I was on campus in Building 5 today doing a Performance and Scalability web cast with PAG and ran into the channel 9 guys filming stuff.  It appears that Robert Scoble was interviewing Chris Sells which must be part of the MSDN contingent in Building 5.  I waved Hi and went about my way. Time to wait and see if I end up on the editing room floor or if they leave my ugly mug in the video.

Thursday, April 08, 2004 3:01:17 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I had a blast last night judging the local entries to the Imagine Cup.  The entries were all over the map but at least two teams I thought did a fairly good job of coming up iwith a plausible scenario.  One team, the winner, had a fully implemented and functional solution.  I couldn't believe the effort that went into it.  They ended up creating half a dozen new controls for the compact framework and demoed the application running on the smartphone emulator.  It was quite clever and they had clearly thought through the issues with making the application run on a small device with no keyboard. They wanted to demo on a real smartphone but ran into the same problems most US developers hit, lack of devices. 

Congratulations to the University of Washington winners and good luck at the national competition.

Thursday, April 08, 2004 8:47:58 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I have started planning for VSLive Orlando 2004.  I am responsible mainly for the ASP.NET track.

Several changes will be happening with this iteration of the conference. 

1. I think this is the right timing to start ramping up on ASP.NET 2.0 content. I have no idea on release dates other than the Visual Studio 2005 name that was announced.  Since this conference will be happening in September the timing seems right that a beta will have shipped by this point and users will be starting to get on board.  That being said I think the majority of folks will be still developing with ASP.NET 1.x.  Some content needs to be maintained for them.  It will be a tricky balance given a total of 10 sessions to shoe horn the content into.
2. I think existing .NET adoption falls into two camps based on technology.  I think the ASP.NET guys tend to be a bit ahead of the curve based on shorter development cycles, the fact that they don't require any client side installs, etc.  Hence most developers have already made the move.  Whereas I think many Windows Forms developer types are just starting to make the move or have made it recently. Based on this my thought is that all ASP.NET 1.x content should move squarely into the Intermediate-Advanced realm while the ASP.NET 2.0 content is more Intro-Intermediate.  Does this make sense?

What are peoples thoughts on the split?  50/50?  60/40?

In addition I have a mission in mind to get more new speakers involved.  This can be a two edged sword. Speakers that I have worked with in the past are a known quantity.  I know quite a bit about their speaking abilities as well as how audiences react to them.  A new speaker is always a crapshoot.  I firmly believe however that we need new blood. This new speaker thing is also complicated by the way speakers are compensated.  They are compensated per session and as a previous speaker I feel that I need to give each speaker at least two sessions.  This means that I have a grand total of 5 speakers for VSLive Orlando.  I wish I could have more but that isn't my choice.

So with all of that in mind I am interested in two additional things.  What do people want to see related to ASP.NET?  Give me both 1.x and 2.x topics. Which speakers do you want to see?  Help me figure out how to create a conference that you will want to attend.

Wednesday, April 07, 2004 2:24:22 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

A client of mine was working on adding drag and drop to a Windows Forms control hosted in Internet Explorer that we use.  They wanted to allow a user to drop a group of files, email messages, etc onto this control and then do something with the items that were dropped.  We got it all working great in a Windows Form but the same control hosted in Internet Explorer exhibited two strange behaviors:

1. Whenever more than one file was dropped onto the control GetData(DataFormats.FileDrop) yielded only the first!  This was a weird one.  Come to find out this was the lack of System.Security.FileIOPermission!  Once we added this attribute: [FileIOPermission(SecurityAction.Assert, Unrestricted=true)] we started to receive more than one file.  According to PSS this is because there is a FileIOPermission demand in GetData() that fails silently after retrieving the first file.  Sounds like a bug to me!
2. Second issue we ran into is that in the DragDrop handler we wanted to make a remoting call to our controller to have it launch a form. This failed only when we were in a DragDrop handler.  We never determined the root cause here but did determine that the source of the drop is blocked until the DragDrop completes.  Sure seems like I should be able call a method to indicate that is the case but instead you must return from the DragDrop event.  To get around this we did a this.Invoke() on a method containing the work. This allowed the DragDrop event to return and then for our form to be launched.

Tuesday, April 06, 2004 1:31:28 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

If you have been reading my blog you realize that I do quite a bit with HREF exe style applications.

Well this past week I was working on a feature for a client with a co-worker and hit a bizarre problem.  We are modifying our application to act as a drop target.  This works great when the control we are using for the drop target is hosted in a windows form.  When the control is hosted in Internet Explorer dropping multiple files on the target results in only the first dropped file showing up!  Sure seems like a bug and turns out to be very problematic for us.  Anyone else ever hit this issue?

Friday, April 02, 2004 7:29:21 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Ever since I started reading about iSCSI I have wanted to pick up some iSCSI devices and build my own SAN that will allow me to share storage resources amongst the multiple boxes in my office.  FC has always been way, way to expensive.

Along comes SANMelody. It isn't exactly free but at $1178 for their low end version it is the most cost effective way that I have found to build a SAN.  Just ordered some hardware today so I can give it a try.

Stay tuned for whether or not it is as cool as it looks.

Friday, March 26, 2004 4:06:49 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Paul posted this great NUnit tip on his blog.  Of course this also works great for ASP.NET.  Just attach to the w3wp.exe process on IIS6 or the aspnet_wp.exe process on IIS 5.X.  How do you debug something however that is part of your startup code?  This is especially tough when wanting to debug the constructor of a HREF EXE or WinForms control in the browser. Use System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break().  This will cause a debugger prompt to pop up when the line is hit allowing you to start a new VS.NET instance or select an existing instance to debug the running application.

Thursday, March 18, 2004 9:47:16 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I have always considered myself fairly well traveled.  While I am on the road about 12-15 weeks a year I obviously return to the same places over and over again.

Check out the following map from http://www.world66.com which provides a way to track where you have lived and or visited:

Pretty cool but I have a lot of places to visit still!

Tuesday, March 16, 2004 10:35:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Mike Schinkel asked me the other day how we do database deployments.

I started thinking and realized it breaks down into two scenarios:

1. Clean Build
2. Version Update Build

#1 is pretty easy to describe.  We script everything.  I am way to paranoid about temporary changes getting made in development that accidentally make their way into production to allow anyone to just replicate databases, use DTS jobs, etc.

All changes must be scripted, all scripts must be in source control, the database is build out of this source tree.  Typically the scripts are broken down like this:

• .sqt files which define the table structure
• .sqx files which define the indexes and primary keys
• .sqp files which define the stored procedures.  There is one file per sproc
• .sqd files which insert initial default data
  

One of my current clients has an implementation of this that as part of the nightly build process it goes through a node of the source tree and runs all .sqt files to put the base schema in place.  Followed by the sqx, sqp and sqd files.  The only problems come when the sqd files come into play and they attempt to insert default data in an order not allowed by constraints, etc.  Here we have a system whereby we can impose an order in which certain ones run.  Awkward at best but it works.

#2 is even more awkward.  In the case of #2 there is existing data in the database that needs to be preserved. As such we have .NB files that are used to make changes to an existing database.  These allow us to for example instead of doing a create table use alter table to add a column.  This is where it gets really hard.  Figuring out what to run and what not to run to preserve data already in the system.

I am suprised that I don't see any tools/nant steps to help automate this type of build.  It is clearly an essential part of the process.

Monday, March 15, 2004 9:56:46 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]