On Tuesday October 26 I will be speaking at the Capital Area .NET Users group.

Here is my session description:

Do you write code as part of a team? Developing enterprise-level applications requires more upfront planning and more procedures, not only to coordinate the larger team doing the development, but to make sure the application is maintainable and deployable. Come to this session to pick up some tips on how to structure your development environment. We will talk about how to best structure a team development environment, manage dependencies, create a repeatable build process and do basic smoke/unit testing.

To answer the first question I always get, "Is this about Team System?".  No not particularly.  This session is more about the process and tools that you can use today.  Not to say that there may not be brief mentions of Team System along the way!

Directions

Friday, October 15, 2004 8:04:35 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I have been thinking about putting a PC in the living room for some time. A friend of mine, Andrew Brust, did it and raves about it.  He used a standard Windows XP machine and loves CinemaNow as well as using it to play MP3s.

I have been on the fence.  I bought a Phillips Tivo the week they came out.  Hacked it of course and way happy with the 80GB capacity.  I then upgraded to a Hughes DirectTivo which I for the most part love.  The only part I don't like is my fault.  I immediately upgraded it to two 200GB drives.  What this translates to is that when I am navigating Now Playing there is a significant pause of sometimes two or three minutes while it reads the catalog off disk.  My understanding is that this is due to the limited memory of the device combined with how large I have made the file system.  There is at least one company offering a hack to add more memory to remove this problem.  However I digress...

I have wanted a way to play our MP3 collection in the family room for some time now.  We ripped all our CDs and then put them in the attic. I got rid of two 400 disc changers and pretty much just use my wife's iPod as our music source.  Problem is that it is a pain to pull it out of the cabinet to change playlists, etc and when she is gone I am SOL.  I have looked at a ton of options for this including the Roku  and others from a variety of providers.  The Tivo Home Media Option would work great however I have a Series 1 Tivo that doesn't support it and a DirectTivo that doesn't yet offer it because DirectTV hasn't decided to bless their subscribers with the feature.

Hence I yearningly look at the Media Center.  It appears it would solve the MP3 problem handily.  However last time I looked at one I couldn't justify spending almost $2000 for a media player that looks like I took a computer from my office and placed it next to my TV.  It looks like prices are coming down however and at least HP has gotten a clue and is now offering a Media Center that looks more like a stereo component at a reasonable price. The kicker however is ultimately I would like to replace my DirectTivo with it.  The only way however to do this appears to be to go back to my old cable receiver, use an IR blaster to control it, and then take the signal off the S-Video output of the receiver.  This is going back several generations to how my old Tivo Series 1 used to do it.  In fact it is going back even further since at least the Tivo could control the receiver via the serial port. The Media Center from what I can tell doesn't even offer that.  Furthermore I lose the fidelity of storing the MPEG stream from DirectTV directly. Instead it gets decompressed, converted to S-Video, and then re-encoded by the Media Center.

I guess what I am still holding out for is someone to make a DirectTV tuner card for the Media Center PC.  I am not holding my breathe however given how idiotic DirectTV can be at times...

Wednesday, October 13, 2004 8:29:12 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

I have been an AT&T Wireless subscriber for over 10 years now...

I know, I know you are probably asking why I haven't switched.  I was almost pushed over the edge tonight.

I have been on their TDMA service since Digital One Rate first came out due to how much I travel.  I have been holding off on moving to GSM America until their service plan expands, etc.  I already have a data plan that I use their Edge and UMTS service with I just haven't moved my voice over.  I had been waiting for the Motorola Mpx220 to come out but when I saw the announced Audiovox SMT 5600 today I realized my wait was over.  I actually prefer the candy bar phone style and was all ready to switch.

I went into the AT&T store in Woodinville and played with the phone.  I then said I wanted one and the salesperson hemmed and hawed and said, "Sorry that is only a demo unit.  I have no idea when we will have stock."  I figured I would do an end run and spoke to a nice enough gal who eventually transferred me to an idiot in "Web Migration".  Finally hung up with her and called back for one last try.  Spoke with an awesome rep in California who helped me attempt to order the phone.  The problem is that via the web I can't seem to upgrade to this phone.  I can as a new customer order the phone however as a long term subscriber it isn't available to me! 

