All posts by Julie

Free online training for ASP.NET/VB.NET, sign up by Wednesday!!

dotNET

From Brad McCabe’s blog

Free VB 2005 and ASP.NET Training

With the holiday’s coming lots of people have some extra time on their hands, with this in mind MSDN and Microsoft Learning got to together to give you something to do, free training!

We were trying to figure out what course to give away and decided to let you pick.  That’s right pick one of 6 courses about Visual Basic 2005 or 9 courses about ASP.NET 2.0.  In addition, after you have completed your free online course you will receive 30% off the price of the next one.

You have to hurry, the free code is only good until January 4th, 2006.  You don’t have to take your free class by then, but you have to sign up and select your class before that day.  You have 90 days from the time you sign up to do the course, but with spare time this holiday season why not do it now?

Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/learning/elearning_promo/ for all of the details and to get the free training code to sign up.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Out with the old – literally

Purely Personal

With no New Year’s resolutions, this was unplanned but a very significant event in our household. A visiting friend offered to help me do something that I have been unable to do for a long time, clean out my closets (and boxes) of long unworn clothes.

I have moved households five times in the past 15 years, but have been quite unable to do major purges of clothing in those moves. What this means is that I have so many clothes that are old, outdated and unworn for years. Every time I have attempted to get rid of them, I have found that I have too many emotional or other ties to them. I was a bit of a clothes horse when I lived in NYC and had pretty expensive taste. There are also clothes of my mothers, additional beautiful things, that she gave to me when she could no longer wear them. And then there are things like a sweater my grandmother knit for my dad when he was young and it is still in perfect shape. I I wore it for years as a funky winter dress.

When Rich and I made the last move 2 1/2 years ago, I searched high and low for the organization that took clothes for women returning to the workforce. Finally I contacted them and was told that they no longer do it and to just bring it to the Salvation Army.

So, after putting this off for many many years, Debbie and I spent hours going through closets, storage containers and boxes. My husband was thrilled beyond belief. We are now well on our way to taking back the “box room” and gaining a second guest room in our house. It was a very trying and emotional thing to do and probably hard for many to understand that. These clothes had a lot of memories associated with them of my many past lives. Debbie was astonished at the gamut that ran from Italian linen skirts from Paul Stuarts to the London designer clothese from Charivari. Who would have guessed I would end up in flannel lined jeans from Eddie Bauer and fleece socks? 🙂

In addition to this I actually unpacked a lot of other boxes that have been untouched for these 2 1/2 years, finding places for what Rich likes to call my knick-knacks.

Had we planned this – put it on a list of New Year’s resolutions, it would probably not have happened for many many months to come. It was an amazing thing to do. I got to visit my past and let go of a lot of it as well.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

and today…contract first (finally!)

Just Rambling

As long as I”m in the middle of a gaggle of learning curves (eg advanced ClickOnce deployment, uncommon UI threading issues, and a host of other things I’m dealing with as I port a particular app to VS2005), I added another one today – contract first web services. In addition to porting the application, I am adding in some enhancements that my client has requested. One of them required a new web service. So I thought it was a perfect time to drop everything and learn to do contract first, of course using thinktecture’s WSCF tool (testing out their not yet released VS2005 version). But I’m not just learning how to use their tool. I am such a weenie when it comes to schemas, WSDL, etc. – like many non-plumbers. This process is requiring me to get a little further under the sheets with this stuff, too. One wonders why it takes me so long to finish something. Of course this is not including the hours I had to take out dealing with compatibilty issues between our scanner (Canon LiDE 35) and our new printer (HP Laserjet 1320) and continued research on DVI KVM’s (I think I found what I’m looking for here) and while I was at it ordering a DVD burner (finally) so I can freakin’ install the new Vista bits.

Anyway, back to it!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

the consultant’s life: living off of a limited resource

Just Rambling

:Larry O’Brien, an independent programmer/writer, talks about the limitations on living off of your time. Since you can’t make more time and there is a limit to how much you can charge for your time, you definitely have a limit to how much income you can earn. Larry, I hear ya. I want to work less, not more. But I sure would like to get rid of this mortgage!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

VS2005 compiler has encountered a problem, do you want to report it?

dotNET

This seems to happen occasionally when I type into the code while debugging. So I say Cancel, i.e. no, and the question keeps coming up over and over. So if I say “ok” I know I’m in trouble when I get the screen about “large sections of the file may be include”. This always ends in a hang. (No there are no 3rd party add-ins installed). And then I just have to give in and open up task manager and trash it. Or wait for it to finally time out, but then I get the error “The Vbc taks failed unexpectedly”. Well, 10 of those errors, in fact. What a pain. Oh well. I’m sure the fact that I’ve got this wierd application that I am moving from VS2003 to Vs2005 has something to do with it.

I can’t tell exactly what the pattern is, but it is certainly not a random act of nastiness.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

ClickOnce and Application Data Directories

dotNET

The application that I am porting to VS2005 has off-line capabilities. In VS2003, after looking at a lot of options, I chose to store the data in the App folder of the All Users area in c:\directory and settings. One reason for this is that it is possible that a laptop will be passed off from one user to another and they need a common area that they can access. The other reason is that occasionally we might need to get at that data manually if there is a problem. This is the main reason why isolated storage was not an option.

I was able to get to this folder with

System.IO.Directory.GetParent(System.Windows.Forms.Application.CommonAppDataPath)

Not so in ClickOnce.

ClickOnce installs apps into a user’s local storage – (Directory and settings/user/local settings/apps). This means that on shared computers, there may be multiple copies of the application. I don’t like that and will see if there is a way around it since I am manually generating manifest files anyway, but I can live with it.

It also means that the above method returns the data directory defined by ClickOnce, which is inside of this install (rather, in the same parent folder). Not just that, but there will be a different one for each update of the application. This is bad bad bad (for my application).

You can read more about this here in the docs, online.

Even though the LocalSettings  folder is a safe folder as far as CAS is concerned, I don’t like the idea of hardcoding that file path (or making it a resource). But at this point, I think it’s going to be the solution. Bah!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Holy Moly – 4000+ spam referrals overnight

Just Rambling

My blog site is really under attack! I thought I had it at bay after implementing AngryPets’ ReverseDos and not seeing any more of these since yesterday.  ReverseDOS is doing an amazing job, but I do have to keep up with adding the domains into the config file. Only about 4 would have done the trick here. It’s amazing. Clearly there is a list of a number of my blog posts somewhere and they just run that list against their own list of urls that they want linkbacks to and keep republishing some page with that list on there or something. It’s becoming a full time job and I’m getting more than annoyed. Sadly I have “trackback services” turned off in my dasblog settings, but all of this stuff still shows up on the post’s pages.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Referral Spam for Christmas

Just Rambling

I got a ton of referral spam yesterday, then left the house at about 2pm. When I came home our power was out and I didn’t boot up my computer until this morning.

Outlook has been downloading email for over an hour! It’s all referral spam on my blog. Thousands upon thousands. I have never seen anything like it.

Quite insane.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org