DevTeach Keynote: Steve Swartz & Ted Neward

Community Cheerleading

I don’t know why I didn’t realize this before. Steve is a system architect for Indigo. A knowledgable, interesting and entertaining presenter, I have seen Steve do team tag in an Indigo presentation at VSLive with Don Box and he definitely kept Don on his toes!!. Christian Weyer, who won’t be able to make it to DevTeach this year, boohoo, refers to Steve as “Mr. Indigo… *the* man behind Indigo”.  Ted is Ted …. and I can easily also say knowledgable, interesting and entertaining. Ted is all about WS Interop so Indigo is a natural for him.

I am *really* looking forward to this keynote!! DevTeach is from Sun June 19th – June 22nd in Montreal. Today is the last day to get the last of the early bird discounts. VTdotNet-ters can also get an additional $50 user group discount.

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEd Women in Technology Luncheon

Community Cheerleading

This year – a whole page dedicated to this great luncheon!! There will be nine panelists this time! And still including our fave developers, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Kate Gregory and Kimberly Tripp. Angela Mills, who blew me away last year, will be back this year. And they have added some more women with fascinating jobs. Once again, I am really looking forward to this lucheon, which will be on Wednesday June 8th at The Convention Center- North Hall A1 from 11:30 – 1:30.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Thank you, Juval!!!

dotNET

I have to write what I hope will be my last vs2003 app – just a quickie for a client. Now that I have done so much work with Whidbey, there was something that is painfully missing from .NET 1.1, the backgroundworker class component. This is for easily making asynchronous calls without having to write all the goo yourself. Thanks loads to Juval Lowy for creating a totally compatible v1.1 BackGroundWorker component (CoDe Magazine Mar/Apr 2004 issue and download the code from the www.IDesign.net website). He has written it with the same properties, methods etc so that when 2.0 RTMs, I can easily just update this little app and in the meantime, I get to use the syntax I am now quite familiar with from .NET 2.0,

http://www.AcehAid.org

INETA May NORAM Newsletter went out last night

Ineta

Oh yeah, and we left the “Test” title on the email – since we email it to each other in advance for last minute checks. So even though it says “Test” that is the real deal!!!

Lots of good stuff in there – our User Group Leader Summit schedule, an article on creating Certification Study Groups, some new NORAM Liaisons have come on board (yippee!!!) and more more more.

If you are not on the newsletter email list, you can sign up on the h ome page of INETA. The newsletters (NORAM’s and other regions) are archived at www.ineta.org/newsletters.

As always, if you have ANYTHING to share that your user group is proud of, or an idea you think other user groups could benefit from, a community driven event coming up, let us know!! Email newsletter@ineta.org.



http://www.AcehAid.org

Software Factories

dotNET

When I was at Microsoft’s Reston office earlier this month, there was a ‘Softie (oh, I just can’t remember his name) who was telling me that the next big thing was going to be Software Factories. He showed me the dev center for them. Said to get to know them, keep my eyes out, etc. Well, I have definitely seen the beginnings of buzz over the last few weeks hither and thither – mostly on the MSDN blogs. Here looks like a good blog to follow for more info…

So, it’s on my list, though I’m still not there quite yet…

http://www.AcehAid.org

My first webcast behind me

ADO.NET 2

Well that was fun. I just did a webcast with DCC Glen Gordon on MARS, a new feature of SQL Server2005 that is leveraged in ADO.NET 2.0. (I’ll post a link to the on-demand version of it when it gets posted)

Although I have looked at, experimented with, presented on and written about MARS previously, this was the deepest I have gotten into it. Glen and I had a lot of interesting talks in advance of doing the webcast. One thing that I really have learned a lot more about is transactions, where we can benefit from MARS the most.

Doing a webcast is fun, but for me the downside is not having the interaction with a group of people that you get doing a live presentation. You can see on people’s faces when something is confusing, or if you are going on a little too long about something you may think is really fascinating, but they don’t. 🙂 and make adjustments as you go along.

MARS is very powerful, but it’s so important to understand what it does and how it works before you start leveraging it. Otherwise you have the potential, as Christian Kleinerman says in his excellent MARS article, to really shoot yourself in the foot!

http://www.AcehAid.org

WSE2 Built In Tracing… Memory Problems??

WSE

I just had a call from a client with some big problems on their server that has IIS and SQL Server on it.

Their most used application that interacts directly with SQL Server was having problems – from many computers and randomly throughout the application.

I watched the SQL Server profiler and saw rpc requests coming in and occasionaly that request was not being followed by a BatchCompleted.

Also on that server, things were really slow.

A quick peek in the task manager showed a very bloated ASP.Net worker process (w3wp.exe). On the first call to a particular webservice, it was flying up from about 108,000K to over 550,000K.

Restarting that application made the memory drop back down to 108,000 or so.

I checked everything I could think of and tested each time after I made a change. Still the worker process was bloating.

Finally, I targetted two little seemingly innocent lines in my web.config. The flags whcih enable wse2 to trace it’s incoming and outgoing messages to xml files and also policy tracing. These are simple settings in the WSE2 config tool.

I commented them out and voila – all was well again.

Lesson learned – remember to turn of the darn analysis tools in a live app when you are not using them.

Crisis averted – phew!

http://www.AcehAid.org