Finally went to the AT&T Wireless store in Bellevue Square and picked up the phone.  Of course I first had to argue with the salesperson for a few minutes over the required data plan.  He tried to sell me a $40 unlimited plan even though the AT&T web site as well as their own product collateral mentions a $24.99 unlimited plan.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004 10:03:08 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I am currently at the Patterns & Practices Summit and Anil John just asked me for an update on the SAN.  I realized I hadn't written anything in a while.

I finally decided the iSCSI SAN stuff I was using just wasn't ready for prime time.  The SAN Melody target was great but expensive.  To get the features I wanted I was going to have to pony up around $7000.  The biggest problem however was the Microsoft iSCSI initiator.  It just had too many quirks to make me feel comfortable. Not mounting drives on startup, etc.  It just didn't feel like direct attached storage.

So for the moment the SAN target box is just becoming a large Exchange/SQL Server/File Server to use up the 2Tb I dropped on it.  Perhaps in another 9 months I will poke my head up and give things another look.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004 8:16:59 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

A client of mine has been checking out Identify Software's Black Box. 

It looks like a great product that can act as a flight recorder and track activity across all tiers in the stack.  Only drawback is that it costs the GNP of a small country to purchase.  As a result we are out there looking for alternatives.

What do follks out there use to do flight recording / root cause analysis?

Tuesday, September 28, 2004 5:22:50 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

VSLive San Francisco, the biggest VSLive, is sneaking up on us. It's being held Feb. 6-10 in the West Wing of the Moscone Convention Center and will again feature three tracks -- VBITS, ASP Live!, and C# Live!. The call for Papers is now open. I am actively seeking proposals for sessions at this event. You can send your submissions directly to me and I will distribute them to our conference chairs or you can contact them directly:

VBITS - Keith Pleas

C# Live - Richard Hale Shaw

ASP Live - Chris Kinsman

The drop-dead deadline for submissions is Oct. 8.

Here's a rough and very general list of topics to be covered (please feel free to work outside this list as well).

.NET Framework
ADO.NET
ASP.NET
C#
C++
Common Language Runtime (CLR)
Compact Framework
GDI+
Internet Information Server (IIS)
Oracle RDBMS
Security
SQL Server 2000
SQL Server 2005 (Yukon)
TabletPC
Visual Basic .NET
Visual Basic 6
Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey)
XML

Thanks!

Friday, September 24, 2004 8:30:45 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

Wow!  Scott surprised us this morning. He did a merged keynote called ASP.NET Futures that was originally intended to speak about Whidbey but at the last minute he decided to talk about IIS 7.0.  IIS 7.0 is the Asp.Net release after Whidbey. It feels as though this may be pre-Orcas!  I hadn't heard anything about this.

Key features:

• Integrated Web Application Server Platform
• Rich Configuration and Administration
  • Unified configuration system w/delegated admin support
  • Rich administration tool that supports delegated management
• Deep Componentization and Extensibility Support
  • Extremlely modular server
  • Enabled infrastructure to be added/removed i.e. authentication schemes
• Rich Web Service Integration
  • Indigo support!

It appears the key push is to unify the divide between IIS and ASP.NET.  They truly become one in this release it appears.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004 6:44:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Well we had some last minute breaking changes for ASPLive Orlando.  Rob Howard who was schedule to do an ASP.NET 2.0 workshop with me was unable to attend due to an illness in the family.  However he helped me find a replacement and guess what?  Fritz Onion will now be presenting the entire ASP.NET 2.0 Workshop! 

I must admit I don't know that we could have found a better replacement.  If you have read his great ASP.NET 1.1 book or read his blog at http://pluralsight.com/blogs/fritz/default.aspx you will understand my excitement.  There is still time to register and attend what I think will turn out to be a great event.

Tuesday, September 07, 2004 4:19:41 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

If you are using the Microsoft iSCSI initiator make sure that you create your disks as basic disks instead of dynamic disks. Dynamic disks will not automatically mount upon a restart of the initiator.  Basic disks will.  In addition make sure that you make the services relying on the disk dependent on the iSCSI initiator service to make sure the disks are available before the service starts.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 8:30:01 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Rocky has posted a couple of great missives and his latest does a great job tackling some of the hype around EnterpriseServices.

http://www.lhotka.net/WeBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=a70aad9c-79fd-45cc-875f-00dfd3dc0fb6

Friday, August 13, 2004 2:08:05 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]