From Chris Sells’ blog:

Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn’t change the meaning of anything.

With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice.

Egad!

I have a feeling that Charles Petzold is doing the same about now, since on 4/5 he said he had one more month before his 1000 page WPF book is due.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some very knowledgable people are debating WSDL first. I think reading these types of threads where you get not only people’s opinions of pros and cons, but the why’s start getting answered too.

It starts with Craig Andera’s post about protecting himself (and the world) from poorly written WSDLs by implementing iXMLSerializable.

This post woke Tim Ewald out of his blog slumber who, as a big contract first proponent,thinks that Craig’s proposal is overkill.

Craig responded.

Aaron Skonnard got in on the conversation.

Christian Weyer did too (in Craig’s comments) since he’s got THE tool for doing contract first web services.

All in all, very educational thread, whichever side of the fence  you are on. Me … I’m just, as always, on the fence.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have Urchin on my website for site analysis but never think to look at the stats. It is an amazing reporting tool with the amount of detail and analysis it does. My site is hosted on Alentus and this is one of the tools they offer.

I was surprised to see that blog folder alone is getting about 400,000 page views a month. I know from my referrals that an enormous amount of that is coming from Google.

Another stat I noticed that surprised me was that in the past month, there have been over 2,000 downloads of powerpoints and zip files(containing my demos) from my presentations page. I sure hope people are finding them useful!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Having spoken a few times over the years at the one of the Poughkeepsie NY ACM groups, I am on their mailing list. I got a good laugh from the recent mailing announcing a talk about Image Storage ex-IBM engineer (that describes most of the members of the chapter) who has an I.T. support business. In his business description, he says:

To keep from being swamped with more and more business, Jerry has adopted a new slogan:  Highest Priced Computer Service in Town.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

CoDe Magazine sends a pile of issues for the VTdotNET user group every month. I got the box before I left for DevConnections and set it aside, only opening it this morning in prep for tonight’s user group meeting. I didn’t realize that the Query Notification article and the opinion piece I wrote for them had already been printed, but there they were. It’s the May/June issue but is not online yet. In addition to my articles, there is the first of the WCF series articles in there (yay!!!) by Juval Lowy and one on Transactions in ADO.NET by Sahil Malik (yay!). And of course (as always) bunches of other great articles and columns.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have an application with lots of projects in it.The main project, which compiles to the EXE has references to two Janus assemblies and to one of my own assemblies (the dll, not the project). Additionally, I have about 15 assemblies that use these components and point to their dll’s in the same location as the main exe does. Somehow, something got out of whack and in design mode the main exe couldn’t “find” these 3 assemblies. I got that fixed and at the same time had to make some different changes to two of the other assemblies. After doing my update via clickonce, I couldn’t load these two assemblies in the application on client machines. I did a lot of recompiling and redeploying of specific assemblies so that I could continue with my minimal impact ClickOnce update.This means that I don’t republish and redploy the ENTIRE application, but can just move only the assembies I need to the webserver and recreate the manifests there. (I need to write an article on this).

When I tried to access the functions that loaded these assemblies, there was an error complaining about matching assemblies listed in the manifest.

“The located assesmbly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference”

When I opened up these projects in VS2005 and looked at the references, those three assemblies had this “<system could not find the reference specified>” in the value where the path should have been.

So, I had to load up every one of these projects and in each one, remove the existing refs to those 3 assembiles and re-add them in.

Then I rebuilt the entire solution and had to run the full publish utility on my development machine and redeploy the entire application to the web server – a two part process. Two-part, because the dynamic assemblies do not get picked up by the publish tool. I have to deploy the results of the publish, then copy that folder into a new folder (next version number), add all of the dynamic dll’s, then rebuild the manifests. (That’s part of the trick I will write about in the aforementioned article.) The whole app is about 11MB. Copying this over VPN with 350K upload speed takes longer than I have patience for, but that’s life.

Nevertheless, after a lot of copying, pastng, manifest buildng adn testing, I was able to get the whole re-jiggered app deployed without requiring the dreaded un-install. The end-users won’t even notice a thing tomorrow morning when they get back to work.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

(note: for those of you who need this clarification – eg the anonymous commentor who gave me the big lecture 🙂 – the title and the last sentences of this post are intended to be sarcastic. Sheesh.)

In my talk on Preparing WSE3 Web Services for WCF at DevConnections, I was asked the dreaded question: do these work on the compact framework?

Nobody likes to get this question, because the answer is just way too embarrassing.

The answer is “No”.

This has been the cause a lot of ruffled feathers in the CF and Web Services community. Casey Chesnut , our resident genius, even wrote his own implementations: cfWSE and cfWSE2.

The last version of the WCF story that I heard was that R1 will not have it, but R2 will. The WCF footprint is small which will help enormously. But R2.

To top it off, though I don’t have a PPC and didn’t see this myself, I am astonished to learn through Softwaremaker, yet another place where security has been set aside: Passport logins. On the web, we get a login and a masked password, along with options to remember the login, password or both. Not only are those options gone with the PPC interface, but the password is not masked! Hello?

I suppose that it is another indication that people who use PPCs or write applications for them, are just not doing anything important enough to require security. I suppose.

DonXML took the plunge and went back to being on someone’s payroll. This has been on my mind a lot since I read his post. [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

There was an article in the local paper about Computer Camps offered by the South Burlington School District this summer.

Maybe it’s because I don’t have kids, but I was definitely a surprise to see a robotics class for 6 year olds!

Here’s the whole list which sounds like a blast! (No pun intended wrt the rocket tech class 🙂 )

Robotics: Beginning robotics for grades one-three; mastering mazes for grades four-seven.

Rocket Tech: Grades three-six; learn how to build, test and launch solid propellant rockets.

Programming a Computer Game with HyperStudio: Grades four-eight.

3D Computer Animation: Grades six-12; introduction, advanced modeling, advanced animation and advanced team project.

Animating Your Web Site with Flash: Grades seven to adult.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

If you’ve ever wondered how Rick manages to churn out so much, the secret is out….