As "rizzo" points out, my astonishment re: wrapping a SQL excution inside the new System.Transactions.TransactionScope in .NET 2.0 isn’t 100% a new concept. If you used Enterprise Services (which I never ever had need to so I don’t know jack about them) which is in the namespace SystemEnterpriseServices, you know that some of this ability existed in .NET 1.1 for anyone doing distributed transactions. The new stuff is improved greatly over the old which I can tell from reading the documentation but I can tell even more from reading the excitement of developers like Bill Ryan  and Sahil Malik who did use the transactions in Enterprise Services.

Posted from BLInk!

I just can’t. It’s a little lonely working here on on a gray Sunday afternoon, so I popped in a CD that I bought in Santa Fe, NM a few years ago: Gypsy Passion: New Flamenco. This doesn’t help me work. I can’t sit still now. I just want to get up and dance around the room!

Posted from BLInk!

Last night I dreamt that I was giving a presentation to people involved in the medical field for something in Visual Studio. Somehow, 45 minutes into the presentation, I still hadn’t gotten started yet. I had forgotten my remote clicker, there were all kinds of technical problems. I walked out of the room and out of the building. but then turned around and came back. Finally, I really started doing my presenation and then my “ghost” program showed up as I had inadvertantly clicked on the icon to start the application. But it wasn’t really like Symantec Ghost. It was a program that displayed transparent images over the desktop that looked like ghosts. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, but the attendees wanted me to which took more time. After that, I started up again, but then my computer rebooted itself and there was a message written in ink on the screen that was some kind of “ha ha I just reformatted your drive and installed WindowsXP but nothing else”. So my presentation was gone. Powerpoint was gone. Visual Studio was gone. I didn’t’ have my thumbdrive with my samples on it. I didn’t have a spare hard drive with all of my applications on it. Plus I had two more presenations to do after this one and only like 5 minute breaks in between. So, not only was this presentation a wash, there was no way I would be able to do the others.

Somehow I was back home and whatever virus had created that problem was also on my main development machine and when I restarted the computer, it triggered the same event, wiping out my hard drive. And of course I hadn’t backed up in a week or so.

My husband has nightmares about zombies and things like that. This is my version of a nightmare.

Maybe I should look at this dream and say “well, at least things didn’t go that badly at ASPConnections!” Or maybe I should go take the shrink wrap off of the Ghost application I bought last week and set it up to control my backups on to my external 200GB drive. Maybe I should even get another drive. Maybe I should just pack it in and go pursue an alternate career.

Posted from BLInk!

from Clemens Vasters’ blog

I am presently doing some intense research on services, service patterns, message exchange patterns and many other issues related to services (No surprise there). However, I can’t do that without external help and since many people are reading my blog, I can just as well start asking around right here:

I would like to get in touch with companies (preferrably insurances and banks) who afford a corporate history department. The ambitious goal I have is to reconstruct a few banking or insurance or purchasing business processes of ca. 1955-1965.

more on his blog…

Posted from BLInk!

TabletPC Stuff
Doodle Application: www.thedatafarm.com/doodle.aspx
TabletPC Developer Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc
Lora Heiny’s sites (the tablet pc “guru” that Brian Noyes talked about in the chat room)
www.whatisnew.com and www.tabletpcpost.com

ADO.NET 2.0
Angel Saenz-Badillos weblog (ADO.NET Team Member) http://weblogs.asp.net/angelsb/
Watch for article by me in MSDN Mag sometime in the spring.

Web Services Enhancements 2.0
Dev Center, including articles and Hands on Labs http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/wse/
www.wsefaq.com
www.dasblonde.net
www.benjaminm.net
www.softwaremaker.net/blog
Watch for article by me on the DevCenter sometime soon

INETA and .NET User Groups
www.ineta.org
(my user group… www.vtdotnet.org)

IMAGINE CUP
www.imaginecup.com

Base Class Libraries in Whidbey
Dev Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/bcl/
BCLTeam Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/bclteam
Watch this page as I will upload the latest version of my BCL Whidbey deck: http://www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx
Watch for article in Code Magazine by me on DebuggerVisualizers!

Upcoming conferences I’ll be speaking at are listed at www.thedatafarm.com/blog (requires actually browsing to my blog)

Thanks Carl & Rory & Geoff. It was a blast!

Since Microsoft says WindowsForms controls only work in IE, I have never tried anything else. I don’t have FireFox on my computer. I did not reply to the recent request from Netscape to beta test their new browser and don’t want an AOL screenname just to do so. Has anyone even tried it? I’d be curious if someone with a tablet and the latest O/S browses to www.thedatafarm.com/doodle.aspx with Firefox or the new beta. Let me know.

Posted from BLInk!

