Monthly Archives: April 2006

Vermont IT Jobs: SQL DBA

Jobs

Technical Connection has been contracted to recruit for a full time position with a Major Vermont company.
 
We are reviewing candidates for a SQL DBA.  The position is full time with full benefits. We would like to see MSDBA or the equivalent experience.  This is a lead position that will involve hands on development as well as extensive liaison between management and clients.  As part of a team you will have considerable resources and support on hand to insure success. 
 
This is an onsite position so telecommuting is not an option at this time.  The Company offers a high degree of security and stability with fully developed Software Products that dominate their market.
 
Salary target is $75 K
 
Please apply by resume to:
 
Kathie Taft
Technical Connection, Inc.
Vermontjobs@vttechjobs.com
802-658-TECH

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Scary Vermont.NET Meeting tonight and a VS2005 Pro license

dotNET

I’ll be doing a talk entitled “Five Supposedly Scary things about .NET” at Vermont.NET this evening.

The talk covers the following daunting topics on a high level

  1. Declarative Attributes
  2. Reflection
  3. Delegate
  4. Threading
  5. Code Access Security

I’ll be raffling off the last of the launch copies of Visual Studio 2005 PRO and SQL SErver 2005 Standard.

Free pizza courtesy of www.dottnetjobs.com.

After I did this talk at DevConnections last week, an attendee told me that he had been trying to solve some problems with an app and hadn’t looked at any of these technologies becuase they seemed over his head. He was very excited because he realized that he could solve these problems using some of the stuff covered in the talk and was looking forward to learning more and leveraging them. That is exactly why I did the talk. I hope to inspire others as well.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Oh! My CoDe mag article AND opinion piece are out (in a GREAT issue)

Just Rambling

CoDe Magazine sends a pile of issues for the VTdotNET user group every month. I got the box before I left for DevConnections and set it aside, only opening it this morning in prep for tonight’s user group meeting. I didn’t realize that the Query Notification article and the opinion piece I wrote for them had already been printed, but there they were. It’s the May/June issue but is not online yet. In addition to my articles, there is the first of the WCF series articles in there (yay!!!) by Juval Lowy and one on Transactions in ADO.NET by Sahil Malik (yay!). And of course (as always) bunches of other great articles and columns.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Eolas, ActiveX in I.E. and Ink on the Web

Tablet

Lori McKinney sent me an email in response to my Winforms hosted in i.e. post, pointing out the I.E. update that  caters to the EOLAS lawsuit.This hadn’t caught my eye before. The update forces users to “activate” ActiveX controls (such as Flash) hosted on a web page. Here is the official article on how that affects our websites. I also found a blog post by Steve Smith and another by Matt Watson with discusson on workarounds.

I installed the update this morning from Windows Update to see  how it affected my ink-enabled winforms controls that are hosted in a web page (eg the Doodling website). Without any of the scripting workarounds, the effect is not really bad at first. Just by placing the cursor over the control area, I get the popup that says “click to activate and use this control.” Click and I’m instantly inking. But it doesn’t remember! I have to do it every time I ope the page in a new i.e. session. This is with Disable Script Debugging checked. If I refresh the page, I get a different message, “press spacebar or enter to activate the control.” But just clicking still works. Odd.

Okay so that was testing on my non-tablet with a mouse. With the tablet and stylus, luckily I don’t really need to tap and THEN draw. Doing that gives me an inky dot where I tapped. But I can actually just ignore the message and start drawing and it works. But this means, I will have to explain this on my website. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll have to check into the scripting after all.

So the known issue is with this thing unchecked – as all good web developers have it set. I didn’t experience anything different. I’ll keep playing with it.

 



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Hosting WinForms Controls in ASP.NET 2.0 VS2005 wierdness

dotNET

I have spent most of the day trying to understand some bizarre behavior in VS2005 with ink on the web apps. The issue is not related to the inkable control per se, but the Windows Forms control hosted on a web page.

When I compile the Window Control Library into a dll for the first time, add it into the web project, then embed into the html as an <OBJECT> it works fine. But if I recompile the dll and re-add it tothe project, the control does not display. I get the standard “image not found” graphic that you would get on any web page displaying a jpg where the jpg is not available.

After many hours, I discovered the solution, which I am leaning towards thinking is only related to working on the development machine – if I change the name of the output assembly, then add that new assembly to the web project and modify the object tags accordingly, it works just fine.

This really made me nuts and I think I spent 6 hours trying to figure out “what I was doing wrong”. Of course, I’m not done with this yet… as this is not good behavior! I’ll have to find out if there is a logical reason for this, but it will be one more hindrance to people using ink on the web if they are developingin VS2005.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

A little more DLL hell today in VS2005 and how it affected my ClickOnce deployment

Just Rambling

I have an application with lots of projects in it.The main project, which compiles to the EXE has references to two Janus assemblies and to one of my own assemblies (the dll, not the project). Additionally, I have about 15 assemblies that use these components and point to their dll’s in the same location as the main exe does. Somehow, something got out of whack and in design mode the main exe couldn’t “find” these 3 assemblies. I got that fixed and at the same time had to make some different changes to two of the other assemblies. After doing my update via clickonce, I couldn’t load these two assemblies in the application on client machines. I did a lot of recompiling and redeploying of specific assemblies so that I could continue with my minimal impact ClickOnce update.This means that I don’t republish and redploy the ENTIRE application, but can just move only the assembies I need to the webserver and recreate the manifests there. (I need to write an article on this).

When I tried to access the functions that loaded these assemblies, there was an error complaining about matching assemblies listed in the manifest.

“The located assesmbly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference”

When I opened up these projects in VS2005 and looked at the references, those three assemblies had this “<system could not find the reference specified>” in the value where the path should have been.

So, I had to load up every one of these projects and in each one, remove the existing refs to those 3 assembiles and re-add them in.

Then I rebuilt the entire solution and had to run the full publish utility on my development machine and redeploy the entire application to the web server – a two part process. Two-part, because the dynamic assemblies do not get picked up by the publish tool. I have to deploy the results of the publish, then copy that folder into a new folder (next version number), add all of the dynamic dll’s, then rebuild the manifests. (That’s part of the trick I will write about in the aforementioned article.) The whole app is about 11MB. Copying this over VPN with 350K upload speed takes longer than I have patience for, but that’s life.

Nevertheless, after a lot of copying, pastng, manifest buildng adn testing, I was able to get the whole re-jiggered app deployed without requiring the dreaded un-install. The end-users won’t even notice a thing tomorrow morning when they get back to work.

 

 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Discount for DevConnections Europe for INETA User Group Leaders and Members!

Connections

From Damir Tomicic’s weblog:

Great offering for INETA User Groups in Europe – DevConnections, 24-27 April 2006, Nice, France, with ScottGu, Dino Esposito, Michele Bustamante, Juwal Lowy, Prashant Sridharan, Hans Verbeeck and many more:

“…Hi Damir,  I would like your help getting the message out to INETA members in Europe that we are offering them a discount to the event in Nice and I will give you a discount code to offer…”

You are INETA UG leader or INETA UG member? You would like to attend the conference and get INETA discout? Contact me at: Damir Tomicic@ineta.org 

Now in its sixth successful year in the US, Developer Connections now makes it s European debut on the French Riviera. Meet Microsoft developers and DBAs from around the world and build a network of peers to stay in touch with.  Unwind and relax with you colleagues in Europe on the French Riviera while obtaining the most relevant technical advice from Microsoft’s ASP.NET, Visual Studio and SQL Server teams and training with Microsoft architects and world-renowned developers and DBAs delivering over 80 in depth, no hype sessions!



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org