Another new RD – Guy Barrette from Montreal

Community Cheerleading

Hey look at that. Guy Barrette who runs the .net user group in Montreal just emailed to let me know that he has become an RD. This is great news. Montreal has been without an RD for a while. Guy and I do a lot of user group stuff together since we are only 2 hours apart so we try to share resources. He also helps out on the user group relations committee  that I chair for INETA. He works with the user groups in Quebec. 

Guy and I got together to bring Steven Smith from ASPAlliance on a little cross-border tour. He will be here in Vermont in a few weeks to play a little and speak at VErmont.NET and then drive up to Montreal to speak at Guy’s user group. His Montreal gig is an INETA sponsored event. His trip to Vermont is a “Julie bribed me…“ production.

More on that though later…

Rich Strahl’s weblog

Community Cheerleading

I love reading Rick’s blog. He’s a really smart and innovative guy who has been working with .net for a long time. He is writing applications and also experimenting and his weblog talks about some of the hurdles he runs into while trying to write software and how he gets around them. Very practical, very engaging and educational. Rick lives in Hawaii. I’m always waiting for some surfing pictures! I have fun emailing him once in a while to tell him the temperature – like when it’s 20 below (F). It’s pretty funny going to a conference and hanging out with Rick from Hawaii and Don Kiely from Alaska.

Whidbey BCL the Easy Way #2: Shifting how we look at the Base Class Library on the road to Avalon

dotNET

Here is another point that I will be making in my Whidbey BCL talk.

Most people have seen this Base Class Library diagram many times. Here’s a picture you have seen a thousand times before where the namespaces are organized hierarchically. There seems to be an attempt to stack them as though they were building blocks, with the fundamentals on the bottom and the UI stuff at the top.

If you look at the WinFX namespace diagram (to which Whidbey is an evolutionary step) you can see that the classes are now grouped not by namespace, but by functionality. I don’t recall seeing the classes organized like this before I went to the PDC, though I could be wrong.

Thanks to the Chilean MVP website, I was able to find some jpgs of this poster that I have on my wall. Here is a small one , click on it to get a HUGE one that you can actually read (warning the big one is almost 1MB)

What you will see is, for example, pieces of System.Web in the “presentation” bucket, in the  “Data” bucket in the “Communication” bucket and even in the “Fundamentals” bucket.

Though of course, it will always be important to understand the hierarchy of the classes, this shift in perception will make a developer’s evolution to Avalon easier.

DevDays and DevDays Bloggers

dotNET


Though I wrote about DevDays 2004 eons ago (and that attendees will be getting Whidbey!!), since I am speaking at two events (Hartford 3/2 and Boston 3/16) I just signed up for the devdaysbloggers.net site.  Here is my little “I’ll be there” graphic. It doesn’t really give me the same jitters as going to PDC, but it’s a very important event, because it will reach a lot of developers that would never get to a TechEd or PDC.

ooh – I think I got a secret code message!

Just Rambling

I received an “order confirmation from Amazon” email and of course, I hadn’t ordered anything. Out of curiousity I looked at the source of the email. It is filled with tags that I don’t feel like deciphering or examing, but it looks like it’s some secret message or something! If you are curious, I have uploaded a screen shot of the source, rather than paste the text in here and give them some google juice!

 

This is just a splice. Click on the message to view the whole jpg.

hahahahahaha (a SQL Server Joke)

Tools

Just because I have had one or ten roadblocks every step of the way of rebuilding my server, I thought that this was very funny (thank goodness my sense of humor has returned after a good nights’ sleep!)

When trying to install SQL Server 2000 Ent from my 12/03 MSDN Universal CD on to a Windows 2003 server with all updates applied:

“SQL Server 2000 SP2 is not supported by this version of windows”

hahahahahahahaha

Of course I’m not the first person to see this, but it was a little suprising and the  solution is really just to ignore the message as I see in the many posts that google showed me.

My new computer parts and win2k3 server

Tools

Seems I have gotten side tracked with a lot of hardware issues lately. About two months ago (more?) I decided that I needed more hard drive space on my server. I upgraded to sql server 2000 so that I could accomodate things like Reporting Services and SourceGear Vault (single user). I just couldn’t eek along my old 4 gig scsi drive anymore. So a friend sent me a spare 18gb scsi drive, but it was a different type of scsi and I finally received a new scsi adapter card and cable and went to town with my server box on Saturday afternoon. What I really wanted to do was start absolutely from a clean slate and with Windows 2003 server while I was at it. I have to say I went though my own little hell – some incompaitibiliites between the scsi cards, the fact that the floppy disk drive hasn’t worked in 3 years (but who cares, right?) and that no matter what I did, the CD refused to be used as a bootable drive and lastly of COURSE, my ethernet card was “incompatible” with win2k3 server (though it turned out that the winxp drivers worked just fine). Because of the scsi problems, I still have some issues to work out with getting my cd player and old drive back into the mix, but I’m not concerned about that – I can just keep moving cables around till it works.

Speaking of cables, there was a little issue of the improperly seated cable which really broke the camel’s back!

Anyway, now I am rolling along, have gotten AD setup, IIS installed and have just a few more things to do. One thing I like is that when I set up IIS the first time, I just dumped everyhting into the default web server – now I have set up a separate web server just for my stuff. So what I have left is pull my web sites back intot he new IIS, install SQL 2K and bring the databases back in, install Reporting Services and install SourceGear.

Then it’s back to the regular work.

Why do I say Win2K3 instead of Win2003? It saves me ONE keystroke!

Two really great posts from Robert Scoble this morning

Just Rambling

Not to say that they are the only ones, but these two really stood out for me. Was it just because one was about a great outdoor gear chain and the other had something to do with Vermont? No, they both go much deeper than that.

The first gives some true visions from a successful retailer on future technology and how it will help his business – and this is something we developers should be paying attention to! It’s almost like a hot stock tip! And notice how Robert slips in that the guy uses a tablet?

The other is Robert’s take on why he is suddenly very disappointed with the whole phenom of the dean blogging thing. I have watched Halley Suitt and Robert get very caught up in the campaign (and Dave Winer was here helping them out just last week) and I wasn’t sure if it was because it involved blogging or because they are really behind what Dean wants to do for the U.S. I sure hope that he (Dean) is kidding when he says he wants the whole country to be just like Vermont – land of the $7.50/hour service jobs (and many people who need to have more than one job), taxes that are out of synch with incomes and let’s just say a little problem when it comes to health insurance. Robert accepts that the Dean Blog isn’t blogging as he knows and loves it, but politics as usual. There’s more than politics to Robert’s post and I dug the whole thing.