Rob Windsor sent me the transcript from the chat room during the DotNetRocks show last night. I had a great laugh at the reaction from these guys when I started talking about the fact that I worked at Penthouse (hey, and OMNI, okay?) Magazine during the mid-80’s and then Playboy a few years later. Not like working with models or anything. Just doing computer stuff of course. But I did get to travel all around the country because of a little program I wrote for Playboy’s advertisers to do some whiz bang analysis. One of those trips out to L.A.(where I got to go the VERY cool Chiat/Day in Venice, CA who was really breaking the mold with their Mac ads) coincided with a Playmate of the Year party. So I actually got to go to Hef’s mansion for the party. And of course I worked in an office environment where it was totally acceptable for the guys to have posters and calendars of naked girls in their offices and cubicles. I somehow managed to justify it all. I had a great job, got to travel a lot and was getting paid pretty well at about 27 or 28 and lived what seemed like the high life. It was the 80’s in NYC. Right after Warhol had died so things had started changing, the club scene was evolving, Reagan was president. We transitioned from the larger than life Ed Koch who seemed to represent what NY was all about to David Dinkins. Ahhh I begin to wax poetic. Back to work.

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Yippee!! I’m hoping to hear about one more that would be part of VSConnections, not ASPConnections.

The best part is I will get three hours to do my WSE talk which is a combination of a thorough explanation of the security tools (signing, encryption, etc) which are what WS-Security depends on completely and then a look at the API (the security part), how to code up the basics (real life stuff including a authorizing against a sql database), what policies are and what they look like and how to get at some of them via the Settings Tool. I love love love this talk and getting people off the ground with WSE.

The ADO.NET 2.0 talk is going to be fun for me since I have an article on this topic coming out in MSDN Magazine sometime soon and I had a blast digging through this stuff because I am a database developer first and foremost. Pablo Castro was an amazing resource for me.

The BCL talk is going to keep evolving as new bits come out and it’s fun to do and to make sure people see some of the really useful stuff in the framework that aren’t really getting a lot of heralding.

Congratulations. You’ve been accepted to speak at the Spring 2005 Microsoft ASP.NET Connections in Orlando, March 20-23.

ADX252: What’s New in ADO.NET 2.0
ADO is here to stay and Microsoft just keeps making it better. ADO.NET has been fine tuned to increase ease of coding, flexibility and performance as well as adding better integration with SQL Server. From the provider independent data access to asynchronous SQL Commands to batch processing to the beauty of the DataTable class now implementing iXMLSerializable, this session will run through the many wonderful enhancements that make ADO.NET 2.0 Evolutionary not Revolutionary.

AGN252: ASP.NET Beyond the System.Web Namespace
A lot of emphasis has been placed on the IDE features of ASP.NET 2.0. This session will take you deeper into the many new things available in the fundamental class libraries that you can use in Whidbey to write more powerful Web applications with ease.

APR301: Web Services Security for Dummies with WSE2 (Half-Day Precon)
If you believe that you shouldn’t have to read a 20-page white paper four times in order to secure your Web services, then the new version of Web Service Enhancements has been designed with you in mind. Although WSE2 has a lot of new tools for plumbers, it is possible to do a lot of very cool and necessary stuff without having to comprehend and code all of the nasty details. This session is designed to explain the key parts of WSE that can and should be part of the basic functionality of any Web service dependent application that you are writing in your corporate environment. The talk will focus on the basics rather than fly through them.

This is not the first time I have had a referrer come in from the IAEA website. That’s the International Atomic Energy Agency that we hear about in the news all the time. I know they are not linking to my blog so it must be some hack or something. I got these two this morning

You got a referral from

http://www.iaea.org/

on your weblog entry ‘Larry O’Brien’s blog’

(http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0af18678-2417-40fa-9c23-6243457bc5d4)

————————–

You got a referral from

http://www.iaea.org/

on your weblog entry ‘Dare’s other mission’

(http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=e9432c8b-b274-401e-bdab-5307bce50e5c)

Posted from BLInk!

Scott Hanselman (who does a LOT of presentations) adds some more presentation tips here.

It reminded me that I wanted to share one I learned from Paul Litwin while I was at DevConnections.

How to avoid showing ugly powerpoint IDE.
Since I have all of my shortcuts on my desktop, I would have to stop PowerPoint, minimize it and go to the shortcut I need.  (this reminds me – I hate when someone does that and you can see their speaker notes. It always makes me think someone else wrote the content and they are not the expert.) Normally, I have all of my vs.net projects running and I just alttab between them. But in this case I was running whidbey demos and did not want to chance having multiple instances running on a box with only 512MB RAM. So I had to get to the desktop and you can’t alt-tab to desktop icons. Paul suggested this great idea. Create a folder on the desktop and have that open. Then you can alt-tab to the folder and click on your shortcuts without having to stop the powerpoint. I still sometimes just stop the powerpoint – that’s a habit to break.

I think there was something else he taught me that was new for me, but I have to remember which it was.

Another one hard learned from me
If you are having trouble sleeping the night before a morning presentation and you have to take something to help you sleep, make sure you take something that will do the trick! I took two Tylenol pms at 3:20 in the morning knowing I had to get up at 8am. Somehow I still did not sleep. So when I did get up, the Tylenols’ basically had the effect of my feeling drugged which is a lot worse than being tired. And it did affect my presentation – just in some really stupid ways – which I am still really upset about. I’m really not someone who likes taking anything at all – I will suffer through a headache rather than take aspirin or go for something homeopathic than allapathic. But I think this is a good warning nonetheless!