 8:00 pm.

But he still wanted to come (and we still wanted him to!), so we scheduled Rob again and that meeting was last night – and it was worth the wait!

Rob did a presentation on ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Tricks. He had a list of 10 cool things you can do with ASP.NET 2.0, but also talked about others that he was using in the code samples, such as master pages and the fact that VS no longer boggles your HTML formatting. Talks like these are great. Sure I can find the info elsewhere, but I am busy and focusing on many things at once, so having this stuff spoon fed to me is almost a necessity. One thing that makes a session great is not just showing how, but also explaining why, which Rob did regarding each of his 10.

Of the list, the one item that is the most intriguing to me is the cross page postback. I have had to do an enormous amount of trickery to move inkdata around in a web application as the ink data is client side data and I want to do things with it on the server side and have to do things like expose it in a hidden field, grab it in the server side code of another page from the page.request object then stuff it into a session and have my way with it. Pre-RTM,  I was having problems with ink on the web in VS2005, but will now be able to explore the possibility of simplifying moving the data around with the cross page postback. I still have the problem of the ink data being on the client side, not the server side, but with some additional tools at my disposal, I may be able to come up with a better solution.

Rob’s talk was great. As he said, he was only able to skip a stone across the surface of the goodies in ASP.NET 2.0, but it’s a fantastic start for people to be able to take advantage of the new release. The power of getting this information out in front of people is expressed well by Dave Burke, who said in a blog post this morning “because of Rob’s presentation the fear of potential problems in migrating my primary development machine from Beta 2.0 to the RTM has been lessened by the anticipation of using VS2005 exclusively.”

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

E-Commerce (well, lack of) in South Africa

Just Rambling

Here’s a market for someone to figure out how to capture. While I was in South Africa, I was talking with Microsoft S.A.’s Lillian Serobatse about buying clothes on the internet, trying them on at home and shipping the rejects back. This works well when you live in the boonies and retailers like Patagonia have their big annual sales online! Lillian was surprised. “You bought clothes on the internet?” I was surprised (at her question). “Don’t you?” I asked.

Lillian explained to me that e-commerce has not really taken off in South Africa. One of the reasons, she tells me, is that like many South Africans, she LOVES to shop. The shopping trip itself is a good part of the fun – as it is for many here in the U.S. I personally hate shopping. I only go when I have to find something very specific. I don’t like wandering around from store to store just looking at stuff and maybe buying something I didn’t really need.

I imagine that purchasing stuff from outside of S.A. is cost prohibitive – think of the shipping! So it would be South African retailers that would benefit from this more than anyone. Perhaps a retailer in Jo’burg that does not want to open a storefront in Capetown or Durban (or visa-versa).



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rob Howard tonight at Vermont.NET

dotNET

Rob Howard has come to Vermont on a cold, gray, cloudy, blustery day. Maybe we can make it up to him with a great pancake breakfast!

Rob is presenting at Vermont.NET tonight (thank you INETA!!) and will be giving a talk on ASP.NET 2.0 tips & tricks. We are very excited to have him here!

Addison-Wesley has donated 6 copies of ASP.NET v2.0 which Rob co-authored, to raffle off at the meeting! Plus we will be raffling off a copy of Infragistics Net Advantage.

Our .NET Newbie session is by Mike Soulia who teaches .NET development at Vermont Tech and also owns two awesome retail stores on Church Street in downtown Burlington (www.kissthecook.net and www.applemountain.net) which he built .NET e-commerce sites for in the very early days of ASP.NET (you may recognize the UI 🙂 ). Mike will be talking about Extreme Programming concepts.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org