Category Archives: Just Rambling

BizTalk – For IT Pros? or for Developers?

Just Rambling

I heard this dialog in a conversation:

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer) : “developers just don’t understand BizTalk:

.NET Developer: “yeah, but why should I? BizTalk is for IT Pros”

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer): “See, that’s because you don’t understand BizTalk”

I could have very easily been the developer in that conversation, and it’s true, I don’t understand it at all. Unfortunately, I’ll have to leave it to the BizTalk guru for now.

http://www.AcehAid.org

XMLRPC samples

Just Rambling

When I wrote my blogging application, I had a few learning curves to get over: new ideas for tablet UI, working with blogger and metablog apis, learning how to ftp in the background. But the most challenging thing I had to deal with was coding with XMLRPC for lack of samples. What was out there was in C# so I ended up also doing a LOT of C# coding which was the most I had ever done at that point.

Dave Burke just went through the XMLRPC learning curve as well, but he did something very smart (and very kind). He posted his code, which gets some more sample code out there. Here it is.

http://www.AcehAid.org

My first .NET article printed on real paper

Just Rambling

I just realized that the box sitting in the corner of my office which came while I was out west was filled with copies of the Mar/April 2005 issue of Code Magazine. EPS is kind enough to send issues to Vermont.NET. (We also get mags from ASPNetPro)

In this issue is my first .NET article that has been printed on paper – not just online. I did have a few FoxPro articles in FoxPro advisor many years ago.

The article is “Creating Debugger Visualizers with Visual Studio 2005” a very cool and underplayed feature in the next version of VS.NET. You may have noticed that I have written quite a few blog posts on this topic in the past so it was fun to formalize it as well as to update it for some of the nice changes that were made as of the November CTP bits.

The article has all samples in both VB and C# because of the big differences between creating attributes, inheriting objects, etc in the two languages. In fact, as far as I know, these are the first VB samples for debugger visualizers in print. Even the MSDN Library still only has C#.

There were two articles written on this previously – Scott Nonneberg wrote one on MSDN Online based on Beta 1, and Morgan Skinner included visualizers in this early article which based on pre-Beta 1 bits.

I was hoping to get a chance to drill into this and a few other of the new debugger display attributes at TechEd but it looks like that won’t be happening. I see only 29 developer specific topics in all of TechEd2005 and it’s not one of them.

Anyway, I hope the article is useful to many. There are also articles in there by Juval Lowy, Deborah Kurata and Dino Esposito as well as a few others. It’s nice to be in such fine company. 🙂

My second in print .NET article is coming very soon – though in a different magazine.

Thanks again Rodman!



http://www.AcehAid.org

VSLive SF and Snow in Vermont

Just Rambling

Somehow I managed to get home last night at the scheduled time. The previous plane that was supposed to fly into Burlington was diverted to Albany, so I was lucky.

Powder day today! Though one morning of skiing through heavy powder was more than enough for me.

VSLive/Windows Anywhere was a blast. Lots to learn, everyone to see, new people to meet. Walt Ritscher posted some pictures from Wednesday night’s dinner when I *finally* got to get some sushi. Apologies to Sam Gentile since I neglected to call to let him know where we landed after I had had a few too many sakes.

I finally saw a Wacom digitizer that is a small device you can plug into your desktop and have inking capablities. I am definitely going to get one since I spend most of my time at my desk using my desktop computer.

The MS Tablet Team put together a great event Tuesday night at a very cool art gallery called Varnish.

This was after a long weekend in Seattle for the INETA working group meeting which Chris Pels blogged about and a few days of hanging out before heading to SF. I went on the Underground Tour of Seattle with Chris Wallace. It was fantastic and I highly recommend it. What a bizarre history Seattle has!

So now I am just trying to catch up with the emails then I’m off to Boston for Web Services Edge East on Tuesday then NYC to see a client the next week, then back to Boston for  Code Camp a few weeks after that and then Orlando for DevConnections a few weeks after that. That’s a lot of travelling for me, but nothing compared to what Kimberly Tripp rattled off the other evening!



http://www.AcehAid.org