Steve Smith’s International Border Tour presentations!

dotNET

Steve Smith, Mr. ASPAlliance etc is coming to speak to the Vermont.NET User Group on Monday night, Feb 9th and then he is on to Montreal for the GUVSM.NET User Group on Tuesday night. His Tuesday night talk in Montreal is an INETA sponsored event. Monday is a Julie & Rich’s Bed & Breakfast sponsored event. Steve is coming (sans Michelle boo hoo) on Saturday and we are going to have some Vermont fun with him. I have decided not to make him ski since I don’t want to be blamed for broken bones. We will take Steve snowshoeing in the Green Mountains as we have done with Chris Kinsman and Stephen Forte before. Steve is going to do a presentaion on Caching in ASP.NET and Whidbey. I (and many) are really looking forward to this.

“going to redmond” blog announcements

Just Rambling

Don’t you always wonder what mysterious things are going on when suddenly a rash of (or even just a few) bloggers announce that they are going to “campus”. Oooh aaah. I remember last year James Avery talked about it a lot. I’m starting to see it pop up again. But you never hear WHY anyone goes. Everything is shrouded in mystery. Rory was the only one who said “I’m going because it’s fun and my birthday”. There is definitily a big event coming up in April which is the MVP global summit. So you will hear a lot of people talking about that.

Goodbye Beautiful Silky

Purely Personal

Blue Heaven’s Ch. Silk Stocking

Silky at 3 months in 1994.

Silky the Champion at 2 years

Silky at 5 years

Silky is my parent’s dog. I have always loved him madly – he’s a hollywood hunk and a big love. But he’s 10. 10 for Newfs is generall pretty old. He’s feeling pretty badly now and they are putting him down today. He’ll feel so much better after that and will always stick around. Especially to be with his best best friend in the world, Daisy. This is always outrageously heartbreaking. Here are more of Silky’s family and progeny.

Some “Extreme” skiing and the how the virtual 1st down line works

Purely Personal

I actually went skiing yesterday. Rich and I went to Mad River and we skiid in the woods all day. THis is a big deal for me. I am afraid of trees. I do things like snow plow, make a turn and stop for  3 minutes, etc. One of the reasons is that even though I have skiid most of my life, I switched over to telemark skiing a few years ago and just don’t have that edge of being able to ski on absolutely anything anymore (yet). But after a few hours my confidence was great. I wasn’t swooshing down through the trees by any means, but I know that I can go in there and be in control and even enjoy myself a little. The rest of the ski area (open trails) was pretty windblown and classic eastern skiing while the woods had gobs of fresh (hard packed) powder. One spot that we skiid on not once but twice was (well seemed!) almost totally vertical for about 150′. So now I know that I can get down stuff like that too. And heck, I can even walk today.

Here are some great videos of awesome tele skiiers skiing in the woods, on the bumps and all over at Mad River.

We actually watched a good part of the super bowl, little of the 1st q and the full 4th q – apparently missed the half time tata show. Anyway, we were really curious about how they get that orange 1st down line and it was darned easy to find the answer on google.

A thought about Reporting Services / Crystal/ Active Reports

Tools

My client and I are getting ready to start sharing reports via the web with clients.

These are the same reports we have in windows apps (VB6 and Winforms).

I want to generate the reports dynamically because there will be so many. There are thousands of clients (though only maybe 50 active at a time) and each client could have a number of projects and depending on the type of project, a *huge* variety of possible reports to choose from. We looked at this a few years ago with a company that had a whole management front end written that would juggle pdf or other doc types. But we would have had to export and send every single report for every single client. Egads. Dynamic generation please

So I seem to have these choices

Reporting Services
Win/Web Report Design: Web reports created with Microsoft’s VS.NET based design tool
Still need to create my Windows reports with Crystal or ActiveReports
Management: built in
If we keep our current set up of webserver and sql server on the same box, we are golden with no extra licensing fees

Crystal Reports (this link may come as a surprise to some…)
Win/Web Report Design: Likely will get two for one creating report that can be viewed in WinForms or ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Pay through the nose to license Crystal for use on the web

ActiveReports
Win/Web Report Design:Two for one report creation for Winforms/ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Affordable Licensing

Other thoughts

I can easily have an ASP.NET front end to get at a report and a WinForms front end to get at the same report.

But I have a lot of pro/con weighing to do now.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone who has gone through this thought process to solve this same type of problem…

Casey Chesnut’s weblog

Just Rambling

4/14/04: Now he tells me: I misspelled Casey’s last name in the title and below and am correcting it for google’s sake. But my misspelling, for those of you who came here for the laugh was “Chestnut“.

I haven’t looked at Casey Chesnut’s weblog in a long time. Not since I was fiddling with doing some work on the pocket pc for a client but that turned into a tablet/laptop app.

Don Box recently pointed to Casey’s blog. I have been looking around there. I have a sinking feeling after looking at what he is doing which is something along the lines of wondering who I think I’m kidding sometimes when writing about the things I am learning. This guy is damned smart and he doesn’t have to work too hard for it to show.

I am so unfocused – one day trying to rebuild my server, another day playing with ink controls, the next day looking at wse2 the next day Whidbey bits and then Lonestar and  around and over and under and back and forth. And all in between trying to do my own work, etc.  I don’t get a chance to stick with any one thing long enough and I am looking at just too many things at once. Not sure where I am going with this thought. Part of me (and everyone I know) says I need a major vacation. But then of course I’ll only fall further behind.

(Subscribed of course.)

IIS6 and Visual Studio/Interdev 6

Tools

Oh no. Here we go again. My client asked me to make a minor change in their old website which I did in InterDev. I never updated it to asp.net since it is a rarity to make a change.

I couldn’t open up my project in VI6 because I don’t have the FrontPage98 server extensions on the new box.

After googling for a quick fix (for over a quick 90 minutes) I just finally went into notepad on the live machine and modified the damned file (late at night – not a problem).