Whidbey’s FtpWebRequest Class – hooray

dotNET

I struggled with webclient for a while trying to ftp and naturally, I blogged about it.

Enter  System.NET.FtpWebRequest as well as my favorite sentence in its’ remarks: “You can also use the WebClient class to upload and download information from an FTP server.”

Though I still have to play with it to believe it!

Michael Lane Thomas also gets into the FtpWebRequest class in his excellent article in Code Magazine. If you don’t recognize the name, it’s probably because you know him as “The .NET Cowboy”.

Focus of my BCL talk

dotNET

I think that the focus of my BCL talk (here and here) has finally congealed. My talk is supposed to be about level 200 +. My target audience corporate developers (not plumber types) who may already be using .NET or might not even be there yet. So the focus of my talk is going to be that Microsoft has figured out what things people are struggling to do. A lot of these things are those that the average developer would never attempt or may just not be familiar with. However, the tasks that are being accomplished should absolutely be part of every developers “quiver” (as we say in the ski-bum world). A perfect example of this is the DoubleBuffered property of the windows.forms.control (and it’s counterpart the new System.Drawing.BufferedGraphics). It helps reduce flickering by parlaying the graphics data to a buffer and then when it is all together, flipping it back to the display. Skilled developers with graphic intensive applications have realized a need for this and gone to the effort of orchestrating code to make this happen. The average developer might just accept a little flickering in their form and be done with it. But a simple property like this will now help that average developer put a little more polish in their application. And therefore I feel like it is my mission (in this talk) to help ensure that the average developer does not miss out on the fact that these very simple solutions now exist to help them be above average.

more Backup Strategies for Independents – experience talks

Tools

I have found this incredibly informative thread on Dell of all places (thank you google) that talks about a variety of backup solutions revolvoing around an external hard drive and various software (eg. Retrospects Dantz is bundled with Maxtor One-Touch, vs. Ghost vs. some others).

I am closing in on a solution which will involve occasional complete images via ghost and then frequent incremental backups. I have a 160 gig hard drive with 3 partitions.

The various Maxtor options look great for a single hardware solution – encased USB2 or Firewire hard drive. And they these drives got a “storage product of the year“ award from an industry magazine.

Gha – why do I have to learn all this stuff? Oh yeah, cause I’m a geek and it’s fun!

How to read The Daily Grind

Blogging

The Daily Grind. Admit it. You (developers) all read it and this is how you read it. First you do a quick scan to see if your name is in there – if you actually wrote something (comment/software/utility) worthy of being listed in one of the most valuable online developer resources. Then and only then do you go back to the top, read Mike’s quip on whatever is going on in his life that day, then start ticking through the great links (and keen observations) he has listed.

I am clearly procrastinating at the moment. Rich went skiing (boo hoo hoo) and I said “You go on and have a nice time, honey. I am working on my presentation today!” New snow, no crowds a little bit of sunshine and blue sky peeking through and temperate weather. This is why I have a season pass and live 7 miles from Mad River Glen. Whine whine whine.

Choosing what to put into under one hour on the Whidbey BCL

dotNET

I have a lot of fun discovering what’s new in the base class library for whidbey. Besides just digging through the documentation , there are some other great resources.

Kit George’s PDC presentation (using bits that are different that from what we have)
Newgroup discussions
Michael Lane Thomas article in Code Magazine
BCL Team page on GotDotNet (code, articles, demos, etc)
BCL Team Blog

and of course lots of weblogs of other people in discovery mode, too.

Also, I have learned a lot from some of the comments in some of my own posts, as well.

Everybody has a different set of things that they think are cool when given a time or space limit and you really have to select.

So my EdgeEast talk has to be 45 minutes (though I’m at 4:00 pm with nothing after me, so maybe my time is longer) and I have to go through the list of everything that I found interesting and pick and choose from there what I will talk about, demo on, breeze by or or just have to skip for now. I think it would be a lot more fun if my talk was 8 hours long!!

Bill Evjen’s books

Community Cheerleading

If you don’t know Bill Evjen – he wears a lot of hats. He is a Regional Director, an ASP.NET MVP, an ASPInsider, the leader of the St. Louis .NET User Group and most notably the founder and executive director of INETA. He also has recently become a prolific and interesting blogger. But Bill is also a prolific technical author. If you go to the home page of his blog you will see links to all of the above organizations as well as his many books and articles.

But that’s not even why I wanted to write this post. Here’s what I love about Bill’s books. When you are trying to learn something, reading his book is like having him sit there and explain it to you. He seems to know that in explaining a particular piece of technology, you may not know some of the background so he explains that to you. For example in his web services book, he walks through how to do some basic settings in IIS. I have always found that he speaks my language. He doesn’t explain things from the point of an administrator or a plumber, but from the perspective of someone who is trying to write corporate applications and gets stuck having to worry about a lot of the details that you might not necessarily have the time to become an expert in. I have told this to Bill before, but I thought I would share it.